Employees’ perceptions of the impact of work on health behaviours

Research examining the impact of work on health behaviours has rarely provided a complete picture of the impact across health behaviours. Twenty-four employees were interviewed about their smoking, drinking, exercise and eating. Themes included the impact of the work environment, including policy, convenience and workplace cultural norms; business events effecting one’s routine, and again convenience and workplace cultural norms; being busy at work effecting time and energy for healthy behaviour; and work stress leading to health behaviours being used as coping responses on bad and good days. The impact of work is similar across health behaviours and is primarily detrimental

RGB generation by four-wave mixing in small-core holey fibers

We report the generation of white light comprising red, green, and blue spectral bands from a frequency-doubled fiber laser by an efficient four-wave mixing process in submicron-sized cores of microstructured holey fibers. A master-oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) source based on Yb-doped fiber is employed to generate 80 ps pulses at 1060 nm wavelength with 32 MHz repetition rate, which are then frequency-doubled in an LBO crystal to generate up to 2 W average power of green light. The green pump is then carefully launched into secondary cores of the cladding of photonic bandgap fibers. These secondary cores with diameters of about 400 to 800 nm act as highly nonlinear waveguides. At the output, we observe strong red and blue sidebands which, together with the remaining green pump light, form a visible white light source of about 360 mW. The generating process is identified as four-wave mixing where phase matching is achieved by birefringence in the secondary cores which arises from non-symmetric deformation during the fiber fabrication. Numerical models of the fiber structure and of the nonlinear processes confirm our interpretation. Finally, we discuss power scaling and limitations of the white light source due to the damage threshold of silica fibers

Validation of the inverted adsorption structure for free-base tetraphenyl porphyrin on Cu(111)

Utilising normal incidence X-ray standing waves we rigourously scrutinise the “inverted model” as the adsorption structure of free-base tetraphenyl porphyrin on Cu(111). We demonstrate that the iminic N atoms are anchored at near-bridge adsorption sites on the surface displaced laterally by 1.1 ± 0.2 Å in excellent agreement with previously published calculations

Componential coding in the condition monitoring of electrical machines Part 2: application to a conventional machine and a novel machine

This paper (Part 2) presents the practical application of componential coding, the principles of which were described in the accompanying Part 1 paper. Four major issues are addressed, including optimization of the neural network, assessment of the anomaly detection results, development of diagnostic approaches (based on the reconstruction error) and also benchmarking of componential coding with other techniques (including waveform measures, Fourier-based signal reconstruction and principal component analysis). This is achieved by applying componential coding to the data monitored from both a conventional induction motor and from a novel transverse flux motor. The results reveal that machine condition monitoring using componential coding is not only capable of detecting and then diagnosing anomalies but it also outperforms other conventional techniques in that it is able to separate very small and localized anomalies

An inventory and condition survey of rangelands in the Carnarvon Basin, Western Australia

The inventory and condition survey of rangelands in the Carnarvon Basin, undertaken by the Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia (DAFWA) between 1980 and 1982, describes and maps the natural resources of the region’s pastoral leasehold land. This survey report provides a baseline record of the existence and condition of the natural area’s resources, to assist with the planning and implementation of land management practices. The report identified and described the condition of soils, landforms, vegetation, habitat, ecosystems, and declared plants and animals. It also assessed the impact of pastoralism and made land management recommendations. The area surveyed covers about 74 500km² in the Carnarvon Basin and Shark Bay regions, and includes the catchments of the Lyndon and Minilya rivers and the lower reaches of the Gascoyne and Wooramel Rivers. The vegetation of the Carnarvon Basin area is mainly dominated by perennial shrubs. A small number of botanical families contain a large proportion of the dominant perennials in the area. Of these Acacia, Eremophila and Cassia are pre-eminent in the taller shrub communities, Atriplex and Maireana in the low chenopod shrublands, Eucalyptus in the low woodlands and Triodia and Plectrachne in the hummock grasslands

