Fatigue in long-duration travel diaries

This paper introduces a new long-duration travel diary survey undertaken in a small town and rural environment, which complements the existing urban Mobidrive survey of 1999. Policy-making is dominated by the 1-day view of the world provided by the usual diaries. Long-duration surveys can balance this by highlighting the strong intrapersonal variance in choices, modes used and other aspects of travel behaviour. They also allow us to gain an understanding of the activity space of the travellers. The new 2003 Thurgau data followed the protocol of the earlier study, but developed the set of questions further. These new questions concerned the social context of respondents as well as trip-related items, such as planning horizon of the activity, previous frequency of visits or the groups involved in the trip or activity. The descriptive and model-based analysis of the data showed that respondent fatigue is not an issue in either survey. Where significant deviations from a steady number of reported trips were found, they showed positive tendencies, i.e. learning. The skill accrued in the intensive round of contacts between respondent and interviewer is significant. Papers on travel diaries tend not to report interviewer effects, although their impacts are clearly discernable. The analysis shows that the four interviewers employed in this survey had a substantial effect on the number of reported trip

特別支援教育専攻学生を対象とした障害理解のための教材開発(2)―糖尿病・血友病等の「自己注射」場面を中心にした教材―

　特別支援教育専攻学生の指導では、対象とする障害児・者が活用する機器・道具を提示し、その使用法の解説がなされてきた。これは感覚・情報系障害領域では指導上意義がある。また肢体不自由・運動障害系では、車イスや生活補助具、障害体験グッズなどが障害理解教材として活用されてきた。しかし病弱教育領域では、子どもの困難理解につながる「病気体験」は、健常学生にはできない。そこで教員は、病院見学、療養生活の映像資料等を活用し、病気の影響や困難をイメージさせる方法をとることが多い。本研究では糖尿病および血友病を例にとり、病気による「困難」を体験・体感させる教材について検討した。糖尿病・血友病の自己注射モデルを提示し、その作製・改善とそれを使用した授業経過を分析対象とした。学生による試作及び改良モデルは、自己注射実施時の困難・不安・躊躇を「体感」させることを目的としているが、作製過程そのものが、学生による困難・不安・躊躇といった自己注射実施を必要とする疾患のもつ障害特性の理解を促進することが推察された

Textural variations in Neogene pelagic carbonate ooze at DSDP Site 593, southern Tasman Sea, and their paleoceanographic implications

Changes in Neogene sediment texture in pelagic carbonate-rich oozes on the Challenger Plateau, southern Tasman Sea, are used to infer changes in depositional paleocurrent velocities. The most obvious record of textural change is in the mud:sand ratio. Increases in the sand content are inferred to indicate a general up-core trend towards increasing winnowing of sediments resulting from increasing flow velocity of Southern Component Intermediate Water (SCIW), the forerunner of Antarctic Intermediate Water. In particular, the intervals c. 19-14.5 Ma, c. 9.5-8 Ma, and after 5 Ma are suggested to be times of increased SCIW velocity and strong sediment winnowing. Within the mud fraction, the fine silt to coarse clay sizes from 15.6 to 2 µm make the greatest contribution to the sediments and are composed of nannofossil plates. During extreme winnowing events it is the fine silt to very coarse clay material (13-3 µm) within this range that is preferentially removed, suggesting the 10 µm cohesive silt boundary reported for siliciclastic sediments does not apply to calcitic skeletal grains. The winnowed sediment comprises coccolithophore placoliths and spheres, represented by a mode at 4-7 µm. Further support for seafloor winnowing is gained from the presence in Hole 593 of a condensed sedimentary section from c. 18 to 14 Ma where the sand content increases to c. 20% of the bulk sample. Associated with the condensed section is a 6 m thick orange unit representing sediments subjected to particularly oxygen-rich, late early to early middle Miocene SCIW. Together these are inferred to indicate increased SCIW velocity resulting in winnowed sediment associated with faster arrival of oxygen-rich surface water subducted to form SCIW. Glacial development of Antarctica has been recorded from many deep-sea sites, with extreme glacials providing the mechanism to increase watermass flow. Miocene glacial zones Mi1b-Mi6 are identified in an associated oxygen isotope record from Hole 593, and correspond with times of particularly invigorated paleocirculation, bottom winnowing, and sediment textural changes

