619 research outputs found
Vibrotactile sensitivity in active touch: effect of pressing force
An experiment was conducted to study the effects of force produced by active touch on vibrotactile perceptual thresholds. The task consisted in pressing the fingertip against a flat rigid surface that provided either sinusoidal or broadband vibration. Three force levels were considered, ranging from light touch to hard press. Finger contact areas were measured during the experiment, showing positive correlation with the respective applied forces. Significant effects on thresholds were found for vibration type and force level. Moreover, possibly due to the concurrent effect of large (unconstrained) finger contact areas, active pressing forces, and long duration stimuli, the measured perceptual thresholds are considerably lower than what previously reported in the literature
Underpaid and Overloaded: Women in Low-Wage Jobs
This report provides a comprehensive look at the women and men in the low-wage workforce, holding down jobs that typically pay $10.10 per hour or less, such as home health aides, child care workers, fast food workers, restaurant servers, maids and cashiers. The report reveals that, although women's educational credentials are better than ever, women are two-thirds of the 20 million workers in low-wage jobs. And, regardless of their education level, age, marital or parental status, race, ethnicity, or national origin, women's shares of the low-wage workforce are larger than those of their male counterparts. Especially striking is the finding that women need a bachelor's degree to avoid being overrepresented in low-wage jobs -- while men only need to finish high school
Taking account of context in population health intervention research: guidance for producers, users and funders of research
Population health intervention research (PHIR) seeks to develop and evaluate policies, programmes and
other types of interventions that may affect population health and health equity. Such interventions are
strongly influenced by context â taken to refer to any feature of the circumstances in which an intervention
is conceived, developed, implemented and evaluated. Understanding how interventions relate to context is
critical to understanding how they work; why they sometimes fail; whether they can be successfully
adapted, scaled up or translated from one context to another; why their impacts vary; and how far effects
observed in one context can be generalised to others.
Concerns that context has been neglected in research to develop and evaluate population health
interventions have been expressed for at least 20 years. Over this period, an increasingly comprehensive
body of guidance has been developed to help with the design, conduct, reporting and appraisal of PHIR.
References to context have become more frequent in recent years, as interest has grown in complex and
upstream interventions, systems thinking and realist approaches to evaluation, but there remains a lack of
systematic guidance for producers, users and funders of PHIR on how context should be taken into account.
This document draws together recent thinking and practical experience of addressing context within
PHIR. It provides a broad, working definition of context and explains why and how context is important to
PHIR. It identifies the dimensions of context that are likely to shape how interventions are conceptualised,
the impacts that they have and how they can be implemented, translated and scaled up. It suggests how
context should be taken into account throughout the PHIR process, from priority setting and intervention
development to the design and conduct of evaluations and reporting, synthesis and knowledge exchange.
It concludes by summarising the key messages for producers, users and funders of PHIR and suggesting
priorities for future research. The document is meant to be used alongside existing guidance for the
development, evaluation and reporting of population health interventions. We expect the guidance to
evolve over time, as practice changes in the light of the guidance and experience accumulates on useful
approaches.
The work was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca) â Institute of
Population and Public Health (CIHR-IPPH) and the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)
Additively manufactured device for dynamic culture of large arrays of 3D tissue engineered constructs
The ability to test large arrays of cell and biomaterial combinations in 3D environments is still rather limited in the context of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. This limitation can be generally addressed by employing highly automated and reproducible methodologies. This study reports on the development of a highly versatile and upscalable method based on additive manufacturing for the fabrication of arrays of scaffolds, which are enclosed into individualized perfusion chambers. Devices containing eight scaffolds and their corresponding bioreactor chambers are simultaneously fabricated utilizing a dual extrusion additive manufacturing system. To demonstrate the versatility of the concept, the scaffolds, while enclosed into the device, are subsequently surface-coated with a biomimetic calcium phosphate layer by perfusion with simulated body fluid solution. 96 scaffolds are simultaneously seeded and cultured with human osteoblasts under highly controlled bidirectional perfusion dynamic conditions over 4 weeks. Both coated and noncoated resulting scaffolds show homogeneous cell distribution and high cell viability throughout the 4 weeks culture period and CaP-coated scaffolds result in a significantly increased cell number. The methodology developed in this work exemplifies the applicability of additive manufacturing as a tool for further automation of studies in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.P.F.C. and D.W.H. contributed equally to this work. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council. P.F.C. acknowledges the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for his PhD grant (SFRH/BD/62452/2009)
The Public Assistance Policies of Cities and the Justice Concerns of Elected Officials: The Centrality of the Floors Principle in Addressing Urban Poverty
City councils are significant, though seldom central, actors in local policy networks providing public assistance to disadvantaged residents. Mayors and council members in 12 American cities more often support than oppose public assistance initiatives. They claim that their own normative judgments are more important to their preferences and voting behavior on such matters than are public opinion, group demands, or economic considerations. While such elected officials hold a variety of justice principles, the most important of these affecting their positions on public assistance issues is the âfloorsâ principle. A broad ethical commitment to providing social minimums enhances support for living-wage ordinances, for linking subsidies for economic development to assistance to less advantaged citizens, and for exempting spending on social services from budget cuts. We discuss the implications of these findings for major theories of urban politics and policiesâcollective-action theory, regime theory, and pluralismâand for advocates on behalf of the urban poor
