Ein Material - zwei Verfahren: Das Potenzial eines Monomaterial-Ansatzes von soliden Applikationen auf textilen Substraten aus der Perspektive des Designs

Der Zuwachs an Textile Waste ist eine zentrale Herausforderung der Textilbranche. Der Bedarf nach Textilien steigt und Textilien werden in Ausgestaltung und Funktionalität zunehmend komplexer. Oft werden dabei unterschiedliche Eigenschaften verschiedener Materialien genutzt. Dies führt zu einem Materialmix, der das Textil-Recycling vor zusätzliche Herausforderungen stellt. Das Projekt verbindet die Herausforderung steigender Mengen an Textile Waste mit dem Anspruch, komplexe textile Produkte zu schaffen

Personen, die nicht am Erwerbsleben teilnehmen - Analyse sozioökonomischer Merkmale unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Haushaltskontextes und Bestimmung des Arbeitskräftepotenzials : Endbericht

Für die Fachkräftesicherung stellen bisher nicht am Arbeitsmarkt aktive Personen (sog. Nichterwerbspersonen) ein wichtiges Potenzial dar. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Eigenschaften dieser Personengruppe und schätzt auf dieser Grundlage ihr Aktivierungspotenzial ein. Betrachtet werden Aspekte wie sozio-demographische Merkmale von Nichterwerbspersonen, Übergänge in und aus Nichterwerbstätigkeit, Faktoren, die einen Austritt aus Nichterwerbstätigkeit fördern oder hemmen sowie Erwerbspläne von Nichterwerbspersonen. Mit Hilfe von Clusteranalysen werden Typen von Nichterwerbstätigen identifiziert, die die Grundlage für die Abschätzung von Wahrscheinlichkeiten zur Aktivierung bilden. Abschließend werden Aktivierungsmaßnahmen diskutiert

Towards Designing a Mobile Stress Coping Assistant

Stress is a major public health concern and a severe threat to everyone. Facilitated by their powerful sensing capabilities, mobile devices may assist individuals in coping with stress. Building on existing studies and mobile apps supporting stress coping, we propose the design of a mobile coping assistant that uses multimodal sensor data to reduce its user’s stress. Based on sensor data, a mobile coping assistant (1) warns the user about elevated stress, (2) delivers a fundamental understanding of why they are currently stressed, (3) recommends targeted coping strategies to encourage and train effective coping behavior, and (4) executes automated actions to reduce stress exposure. The presented design comprises an architecture, good practices for designing the architectural components, and an algorithm for selecting adequate coping actions and recommendations. A prototypical instantiation indicates opportunities and challenges. Future research should evaluate the short- and long-term effectiveness of mobile coping assistants in the field

The impact of different care dependencies on people’s willingness to provide informal care: a discrete choice experiment in Germany

Background: Informal care provided by family members, friends, or neighbors is a major pillar in the German long-term care system. As the number of care-dependent older adults grow, ensuring their future care still relies on the willingness of family members, friends, or neighbors to assume the role of an informal caregiver. This study aimed to investigate the impact on people’s willingness to provide informal care to a close relative with predominately cognitive compared to physical impairments. Methods: An online survey was distributed to the general population in Germany, which resulted in 260 participants. A discrete choice experiment was created to elicit and quantify people’s preferences. A conditional logit model was used to investigate preferences and marginal willingness-to-accept values were estimated for one hour of informal caregiving. Results:Increased care time per day (hours) and expected duration of caregiving were negatively valued by the participants and reduced willingness to care. Descriptions of the two care dependencies had a significant impact on participants’ decisions. Having to provide care to a close relative with cognitive impairments was slightly preferred over caring for a relative with physical impairments. Conclusions: Our study results show the impact of different factors on the willingness to provide informal care to a close relative. How far the preference weights as well as the high willingness-to-accept values for an hour of caregiving can be explained by the sociodemographic structure of our cohort needs to be investigated by further research. Participants slightly preferred caring for a close relative with cognitive impairments, which might be explained by fear or discomfort with providing personal care to a relative with physical impairments or feelings of sympathy and pity towards people with dementia. Future qualitative research designs can help understand these motivations

Efficacy of imidacloprid 10%/moxidectin 1% spot-on formulation (Advocate®) in the prevention and treatment of feline aelurostrongylosis

Background: In three randomized, controlled laboratory efficacy studies, the efficacy in the prevention of patent infections of a topical combination of imidacloprid 10%/moxidectin 1% (Advocate® spot-on formulation for cats, Bayer Animal Health GmbH) against larval stages and immature adults of Aelurostrongylus abstrusus, as well as the treatment efficacy of a single or three monthly treatments against adult A. abstrusus, were evaluated. Methods: Cats were experimentally inoculated with 300–800 third-stage larvae (L3). Each group comprised 8 animals and the treatment dose was 10 mg/kg bodyweight (bw) imidacloprid and 1 mg/kg bw moxidectin in each study. Prevention of the establishment of patent infections was evaluated by two treatments at a monthly interval at three different time points before and after challenge infection. Curative efficacy was tested by one or three treatments after the onset of patency. Worm counts at necropsy were used for efficacy calculations. Results: In Study 1, the control group had a geometric mean (GM) of 28.8 adult nematodes and the single treatment group had a GM of 3.4 (efficacy 88.3%). In Study 2, the control group had a GM of 14.3, the prevention group had a GM of 0 (efficacy 100%), while the treatment group had a GM of 0.1 (efficacy 99.4%). In Study 3, the GM worm burden in the control group was 32.6 compared to 0 in all three prevention groups (efficacy 100% for all of those groups). Conclusions: The monthly administration of Advocate® reliably eliminated early larval stages and thereby prevented lung damage from and patent infections with A. abstrusus in cats. Regarding treatment, a single application of Advocate® reduced the worm burden, but it did not sufficiently clear the infection. In contrast, three monthly treatments were safe and highly efficacious against A. abstrusus

