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This paper addresses human capital in the Arctic in relation to tourism. More specifically, with an ever-increasing number oftourists recognizing the attractiveness of the Arctic, tour companies are increasingly recognizing the opportunities. The media(typically southern media) sells the image, either before or after the tourists arrive, and communities are often left to deal with therepercussions – whether those are social, economic, environmental, or the like. Many of the repercussions are negative; however,even when perceived as positive they can create tensions within small communities and showcase a variety of capacity issues.This paper focuses on the realities and possibilities of tourism in the Arctic. It offers an up-to-date descriptive overview of tourismnumbers and valuations. In addition, ‘realities’ also focuses on the current suite of challenges and ‘possibilities’ addresses criticalquestions that need to be asked as tourism grows. We are in an uncertain age and academic critique of the Arctic tourismphenomenon is growing as quickly as the numbers. This paper is almost fully circumpolar in outlook, written by individuals fromthose jurisdictions, and aims to intersect with other sectors active in the Arctic

Improving continence services for older people from the service-providers' perspective: a qualitative interview study

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.Objective To examine in depth the views and experiences of continence service leads in England on key service and continence management characteristics in order to identify and to improve our understanding of barriers to a good-quality service and potential facilitators to develop and to improve services for older people with urinary incontinence (UI). Design Qualitative semistructured interviews using a purposive sample recruited across 16 continence services. Setting 3 acute and 13 primary care National Health Service Trusts in England. Participants 16 continence service leads in England actively treating and managing older people with UI. Results In terms of barriers to a good-quality service, participants highlighted a failure on the part of commissioners, managers and other health professionals in recognising the problem of UI and in acknowledging the importance of continence for older people and prevalent negative attitudes towards continence and older people. Patient assessment and continence promotion regardless of age, rather than pad provision, were identified as important steps for a good-quality service for older people with UI. More rapid and appropriate patient referral pathways, investment in service capacity, for example, more trained staff and strengthened interservice collaborations and a higher profile within medical and nurse training were specified as being important facilitators for delivering an equitable and high-quality continence service. There is a need, however, to consider the accounts given by our participants as perhaps serving the interests of their professional group within the context of interprofessional work. Conclusions Our data point to important barriers and facilitators of a good-quality service for older people with UI, from the perspective of continence service leads. Further research should address the views of other stakeholders, and explore options for the empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of identified service facilitators.Funding was received from the New Dynamics of Ageing Programme, led by the Economic & Social Research Council, UK (grantnumber RES-353-25-0010)

Integrating a sense of coherence into the neonatal environment

Background: Family centred care (FCC) is currently a valued philosophy within neonatal care; an approach that places the parents at the heart of all decision-making and engagement in the care of their infant. However, to date, there is a lack of clarity regarding the definition of FCC and limited evidence of FCCs effectiveness in relation to parental, infant or staff outcomes. Discussion: In this paper we present a new perspective to neonatal care based on Aaron Antonovksy’s Sense of Coherence (SOC) theory of well-being and positive health. Whilst the SOC was originally conceptualised as a psychological-based construct, the SOCs three underpinning concepts of comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness provide a theoretical lens through which to consider and reflect upon meaningful care provision in this particular care environment. By drawing on available FCC research, we consider how the SOC concepts considered from both a parental and professional perspective need to be addressed. The debate offered in this paper is not presented to reduce the importance or significance of FCC within neonatal care, but, rather, how consideration of the SOC offers the basis through which meaningful and effective FCC may be delivered. Practice based implications contextualised within the SOC constructs are also detailed. Summary: Consideration of the SOC constructs from both a parental and professional perspective need to be addressed in FCC provision. Service delivery and care practices need to be comprehensible, meaningful and manageable in order to achieve and promote positive well-being and health for all concerned

Limits to phase resolution in matter wave interferometry

We study the quantum dynamics of a two-mode Bose-Einstein condensate in a time-dependent symmetric double-well potential using analytical and numerical methods. The effects of internal degrees of freedom on the visibility of interference fringes during a stage of ballistic expansion are investigated varying particle number, nonlinear interaction sign and strength as well as tunneling coupling. Expressions for the phase resolution are derived and the possible enhancement due to squeezing is discussed. In particular, the role of the superfluid - Mott insulator cross-over and its analog for attractive interactions is recognized.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Punishment in Public Goods games leads to meta-stable phase transitions and hysteresis

The evolution of cooperation has been a perennial problem in evolutionary biology because cooperation can be undermined by selfish cheaters who gain an advantage in the short run, while compromising the long-term viability of the population. Evolutionary game theory has shown that under certain conditions, cooperation nonetheless evolves stably, for example if players have the opportunity to punish cheaters that benefit from a public good yet refuse to pay into the common pool. However, punishment has remained enigmatic because it is costly, and difficult to maintain. On the other hand, cooperation emerges naturally in the Public Goods game if the synergy of the public good (the factor multiplying the public good investment) is sufficiently high. In terms of this synergy parameter, the transition from defection to cooperation can be viewed as a phase transition with the synergy as the critical parameter. We show here that punishment reduces the critical value at which cooperation occurs, but also creates the possibility of meta-stable phase transitions, where populations can "tunnel" into the cooperating phase below the critical value. At the same time, cooperating populations are unstable even above the critical value, because a group of defectors that are large enough can "nucleate" such a transition. We study the mean-field theoretical predictions via agent-based simulations of finite populations using an evolutionary approach where the decisions to cooperate or to punish are encoded genetically in terms of evolvable probabilities. We recover the theoretical predictions and demonstrate that the population shows hysteresis, as expected in systems that exhibit super-heating and super-cooling. We conclude that punishment can stabilize populations of cooperators below the critical point, but it is a two-edged sword: it can also stabilize defectors above the critical point.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures. Slight title change, version that appears in Physical Biolog

