Fantasy proneness and counterfactual thinking

Counterfactual thinking (CFT; mentally simulating alternatives to reality) is central to learning and motivation. Two studies explored the relationship between CFT and fantasy proneness, a personality trait typified by excessive fantasies hard to distinguish from reality. In study1, participants completed a fictional diary entry which was used to measure spontaneous CFT and the Creative Experiences Questionnaire measure of fantasy proneness. Fantasy proneness was significantly correlated with the generation of counterfactual thoughts. Both CFT and fantasy proneness have been independently associated with low mood and study2 included a measure of negative emotional state (the Depression, Anxiety and Stress scale) in addition to the CEQ and CFT. Fantasy proneness and negative emotion both predicted CFT, but no interaction between them was observed. The results suggest that individuals high in fantasy proneness have a general tendency to think counterfactually. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd

Effects of lowering body temperature via hyperhydration, with and without glycerol ingestion and practical precooling on cycling time trial performance in hot and humid conditions

Background Hypohydration and hyperthermia are factors that may contribute to fatigue and impairment of endurance performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of combining glycerol hyperhydration and an established precooling technique on cycling time trial performance in hot environmental conditions. Methods Twelve well-trained male cyclists performed three 46.4-km laboratory-based cycling trials that included two climbs, under hot and humid environmental conditions (33.3 ± 1.1°C; 50 ± 6% r.h.). Subjects were required to hyperhydrate with 25 g.kg-1 body mass (BM) of a 4°C beverage containing 6% carbohydrate (CON) 2.5 h prior to the time trial. On two occasions, subjects were also exposed to an established precooling technique (PC) 60 min prior to the time trial, involving 14 g.kg-1 BM ice slurry ingestion and applied iced towels over 30 min. During one PC trial, 1.2 g.kg-1 BM glycerol was added to the hyperhydration beverage in a double-blind fashion (PC+G). Statistics used in this study involve the combination of traditional probability statistics and a magnitude-based inference approach. Results Hyperhydration resulted in large reductions (−0.6 to −0.7°C) in rectal temperature. The addition of glycerol to this solution also lowered urine output (330 ml, 10%). Precooling induced further small (−0.3°C) to moderate (−0.4°C) reductions in rectal temperature with PC and PC+G treatments, respectively, when compared with CON (0.0°C, P<0.05). Overall, PC+G failed to achieve a clear change in cycling performance over CON, but PC showed a possible 2% (30 s, P=0.02) improvement in performance time on climb 2 compared to CON. This improvement was attributed to subjects’ lower perception of effort reported over the first 10 km of the trial, despite no clear performance change during this time. No differences were detected in any other physiological measurements throughout the time trial. Conclusions Despite increasing fluid intake and reducing core temperature, performance and thermoregulatory benefits of a hyperhydration strategy with and without the addition of glycerol, plus practical precooling, were not superior to hyperhydration alone. Further research is warranted to further refine preparation strategies for athletes competing in thermally stressful events to optimize health and maximize performance outcomes

A systematic review of integrated working between care homes and health care services

© 2011 Davies et al; licensee BioMed Central LtdBackground In the UK there are almost three times as many beds in care homes as in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals. Care homes rely on primary health care for access to medical care and specialist services. Repeated policy documents and government reviews register concern about how health care works with independent providers, and the need to increase the equity, continuity and quality of medical care for care homes. Despite multiple initiatives, it is not known if some approaches to service delivery are more effective in promoting integrated working between the NHS and care homes. This study aims to evaluate the different integrated approaches to health care services supporting older people in care homes, and identify barriers and facilitators to integrated working. Methods A systematic review was conducted using Medline (PubMed), CINAHL, BNI, EMBASE, PsycInfo, DH Data, Kings Fund, Web of Science (WoS incl. SCI, SSCI, HCI) and the Cochrane Library incl. DARE. Studies were included if they evaluated the effectiveness of integrated working between primary health care professionals and care homes, or identified barriers and facilitators to integrated working. Studies were quality assessed; data was extracted on health, service use, cost and process related outcomes. A modified narrative synthesis approach was used to compare and contrast integration using the principles of framework analysis. Results Seventeen studies were included; 10 quantitative studies, two process evaluations, one mixed methods study and four qualitative. The majority were carried out in nursing homes. They were characterised by heterogeneity of topic, interventions, methodology and outcomes. Most quantitative studies reported limited effects of the intervention; there was insufficient information to evaluate cost. Facilitators to integrated working included care home managers' support and protected time for staff training. Studies with the potential for integrated working were longer in duration. Conclusions Despite evidence about what inhibits and facilitates integrated working there was limited evidence about what the outcomes of different approaches to integrated care between health service and care homes might be. The majority of studies only achieved integrated working at the patient level of care and the focus on health service defined problems and outcome measures did not incorporate the priorities of residents or acknowledge the skills of care home staff. There is a need for more research to understand how integrated working is achieved and to test the effect of different approaches on cost, staff satisfaction and resident outcomes

