The use of conversation mapping to frame key perceptual issues facing the general dental practice system in England

<b>Objective</b>: To demonstrate the use of a novel qualitative methodology namely conversation mapping, which can be used to capture differences in stakeholder perspectives and give a root definition of the problem in a complex policy area. The methodology is used in the context of the changes introduced in the English general dental practice system in April 2006, to investigate the key issues facing the system, as perceived by general dental practitioners (GDPs). <b>Basic research design</b>: From a broad trigger statement, three transformational statements were produced. Each participant recorded their contribution on a hard diagrammatic form as a ‘map’, with others responding with their own written comment, thus generating three conversation maps. Thematic analysis resulted in the generation of a preliminary model summarising key perceptual issues. <b>Results</b>: The five emergent themes identified were: financing, dentists’ wants/needs, the role of the public and patients, system goals and policy level decision making. Financing was identified as the core category to which all other categories were related. <b>Conclusions</b>: Conversation mapping, a methodology arising from a systems approach, can be used to develop a ‘rich picture’ of an oral health care system in order to define the core problem within this policy area. Findings suggest that GDPs identify the financing of the system as a fundamental source of problems within the general dental practice system. This appears to be at variance with the perception of policy makers, who report a more limited view, identifying the system of remuneration as the ‘heart of the problem’

Small scale vegetable oil extraction

The processes required to manufacture human food from oilseeds and nuts vary considerably, depending on the raw materials and the scale of the operation. Large-scale producers can select equipment from a range of manufacturers, but the choice for smaller manufacturers is generally limited. Small-Scale Vegetable Oil Extraction presents the options available for processing a range of common oilseeds from domestic to village scales of operation. Details are provided on the type and source of equipment, and the requirements for financial success are examined. The publication will be of interest both to entrepreneurs and NGOs considering setting up oilseed operations

An evaluation of human factors research for ultrasonic inservice inspection

This work was undertaken to determine if human factors research has yielded information applicable to upgrading requirements in ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section XI, improving methods and techniques in Section V, and/or suggesting relevant research. A preference was established for information and recommendations which have become accepted and standard practice. Manual Ultrasonic Testing/Inservice Inspection (UT/ISI) is a complex task subject to influence by dozens of variables. This review frequently revealed equivocal findings regarding effects of environmental variables as well as repeated indications that inspection performance may be more, and more reliably, influenced by the workers` social environment, including managerial practices, than by other situational variables. Also of significance are each inspector`s relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities, and determination of these is seen as a necessary first step in upgrading requirements, methods, and techniques as well as in focusing research in support of such programs, While understanding the effects and mediating mechanisms of the variables impacting inspection performance is a worthwhile pursuit for researchers, initial improvements in industrial UTASI performance may be achieved by implementing practices already known to mitigate the effects of potentially adverse conditions. 52 refs., 2 tabs

Transverse Fresnel-Fizeau drag effects in strongly dispersive media

A light beam normally incident upon an uniformly moving dielectric medium is in general subject to bendings due to a transverse Fresnel-Fizeau light drag effect. In conventional dielectrics, the magnitude of this bending effect is very small and hard to detect. Yet, it can be dramatically enhanced in strongly dispersive media where slow group velocities in the m/s range have been recently observed taking advantage of the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect. In addition to the usual downstream drag that takes place for positive group velocities, we predict a significant anomalous upstream drag to occur for small and negative group velocities. Furthermore, for sufficiently fast speeds of the medium, higher order dispersion terms are found to play an important role and to be responsible for peculiar effects such as light propagation along curved paths and the restoration of the spatial coherence of an incident noisy beam. The physics underlying this new class of slow-light effects is thoroughly discussed

Fully differential W' production and decay at next-to-leading order in QCD

We present the fully differential production and decay of a W' boson, with arbitrary vector and axial-vector couplings, to any final state at next-to-leading order in QCD. We demonstrate a complete factorization of couplings at next-to-leading order in both the partial width of the W' boson, and in the full two-to-two cross section. We provide numerical predictions for the contribution of a W' boson to single-top-quark production, and separate results based on whether the mass of the right-handed neutrino (nu_R) is light enough for the leptonic decay channel to be open. The single-top-quark analysis will allow for an improved direct W' mass limit of 525-550 GeV using data from run I of the Fermilab Tevatron. We propose a modified tolerance method for estimating parton distribution function uncertainties in cross sections.Comment: 23 pages, revtex3, 13 ps fig

