27,188 research outputs found
Caring in Kent: Patterns and Profiles, Evidence from the Kent Health and Lifestyle Survey, 2005
The ‘Caring in Kent’ report draws on the results of a Kent wide ‘Health and Lifestyle Survey’ conducted in 2005; this included a module on caring. This enables a picture of caring to be reported including: a general profile of carers, levels and types of care-giving, carers’ health, and the level and types of support they receive.
‘Carers provide unpaid care by looking after an ill, frail or disabled family member, friend or partner’. The increasingly recognised importance of the role of the ‘informal carer’ is - in good part - due to the rising proportion of older people in the UK population. Not only do people live longer but many experience a number of chronic conditions; these require support from family members if the older person is to remain living in the community
Helicoidal surfaces with constant anisotropic mean curvature
We study surfaces with constant anisotropic mean curvature which are
invariant under a helicoidal motion. For functionals with axially symmetric
Wulff shapes, we generalize the recently developed twizzler representation of
Perdomo to the anisotropic case and show how all helicoidal constant
anisotropic mean curvature surfaces can be obtained by quadratures
Partial suppression of the radial orbit instability in stellar systems
It is well known that the simple criterion proposed originally by Polyachenko
and Shukhman (1981) for the onset of the radial orbit instability, although
being generally a useful tool, faces significant exceptions both on the side of
mildly anisotropic systems (with some that can be proved to be unstable) and on
the side of strongly anisotropic models (with some that can be shown to be
stable). In this paper we address two issues: Are there processes of
collisionless collapse that can lead to equilibria of the exceptional type?
What is the intrinsic structural property that is responsible for the sometimes
noted exceptional stability behavior? To clarify these issues, we have
performed a series of simulations of collisionless collapse that start from
homogeneous, highly symmetrized, cold initial conditions and, because of such
special conditions, are characterized by very little mixing. For these runs,
the end-states can be associated with large values of the global pressure
anisotropy parameter up to 2K_r/K_T \approx 2.75. The highly anisotropic
equilibrium states thus constructed show no significant traces of radial
anisotropy in their central region, with a very sharp transition to a radially
anisotropic envelope occurring well inside the half-mass radius (around 0.2
r_M). To check whether the existence of such almost perfectly isotropic
"nucleus" might be responsible for the apparent suppression of the radial orbit
instability, we could not resort to equilibrium models with the above
characteristics and with analytically available distribution function; instead,
we studied and confirmed the stability of configurations with those
characteristics by initializing N-body approximate equilibria (with given
density and pressure anisotropy profiles) with the help of the Jeans equations.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical
Journa
Which processes drive observed variations of HCHO columns over India?
We interpret HCHO column variations observed by the Ozone
Monitoring Instrument (OMI), aboard the NASA Aura satellite, over India
during 2014 using the GEOS-Chem atmospheric chemistry and transport model. We
use a nested version of the model with a horizontal resolution of
approximately 25 km. HCHO columns are related to local emissions of volatile
organic compounds (VOCs) with a spatial smearing that increases with the VOC
lifetime. Over India, HCHO has biogenic, pyrogenic, and anthropogenic VOC
sources. Using a 0-D photochemistry model, we find that isoprene has the
largest molar yield of HCHO which is typically realized within a few hours. We also
find that forested regions that neighbour major urban conurbations are
exposed to high levels of nitrogen oxides. This results in depleted hydroxyl
radical concentrations and a delay in the production of HCHO from isoprene
oxidation. We find that propene is the only anthropogenic VOC emitted in
major Indian cities that produces HCHO at a comparable (but slower) rate to
isoprene. The GEOS-Chem model reproduces the broad-scale annual mean HCHO
column distribution observed by OMI (<i>r</i> = 0.6), which is dominated by a
distinctive meridional gradient in the northern half of the country, and by
localized regions of high columns that coincide with forests. Major
discrepancies are noted over the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) and Delhi. We find that the
model has more skill at reproducing observations during winter (JF) and
pre-monsoon (MAM) months with Pearson correlations <i>r</i> > 0.5 but with a
positive model bias of <mo form="infix">≃</mo> 1×10<sup>15</sup> molec cm<sup>−2</sup>. During the
monsoon season (JJAS) we reproduce only a diffuse version of the observed
meridional gradient (<i>r</i> = 0.4). We find that on a continental scale most of
the HCHO column seasonal cycle is explained by monthly variations in surface
temperature (<i>r</i> = 0.9), suggesting a role for biogenic VOCs, in agreement with
the 0-D and GEOS-Chem model calculations. We also find that the seasonal
cycle during 2014 is not significantly different from the 2008 to 2015 mean
seasonal variation. There are two main loci for biomass burning (the states of
Punjab and Haryana, and northeastern India), which we find makes a significant contribution
(up to 1×10<sup>15</sup> molec cm<sup>−2</sup>) to
observed HCHO columns only during March and April over northeastern India.
