An Investigation of Nutrition Risk among Hospitalised Older Adults Admitted to the Assessment, Treatment and Rehabilitation Wards of Waitemata District Health Board Hospitals : A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Nutrition and Dietetics Massey University, Albany New Zealand

Background: The proportion of older adults in New Zealand is increasing. Studies shows compromised nutrition status is prevalent in older adults, and can exacerbate poor health. It is therefore important to identify those who are malnourished, or those who are at nutrition risk for early nutrition intervention. Nutrition screening tools allow for the identification of nutrition risk status and initiation of nutritional care to result in improved health outcomes. Current data on the prevalence of nutrition risk in hospitalised older adults in New Zealand is limited. Design: Cross-sectional, observational study as part of a multicentre prospective study. Aim: To investigate the prevalence of nutrition risk among older adults (65-84 years) in the Assessment, Treatment and Rehabilitation (AT&R) wards of North Shore and Waitakere Hospitals. Potential nutrition risk factors including dysphagia risk, muscle mass and hand grip strength will also be investigated, as well as other relevant physiological and socio-demographic risk factors. Methods: Participants were recruited within five days of admission to the AT&R wards. Face-to-face interviews and assessments were conducted on the wards. A questionnaire incorporating participant characteristics, health and support data and validated screening and assessment tools were used. Nutrition risk status was assessed by the Mini Nutrition Assessment-Short Form, dysphagia risk status was assessed by the Eating Assessment Tool, cognitive status was assessed by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and muscle mass was assessed by bioelectrical impedance analysis. Hand grip strength was measured using a hydraulic dynamometer. Results: A total of 89 participants took part in the study. Nutrition risk and malnutrition was evident in 43.8 and 27.0 percent of the study participants respectively. Indicated by the Mini-Nutrition Assessment-Short Form, participants with poor nutritional status were more likely to report reduced food intake, unintentional weight loss, requiring aid with activities of daily living, having previous dietetic input and being at risk of dysphagia compared to participants with ‘normal’ nutritional status. Conclusion: A high percentage of hospitalised older adults recently admitted to the AT&R wards had compromised nutritional status. Routine screening is highly advised to identify nutritional risk and instigate nutritional care

Review of \u3ci\u3eWhite Sun (Seto Surya)\u3c/i\u3e by Deepak Rauniyar

This is a review of White Sun, a Nepali-language movie directed by Deepak Rauniyar

Loud and Trendy: Crowdsourcing Impressions of Social Ambiance in Popular Indoor Urban Places

New research cutting across architecture, urban studies, and psychology is contextualizing the understanding of urban spaces according to the perceptions of their inhabitants. One fundamental construct that relates place and experience is ambiance, which is defined as "the mood or feeling associated with a particular place". We posit that the systematic study of ambiance dimensions in cities is a new domain for which multimedia research can make pivotal contributions. We present a study to examine how images collected from social media can be used for the crowdsourced characterization of indoor ambiance impressions in popular urban places. We design a crowdsourcing framework to understand suitability of social images as data source to convey place ambiance, to examine what type of images are most suitable to describe ambiance, and to assess how people perceive places socially from the perspective of ambiance along 13 dimensions. Our study is based on 50,000 Foursquare images collected from 300 popular places across six cities worldwide. The results show that reliable estimates of ambiance can be obtained for several of the dimensions. Furthermore, we found that most aggregate impressions of ambiance are similar across popular places in all studied cities. We conclude by presenting a multidisciplinary research agenda for future research in this domain

Quantum Hertz entropy increase in a quenched spin chain

The classical Hertz entropy is the logarithm of the volume of phase space bounded by the constant energy surface; its quantum counterpart, the quantum Hertz entropy, is $\hat S = k_B \ln \hat N$, where the quantum operator $\hat N$ specifies the number of states with energy below a given energy eigenstate. It has been recently proved that, when an isolated quantum mechanical system is driven out of equilibrium by an external driving, the change in the expectation of its quantum Hertz entropy cannot be negative, and is null for adiabatic driving. This is in full agreement with the Clausius principle. Here we test the behavior of the expectation of the quantum Hertz entropy in the case when two identical XY spin chains initially at different temperatures are quenched into a single XY chain. We observed no quantum Hertz entropy decrease. This finding further supports the statement that the quantum Hertz entropy is a proper entropy for isolated quantum systems. We further quantify how far the quenched chain is from thermal equilibrium and the temperature of the closest equilibrium.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

How strong are correlations in strongly recurrent neuronal networks?

Cross-correlations in the activity in neural networks are commonly used to characterize their dynamical states and their anatomical and functional organizations. Yet, how these latter network features affect the spatiotemporal structure of the correlations in recurrent networks is not fully understood. Here, we develop a general theory for the emergence of correlated neuronal activity from the dynamics in strongly recurrent networks consisting of several populations of binary neurons. We apply this theory to the case in which the connectivity depends on the anatomical or functional distance between the neurons. We establish the architectural conditions under which the system settles into a dynamical state where correlations are strong, highly robust and spatially modulated. We show that such strong correlations arise if the network exhibits an effective feedforward structure. We establish how this feedforward structure determines the way correlations scale with the network size and the degree of the connectivity. In networks lacking an effective feedforward structure correlations are extremely small and only weakly depend on the number of connections per neuron. Our work shows how strong correlations can be consistent with highly irregular activity in recurrent networks, two key features of neuronal dynamics in the central nervous system

Aeroacoustics of supersonic jet flows from contoured and solid/porous conical plug-nozzles

The results of an experimental study of the acoustic far-field, the shock associated noise, and the nature of the repetitive shock structure of supersonic jet flows issuing from plug-nozzles having externally-expanded plugs with pointed termination operated at a range of supercritical pressure ratios Xi approaching 2 to 4.5 are reported. The plug of one of these plug-nozzles was contoured. The other plug-nozzles had short conical plugs with either a solid surface or a combination of solid/porous surface of different porosities. The contoured and the uncontoured plug-nozzles had the same throat area and the same annulus-radius ratio K = R sub p/R sub N = 0.43. As the result of modifications of the shock structure, the acoustic performance of improperly expanded jet flows of an externally-expanded short uncontoured plug of an appropriate geometry with suitably perforated plug and a pointed termination, is shown to approach the acoustic performance of a shock-free supersonic jet issuing from an equivalent externally-expanded contoured plug-nozzle