The impact of hand hygiene messages in public toilets

Research questions & Objectives: Which kinds of hand washing and hygiene information are positively evaluated and preferred by women and men in their public toilet areas (e.g. risk likelihood, infection severity, social norms, technique etc.)? Should messages be framed as a gain or a loss? Which format (text vs. pictorial vs. both) is more salient? Design and Methods: Mixed methods are employed. Implicit evaluations towards hand hygiene messages (pictorial and textual) are investigated in a series of experiments and the subjective meaning of these messages for hand-washing activity is explored using Q-sorts. Analyses: Experimental protocols have been created for the evaluation of hygiene messages using response time measures with student participants (n=120). In the main studies (generally of mixed factorial designs, N per study = 100), the protocols will be combined with additional Q-sorts. Together, this will yield a rich implicit-explicit attitudinal data set comprising non-conscious positive-negative evaluations towards the hand hygiene messages along with their multidimensional subjective meanings for both women and men. Discussion: Evidence shows there are higher rates of hand washing in pubic toilets where there is signage compared to none at all. And, certain kinds of textual message content are likely to be differentially effective for women and men. It is envisaged that this research work in progress, through combining implicit evaluation measures with subjective meanings of hand hygiene signage, will provide a firm empirical basis for developing targeted hand hygiene messages to go forward into a planned community level intervention study

Atomistic defect states as quantum emitters in monolayer MoS2_2

Quantum light sources in solid-state systems are of major interest as a basic ingredient for integrated quantum device technologies. The ability to tailor quantum emission through deterministic defect engineering is of growing importance for realizing scalable quantum architectures. However, a major difficulty is that defects need to be positioned site-selectively within the solid. Here, we overcome this challenge by controllably irradiating single-layer MoS$_{2}$ using a sub-nm focused helium ion beam to deterministically create defects. Subsequent encapsulation of the ion bombarded MoS$_{2}$ flake with high-quality hBN reveals spectrally narrow emission lines that produce photons at optical wavelengths in an energy window of one to two hundred meV below the neutral 2D exciton of MoS$_{2}$. Based on ab-initio calculations we interpret these emission lines as stemming from the recombination of highly localized electron-hole complexes at defect states generated by the helium ion bombardment. Our approach to deterministically write optically active defect states in a single transition metal dichalcogenide layer provides a platform for realizing exotic many-body systems, including coupled single-photon sources and exotic Hubbard systems.Comment: Main: 9 pages, 3 figures + SI: 19 pages, 10 figure

A not-so proximate account of cleansing behavior

In this commentary we outline Perceptual Control Theory and suggest this as a fruitful way for Lee and Schwartz to fully embody their account of cleansing behavior. Moreover we take issue with the command control approach that Lee and Schwartz have taken seeing this as an unnecessary cognitive commitment within an embodied model of cleansing behavior

Need for closure and coercion in inter-group conflicts: experimental evidence for the mitigating effect of accessible conflict schemas

Three experimental studies demonstrate that momentarily-accessible conflict-schemas moderate the relationship between need for closure and conflict-strategy preferences, with the relationship between a high need for closure and increased competitiveness reduced to non-significance when a cooperative conflict schema is made salient but strengthened when a hostile one is activated. Study 1 manipulated the accessibility of competitive versus cooperative conflict schemas using different descriptions of a contemporary political conflict, while Studies 2 and 3 manipulated conflict-schema accessibility using primes embedded in an ostensibly-unrelated lexical decision task. Together, the present studies provide a strong pattern of experimental support for the moderating effect of conflict-schema accessibility suggested by earlier correlational studies. The implications for conflict reduction are discussed

Unveiling the potential of diffusion model‑based framework with transformer for hyperspectral image classification

Hyperspectral imaging has gained popularity for analysing remotely sensed images in various fields such as agriculture and medical. However, existing models face challenges in dealing with the complex relationships and characteristics of spectral–spatial data due to the multi-band nature and data redundancy of hyperspectral data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called DiffSpectralNet, which combines diffusion and transformer techniques. The diffusion method is able to extract diverse and meaningful spectral–spatial features, leading to improvement in HSI classification. Our approach involves training an unsupervised learning framework based on the diffusion model to extract high-level and low-level spectral–spatial features, followed by the extraction of intermediate hierarchical features from different timestamps for classification using a pre-trained denoising U-Net. Finally, we employ a supervised transformer-based classifier to perform the HSI classification. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three publicly available datasets to validate our approach. The results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The stability and reliability of our approach are demonstrated across various classes in all datasets