Electrical bending actuation of gold-films with nanotextured surfaces

published_or_final_versio

Social disorganization and history of child sexual abuse against girls in sub-Saharan Africa : a multilevel analysis

Background: Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a considerable public health problem. Less focus has been paid to the role of community level factors associated with CSA. The aim of this study was to examine the association between neighbourhood-level measures of social disorganization and CSA. Methods: We applied multiple multilevel logistic regression analysis on Demographic and Health Survey data for 6,351 adolescents from six countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2006 and 2008. Results: The percentage of adolescents that had experienced CSA ranged from 1.04% to 5.84%. There was a significant variation in the odds of reporting CSA across the communities, suggesting 18% of the variation in CSA could be attributed to community level factors. Respondents currently employed were more likely to have reported CSA than those who were unemployed (odds ratio [OR] = 2.05, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.48 to 2.83). Respondents from communities with a high family disruption rate were 57% more likely to have reported CSA (OR=1.57, 95% CI 1.14 to 2.16). Conclusion: We found that exposure to CSA was associated with high community level of family disruption, thus suggesting that neighbourhoods may indeed have significant important effects on exposure to CSA. Further studies are needed to explore pathways that connect the individual and neighbourhood levels, that is, means through which deleterious neighbourhood effects are transmitted to individuals

Effective health care for older people resident in care homes: the optimal study protocol for realist review

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Care homes in the UK rely on general practice for access to specialist medical and nursing care as well as referral to therapists and secondary care. Service delivery to care homes is highly variable in both quantity and quality. This variability is also evident in the commissioning and organisation of care home-specific services that range from the payment of incentives to general practitioners (GPs) to visit care homes, to the creation of care home specialist teams and outreach services run by geriatricians. No primary studies or systematic reviews have robustly evaluated the impact of these different approaches on organisation and resident-level outcomes. Our aim is to identify factors which may explain the perceived or demonstrated effectiveness of programmes to improve health-related outcomes in older people living in care homes. Methods/Design: A realist review approach will be used to develop a theoretical understanding of what works when, why and in what circumstances. Elements of service models of interest include those that focus on assessment and management of residents’ health, those that use strategies to encourage closer working between visiting health care providers and care home staff, and those that address system-wide issues about access to assessment and treatment. These will include studies on continence, dignity, and speech and language assessment as well as interventions to promote person centred dementia care, improve strength and mobility, and nutrition. The impact of these interventions and their different mechanisms will be considered in relation to five key outcomes: residents’ medication use, use of out of hours’ services, hospital admissions (including use of Accident and Emergency) and length of hospital stay, costs and user satisfaction. An iterative three-stage approach will be undertaken that is stakeholder-driven and optimises the knowledge and networks of the research team. Discussion: This realist review will explore why and for whom different approaches to providing health care to residents in care homes improves access to health care in the five areas of interest. It will inform commissioning decisions and be the basis for further research. This systematic review protocol is registered on the PROSPERO database reference number: CRD42014009112NIHR Health Services & Delivery Research Programme. Project number 11/1021/0

Phylogeny of Prokaryotes and Chloroplasts Revealed by a Simple Composition Approach on All Protein Sequences from Complete Genomes Without Sequence Alignment