Health Industries in the Twentieth Century. Introduction

This article is the introduction to the special issue' Health Industries in the Twentieth Century'. It offers a broad literature review of scholarly works about the history of health and medicine, and stresses the opportunities for business historians to tackle the field of healthcare

The Role of Human Movement in the Transmission of Vector-Borne Pathogens

Vector-borne diseases constitute a largely neglected and enormous burden on public health in many resource-challenged environments, demanding efficient control strategies that could be developed through improved understanding of pathogen transmission. Human movement—which determines exposure to vectors—is a key behavioral component of vector-borne disease epidemiology that is poorly understood. We develop a conceptual framework to organize past studies by the scale of movement and then examine movements at fine-scale—i.e., people going through their regular, daily routine—that determine exposure to insect vectors for their role in the dynamics of pathogen transmission. We develop a model to quantify risk of vector contact across locations people visit, with emphasis on mosquito-borne dengue virus in the Amazonian city of Iquitos, Peru. An example scenario illustrates how movement generates variation in exposure risk across individuals, how transmission rates within sites can be increased, and that risk within sites is not solely determined by vector density, as is commonly assumed. Our analysis illustrates the importance of human movement for pathogen transmission, yet little is known—especially for populations most at risk to vector-borne diseases (e.g., dengue, leishmaniasis, etc.). We outline several important considerations for designing epidemiological studies to encourage investigation of individual human movement, based on experience studying dengue

Symbolic Object Code Analysis

Current software model checkers quickly reach their limit when being applied to verifying pointer safety properties in source code that includes function pointers and inlined assembly. This paper introduces an alternative technique for checking pointer safety violations, called Symbolic Object Code Analysis (SOCA), which is based on bounded symbolic execution, incorporates path-sensitive slicing, and employs the SMT solver Yices as its execution and verification engine. Extensive experimental results of a prototypic SOCA Verifier, using the Verisec suite and almost 10,000 Linux device driver functions as benchmarks, show that SOCA performs competitively to current source-code model checkers and that it also scales well when applied to real operating systems code and pointer safety issues. SOCA effectively explores semantic niches of software that current software verifiers do not reach

Reconstructing the 2003/2004 H3N2 influenza epidemic in Switzerland with a spatially explicit, individual-based model

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Simulation models of influenza spread play an important role for pandemic preparedness. However, as the world has not faced a severe pandemic for decades, except the rather mild H1N1 one in 2009, pandemic influenza models are inherently hypothetical and validation is, thus, difficult. We aim at reconstructing a recent seasonal influenza epidemic that occurred in Switzerland and deem this to be a promising validation strategy for models of influenza spread. METHODS: We present a spatially explicit, individual-based simulation model of influenza spread. The simulation model bases upon (i) simulated human travel data, (ii) data on human contact patterns and (iii) empirical knowledge on the epidemiology of influenza. For model validation we compare the simulation outcomes with empirical knowledge regarding (i) the shape of the epidemic curve, overall infection rate and reproduction number, (ii) age-dependent infection rates and time of infection, (iii) spatial patterns. RESULTS: The simulation model is capable of reproducing the shape of the 2003/2004 H3N2 epidemic curve of Switzerland and generates an overall infection rate (14.9 percent) and reproduction numbers (between 1.2 and 1.3), which are realistic for seasonal influenza epidemics. Age and spatial patterns observed in empirical data are also reflected by the model: Highest infection rates are in children between 5 and 14 and the disease spreads along the main transport axes from west to east. CONCLUSIONS: We show that finding evidence for the validity of simulation models of influenza spread by challenging them with seasonal influenza outbreak data is possible and promising. Simulation models for pandemic spread gain more credibility if they are able to reproduce seasonal influenza outbreaks. For more robust modelling of seasonal influenza, serological data complementing sentinel information would be beneficia