Modified conjugated gradient method for diagonalising large matrices

We present an iterative method to diagonalise large matrices. The basic idea is the same as the conjugated gradient (CG) method, i.e, minimizing the Rayleigh quotient via its gradient and avoiding reintroduce errors to the directions of previous gradients. Each iteration step is to find lowest eigenvector of the matrix in a subspace spanned by the current trial vector and the corresponding gradient of the Rayleigh quotient, as well as some previous trial vectors. The gradient, together with the previous trail vectors, play a similar role of the conjugated gradient of the original CG algorithm. Our numeric tests indicate that this method converges significantly faster than the original CG method. And the computational cost of one iteration step is about the same as the original CG method. It is suitably for first principle calculations.Comment: 6 Pages, 2EPS figures. (To appear in Phys. Rev. E

Two isoperimetric inequalities for the Sobolev constant

In this note we prove two isoperimetric inequalities for the sharp constant in the Sobolev embedding and its associated extremal function. The first such inequality is a variation on the classical Schwarz Lemma from complex analysis, similar to recent inequalities of Burckel, Marshall, Minda, Poggi-Corradini, and Ransford, while the second generalises an isoperimetric inequality for the first eigenfunction of the Laplacian due to Payne and Rayner.Comment: 11 page

Microscopic mechanism for mechanical polishing of diamond (110) surfaces

Mechanically induced degradation of diamond, as occurs during polishing, is studied using total--energy pseudopotential calculations. The strong asymmetry in the rate of polishing between different directions on the diamond (110) surface is explained in terms of an atomistic mechanism for nano--groove formation. The post--polishing surface morphology and the nature of the polishing residue predicted by this mechanism are consistent with experimental evidence.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Quantifying similarity in animal vocal sequences: Which metric performs best?

1. Many animals communicate using sequences of discrete acoustic elements which can be complex, vary in their degree of stereotypy, and are potentially open-ended. Variation in sequences can provide important ecological, behavioural, or evolutionary information about the structure and connectivity of populations, mechanisms for vocal cultural evolution, and the underlying drivers responsible for these processes. Various mathematical techniques have been used to form a realistic approximation of sequence similarity for such tasks. 2. Here, we use both simulated and empirical datasets from animal vocal sequences (rock hyrax, Procavia capensis; humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae; bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus; and Carolina chickadee, Poecile carolinensis) to test which of eight sequence analysis metrics are more likely to reconstruct the information encoded in the sequences, and to test the fidelity of estimation of model parameters, when the sequences are assumed to conform to particular statistical models. 3. Results from the simulated data indicated that multiple metrics were equally successful in reconstructing the information encoded in the sequences of simulated individuals (Markov chains, n-gram models, repeat distribution, and edit distance), and data generated by different stochastic processes (entropy rate and n-grams). However, the string edit (Levenshtein) distance performed consistently and significantly better than all other tested metrics (including entropy, Markov chains, n-grams, mutual information) for all empirical datasets, despite being less commonly used in the field of animal acoustic communication. 4. The Levenshtein distance metric provides a robust analytical approach that should be considered in the comparison of animal acoustic sequences in preference to other commonly employed techniques (such as Markov chains, hidden Markov models, or Shannon entropy). The recent discovery that non-Markovian vocal sequences may be more common in animal communication than previously thought, provides a rich area for future research that requires non-Markovian based analysis techniques to investigate animal grammars and potentially the origin of human language.We thank Melinda Rekdahl, Todd Freeberg and his graduate students, Amiyaal Ilany, Elizabeth Hobson, and Jessica Crance for providing comments of on a previous version of this manuscript. We thank Mike Noad, Melinda Rekdahl, and Claire Garrigue for assistance with humpback whale song collection and initial categorisation of the song, Vincent Janik and Laela Sayigh for assistance with signature whistle collection, Todd Freeberg with chickadee recordings, and Eli Geffen and Amiyaal Ilany for assistance with hyrax song collection and analysis. E.C.G is supported by a Newton International Fellowship. Part of this work was conducted while E.C.G. was supported by a National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, AFSC, NMFS, NOAA. The findings and conclusions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Marine Fisheries Service. We would also like to thank Randall Wells and the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program for the opportunity to record the Sarasota dolphins, where data were collected under a series of National Marine Fisheries Service Scientific Research Permits issued to Randall Wells. A.K. is supported by the Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship Fund. Part of this work was conducted while A.K. was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, an Institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation through NSF Award #DBI-1300426, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.1243