What determines young adults’ attitudes, perceived norms, and perceived behavioral control towards healthy sleep behaviors? A reasoned action approach

A common limitation to the design of public health sleep interventions is the overall lack of using theory. Previous researchers have utilized the theory of planned behavior and the reasoned action approach (RAA) to predict healthy sleep behaviors, however much of this research was done using reflective (or generalized) measures, which alone is likely inadequate to equip health practitioners with tangible information they can use to translate theory into practice. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use formative (or belief-based) measures of the RAA to evaluate the determinants of attitudes, perceived norms, and perceived behavioral control (PBC) of healthy sleep behaviors among young adults. A survey was distributed via email using a university-wide listserv at a large southwestern university. Participants (n = 310) were on average 19.9 years old (+/-1.6), and reported sleeping five and a half hours (+/-0.7) per night. Associations between formative and reflective RAA measures were overall moderate to strong. Thinking clearly (r = 0.55; p \u3c 0.001) was the strongest determinant of attitudes; friends (r = 0.27; p \u3c 0.001) was the strongest referent of injunctive norms; children (r = 0.14; p \u3c 0.05) was the strongest referent of descriptive norms; and having a lot of homework/studying (r = -0.25; p \u3c 0.001) was the strongest determinant of PBC. Understanding the determinants of attitudes, perceived norms, and PBC will help health practitioners bridge the gap between theory and practice, and provide relevant information to aid in the development of effective public health sleep interventions

Characterisation of dispersions within annealed HVOLF thermally sprayed AlSnCu coatings

High velocity oxy-liquid fuel (HVOLF) AlSnCu coatings are characterised following annealing for up to 5 hours at 300°C. A combination of statistical analysis of BSE images and TEM observations demonstrate the decrease in the number of sub-micron and nanoscale Sn particles with annealing, commensurate with a decrease in the coating microhardness. TEM evidence further suggests the coarsening of nanoscale Sn through a mechanism of a liquid phase migration within the Al matrix. EELS and EFTEM additionally allow the identification of the precipitation of theta'

Cup Stacking in Graphs

Here we introduce a new game on graphs, called cup stacking, following a line of what can be considered as $0$-, $1$-, or $2$-person games such as chip firing, percolation, graph burning, zero forcing, cops and robbers, graph pebbling, and graph pegging, among others. It can be more general, but the most basic scenario begins with a single cup on each vertex of a graph. For a vertex with $k$ cups on it we can move all its cups to a vertex at distance $k$ from it, provided the second vertex already has at least one cup on it. The object is to stack all cups onto some pre-described target vertex. We say that a graph is stackable if this can be accomplished for all possible target vertices. In this paper we study cup stacking on many families of graphs, developing a characterization of stackability in graphs and using it to prove the stackability of complete graphs, paths, cycles, grids, the Petersen graph, many Kneser graphs, some trees, cubes of dimension up to 20, "somewhat balanced" complete $t$-partite graphs, and Hamiltonian diameter two graphs. Additionally we use the Gallai-Edmonds Structure Theorem, the Edmonds Blossom Algorithm, and the Hungarian algorithm to devise a polynomial algorithm to decide if a diameter two graph is stackable. Our proof that cubes up to dimension 20 are stackable uses Kleitman's Symmetric Chain Decomposition and the new result of Merino, M\"utze, and Namrata that all generalized Johnson graphs (excluding the Petersen graph) are Hamiltonian. We conjecture that all cubes and higher-dimensional grids are stackable, and leave the reader with several open problems, questions, and generalizations

Comparative genomics approaches accurately predict deleterious variants in plants

Recent advances in genome resequencing have led to increased interest in prediction of the functional consequences of genetic variants. Variants at phylogenetically conserved sites are of particular interest, because they are more likely than variants at phylogenetically variable sites to have deleterious effects on fitness and contribute to phenotypic variation. Numerous comparative genomic approaches have been developed to predict deleterious variants, but the approaches are nearly always assessed based on their ability to identify known disease-causing mutations in humans. Determining the accuracy of deleterious variant predictions in nonhuman species is important to understanding evolution, domestication, and potentially to improving crop quality and yield. To examine our ability to predict deleterious variants in plants we generated a curated database of 2,910 Arabidopsis thaliana mutants with known phenotypes. We evaluated seven approaches and found that while all performed well, their relative ranking differed from prior benchmarks in humans. We conclude that deleterious mutations can be reliably predicted in A. thaliana and likely other plant species, but that the relative performance of various approaches does not necessarily translate from one species to another

