Some implications of sampling choices on comparisons between satellite and model aerosol optical depth fields

The comparison of satellite and model aerosol optical depth (AOD) fields provides useful information on the strengths and weaknesses of both. However, the sampling of satellite and models is very different and some subjective decisions about data selection and aggregation must be made in order to perform such comparisons. This work examines some implications of these decisions, using GlobAerosol AOD retrievals at 550 nm from Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) measurements, and aerosol fields from the GEOS-Chem chemistry transport model. It is recommended to sample the model only where the satellite flies over on a particular day; neglecting this can cause regional differences in model AOD of up to 0.1 on monthly and annual timescales. The comparison is observed to depend strongly upon thresholds for sparsity of satellite retrievals in the model grid cells. Requiring at least 25% coverage of the model grid cell by satellite data decreases the observed difference between the two by approximately half over land. The impact over ocean is smaller. In both model and satellite datasets, there is an anticorrelation between the proportion <i>p</i> of a model grid cell covered by satellite retrievals and the AOD. This is attributed to small <i>p</i> typically occuring due to high cloud cover and lower AODs being found in large clear-sky regions. Daily median AATSR AODs were found to be closer to GEOS-Chem AODs than daily means (with the root mean squared difference being approximately 0.05 smaller). This is due to the decreased sensitivity of medians to outliers such as cloud-contaminated retrievals, or aerosol point sources not included in the model

Effects of higher dietary protein and fiber intakes at breakfast on postprandial glucose, insulin, and 24-H interstitial glucose in overweight adults

Dietary protein and fiber independently influence insulin-mediated glucose control. However, potential additive effects are not well-known. Men and women (n = 20; age: 26 ± 5 years; body mass index: 26.1 ± 0.2 kg/m²; mean ± standard deviation) consumed normal protein and fiber (NPNF; NP = 12.5 g, NF = 2 g), normal protein and high fiber (NPHF; NP = 12.5 g, HF = 8 g), high protein and normal fiber (HPNF; HP = 25 g, NF = 2 g), or high protein and fiber (HPHF; HP = 25 g, HF = 8 g) breakfast treatments during four 2-week interventions in a randomized crossover fashion. On the last day of each intervention, meal tolerance tests were completed to assess postprandial (every 60 min for 240 min) serum glucose and insulin concentrations. Continuous glucose monitoring was used to measure 24-h interstitial glucose during five days of the second week of each intervention. Repeated-measures ANOVA was applied for data analyses. The HPHF treatment did not affect postprandial glucose and insulin responses or 24-h glucose total area under the curve (AUC). Higher fiber intake reduced 240-min insulin AUC. Doubling the amount of protein from 12.5 g to 25 g/meal and quadrupling fiber from 2 to 8 g/meal at breakfast was not an effective strategy for modulating insulin-mediated glucose responses in these young, overweight adults.T32 HL116276 - NHLBI NIH HHS; UL1 TR001108 - NCATS NIH HH

The recent secular trend in grip strength among older adults: findings from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Purpose: Weaker grip strength in older adults is associated with adverse health outcomes and is a key component of sarcopenia. The secular trend of grip strength is, therefore, relevant in the setting of ageing populations. A recent study suggested differences in this trend among countries in mainland Europe. We used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to investigate the recent secular trend of older English adults. Methods: We used data on participants aged 50–89 having their first measurement of grip strength in waves 2 (2002/2003), 4 (2008/2009) or 6 (2012/2013) of ELSA. Grip was measured using a Smedley dynamometer. We expressed grip values as Z-scores (number of standard deviations above the age and gender mean from normative data) for use in linear regression analyses examining the annual secular trend after adjustment for potential confounders. Results: We included a total of 11,476 participants from the three waves of ELSA. Grip strength declined across the three waves, with mean (SD) Z-scores of 0.01 (0.94), − 0.06 (0.97) and − 0.20 (0.98) in waves 2, 4 and 6, respectively. The annual Z-score decline after adjustments was 0.03 SDs (95% CI 0.02, 0.03) per year. Conclusion: We saw evidence of a recent slight decline in the grip strength of older English adults. Over the 9-year period of this study, the decline seen is equivalent to 65-year-olds’ mean strength declining to that previously seen in individuals at age 69. Further monitoring of secular trends in grip strength and investigation of possible causes are warranted

Psychological well-being and incident frailty in men and women:the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Background: observations that older people who enjoy life more tend to live longer suggest that psychological well-being may be a potential resource for healthier ageing. We investigated whether psychological well-being was associated with incidence of physical frailty.Method: we used multinomial logistic regression to examine the prospective relationship between psychological well-being, assessed using the CASP-19, a questionnaire that assesses perceptions of control, autonomy, self-realization and pleasure, and incidence of physical frailty or pre-frailty, defined according to the Fried criteria (unintentional weight loss, weakness, self-reported exhaustion, slow walking speed and low physical activity), in 2557 men and women aged 60 to ?90 years from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).Results: men and women with higher levels of psychological well-being were less likely to become frail over the 4-year follow-up period. For a standard deviation higher score in psychological well-being at baseline, the relative risk ratio (RR) for incident frailty, adjusted for age, sex and baseline frailty status, was 0.46 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.40–0.54]. There was a significant association between psychological well-being and risk of pre-frailty (RR 0.69, 95% CI 0.63–0.77). Examination of scores for hedonic (pleasure) and eudaimonic (control, autonomy and self-realization) well-being showed that higher scores on both were associated with decreased risk. Associations were partially attenuated by further adjustment for other potential confounding factors but persisted. Incidence of pre-frailty or frailty was associated with a decline in well-being, suggesting that the relationship is bidirectional.Conclusions: maintaining a stronger sense of psychological well-being in later life may protect against the development of physical frailty. Future research needs to establish the mechanisms underlying these finding