The slow production of HCHO from propene oxidation results in a smeared
hotspot over Delhi that we resolve only on an annual mean timescale by using
a temporal oversampling method. Using a linear regression model to relate
GEOS-Chem isoprene emissions to HCHO columns we infer seasonal isoprene
emissions over two key forest regions from the OMI HCHO column data. We find
that the a posteriori emissions are typically lower than the a priori
emissions, with a much stronger reduction of emissions during the monsoon
season. We find that this reduction in emissions during monsoon months
coincides with a large drop in satellite observations of leaf phenology that
recovers in post monsoon months. This may signal a forest-scale response to
monsoon conditions
The counter-streaming instability in dwarf ellipticals with off-center nuclei
n many nucleated dwarf elliptical galaxies (dE,N's), the nucleus is offset by
a significant fraction of the scale radius with respect to the center of the
outer isophotes. Using a high-resolution N-body simulation, we demonstrate that
the nucleus can be driven off-center by the m=1 counterstreaming instability,
which is strong in flattened stellar systems with zero rotation. The model
develops a nuclear offset on the order of 30% of the exponential scale length.
We compare our numerical results with the photometry and kinematics of FCC 046,
a Fornax Cluster dE,N with a nucleus offset by 1.2" we find good agreement
between the model and FCC 046. We also discuss mechanisms that may cause
counterrotation in dE,N's and conclude that the destruction of box orbits in an
initially triaxial galaxy is the most promising.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Attentional demand estimation with attentive driving models
The task of driving can sometimes require the processing of large amounts of visual information; such situations can overload the perceptual systems of human drivers
leading to ‘inattentional blindness’, where potentially critical visual information is overlooked. This phenomenon of ‘looking but failing to see’ is the third largest contributor
to traffic accidents in the UK. In this work we develop a method to identify these particularly demanding driving scenes using an end-to-end driving architecture, imbued with
a spatial attention mechanism and trained to mimic ground-truth driving controls from
video input. At test time, the network’s attention distribution is segmented to identify
relevant items in the driving scene which are used to estimate the attentional demand on
the driver according to an established model in cognitive neuroscience. Without collecting any ground-truth attentional demand data - instead using readily available odometry
data in a novel way - our approach is shown to outperform several baselines on a new
dataset of 1200 driving scenes labelled for attentional demand in driving
First year student expectations: Results from a university-wide student survey
Although much has been written on the first-year experience of students at higher education institutions, less attention has been directed to the expectations of students when they enter an institution for the first time. This paper provides additional insights into the expectations of students at an Australian university and highlights areas in which students’ expectations may not necessarily align with the realities of common university practices. By providing opportunities for students to articulate their expectations, staff are able to use the responses for a constructive dialogue and work towards a more positive alignment between perceived expectations and levels of student satisfaction with their experience.Geoffrey Crisp, Edward Palmer, Deborah Turnbull, Ted Nettelbeck, Lynn Ward, Amanda LeCouteur, Aspa Sarris, Peter Strelan, and Luke Schneide
Irradiated Interfaces in the Ara OB1, Carina, Eagle Nebula, and Cyg OB2 Massive Star Formation Regions
Regions of massive star formation offer some of the best and most
easily-observed examples of radiation hydrodynamics. Boundaries where
fully-ionized H II regions transition to neutral/molecular photodissociation
regions (PDRs) are of particular interest because marked temperature and
density contrasts across the boundaries lead to evaporative flows and fluid
dynamical instabilities that can evolve into spectacular pillar-like
structures. When detached from their parent clouds, pillars become ionized
globules that often harbor one or more young stars. H2 molecules at the
interface between a PDR and an H II region absorb ultraviolet light from
massive stars, and the resulting fluoresced infrared emission lines are an
ideal way to trace this boundary independent of obscuring dust. This paper
presents H2 images of four regions of massive star formation that illustrate
different types of PDR boundaries. The Ara OB1 star formation region contains a
striking long wall that has several wavy structures which are present in H2,
but the emission is not particularly bright because the ambient UV fluxes are
relatively low. In contrast, the Carina star formation region shows strong H2
fluorescence both along curved walls and at the edges of spectacular pillars
that in some cases have become detached from their parent clouds. The
less-spectacular but more well-known Eagle Nebula has two regions that have
strong fluorescence in addition to its pillars. While somewhat older than the
other regions, Cyg OB2 has the highest number of massive stars of the regions
surveyed and contains many isolated, fluoresced globules that have head-tail
morphologies which point towards the sources of ionizing radiation. These
images provide a collection of potential astrophysical analogs that may relate
to ablated interfaces observed in laser experiments of radiation hydrodynamics
Simple Calculations to Reduce Litigation Costs in Personal Injury Cases: Additional Empirical Support for the Offset Rule
This article demonstrates that if the nominal rate of interest equals the growth rate of nominal earnings, then a strong case can be made for calculating lump-sum damage awards by using the offset rule, i.e., by simply multiplying the annual loss by the number of years the loss is expected to continue. An examination of the Canadian data not only supports the offset rule, but also suggests that plaintiffs are being systematically undercompensated by rules currently in use
- …