Will Very Light Jets Replace King Air Turboprops for Business Travel?

The purpose of this research was to determine if Very Light Jets (VLJs) such as the Eclipse 500 might replace the Beechcraft King Air Turboprop as the preferred aircraft for short regional flights. There are often significant distances from the location of a given company to the nearest customer. Traveling these distances requires travel time, significant funding, and inconvenience. The research method utilized developed and distributed a survey to present owners of Beechcraft King Air Turboprops used for regional business travel. After careful analysis of the data, the researcher concluded that the present owners of King Air Turboprops were very reluctant to part with what they view as an extremely flexible business aircraft

Male involvement in sexual and reproductive health in the Mendi district, Southern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea: a descriptive study

BACKGROUND: Lack of male involvement and support for sexual and reproductive health services is seen by many Papua New Guinean women as a barrier to accessing services. Poor utilization of services by both men and women is reflected in high maternal mortality and high rates of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections in the Southern Highlands Province. It is therefore important to understand the type of services provided, men’s perceptions of these services and the Health Sector’s capacity to involve men in its programs. METHODS: Information from interviews of married men, officers in charge of health facilities, and information from a focus group discussion with village leaders was collected to assess possible constraints to reproductive and sexual health care delivery. RESULTS: Although many men had heard about antenatal care, supervised births, family planning and sexually transmitted infections including, HIV/AIDS, many were unaware of their importance and of the types of services provided to address these issues. There was a very strong association between men’s literacy and their knowledge of Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) issues, their discussion of these issues with their wives and their wives’ utilisation of sexual and reproductive health services. Some men considered SRH services to be important but gave priority to social obligations. Although men made most decisions for sexual and reproductive issues, pregnancy, child birth and rearing of children were regarded as women’s responsibilities. Knowledge of HIV/AIDS appeared to have changed sexual behaviour in some men. Services for men in this rural setting were inadequate and service providers lacked the capacity to involve men in reproductive health issues. CONCLUSION: Poor knowledge, socio-cultural factors and inadequate and inappropriate services for men hampered utilization of services and impaired support for their wives’ service utilization. Programmatic and policy initiatives should focus on improving service delivery to accommodate men in sexual and reproductive health

Monitoring of groundwater levels for real‑time conjunctive water management

Water users in the Arkansas Grand Prairie wish to maintain sufficient groundwater levels to: insure adequate groundwater reserves for time of drought, protect themselves from litigation caused by wells going dry, and insure a sustained yield. Achievement of these goals requires regular measurement of groundwater levels. Review of monitoring practice and technology indicates that spring and fall measurements taken over the entire area using steel tape and acoustic device is preferred for most long range planning. Continuous monitoring is indicated for critical parts of the region where saturated thicknesses are small. Desirable attributes of a data collection/transmission system for such areas are as follow: Data should be stored in digital format on machine readable medium. Collection device should be installable in existing wells and not require special well construction. Device should be able to monitor pump status, and time and water level at programmable intervals. Device should be upgradable to be able to transmit data as it is collected. A system which has these capabilities was built. It consists of an acoustic probe, interface, computer and cassette recorder

Mind over chatter: plastic up-regulation of the fMRI alertness network by EEG neurofeedback

EEG neurofeedback (NFB) is a brain-computer interface (BCI) approach used to shape brain oscillations by means of real-time feedback from the electroencephalogram (EEG), which is known to reflect neural activity across cortical networks. Although NFB is being evaluated as a novel tool for treating brain disorders, evidence is scarce on the mechanism of its impact on brain function. In this study with 34 healthy participants, we examined whether, during the performance of an attentional auditory oddball task, the functional connectivity strength of distinct fMRI networks would be plastically altered after a 30-min NFB session of alpha-band reduction (n=17) versus a sham-feedback condition (n=17). Our results reveal that compared to sham, NFB induced a specific increase of functional connectivity within the alertness/salience network (dorsal anterior and mid cingulate), which was detectable 30 minutes after termination of training. Crucially, these effects were significantly correlated with reduced mind-wandering 'on-task' and were coupled to NFB-mediated resting state reductions in the alpha-band (8-12 Hz). No such relationships were evident for the sham condition. Although group default-mode network (DMN) connectivity was not significantly altered following NFB, we observed a positive association between modulations of resting alpha amplitude and precuneal connectivity, both correlating positively with frequency of mind-wandering. Our findings demonstrate a temporally direct, plastic impact of NFB on large-scale brain functional networks, and provide promising neurobehavioral evidence supporting its use as a noninvasive tool to modulate brain function in health and disease

From the AMLE editorial team:Disciplined provocation: Writing essays for AMLE

Our aim in this Editorial is to provide our readers, potential authors and reviewers with clarification on the essays section of the journal. We believe that essays make a significant contribution to the advancement of scholarship in management learning and education, but in a different way to empirical papers. We want to encourage the submission of essays by elaborating on what we think is distinctive, interesting and important about this form of writing

Multi-band optical variability of three TeV Blazars on Diverse Timescales

We present our optical photometric observations of three TeV blazars, PKS 1510-089, PG 1553+113 and Mrk 501 taken using two telescopes in India, one in Bulgaria, one in Greece and one in Serbia during 2012 - 2014. These observations covered a total of 95 nights with a total of 202 B filter frames, 247 images in V band, 817 in R band while 229 images were taken in the I filter. This work is focused on multi-band flux and colour variability studies of these blazars on diverse timescales which are useful in understanding the emission mechanisms. We studied the variability characteristics of above three blazars and found all to be active over our entire observational campaigns. We also searched for any correlation between the brightness of the sources and their colour indices. During the times of variability, no significant evidence for the sources to display spectral changes correlated with magnitude was found on timescales of a few months. We briefly discuss the possible physical mechanisms most likely responsible for the observed flux variability.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA

A game theoretic model of the behavioural gaming that takes place at the EMS - ED interface

This research describes the development and application of a 3-player game theoretic model between two queueing systems and a service that distributes individuals to them. The resultant model is used to explore dynamics between all players. The first aspect of this work is the development of a queueing system with two consecutive waiting spaces where the strategic managerial behaviour corresponds to how individuals use these waiting spaces. Two modelling techniques are deployed: discrete event simulation and Markov chains. The state probabilities of the Markov chain system are used to extract the performance measures of the queueing model (e.g. mean time in each waiting room, mean number of individuals in each room, etc.). A 3-player game theoretic model is subsequently proposed between the two queueing systems and the service that distributes individuals to them. In particular this can be viewed as a 2-player normal-form game where the utilities are determined by a third player with its own strategies and objectives. A backwards induction technique is used to get the utilities of the normal-form game between the two queueing systems. This particular system has many applications, including those in healthcare where it captures the emergent behaviour between the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) and the Emergency Department (ED). The impact of time-target measures on patient well-being is explored in this paper

HLA Class I and KIR Genes Do Not Protect Against HIV Type 1 Infection in Highly Exposed Uninfected Individuals With Hemophilia A

A recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) involving patients with hemophilia A who were exposed to but uninfected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) did not reveal genetic variants associated with resistance to HIV-1 infection, beyond homozygosity for CCR5-Δ32. Since variation in HLA class I and KIR genes is not well interrogated by standard GWAS techniques, we tested whether these 2 loci were involved in protection from HIV-1 infection in the same hemophilia cohort, using controls from the general population. Our data indicate that HLA class I alleles, presence or absence of KIR genes, and functionally relevant combinations of the HLA/KIR genotypes are not involved in resistance to parenterally transmitted HIV-1 infectio