On the visibility of electron-electron interaction effects in field emission spectra

One of the most convenient methods to obtain information about the energy distribution function of electrons in conducting materials is the measurement of the energy resolved current $j(\omega)$ in field emission (FE) experiments. Its high energy tail $j_>(\omega)$ (above the Fermi edge) contains invaluable information about the nature of the electron--electron interactions inside the emitter. Thus far, $j_>(\omega)$ has been calculated to second order in the tunnelling probability, and it turns out to be divergent toward the Fermi edge for a wide variety of emitters. The extraction of the correlation properties from real experiments can potentially be obscured by the eventually more divergent contributions of higher orders as well as by thermal smearing around $E_F$. We present an analysis of both factors and make predictions for the energy window where only the second order tunnelling events dominate the behaviour of $j_>(\omega)$. We apply our results to the FE from Luttinger liquids and single-wall carbon nanotubes.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Solid State Communication

Seawater isotope constraints on tropical hydrology during the Holocene

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 34 (2007): L13701, doi:10.1029/2007GL030017.Paleoceanographic data from the low latitude Pacific Ocean provides evidence of changes in the freshwater budget and redistribution of freshwater within the basin during the Holocene. Reconstructed Holocene seawater δ 18O changes compare favorably to differences predicted between climate simulations for the middle Holocene (MH) and for the pre-Industrial late Holocene (LH). The model simulations demonstrate that changes in the tropical hydrologic cycle affect the relationship between δ 18Osw and surface salinity, and allow, for the first time, quantitative estimates of western Pacific salinity change during the Holocene. The simulations suggest that during the MH, the mean salinity of the Pacific was higher because less water vapor was transported from the Atlantic Ocean and more was transported to the Indian Ocean. The salinity of the western Pacific was enhanced further due both to the greater advection of salt to the region by ocean currents and to an increase in continental precipitation at the expense of maritime precipitation, the latter a consequence of the stronger Asian summer monsoon.This work was supported by NSF grants ATM-0501241, ATM-0501351, and WHOI’s Ocean and Climate Change Institute

Measuring Channel Planform Change From Image Time Series: A Generalizable, Spatially Distributed, Probabilistic Method for Quantifying Uncertainty

Abstract Channels change in response to natural or anthropogenic fluctuations in streamflow and/or sediment supply and measurements of channel change are critical to many river management applications. Whereas repeated field surveys are costly and time‐consuming, remote sensing can be used to detect channel change at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Repeat images have been widely used to measure long‐term channel change, but these measurements are only significant if the magnitude of change exceeds the uncertainty. Existing methods for characterizing uncertainty have two important limitations. First, while the use of a spatially variable image co‐registration error avoids the assumption that errors are spatially uniform, this type of error, as originally formulated, can only be applied to linear channel adjustments, which provide less information on channel change than polygons of erosion and deposition. Second, previous methods use a level‐of‐detection (LoD) threshold to remove non‐significant measurements, which is problematic because real changes that occurred but were smaller than the LoD threshold would be removed. In this study, we present a new method of quantifying uncertainty associated with channel change based on probabilistic, spatially varying estimates of co‐registration error and digitization uncertainty that obviates a LoD threshold. The spatially distributed probabilistic (SDP) method can be applied to both linear channel adjustments and polygons of erosion and deposition, making this the first uncertainty method generalizable to all metrics of channel change. Using a case study from the Yampa River, Colorado, we show that the SDP method reduced the magnitude of uncertainty and enabled us to detect smaller channel changes as significant. Additionally, the distributional information provided by the SDP method allowed us to report the magnitude of channel change with an appropriate level of confidence in cases where a simple LoD approach yielded an indeterminate result

Willingness to provide informal care to older adults in Germany: a discrete choice experiment

As the German population is continually aging and the majority of older adults still wish to ‘age in place’, the need for informal care provided by family and friends will correspondingly continue to increase. In addition, while the need for formal (professional) care services is also likely to increase, the supply already does not meet the demand in Germany today. The aim of our study is the elicitation of people’s willingness to provide informal care by means of a discrete choice experiment. The self-complete postal survey was disseminated to a random sample of the German general population in Lower Saxony. Data cleansing resulted in a final sample size of 280 participants. A conditional logit and a latent class model were estimated. All attributes were judged as highly relevant by the respondents. The results revealed that an increase in the care hours per day had the greatest negative impact overall on the willingness to provide informal care in our sample. The marginal willingness-to-accept for 1 h of informal care was €14.54 when having to provide informal care for 8 h in reference to 2 h per day. This value is considerably higher than the national minimum wage of €9.82. A three-class latent class model revealed preference heterogeneity. While a monetary compensation is often discussed to increase the willingness and availability of informal care in a country, our results show that this statement could not be generalized within our entire sample