Using a taxonomy of behaviour change techniques to define key components of Stop Delirium! a complex intervention to prevent delirium in care homes

Objective: This paper aims to describe Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs) used within a multi-component intervention to prevent delirium in older people living in care homes, called Stop Delirium! Methods: The Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy version 1 (BCTTv1) was used to code and characterise the ‘key ingredients’ within Stop Delirium!. Four sources of information were examined to identify BCTs used: intervention manual and toolkit; the delirium resource box; and contemporaneous written logs recorded by staff delivering the intervention in two feasibility studies. Details of BCTs used in each part of the intervention and whom they were targeting were recorded, as well as the frequency of each identified BCT. Results: 31.2% of all BCTs described in the BCTTv1 were used in the Stop Delirium! intervention. The majority of BCTs focused on changing care home staff behaviour through enhanced education, training and empowerment. ‘Social support (practical)’ was the most frequently occurring BCT. Conclusion: The large number of different BCTs identified within the Stop Delirium! intervention reflects the complexities of multicomponent interventions. The prominence of social support and empowerment further emphasises the group and organisational effort required to improve delirium care. By explicitly identifying and describing the BCTs used in Stop Delirium!, can enhance standardisation and replicability, and promote intervention fidelity for future trial evaluation and implementation of a multicomponent intervention to prevent delirium in long-term care

Quantum trajectories and their statistics for remotely entangled quantum bits

We experimentally and theoretically investigate the quantum trajectories of jointly monitored transmon qubits embedded in spatially separated microwave cavities. Using nearly quantum-noise limited superconducting amplifiers and an optimized setup to reduce signal loss between cavities, we can efficiently track measurement-induced entanglement generation as a continuous process for single realizations of the experiment. The quantum trajectories of transmon qubits naturally split into low and high entanglement classes corresponding to half-parity collapse. The distribution of concurrence is found at any given time and we explore the dynamics of entanglement creation in the state space. The distribution exhibits a sharp cut-off in the high concurrence limit, defining a maximal concurrence boundary. The most likely paths of the qubits' trajectories are also investigated, resulting in three probable paths, gradually projecting the system to two even subspaces and an odd subspace. We also investigate the most likely time for the individual trajectories to reach their most entangled state, and find that there are two solutions for the local maximum, corresponding to the low and high entanglement routes. The theoretical predictions show excellent agreement with the experimental entangled qubit trajectory data.Comment: 11 pages and 4 figure

Sugar-hydrolysing enzymes in gustatory mutants of Drosophila

The distribution of the isozymes of α-glucosidase in different parts of Drosophila melanogaster was examined. Two of the eight glucosidase bands are associated with tarsi. The gustatory mutations in the genes gustB and gustC greatly reduce tarsal glucosidase activity, but the enzyme deficiency is not correlated with inability to taste sugars

Effects of Individual Strategies for Resource Access on Collaboratively Maintained Irrigation Infrastructure

Built infrastructure for water and energy supply, transportation, and other such services underpins human well-being and socioeconomic development. A fundamental understanding of how infrastructure design and user strategies interact can guide important design decisions as well as policy formulation for ensuring long-term infrastructure viability in conjunction with improved individual user benefits. In this work, an agent based model (ABM) is developed to study this issue for the specific case of irrigation canals. Cooperatively maintained irrigation canals serve essential roles in sustaining agriculture-based economies in many regions. Canal system design can strongly affect benefits derived by distributed users, regional agricultural output, and the long-term viability of the shared infrastructure itself. Here, an ABM is used to investigate how an option to use an independent water source interacts with canal design to affect canal maintenance cooperation and farmer income. The independent water source is stylized as a well that provides access to groundwater and represents a strategically robust design option; a design option that reduces the implementer\u27s utility vulnerability to unfavorable actions by other actors. Research in other systems has demonstrated that strategically robust designs can improve both implementer utility and the probability of collaboration. The results of this research, in contrast, demonstrate that the option of individual resource access, the strategically robust design option, as represented by a well, reduces cooperative maintenance in most cases. However, wells also improve farmer income, especially for downstream farmers that are most affected by water theft

Always-On Quantum Error Tracking with Continuous Parity Measurements

We investigate quantum error correction using continuous parity measurements to correct bit-flip errors with the three-qubit code. Continuous monitoring of errors brings the benefit of a continuous stream of information, which facilitates passive error tracking in real time. It reduces overhead from the standard gate-based approach that periodically entangles and measures additional ancilla qubits. However, the noisy analog signals from continuous parity measurements mandate more complicated signal processing to interpret syndromes accurately. We analyze the performance of several practical filtering methods for continuous error correction and demonstrate that they are viable alternatives to the standard ancilla-based approach. As an optimal filter, we discuss an unnormalized (linear) Bayesian filter, with improved computational efficiency compared to the related Wonham filter introduced by Mabuchi [New J. Phys. 11, 105044 (2009)]. We compare this optimal continuous filter to two practical variations of the simplest periodic boxcar-averaging-and-thresholding filter, targeting real-time hardware implementations with low-latency circuitry. As variations, we introduce a non-Markovian ``half-boxcar\u27\u27 filter and a Markovian filter with a second adjustable threshold; these filters eliminate the dominant source of error in the boxcar filter, and compare favorably to the optimal filter. For each filter, we derive analytic results for the decay in average fidelity and verify them with numerical simulations