Opportunity or dead end? Rethinking the study of entrepreneurial action without a concept of opportunity

This article has two objectives: to critique the dominant opportunity discovery and creation literatures and to propose a new, critical realist–inspired analytical framework to theorise the causes, processes and consequences of entrepreneurial action – one that needs no concept of opportunity. We offer three reasons to support our critique of opportunity studies. First, there are important absences, contradictions and inconsistencies in definitions of opportunity in theoretical and empirical work that mean the term cannot signal a clear direction for theorising or empirical research. Our central criticism is that the concept of opportunity cannot refer simultaneously, without contradiction, to a social context offering profit-making prospects, to particular practices and to agents’ subjective beliefs or imagined futures. Second, a new definition of opportunity would perpetuate the conceptual chaos. Third, useful concepts to capture important entrepreneurial processes are readily available, for instance, combining resources, creating new ventures and achieving product sales, which render a concept of opportunity superfluous. Instead, we conceptualise entrepreneurial action as investments in resources intended to create new goods and services for market exchange emergent from the interaction between agential, socialstructural and cultural causal powers

The limits of process: On (re)reading Henri Bergson

This article offers a reading of the work of Henri Bergson as it pertains to organizations through the lens of ideas drawn from critical realism. It suggests an alternative to interpretations based on a stark division between process and realist perspectives. Much of the existing literature presents a rather partial view of Bergson’s work. A review suggests some interesting parallels with themes in critical realism, notably the emergence of mind. Critical realism has a focus on process at its heart, but is also concerned with how the products of such processes become stabilized and form the conditions for action. This suggests that attention might usefully be paid to the relationship between organizational action and the sedimented practices grouped under the heading of ‘routines’. More attention to Bergson’s account of the relationship between instinct, intuition and intelligence provides a link to the social character of thought, something which can be mapped on to Archer’s work on reflexivity and the ‘internal conversation’. This suggests that our analyses need to pay attention to both memory and history, to building and dwelling, rather than the one-sided focus found in some process theory accounts

Effects of dietary protein and fiber at breakfast on appetite, ad libitum energy intake at lunch, and neural responses to visual food stimuli in overweight adults

Increasing either protein or fiber at mealtimes has relatively modest effects on ingestive behavior. Whether protein and fiber have additive or interactive effects on ingestive behavior is not known. Fifteen overweight adults (5 female, 10 male; BMI: 27.1 ± 0.2 kg/m²; aged 26 ± 1 year) consumed four breakfast meals in a randomized crossover manner (normal protein (12 g) + normal fiber (2 g), normal protein (12 g) + high fiber (8 g), high protein (25 g) + normal fiber (2 g), high protein (25 g) + high fiber (8 g)). The amount of protein and fiber consumed at breakfast did not influence postprandial appetite or ad libitum energy intake at lunch. In the fasting-state, visual food stimuli elicited significant responses in the bilateral insula and amygdala and left orbitofrontal cortex. Contrary to our hypotheses, postprandial right insula responses were lower after consuming normal protein vs. high protein breakfasts. Postprandial responses in other a priori brain regions were not significantly influenced by protein or fiber intake at breakfast. In conclusion, these data do not support increasing dietary protein and fiber at breakfast as effective strategies for modulating neural reward processing and acute ingestive behavior in overweight adults.R01 MH102224 - NIMH NIH HHS; UL1 TR001108 - NCATS NIH HHS; UL1TR001108 - NCATS NIH HH

Peer review and citation data in predicting university rankings, a large-scale analysis

Most Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) draw on peer review and bibliometric indicators, two different method- ologies which are sometimes combined. A common argument against the use of indicators in such research evaluation exercises is their low corre- lation at the article level with peer review judgments. In this study, we analyse 191,000 papers from 154 higher education institutes which were peer reviewed in a national research evaluation exercise. We combine these data with 6.95 million citations to the original papers. We show that when citation-based indicators are applied at the institutional or departmental level, rather than at the level of individual papers, surpris- ingly large correlations with peer review judgments can be observed, up to r <= 0.802, n = 37, p < 0.001 for some disciplines. In our evaluation of ranking prediction performance based on citation data, we show we can reduce the mean rank prediction error by 25% compared to previous work. This suggests that citation-based indicators are sufficiently aligned with peer review results at the institutional level to be used to lessen the overall burden of peer review on national evaluation exercises leading to considerable cost savings

Identity as a causal power : contextualising entrepreneurs' concerns

We propose a critical realist-informed conception of entrepreneurial identity – the personal power to create a new venture. Although most people have the power to become an entrepreneur, not everyone can, or is motivated to, realize that potential. Other countervailing powers – personal, material and social – can constrain, or discourage, action. Utilizing a stratified, emergent ontology, we contextualize entrepreneurial identity within three analytical orders – natural, practical and social. We distinguish personal identity, the set of concerns in the three orders that motivate action, from social identity, the roles we commit to in society. While entrepreneurial identity is a type of social identity, the underlying concerns that motivate commitment to an entrepreneurial role cannot be reduced to social interaction alone. The concept of internal conversation is used to theorize the connection of entrepreneurial motivation, context and behaviour. We draw on qualitative data from three UK-based disabled entrepreneurs to demonstrate the value of our framework