Bifurcations and bistability in cavity assisted photoassociation of Bose-Einstein condensed molecules

We study the photo-association of Bose-Einstein condensed atoms into molecules using an optical cavity field. The driven cavity field introduces a new dynamical degree of freedom into the photoassociation process, whose role in determining the stationary behavior has not previously been considered. The semiclassical stationary solutions for the atom and molecules as well as the intracavity field are found and their stability and scaling properties are determined in terms of experimentally controllable parameters including driving amplitude of the cavity and the nonlinear interactions between atoms and molecules. For weak cavity driving, we find a bifurcation in the atom and molecule number occurs that signals a transition from a stable steady state to nonlinear Rabi oscillations. For a strongly driven cavity, there exists bistability in the atom and molecule number

Origin of life in a digital microcosm

While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the digital evolution system Avida to study the origin of self-replicating computer programs. By using a computational system, we avoid many of the uncertainties inherent in any biochemical system of self-replicators (while running the risk of ignoring a fundamental aspect of biochemistry). We generated the exhaustive set of minimal-genome self-replicators and analyzed the network structure of this fitness landscape. We further examined the evolvability of these self-replicators and found that the evolvability of a self-replicator is dependent on its genomic architecture. We studied the differential ability of replicators to take over the population when competed against each other (akin to a primordial-soup model of biogenesis) and found that the probability of a self-replicator out-competing the others is not uniform. Instead, progenitor (most-recent common ancestor) genotypes are clustered in a small region of the replicator space. Our results demonstrate how computational systems can be used as test systems for hypotheses concerning the origin of life.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. To appear in special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Re-Conceptualizing the Origins of Life from a Physical Sciences Perspectiv

Integrated information increases with fitness in the evolution of animats

One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of an organism remains a challenging problem, in particular since organismal functional complexity is not well-defined. We present here several candidate measures that quantify information and integration, and study their dependence on fitness as an artificial agent ("animat") evolves over thousands of generations to solve a navigation task in a simple, simulated environment. We compare the ability of these measures to predict high fitness with more conventional information-theoretic processing measures. As the animat adapts by increasing its "fit" to the world, information integration and processing increase commensurately along the evolutionary line of descent. We suggest that the correlation of fitness with information integration and with processing measures implies that high fitness requires both information processing as well as integration, but that information integration may be a better measure when the task requires memory. A correlation of measures of information integration (but also information processing) and fitness strongly suggests that these measures reflect the functional complexity of the animat, and that such measures can be used to quantify functional complexity even in the absence of fitness data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, one supplementary figure. Three supplementary video files available on request. Version commensurate with published text in PLoS Comput. Bio

Evolutionary instability of Zero Determinant strategies demonstrates that winning isn't everything

Zero Determinant (ZD) strategies are a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies that are able to unilaterally set the expected payoff of an opponent in iterated plays of the Prisoner's Dilemma irrespective of the opponent's strategy, or else to set the ratio between a ZD player's and their opponent's expected payoff. Here we show that while ZD strategies are weakly dominant, they are not evolutionarily stable and will instead evolve into less coercive strategies. We show that ZD strategies with an informational advantage over other players that allows them to recognize other ZD strategies can be evolutionarily stable (and able to exploit other players). However, such an advantage is bound to be short-lived as opposing strategies evolve to counteract the recognition.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Change in title (again!) to comply with Nature Communications requirements. To appear in Nature Communication

Parallel experimental study of a novel super-thin thermal absorber based photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) system against conventional photovoltaic (PV) system

Photovoltaic (PV) semiconductor degrades in performance due to temperature rise. A super thin-conductive thermal absorber is therefore developed to regulate the PV working temperature by retrofitting the existing PV panel into the photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) panel. This article presented the parallel comparative investigation of the two different systems through both laboratory and field experiments. The laboratory evaluation consisted of one PV panel and one PV/T panel respectively while the overall field system involved 15 stand-alone PV panels and 15 retrofitted PV/T panels. The laboratory testing results demonstrated the PV/T panel could achieve the electrical efficiency of about 16.8% (relatively 5% improvement comparing with the stand-alone PV panel), and yield an extra amount of heat with thermal efficiency of nearly 65%. The field testing results indicated that the hybrid PV/T panel could enhance the electrical return of PV panels by nearly 3.5%, and increase the overall energy output by nearly 324.3%. Further opportunities and challenges were then discussed from aspects of different PV/T stakeholders to accelerate the development. It is expected that such technology could become a significant solution to yield more electricity, offset heating load freely and reduce carbon footprint in contemporary energy environment