Supporting reflection and creative thinking by carers of older people with dementia

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects

Virtual light-by-light scattering and the g factor of a bound electron

The contribution of the light-by-light diagram to the g factor of electron and muon bound in Coulomb field is obtained. For electron in a ground state, our results are in good agreement with the results of other authors obtained numerically for large Z. For relatively small Z our results have essentially higher accuracy as compared to the previous ones. For muonic atoms, the contribution is obtained for the first time with the high accuracy in whole region of Z.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, RevTe

Contemporary Guarani Shamanisms: “Traditional Medicine” and Discourses of Native Identity in Brazil

The psychoactive substance known as ayahuasca has long been identified with Amazonian shamanism and traditional medicine. Over the last two decades its use has spread outside this region to urban populations in different parts of the world. This paper examines the adoption of the ritual use of the beverage by the Guarani Indians along the southern coast of Brazil. We argue that this process is related to the growing politics of identity of Brazilian indigenous peoples as well as to public policies that promote cultural diversity. In the case analyzed here, the adoption of ayahuasca is articulated with an ongoing cultural revitalization in activities related to shamanism, health and education and with the specific desires and actions of the leading family in one Guarani village

Introducing creativity techniques and software apps to the care of people with dementia

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes

Declining Burden of Plasmodium vivax in a Population in Northwestern Thailand from 1995 to 2016 before Comprehensive Primaquine Prescription for Radical Cure.

All Plasmodium cases have declined over the last decade in northwestern Thailand along the Myanmar border. During this time, Plasmodium vivax has replaced Plasmodium falciparum as the dominant species. The decline in P. falciparum has been shadowed by a coincidental but delayed decline in P. vivax cases. This may be due to early detection and artemisinin-based therapy, species-specific diagnostics, and bed net usage all of which reduce malaria transmission but not P. vivax relapse. In the absence of widespread primaquine use for radical cure against P. vivax hypnozoites, the decline in P. vivax may be explained by decreased hypnozoite activation of P. vivax relapses triggered by P. falciparum. The observed trends in this region suggest a beneficial effect of decreased P. falciparum transmission on P. vivax incidence, but elimination of P. vivax in a timely manner likely requires radical cure

Macrorealism from entropic Leggett-Garg inequalities

We formulate entropic Leggett-Garg inequalities, which place constraints on the statistical outcomes of temporal correlations of observables. The information theoretic inequalities are satisfied if macrorealism holds. We show that the quantum statistics underlying correlations between time-separated spin component of a quantum rotor mimics that of spin correlations in two spatially separated spin-$s$ particles sharing a state of zero total spin. This brings forth the violation of the entropic Leggett-Garg inequality by a rotating quantum spin-$s$ system in similar manner as does the entropic Bell inequality (Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 662 (1988)) by a pair of spin-$s$ particles forming a composite spin singlet state.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX, 2 eps figures, Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

A Library of Integrated Spectra of Galactic Globular Clusters

We present a new library of integrated spectra of 40 Galactic globular clusters, obtained with the Blanco 4-m telescope and the R-C spectrograph at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. The spectra cover the range ~ 3350 -- 6430 A with ~ 3.1 A (FWHM) resolution. The spectroscopic observations and data reduction were designed to integrate the full projected area within the cluster core radii in order to properly sample the light from stars in all relevant evolutionary stages. The S/N values of the flux-calibrated spectra range from 50 to 240/A at 4000 A and from 125 to 500/A at 5000 A. The selected targets span a wide range of cluster parameters, including metallicity, horizontal-branch morphology, Galactic coordinates, Galactocentric distance, and concentration. The total sample is thus fairly representative of the entire Galactic globular cluster population and should be valuable for comparison with similar integrated spectra of unresolved stellar populations in remote systems. For most of the library clusters, our spectra can be coupled with deep color-magnitude diagrams and reliable metal abundances from the literature to enable the calibration of stellar population synthesis models. In this paper we present a detailed account of the observations and data reduction. The spectral library is publicly available in electronic format from the National Optical Astronomical Observatory website.Comment: 39 Pages, including 2 tables and 15 Figures. To appear in the Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Serie

