Managing multiple morbidity in mid-life: a qualitative study of attitudes to drug use

OBJECTIVE: To examine attitudes towards drug use among middle aged respondents with high levels of chronic morbidity. DESIGN: Qualitative study with detailed interviews. SETTING: West of Scotland. PARTICIPANTS: 23 men and women aged about 50 years with four or more chronic illnesses. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Participants' feelings about long term use of drugs to manage chronic multiple morbidity. RESULTS: Drugs occupied a central place in the way people managed their comorbidities. Respondents expressed an aversion to taking drugs, despite acknowledging that they depended on drugs to live as "normal" a life as possible. Respondents expressed ambivalence to their drugs in various ways. Firstly, they adopted both regular and more flexible regimens and might adhere to a regular regimen in treating one condition (such as hypertension) while adopting a flexible regimen in relation to others, in response to their experience of symptoms or varying demands of their daily life. Secondly, they expressed reluctance to take drugs, but an inability to be free of them. Thirdly, drugs both facilitated performance of social roles and served as evidence of an inability to perform such roles. CONCLUSIONS: Insight into the considerable tension experienced by people managing complex drug regimens to manage multiple chronic illness may help medical carers to support self care practices among patients and to optimise concordance in their use of prescribed drugs

Multimode interference devices for focusing in microfluidic channels

Low-cost, compact, automated optical microsystems for chemical analysis, such as microflow cytometers for identification of individual biological cells, require monolithically integrated microlenses for focusing in microfluidic channels, to enable high-resolution scattering and fluorescence measurements. The multimode interference device (MMI), which makes use of self-imaging in multimode waveguides, is shown to be a simple and effective alternative to the microlens for microflow cytometry. The MMIs have been designed, realized, and integrated with microfluidic channels in a silica-based glass waveguide material system. Focal spot sizes of 2.4 µm for MMIs have been measured at foci as far as 43.7 µm into the microfluidic channel

The capacity and attractor basins of associative memory models

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com . Copyright SpringerThe performance characteristics of five variants of the Hopfield network are examined. Two performance metrics are used: memory capacity, and a measure of the size of basins of attraction. We find that the posttraining adjustment of processor thresholds has, at best, little or no effect on performance, and at worst a significant negative effect. The adoption of a local learning rule can, however, give rise to significant performance gains.Peer reviewe

Material Flow Analysis: Outcome Focus (MFA:OF) for Elucidating the Role of Infrastructure in the Development of a Liveable City

Engineered infrastructures (i.e., utilities, transport & digital) underpin modern society. Delivering services via these is especially challenging in cities where differing infrastructures form a web of interdependencies. There must be a step change in how infrastructures deliver services to cities, if those cities are to be liveable in the future (i.e., provide for citizen wellbeing, produce less CO2 & ensure the security of the resources they use). Material Flow Analysis (MFA) is a useful methodology for understanding how infrastructures transfer resources to, within and from cities and contribute to the city’s metabolism. Liveable Cities, a five-year research programme was established to identify & test radical engineering interventions leading to liveable cities of the future. In this paper, the authors propose an outcome-focussed variation on the MFA methodology (MFA: OF), evidenced through work on the resource flows of Birmingham, UK. These flows include water, energy, food & carbon-intensive materials (e.g., steel, paper, glass), as well as their associated waste. The contribution MFA: OF makes to elucidating the interactions & interdependencies between the flows is highlighted and suggestions are made for how it can contribute to the (radical) rethinking of the engineered infrastructure associated with such flow

Investigating Bar Structure of Disc Galaxies via PRIMAL: A PaRtIcle-by-particle M2M ALgorithm

We have modified our particle-by-particle adaptation of the made-to-measure (M2M) method, with the aim of modelling the Galactic disc from upcoming Galactic stellar survey data. In our new particle-by-particle M2M algorithm, PRIMAL, the observables of the target system are compared with those of the model galaxy at the position of the target stars, i.e. particles. The mass of the model particles are adjusted to reproduce the observables of the target system, and the gravitational potential is automatically adjusted by the changing mass of the particles. This paper builds upon our previous work, introducing likelihood-based velocity constraints in PRIMAL. In this paper we apply PRIMAL to barred disc galaxies created by a N-body simulation in a known dark matter potential, with no error in the observables. This paper demonstrates that PRIMAL can recover the radial profiles of the surface density, velocity dispersion in the radial and perpendicular directions, and the rotational velocity of the target discs, along with the apparent bar structure and pattern speed of the bar, especially when the reference frame is adjusted so that the bar angle of the target galaxy is aligned to that of the model galaxy at every timestep.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, Accepted 2013 April 16. Received 2013 April 8; in original form 2013 February

Transformations between HCLP and PCSP

We present a general methodology for transforming between HCLP and PCSP in both directions. HCLP and PCSP each have advantages when modelling problems, and each have advantages when implementing models and solving them. Using the work presented in this paper, the appropriate paradigm can be used for each of these steps, with a meaning-preserving transformation in between if necessary

Review study and evaluation of possible flight experiments relating to cloud physics experiments in space

The general objectives of the Zero-Gravity Atmospheric Cloud Physics Laboratory Program are to improve the level of knowledge in atmospheric cloud research by placing at the disposal of the terrestrial-bound atmospheric cloud physicist a laboratory that can be operated in the environment of zero-gravity or near zero-gravity. This laboratory will allow studies to be performed without mechanical, aerodynamic, electrical, or other techniques to support the object under study. The inhouse analysis of the Skylab 3 and 4 experiments in dynamics of oscillations, rotations, collisions and coalescence of water droplets under low gravity-environment is presented

Individual and corporate sources of motivation - A preliminary investigation

Rating scales of individual and corporate motivations and factor analysis of result