Household item ownership and self-rated health: material and psychosocial explanations

Background: There has been an ongoing debate whether the effects of socioeconomic factors on health are due to absolute poverty and material factors or to relative deprivation and psychosocial factors. In the present analyses, we examined the importance for health of material factors, which may have a direct effect on health, and of those that may affect health indirectly, through psychosocial mechanisms.Methods: Random national samples of men and women in Hungary (n=973) and Poland (n=1141) were interviewed (response rates 58% and 59%, respectively). The subjects reported their self-rated health, socioeconomic circumstances, including ownership of different household items, and perceived control over life. Household items were categorised as "basic needs", "socially oriented", and "luxury". We examined the association between the ownership of different groups of items and self-rated health. Since the lists of household items were different in Hungary and Poland, we conducted parallel identical analyses of the Hungarian and Polish data.Results: The overall prevalence of poor or very poor health was 13% in Poland and 25% in Hungary. Education, material deprivation and the number of household items were all associated with poor health in bivariate analyses. All three groups of household items were positively related to self-rated health in age-adjusted analyses. The relation of basic needs items to poor health disappeared after controlling for other socioeconomic variables (mainly material deprivation). The relation of socially oriented and luxury items to poor health, however, persisted in multivariate models. The results were similar in both datasets.Conclusions: These data suggest that health is influenced by both material and psychosocial aspects of socioeconomic factors

One hundred angstrom niobium wire

Composite of fine niobium wires in copper is used to study the size and proximity effects of a superconductor in a normal matrix. The niobium rod was drawn to a 100 angstrom diameter wire on a copper tubing

Competition of mixing and segregation in rotating cylinders

Using discrete element methods, we study numerically the dynamics of the size segregation process of binary particle mixtures in three-dimensional rotating drums, operated in the continuous flow regime. Particle rotations are included and we focus on different volume filling fractions of the drum to study the interplay between the competing phenomena of mixing and segregation. It is found that segregation is best for a more than half-filled drum due to the non-zero width of the fluidized layer. For different particle size ratios, it is found that radial segregation occurs for any arbitrary small particle size difference and the final amount of segregation shows a linear dependence on the size ratio of the two particle species. To quantify the interplay between segregation and mixing, we investigate the dynamics of the center of mass positions for each particle component. Starting with initially separated particle groups we find that no mixing of the component is necessary in order to obtain a radially segregated core.Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures (EPIC/EEPIC & EPS, macros included), submitted to Physics of Fluid

Spin projection and spin current density within relativistic electronic transport calculations

A spin projection scheme is presented which allows the decomposition of the electric conductivity into two different spin channels within fully relativistic $ab$ $initio$ transport calculations that account for the impact of spin-orbit coupling. This is demonstrated by calculations of the spin-resolved conductivity of Fe$_{1-x}$Cr$_x$ and Co$_{1-x}$Pt$_x$ disordered alloys on the basis of the corresponding Kubo-Greenwood equation implemented using the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker coherent potential approximation (KKR-CPA) band structure method. In addition, results for the residual resistivity of diluted Ni-based alloys are presented that are compared to theoretical and experimental ones that rely on Mott's two-current model for spin-polarized systems. The application of the scheme to deal with the spin-orbit induced spin Hall effect is discussed in addition

Inclusive and effective bulk viscosities in the hadron gas

We estimate the temperature dependence of the bulk viscosity in a relativistic hadron gas. Employing the Green-Kubo formalism in the SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly-interacting Hadrons) transport approach, we study different hadronic systems in increasing order of complexity. We analyze the (in)validity of the single exponential relaxation ansatz for the bulk-channel correlation function and the strong influence of the resonances and their lifetimes. We discuss the difference between the inclusive bulk viscosity of an equilibrated, long-lived system, and the effective bulk viscosity of a short-lived mixture like the hadronic phase of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where the processes whose inverse relaxation rate are larger than the fireball duration are excluded from the analysis. This clarifies the differences between previous approaches which computed the bulk viscosity including/excluding the very slow processes in the hadron gas. We compare our final results with previous hadron gas calculations and confirm a decreasing trend of the inclusive bulk viscosity over entropy density as temperature increases, whereas the effective bulk viscosity to entropy ratio, while being lower than the inclusive one, shows no strong dependence to temperature.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figure

Experiences with the Greenstone digital library software for international development

Greenstone is a versatile open source multilingual digital library environment, emerging from research on text compression within the New Zealand Digital Library Research Project in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato. In 1997 we began to work with Human Info NGO to help them produce fully-searchable CD-ROM collections of humanitarian information. The software has since evolved to support a variety of application contexts. Rather than being simply a delivery mechanism, we have emphasised the empowerment of users to create and distribute their own digital collections

Persistent currents in mesoscopic rings and boundary conformal field theory

A tight-binding model of electron dynamics in mesoscopic normal rings is studied using boundary conformal field theory. The partition function is calculated in the low energy limit and the persistent current generated as a function of an external magnetic flux threading the ring is found. We study the cases where there are defects and electron-electron interactions separately. The same temperature scaling for the persistent current is found in each case, and the functional form can be fitted, with a high degree of accuracy, to experimental data.Comment: 6 pages, 4 enclosed postscript figure

Coherent description of the intrinsic and extrinsic anomalous Hall effect in disordered alloys on an abab initioinitio level

A coherent description of the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) is presented that is applicable to pure as well as disordered alloy systems by treating all sources of the AHE on equal footing. This is achieved by an implementation of the Kubo-St\v{r}eda equation using the fully relativistic Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker (KKR) Green's function method in combination with the Coherent Potential Approximation (CPA) alloy theory. Applications to the pure elemental ferromagnets bcc-Fe and fcc-Ni led to results in full accordance with previous work. For the alloy systems fcc-Fe$_x$Pd$_{1-x}$ and fcc-Ni$_x$Pd$_{1-x}$ very satisfying agreement with experiment could be achieved for the anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) over the whole range of concentration. To interpret these results an extension of the definition for the intrinsic AHC is suggested. Plotting the corresponding extrinsic AHC versus the longitudinal conductivity a linear relation is found in the dilute regimes, that allows a detailed discussion of the role of the skew and side-jump scattering processes.Comment: * shortened manuscript * slight rewordings * changed line style in Fig 1 * corrected misprinted S (skewness) factor * merged Fig. 3 with Fig. 1 * new citation introduce