Incentives for breastfeeding and for smoking cessation in pregnancy: An exploration of types and meanings

Financial or tangible incentives are a strategy for improving health behaviours. The mechanisms of action of incentives are complex and debated. Using a multidisciplinary integrated mixed methods study, with service-user collaboration throughout, we developed a typology of incentives and their meanings for initiating and sustaining smoking cessation in pregnancy and breastfeeding. The ultimate aim was to inform incentive intervention design by providing insights into incentive acceptability and mechanisms of action. Systematic evidence syntheses of incentive intervention studies for smoking cessation in pregnancy or breastfeeding identified incentive characteristics, which were developed into initial categories. Little published qualitative data on user perspectives and acceptability was available. Qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted in three UK regions with a diverse socio-demographic sample of 88 women and significant others from the target population, 53 service providers, 24 experts/decision makers, and conference attendees identified new potential incentives and providers, with and without experience of incentives. Identified incentives (published and emergent) were classified into eight categories: cash and shopping vouchers, maternal wellbeing, baby and pregnancy-related, behaviour-related, health-related, general utility, awards and certificates, and experiences. A typology was refined iteratively through concurrent data collection and thematic analysis to explore participants' understandings of ‘incentives’ and to compare and contrast meanings across types. Our typology can be understood in three dimensions: the degree of restriction, the extent to which each is hedonic and/or utilitarian, and whether each has solely monetary value versus monetary with added social value. The layers of autonomy, meanings and the social value of incentive types influence their acceptability and interact with structural, social, and personal factors. Dimensions of incentive meaning that go beyond the simple incentive description should inform incentive programme design and are likely to influence outcomes

Effects of Climate Change on Factory Life Cycle

AbstractClimate change and global warming have negative consequences for humans and nature. While many research activities analyze the effects of industrial production on global warming and aim to develop actions using rare resources more efficiently and reducing CO2-emission, the effects of climate change on industrial production is rarely discussed. Hence, manufacturing companies are considered in research as cause of climate change and not as affected by climate change. Thus, there is no systematic consideration of effects of climate change in factory planning. This leads to expensive adaptions within factory life cycle. For this reason the paper identifies ecological, economical and social changes caused by the climate change. These changes are analyzed on their effects on factories and prioritized according to their risk for the company. Subsequently, the identified changes are matched to different functions of factory planning. The matching allows developing planning-related and preventive strategy to cope with changes during factory life cycle

Thermal microwave emissions from vegetated fields: A comparison between theory and experiment

The radiometric measurements over bare field and fields covered with grass, soybean, corn, and alfalfa were made with 1.4 GHz and 5 GHz microwave radiometers during August - October 1978. The measured results are compared with radiative transfer theory treating the vegetated fields as a two layer random medium. It is found that the presence of a vegetation cover generally gives a higher brightness temperature T(B) than that expected from a bare soil. The amount of this T(B) excess increases in the vegetation biomass and in the frequency of the observed radiation. The results of radiative transfer calculations generally match well with the experimental data, however, a detailed analysis also strongly suggests the need of incorporating soil surface roughness effect into the radiative transfer theory in order to better interpret the experimental data

Generalization of Hasimoto's transformation

In this paper, we generalize the famous Hasimoto's transformation by showing that the dynamics of a closed unidimensional vortex filament embedded in a three-dimensional manifold of constant curvature gives rise under Hasimoto's transformation to the non-linear Schrodinger equation. We also give a natural interpretation of the function \psi introduced by Hasimoto in terms of moving frames associated to a natural complex bundle over the filament

Spatial distribution of local density of states in vicinity of impurity on semiconductor surface

We present the results of detailed theoretical investigations of changes in local density of total electronic surface states in 2D anisotropic atomic semiconductor lattice in vicinity of impurity atom for a wide range of applied bias voltage. We have found that taking into account changes in density of continuous spectrum states leads to the formation of a downfall at the particular value of applied voltage when we are interested in the density of states above the impurity atom or even to a series of downfalls for the fixed value of the distance from the impurity. The behaviour of local density of states with increasing of the distance from impurity along the chain differs from behaviour in the direction perpendicular to the chain.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

An example of spectral phase transition phenomenon in a class of Jacobi matrices with periodically modulated weights

We consider self-adjoint unbounded Jacobi matrices with diagonal q_n=n and weights \lambda_n=c_n n, where c_n is a 2-periodical sequence of real numbers. The parameter space is decomposed into several separate regions, where the spectrum is either purely absolutely continuous or discrete. This constitutes an example of the spectral phase transition of the first order. We study the lines where the spectral phase transition occurs, obtaining the following main result: either the interval (-\infty;1/2) or the interval (1/2;+\infty) is covered by the absolutely continuous spectrum, the remainder of the spectrum being pure point. The proof is based on finding asymptotics of generalized eigenvectors via the Birkhoff-Adams Theorem. We also consider the degenerate case, which constitutes yet another example of the spectral phase transition

Spatial effects of Fano resonance in local tunneling conductivity in vicinity of impurity on semiconductor surface

We present the results of local tunneling conductivity spatial distribution detailed theoretical investigations in vicinity of impurity atom for a wide range of applied bias voltage. We observed Fano resonance in tunneling conductivity resulting from interference between resonant tunneling channel through impurity energy level and direct tunneling channel between the tunneling contact leads. We have found that interference between tunneling channels strongly modifies form of tunneling conductivity measured by the scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS) depending on the distance value from the impurity.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Homotheties and topology of tangent sphere bundles

We prove a Theorem on homotheties between two given tangent sphere bundles $S_rM$ of a Riemannian manifold $M,g$ of $\dim\geq 3$, assuming different variable radius functions $r$ and weighted Sasaki metrics induced by the conformal class of $g$. New examples are shown of manifolds with constant positive or with constant negative scalar curvature, which are not Einstein. Recalling results on the associated almost complex structure $I^G$ and symplectic structure ${\omega}^G$ on the manifold $TM$, generalizing the well-known structure of Sasaki by admitting weights and connections with torsion, we compute the Chern and the Stiefel-Whitney characteristic classes of the manifolds $TM$ and $S_rM$.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in Journal of Geometr

Histone H1 binding to nucleosome arrays depends on linker DNA length and trajectory

Throughout the genome, nucleosomes often form regular arrays that differ in nucleosome repeat length (NRL), occupancy of linker histone H1 and transcriptional activity. Here, we report cryo-EM structures of human H1-containing tetranucleosome arrays with four physiologically relevant NRLs. The structures show a zig-zag arrangement of nucleosomes, with nucleosomes 1 and 3 forming a stack. H1 binding to stacked nucleosomes depends on the NRL, whereas H1 always binds to the non-stacked nucleosomes 2 and 4. Short NRLs lead to altered trajectories of linker DNA, and these altered trajectories sterically impair H1 binding to the stacked nucleosomes in our structures. As the NRL increases, linker DNA trajectories relax, enabling H1 contacts and binding. Our results provide an explanation for why arrays with short NRLs are depleted of H1 and suited for transcription, whereas arrays with long NRLs show full H1 occupancy and can form transcriptionally silent heterochromatin regions