Sizes and shapes of 10-Ma Distal fall pyroclasts in the Ogallala gGroup, Nebraska

Size distributions of distal ashfall particles from correlated 10-Ma layers in Nebraska, measured using laser diffraction methods, are lognormal with mode diameters of ∼90 mm. This ashfall is ∼100% bubble-wall shards of rhyolite glass and apparently represents a distal ashfall from an eruption 1400 km away. Measured terminal velocities of these ash particles are 0.2–18 cm/s, consistent with Stokes Law settling of spherical particles with diameters of 9–50 mm. Surface area of the ash particles, measured with gas adsorption, is 20–30 times the surface area of equivalent Stokes spheres. These results highlight the effects of shape and atmospheric drag in distal ashfalls. They also highlight atmospheric transport and fallout of distal ashfall particles, because these deposits resemble many other ashfalls preserved in the Great Plains of North America throughout the Tertiary and Quaternary. Because the ashfalls preserve major mammalian death assemblages, they demonstrate that deposits with modes of optical diameters 1100 mm are still hazardous by aerodynamic definitions of lung disease risk and include particles substantially within hazardous PM10 ranges. The aerodynamically fine particle size may lead to substantial aeolian redistribution, causing local thicknesses of 12 m. Overall, the ashfall thicknesses observed are at least several times larger than would be expected based on exponential thinning from the volcano. Shape measurements of distal ash particles may be necessary to assess risk. The possible health risks in the central United States from a future rhyolitic eruption in the western United States may be significant

Determination of the total grain size distribution in a Vulcanian eruption column, and its implications to stratospheric aerosol perturbation

Grain size analysis of samples representing all sampleable portions of the airfall deposit produced by the Fuego volcano in Guatemala on 14 October 1974 form the basis for estimating the total grain size distribution of tephra from this eruption. The region enclosed by each isopach has a particular average grain size distribution which can be weighted proportionally to its percentage volume. The grain size of pyroclastic avalanche deposits produced during the eruption are also included. The total grain size distribution calculated as a sum of weighted distributions has a median grain size of 0.8∅ (0.6mm) and a sorting coefficient (σ∅) of 2.3. The size distribution seems to approximate Rosin and Rammler\u27s law of crushing and this observation allows us to estimate that no more than 15% volume of the fine tail of the total size distribution is likely to be missing. The ash composed of these fine particles did not fall in the region of the volcano as part of the recognizable tephra blanket. The eruption column reached well into the stratosphere: heights estimated from the ground were 10-12 km above sea level but estimated heights based on mass flux rates are higher (18-23 km). The proportion of ash smaller than 2 µm, which could remain for substantial periods in the stratosphere, is no more than 0.8% volume of the total. It seems probable that acid aerosol particles from vulcanian type eruptions are more important to stratospheric aerosol perturbation than fine silicate ash particles by at least an order of magnitude

Dirac Hamiltonian with superstrong Coulomb field

We consider the quantum-mechanical problem of a relativistic Dirac particle moving in the Coulomb field of a point charge $Ze$. In the literature, it is often declared that a quantum-mechanical description of such a system does not exist for charge values exceeding the so-called critical charge with $Z=\alpha ^{-1}=137$ based on the fact that the standard expression for the lower bound state energy yields complex values at overcritical charges. We show that from the mathematical standpoint, there is no problem in defining a self-adjoint Hamiltonian for any value of charge. What is more, the transition through the critical charge does not lead to any qualitative changes in the mathematical description of the system. A specific feature of overcritical charges is a non uniqueness of the self-adjoint Hamiltonian, but this non uniqueness is also characteristic for charge values less than the critical one (and larger than the subcritical charge with $Z=(\sqrt{3}^{-1}=118$). We present the spectra and (generalized) eigenfunctions for all self-adjoint Hamiltonians. The methods used are the methods of the theory of self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators and the Krein method of guiding functionals. The relation of the constructed one-particle quantum mechanics to the real physics of electrons in superstrong Coulomb fields where multiparticle effects may be of crucial importance is an open question.Comment: 44 pages, LaTex file, to be published in Teor.Mat.Fiz. (Theor.Math.Phys.