Higgs-Boson Production Induced by Bottom Quarks

Bottom quark-induced processes are responsible for a large fraction of the LHC discovery potential, in particular for supersymmetric Higgs bosons. Recently, the discrepancy between exclusive and inclusive Higgs boson production rates has been linked to the choice of an appropriate bottom factorization scale. We investigate the process kinematics at hadron colliders and show that it leads to a considerable decrease in the bottom factorization scale. This effect is the missing piece needed to understand the corresponding higher order results. Our results hold generally for charged and for neutral Higgs boson production at the LHC as well as at the Tevatron. The situation is different for single top quark production, where we find no sizeable suppression of the factorization scale. Turning the argument around, we can specify how large the collinear logarithms are, which can be resummed using the bottom parton picture.Comment: 18 page

Pseudoscalar Higgs boson production associated with a single bottom quark at hadron colliders

We compute the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) SUSY-QCD corrections for the associated production of a pseudoscalar Higgs boson with a bottom quark via bottom-gluon fusion at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Fermilab Tevatron. We find that the NLO QCD correction in the MSSM reaches $40$ at the LHC and $45$ at the Tevatron in our chosen parameter space

Minimum Wages and Poverty with Income-Sharing

Textbook analysis tells us that in a competitive labor market, the introduction of a minimum wage in terms of poverty rather than in terms of unemployment. This paper makes three contributions to the basic theory of the minimum wage. First, we analyze the effects of a higher minimum wage in terms of poverty rather than in terms of unemployment. Second, we extend the standard textbook model to allow for income-sharing between employed and unemployed persons in society. Third, we extend the basic model to deal with income sharing within families. We find that there are situations in which a higher minimum wage raises poverty, others where it reduces poverty, and yet others in which poverty is unchanged. We characterize precisely how the poverty effect depends on four parameters: the degree of poverty aversion, the elasticity of labor demand, the ratio of the minimum wage to the poverty line, and the extent of income-sharing. Thus, shifting the perspective from unemployment to poverty leads to a considerable enrichment of the theory of the minimum wage

Plasmonic nanoparticle monomers and dimers: From nano-antennas to chiral metamaterials

We review the basic physics behind light interaction with plasmonic nanoparticles. The theoretical foundations of light scattering on one metallic particle (a plasmonic monomer) and two interacting particles (a plasmonic dimer) are systematically investigated. Expressions for effective particle susceptibility (polarizability) are derived, and applications of these results to plasmonic nanoantennas are outlined. In the long-wavelength limit, the effective macroscopic parameters of an array of plasmonic dimers are calculated. These parameters are attributable to an effective medium corresponding to a dilute arrangement of nanoparticles, i.e., a metamaterial where plasmonic monomers or dimers have the function of "meta-atoms". It is shown that planar dimers consisting of rod-like particles generally possess elliptical dichroism and function as atoms for planar chiral metamaterials. The fabricational simplicity of the proposed rod-dimer geometry can be used in the design of more cost-effective chiral metamaterials in the optical domain.Comment: submitted to Appl. Phys.

Magnetoelectric ordering of BiFeO3 from the perspective of crystal chemistry

In this paper we examine the role of crystal chemistry factors in creating conditions for formation of magnetoelectric ordering in BiFeO3. It is generally accepted that the main reason of the ferroelectric distortion in BiFeO3 is concerned with a stereochemical activity of the Bi lone pair. However, the lone pair is stereochemically active in the paraelectric orthorhombic beta-phase as well. We demonstrate that a crucial role in emerging of phase transitions of the metal-insulator, paraelectric-ferroelectric and magnetic disorder-order types belongs to the change of the degree of the lone pair stereochemical activity - its consecutive increase with the temperature decrease. Using the structural data, we calculated the sign and strength of magnetic couplings in BiFeO3 in the range from 945 C down to 25 C and found the couplings, which undergo the antiferromagnetic-ferromagnetic transition with the temperature decrease and give rise to the antiferromagnetic ordering and its delay in regard to temperature, as compared to the ferroelectric ordering. We discuss the reasons of emerging of the spatially modulated spin structure and its suppression by doping with La3+.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, 3 table