Seeing and doing: Feasibility study towards valuing visual impairment using simulation spectacles

Elicitation of utilities from those who do not have the health condition of interest generally uses verbal description of health states. This paper reports on the results of a small-scale investigation on the feasibility of an alternative approach, where health states are simulated and thus directly experienced by respondents. Three visual impairment health states were simulated using plastic spectacles, and were evaluated using the time trade-off. The first group of respondents (n = 19) found it difficult to assess visually impaired health states without referring to their own current health. With a further group of respondents (n = 14), we investigated the use of the respondents’ current health as the upper anchor of the time trade-off. Regression analysis shows that whilst there is a positive effect (p = 0.05) of the respondent’s own health state on the values from the first group, there is a non-significant negative effect (p = 0.36) on the values from the latter group with this revised method. Thus, it is feasible to simulate visual impairment in valuation exercises, but care must be taken to ensure what health state is effectively being valued

Seeing and doing: Feasibility study towards valuing visual impairment using simulation spectacles

Elicitation of utilities from those who do not have the health condition of interest generally uses verbal description of health states. This paper reports on the results of a small-scale investigation on the feasibility of an alternative approach, where health states are simulated and thus directly experienced by respondents. Three visual impairment health states were simulated using plastic spectacles, and were evaluated using the time trade-off. The first group of respondents (n = 19) found it difficult to assess visually impaired health states without referring to their own current health. With a further group of respondents (n = 14), we investigated the use of the respondents’ current health as the upper anchor of the time trade-off. Regression analysis shows that whilst there is a positive effect (p = 0.05) of the respondent’s own health state on the values from the first group, there is a non-significant negative effect (p = 0.36) on the values from the latter group with this revised method. Thus, it is feasible to simulate visual impairment in valuation exercises, but care must be taken to ensure what health state is effectively being valued

Duality Breaking of Vortex Configuration in a Hierarchical Honeycomb Network

We report measurements of Little-Parks oscillation on the hierarchical honeycomb-superconducting network for investigating possible effects of hierarchical structure in terms of spatial symmetry, parity and duality. We observed an asymmetric Little-Parks oscillation about $\Phi/\Phi_0 = 1/2$, although spatial symmetry was kept in the network. In comparison with a regular honeycomb network, the asymmetric oscillation is attributed to hierarchy which induces mixture of commensurate and incommensurate regions. The asymmetric oscillation is found to indicate breaking of the duality of vortex configuration.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Pump- and Probe-polarization Analyses of Ultrafast Carrier Dynamics in Organic Superconductors

We investigated photo-excited carrier relaxation dynamics in the strongly correlated organic superconductors kappa-(BEDT-TTF)(2)Cu(NCS)(2) and kappa-(BEDT-TTF)(2)Cu[N(CN)(2)]Br, using different polarizations of pump and probe pulses. Below the glasslike transition temperature (T (g)) anisotropic responses for probe polarization were observed in both compounds. Decomposing the data into anisotropic and isotropic components, we found the anisotropic component shows no pump polarization dependence, meaning that dissipative excitation process was dominant for the anisotropic carrier relaxation. This behavior indicates that the appearance of anisotropic responses can be associated with spatial symmetry breaking due to structural change of BEDT-TTF molecules