Magnetism, FeS colloids, and Origins of Life
A number of features of living systems: reversible interactions and weak
bonds underlying motor-dynamics; gel-sol transitions; cellular connected
fractal organization; asymmetry in interactions and organization; quantum
coherent phenomena; to name some, can have a natural accounting via
interactions, which we therefore seek to incorporate by expanding the horizons
of `chemistry-only' approaches to the origins of life. It is suggested that the
magnetic 'face' of the minerals from the inorganic world, recognized to have
played a pivotal role in initiating Life, may throw light on some of these
issues. A magnetic environment in the form of rocks in the Hadean Ocean could
have enabled the accretion and therefore an ordered confinement of
super-paramagnetic colloids within a structured phase. A moderate H-field can
help magnetic nano-particles to not only overcome thermal fluctuations but also
harness them. Such controlled dynamics brings in the possibility of accessing
quantum effects, which together with frustrations in magnetic ordering and
hysteresis (a natural mechanism for a primitive memory) could throw light on
the birth of biological information which, as Abel argues, requires a
combination of order and complexity. This scenario gains strength from
observations of scale-free framboidal forms of the greigite mineral, with a
magnetic basis of assembly. And greigite's metabolic potential plays a key role
in the mound scenario of Russell and coworkers-an expansion of which is
suggested for including magnetism.Comment: 42 pages, 5 figures, to be published in A.R. Memorial volume, Ed
Krishnaswami Alladi, Springer 201
Chiral effective theory with a light scalar and lattice QCD
We extend the usual chiral perturbation theory framework (PT) to allow
the inclusion of a light dynamical isosinglet scalar. Using lattice QCD
results, and a few phenomenological inputs, we explore the parameter space of
the effective theory. We discuss the S-wave pion-pion scattering lengths,
extract the average value of the two light quark masses and evaluate the impact
of the dynamical singlet field in the low--energy constants ,
and of PT. We also show how to extract the mass
and width of the sigma resonance from chiral extrapolations of lattice QCD
data.Comment: Journal version. Added the study of the scalar two-point function and
a discussion of the analytical properties of the sigma pole and its
dependence on the quark masses. We clarified the relation of PT with
unitarized PT. Figures 6 and 8 have been improved. 28 pages, 2 tables, 8
figure
Development of silk-based scaffolds for tissue engineering of bone from human adipose derived stem cells
Silk fibroin is a potent alternative to other biodegradable biopolymers for bone tissue engineering (TE), because of its tunable architecture and mechanical properties, and its demonstrated ability to support bone formation both in vitro and in vivo. In this study, we investigated a range of silk scaffolds for bone TE using human adipose-derived stem cells (hASCs), an attractive cell source for engineering autologous bone grafts. Our goal was to understand the effects of scaffold architecture and biomechanics and use this information to optimize silk scaffolds for bone TE applications. Silk scaffolds were fabricated using differ- ent solvents (aqueous vs. hexafluoro-2-propanol (HFIP)), pore sizes (250â500 um vs. 500â1000 um) and structures (lamellar vs. spherical pores). Four types of silk scaffolds combining the properties of interest were systematically compared with respect to bone tissue outcomes, with decellularized trabecular bone (DCB) included as a ââgold standardââ. The scaffolds were seeded with hASCs and cultured for 7 weeks in osteogenic medium. Bone formation was evaluated by cell proliferation and differentiation, matrix production, calcification and mechanical properties. We observed that 400â600 um porous HFIP-derived silk fibroin scaffold demonstrated the best bone tissue formation outcomes, as evidenced by increased bone protein production (osteopontin, collagen type I, bone sialoprotein), enhanced calcium deposition and total bone volume. On a direct comparison basis, alkaline phosphatase activity (AP) at week 2 and new calcium deposition at week 7 were comparable to the cells cultured in DCB. Yet, among the aqueous- based structures, the lamellar architecture induced increased AP activity and demonstrated higher equi- librium modulus than the spherical-pore scaffolds. Based on the collected data, we propose a conceptual model describing the effects of silk scaffold design on bone tissue formation.FCT: SFRH/BD/42316/2007NIH: DE161525 and EB0252
Catching Element Formation In The Act
Gamma-ray astronomy explores the most energetic photons in nature to address
some of the most pressing puzzles in contemporary astrophysics. It encompasses
a wide range of objects and phenomena: stars, supernovae, novae, neutron stars,
stellar-mass black holes, nucleosynthesis, the interstellar medium, cosmic rays
and relativistic-particle acceleration, and the evolution of galaxies. MeV
gamma-rays provide a unique probe of nuclear processes in astronomy, directly
measuring radioactive decay, nuclear de-excitation, and positron annihilation.
The substantial information carried by gamma-ray photons allows us to see
deeper into these objects, the bulk of the power is often emitted at gamma-ray
energies, and radioactivity provides a natural physical clock that adds unique
information. New science will be driven by time-domain population studies at
gamma-ray energies. This science is enabled by next-generation gamma-ray
instruments with one to two orders of magnitude better sensitivity, larger sky
coverage, and faster cadence than all previous gamma-ray instruments. This
transformative capability permits: (a) the accurate identification of the
gamma-ray emitting objects and correlations with observations taken at other
wavelengths and with other messengers; (b) construction of new gamma-ray maps
of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies where extended regions are
distinguished from point sources; and (c) considerable serendipitous science of
scarce events -- nearby neutron star mergers, for example. Advances in
technology push the performance of new gamma-ray instruments to address a wide
set of astrophysical questions.Comment: 14 pages including 3 figure
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