The complete genomes of living organisms have provided much information on their phylogenetic relationships. Similarly, the complete genomes of chloroplasts have helped to resolve the evolution of this organelle in photosynthetic eukaryotes. In this paper we propose an alternative method of phylogenetic analysis using compositional statistics for all protein sequences from complete genomes. This new method is conceptually simpler than and computationally as fast as the one proposed by Qi et al. (2004b) and Chu et al. (2004). The same data sets used in Qi et al. (2004b) and Chu et al. (2004) are analyzed using the new method. Our distance-based phylogenic tree of the 109 prokaryotes and eukaryotes agrees with the biologists tree of life based on 16S rRNA comparison in a predominant majority of basic branching and most lower taxa. Our phylogenetic analysis also shows that the chloroplast genomes are separated to two major clades corresponding to chlorophytes s.l. and rhodophytes s.l. The interrelationships among the chloroplasts are largely in agreement with the current understanding on chloroplast evolution

Local Charge of the nu=5/2 Fractional Quantum Hall State

Electrons in two dimensions and strong magnetic fields effectively lose their kinetic energy and display exotic behavior dominated by Coulomb forces. When the ratio of electrons to magnetic flux quanta in the system is near 5/2, the unique correlated phase that emerges is predicted to be gapped with fractionally charged quasiparticles and a ground state degeneracy that grows exponentially as these quasiparticles are introduced. Interestingly, the only way to transform between the many ground states would be to braid the fractional excitations around each other, a property with applications in quantum information processing. Here we present the first observation of localized quasiparticles at nu=5/2, confined to puddles by disorder. Using a local electrometer to compare how quasiparticles at nu=5/2 and nu=7/3 charge these puddles, we are able to extract the ratio of local charges for these states. Averaged over several disorder configurations and samples, we find the ratio to be 4/3, suggesting that the local charges are e/3 at seven thirds and e/4 at five halves, in agreement with theoretical predictions. This confirmation of localized e/4 quasiparticles is necessary for proposed interferometry experiments to test statistics and computational ability of the state at nu=5/2.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures corrected titl

Even Between-Lap Pacing Despite High Within-Lap Variation During Mountain Biking

Purpose: Given the paucity of research on pacing strategies during competitive events, this study examined changes in dynamic high-resolution performance parameters to analyze pacing profiles during a multiple-lap mountain-bike race over variable terrain. Methods: A global-positioning-system (GPS) unit (Garmin, Edge 305, USA) recorded velocity (m/s), distance (m), elevation (m), and heart rate at 1 Hz from 6 mountain-bike riders (mean ± SD age = 27.2 ± 5.0 y, stature = 176.8 ± 8.1 cm, mass = 76.3 ± 11.7 kg, VO2max = 55.1 ± 6.0 mL · kg–1 . min–1) competing in a multilap race. Lap-by-lap (interlap) pacing was analyzed using a 1-way ANOVA for mean time and mean velocity. Velocity data were averaged every 100 m and plotted against race distance and elevation to observe the presence of intralap variation. Results: There was no significant difference in lap times (P = .99) or lap velocity (P = .65) across the 5 laps. Within each lap, a high degree of oscillation in velocity was observed, which broadly reflected changes in terrain, but high-resolution data demonstrated additional nonmonotonic variation not related to terrain. Conclusion: Participants adopted an even pace strategy across the 5 laps despite rapid adjustments in velocity during each lap. While topographical and technical variations of the course accounted for some of the variability in velocity, the additional rapid adjustments in velocity may be associated with dynamic regulation of self-paced exercise

Renormalization in General Gauge Mediation

We revisit General Gauge Mediation (GGM) in light of the supersymmetric (linear) sigma model by utilizing the current superfield. The current superfield in the GGM is identified with supersymmetric extension of the vector symmetry current of the sigma model while spontaneous breakdown of supersymmetry in the GGM corresponds to soft breakdown of the axial vector symmetry of the sigma model. We first derive the current superfield from the supersymmetric linear sigma model and then compute 2-point functions of the current superfield using the (anti-)commutation relations of the messenger component fields. After the global symmetry are weakly gauged, the 2-point functions of the current superfield are identified with a part of the 2-point functions of the associated vector superfield. We renormalize them by dimensional regularization and show that physical gaugino and sfermion masses of the MSSM are expressed in terms of the wavefunction renormalization constants of the component fields of the vector superfield.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figure