Primary care groups - Modernising primary and community health services

Developing primary and community health services is a key component of the government's plans for modernising the NHS. Primary care groups and trusts have a vital part to play in overcoming the variability, fragmentation, and isolation that have been the weaknesses of primary health care in the NHS. Primary care groups and trusts have introduced initiatives to promote greater collaboration between general practices and to share expertise and resources. Improving access to care is an important feature of the modernisation plan, and most groups and trusts are actively promoting access, particularly for people who have been poorly served traditionally. Groups and trusts are tackling staff shortages by using clinical specialists and promoting extended roles for nurses and pharmacist

Vascular perfusion chilling of red meat carcasses - A feasibility study.

Meat carcasses must be chilled to below 7°C before leaving the slaughterhouse. Typically this is done by passing cold air over the surfaces of eviscerated and de-hided carcasses. This surface cooling can take many hours to reduce centre temperatures to below 7°C. In vascular perfusion chilling (VPC), a cold fluid is circulated through the intact vascular system, offering significant reductions in cooling time. This paper describes a small feasibility study to evaluate vascular perfusion techniques for rapid chilling of lamb carcasses using a proprietary Flo-ice(™) system. This produces pumpable ice slurries containing very fine ice particles, suitable for circulating through vascular systems. VPC was found to be capable of rapid initial reduction of carcass temperatures in comparison with air chilling (mean times to 20°C in deep legs were reduced from 2.6 to 1.3h, which was significantly different at P<0.05). In all cases however, uptake of perfusate into the carcasses occurred. This limited the duration of the perfusion treatment and as a result restricted the period of enhanced cooling. Samples from carcasses treated with VPC were lighter (P<0.05, with mean measured L value increasing from 43.4 to 46.8) and more yellow (P<0.05, with mean measured b value increasing from 6.7 to 7.9) than samples from conventionally chilled carcasses, and had lower shear force values when cooked (P<0.05, with mean force reducing from 10.0 to 6.8kg). This was most probably due to the added water in the meat. Microbial quality of the meat was not significantly affected by the perfusion treatments

Low-lying excitations of a trapped rotating Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate the low-lying excitations of a weakly-interacting, harmonically-trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gas under rotation, in the limit where the angular mometum $L$ of the system is much less than the number of the atoms $N$ in the trap. We show that in the asymptotic limit $N \to \infty$ the excitation energy, measured from the energy of the lowest state, is given by $27 N_{3}(N_{3}-1) v_0 /68$, where $N_{3}$ is the number of octupole excitations and $v_{0}$ is the unit of the interaction energy.Comment: 3 pages, RevTex, 2 ps figures, submitted to PR

The Grain-Storage Picture

Grain storage and the capacity for it have grown rapidly in the past 10 years, and there\u27s much interest in the cost of the over-all operation. Here\u27s a brief summary of the situation-nationally and here in Iowa

Energy cost associated with vortex crossing in superconductors

Starting from the Ginzburg-Landau free energy of a type II superconductor in a magnetic field we estimate the energy associated with two vortices crossing. The calculations are performed by assuming that we are in a part of the phase diagram where the lowest Landau level approximation is valid. We consider only two vortices but with two markedly different sets of boundary conditions: on a sphere and on a plane with quasi-periodic boundary conditions. We find that the answers are very similar suggesting that the energy is localised to the crossing point. The crossing energy is found to be field and temperature dependent -- with a value at the experimentally measured melting line of $U_\times \simeq 7.5 k T_m \simeq 1.16/c_L^2$, where $c_L$ is the Lindemann melting criterion parameter. The crossing energy is then used with an extension of the Marchetti, Nelson and Cates hydrodynamic theory to suggest an explanation of the recent transport experiments of Safar {{\em et al.}\ }.Comment: 15 pages, RevTex v3.0, followed by 5 postscript figure

Morse theory of the moment map for representations of quivers

The results of this paper concern the Morse theory of the norm-square of the moment map on the space of representations of a quiver. We show that the gradient flow of this function converges, and that the Morse stratification induced by the gradient flow co-incides with the Harder-Narasimhan stratification from algebraic geometry. Moreover, the limit of the gradient flow is isomorphic to the graded object of the Harder-Narasimhan-Jordan-H\"older filtration associated to the initial conditions for the flow. With a view towards applications to Nakajima quiver varieties we construct explicit local co-ordinates around the Morse strata and (under a technical hypothesis on the stability parameter) describe the negative normal space to the critical sets. Finally, we observe that the usual Kirwan surjectivity theorems in rational cohomology and integral K-theory carry over to this non-compact setting, and that these theorems generalize to certain equivariant contexts.Comment: 48 pages, small revisions from previous version based on referee's comments. To appear in Geometriae Dedicat

Free expansion of lowest Landau level states of trapped atoms: a wavefunction microscope

We show that for any lowest-Landau-level state of a trapped, rotating, interacting Bose gas, the particle distribution in coordinate space in a free expansion (time of flight) experiment is related to that in the trap at the time it is turned off by a simple rescaling and rotation. When the lowest-Landau-level approximation is valid, interactions can be neglected during the expansion, even when they play an essential role in the ground state when the trap is present. The correlations in the density in a single snapshot can be used to obtain information about the fluid, such as whether a transition to a quantum Hall state has occurred.Comment: 5 pages, no figures. v2: discussion of neglect of interactions during expansion improved, refs adde

Perturbative spectrum of Trapped Weakly Interacting Bosons in Two Dimensions

We study a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate under rotation in the limit of weak, translational and rotational invariant two-particle interactions. We use the perturbation-theory approach (the large-N expansion) to calculate the ground-state energy and the excitation spectrum in the asymptotic limit where the total number of particles N goes to infinity while keeping the total angular momentum L finite. Calculating the probabilities of different configurations of angular momentum in the exact eigenstates gives us a clear view of the physical content of excitations. We briefly discuss the case of repulsive contact interaction.Comment: Revtex, 10 pages, 1 table, to appear in Phys. Rev.