Microstructural characterisation of TiAlTiAu and TiAlPdAu ohmic contacts to AlGaN/GaN

Ti/Al/Ti/Au and Ti/Al/Pd/Au contacts to AlGaN/GaN have been investigated to ascertain the effect of annealing temperature on the structural evolution of the contacts. Ti/Al/Ti/Au contacts become ohmic after rapid thermal annealing at 750°C or higher, corresponding to the formation of an interfacial TiN phase, with inclusions penetrating through the AlGaN layer observed after annealing at 950°C. The Pd layer is shown to be more efficient at inhibiting diffusion of Au to the interface than Ti. Ohmic behaviour was not seen with the Ti/Al/Pd/Au scheme. Either the presence of Au at the interface may improve ohmic behaviour, or the Ti:Al ratio is insufficient in this scheme

Multiple impact crashes - consequences for occupant protection measures

Much analysis of accident data and most crash tests focus on single impacts. However, in reality, multiple impacts account for a large proportion of serious injury accidents and are expected to become a larger proportion as countermeasures, developed primarily for single mode impacts, take effect. It is proposed that multiple impacts should be considered separately since consideration of their characteristics may have implications for occupant protection. This study investigates multiple impacts in more detail and, in particular, explores their relative importance in the accident population, analyses their characteristics and discusses some possible consequences for occupant protection measures

Enabling imagination through story alignment

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-82).Stories are an essential piece of human intelligence. They exist in countless forms and varieties seamlessly integrated into every facet of our lives. Stories fuel human understanding and our explanations of the world. Narrative acts as a Swiss army knife, simultaneously facilitating the transfer of knowledge, culture and beliefs while also powering our high level mental faculties. If we are to develop artificial intelligence with the cognitive capacities of humans, our systems must not only be able to understand stories but also to incorporate them into the thought process as humans do. In order to work towards the goal of computational story understanding, I developed a novel story comparison method. The techniques I present in this thesis enable efficient and effective story comparison through story alignment. My algorithms, implemented into the Genesis system, allow the comparison and combination of stories which is a step towards enabling imagination in artificial intelligence. This capability is made possible by reducing the runtime of a previously intractable computational problem to polynomial time. In the course of this research, these algorithms have been applied to a variety of story analysis problems. By comparing short, 10 sentence summaries of the Tet Offensive and the Yom Kippur War, the system predicts information omitted from both stories. In the analysis of a brief synopsis of Shakespeare's Macbeth, my algorithm is able to correctly match actors and events between two different variations of the tale by cutting down a search space of over 10³⁰ nodes to a mere 546 nodes. My techniques also demonstrate promise as a component of a larger video analysis system. The story alignment capabilities are used to fill in missing gaps in descriptions of videos, corresponding to missing video data, by comparing video feeds to an existing video corpus.by Matthew Paul Fay.S.M

Do injunctive and descriptive normative beliefs need a value-laden multiplier in value expectancy models? A Case Series Across Multiple Health Behaviors

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the benefit of transforming expectancy-based determinants of injunctive and descriptive norms with a value-laden construct across a case series of health behaviors. This case series draws upon three cases (sugar-sweetened beverages, physical activity, and sleep), each evaluating generalized injunctive (ΣIN) and descriptive norms (ΣDN), with corresponding value-expectancy based determinants: injunctive normative belief strength (inbi) and motivation to comply (mtci), and descriptive normative belief strength (dnbi) and identification with referents (iwri). Each belief-based measure (inbi/dnbi) and product between belief-based measure and value-laden measure (inbi x mtci/dnbi x iwri) was correlated to its corresponding generalized scale (ΣIN/ΣDN), and the associations were compared using Steiger’s test for comparing two dependent correlations with one variable in common. Across three case series, generalized injunctive norms (ΣIN) was correlated to 12 referents using a value-expectancy model (inbi x mtci) and expectancy-only model (inbi), and generalized descriptive norms was correlated to 15 referents using the same approach (inbi x iwri vs. dnbi). Using Steiger’s test, it was found that the expectancy-only model was significantly better than the value-expectancy model for injunctive norms, but results were mixed for descriptive norms. Results from this study suggest that value-laden constructs only add error when evaluating determinants of injunctive norms, and researchers should consider re-scaling or finding alternative means of measuring mtci. Results pertaining to descriptive norms were mixed, and a better consensus on best methods for operationalizing the construct is warranted