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Giving up on the Church of England in the time of pandemic : individual differences in responses of non-ministering members to online worship and offline services
Get PDFThis study draws on data provided to the Covid-19 & Church-21 Survey by 826 ‘non- ministering’ Anglicans living in England in order to explore why some people gave up worshipping online or in church during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2021. Nearly a quarter of the participants had given up online worship, attending off-line services in church, or both: 15% had given up on online worship, 13% had given up on going to church, and 5% had given up on both. Giving up was significantly correlated with negative experience of services. Those under the age of forty and Anglo-Catholics were most likely to give up online worship. Women and extraverts were most likely to give up on socially-distanced services in church. The results indicate the sorts of people who might drift from the church post- pandemic and what the Church could concentrate on to prevent this process
Physics-informed neural networks as surrogate models of hydrodynamic simulators
No full textIn response to growing concerns surrounding the relationship between climate change and escalating flood risk, there is an increasing urgency to develop precise and rapid flood prediction models. Although high-resolution flood simulations have made notable advancements, they remain computationally expensive, underscoring the need for efficient machine learning surrogate models. As a result of sparse empirical observation and expensive data collection, there is a growing need for the models to perform effectively in ‘small-data’ contexts, a characteristic typical of many scientific problems. This research combines the latest developments in surrogate modelling and physics-informed machine learning to propose a novel Physics-Informed Neural Network-based surrogate model for hydrodynamic simulators governed by Shallow Water Equations. The proposed method incorporates physics-based prior information into the neural network structure by encoding the conservation of mass into the model without relying on calculating continuous derivatives in the loss function. The method is demonstrated for a high-resolution inland flood simulation model and a large-scale regional tidal model. The proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art data-driven approaches by up to 25 %. This research demonstrates the benefits and robustness of physics-informed approaches in surrogate modelling for flood and hydroclimatic modelling problems
Recognize your audience : stakeholders’ coaptation work to improve political representation in innovation programs
No full textManagers often exclude some stakeholders from innovation programs, believing they would be “dangerous” for the purpose and pace of new product/service development. The exclusion of “dangerous” stakeholders, however, has negative implications on innovation, as it prevents access to key knowledge and connections. Our study investigates how “dangerous” stakeholders can overturn their exclusion, and gain key decision-making responsibilities. Theoretically, we import the “general theory of political representation” from Rehfeld (2006) to derive insight into agency of five actors: selection agents, strategic constellation and representatives (on the side of innovators), represented and “audience” (on the side of stakeholders). Empirically, we undertake a 4-year longitudinal case study of a digital innovation program in an English public hospital. Our study highlighted that only an elite “audience” of clinical leads enacted a strategy of “coaptation work” to overturn their exclusion from the innovation program, and ascend to a role of selection agents. Through “coaptation work,” the clinical leads used their privileged access to clinical resources to first create fractures within the community of innovators, and then embed clinical stakeholders in key decision-making roles to heal them. Our results challenge established “hub-and-spoke” interpretations of innovation programs, and emphasize the importance of political representation work to understand how stakeholders exert their influence
A holistic review on e-mobility service optimization : challenges, recent progress and future directions
Get PDFIn recent years, countries around the world have attached great attention to the development of transportation electrification. As an alternative to achieve carbon neutrality, Electric Vehicles (EVs) are deemed as the goal of vehicle transformation to achieve zero carbon emissions. However, the challenges of EV energy supplementation has not been adequately investigated, causing the concerns on range anxiety, inconvenience of perceive charging service etc. By identifying stakeholders and investigating various services under the umbrella of E-mobility services, this paper firstly introduces the concept, population and challenges of EVs as the key enabler of Electro-Mobility (E-Mobility), and then summarizes recent E-Mobility services with holistic insight. Then, overviews of plug-in charging, battery swapping, vehicle to vehicle charging, mobile and wireless charging are introduced, including the objectives, risks and their service optimization categories. Further to literature review, concern on identifying the gap between academia and industry application is also provided to help coach the technology transformation. From our review, it is observed that flexible and emerging service modes beyond plug-in charging has been receiving great attention from both academia and industry. Therefore, several recent market efforts have been showcased, by following the summarization of mainstream optimization methods been applied for E-Mobility services. Finally, this paper is concluded with several future direction highlights including integration of multi-energy source, concern on cyber security, application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and promotion of global policy to guide with wide communities
Psychological distress and convergence of own and proxy health‐related quality of life in carers of adults with an intellectual disability
No full textBackgroundIn adults with an intellectual disability, health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) is often measured by proxy report. This cross‐sectional study investigated whether the mental health of proxy raters impacts the way they rate HRQoL.MethodsIn this study, 110 carers of adults with an intellectual disability completed measures of psychological distress (Kessler‐6) and HRQoL (EQ‐5D‐3L) about their own HRQoL and that of the care recipient. Differences between HRQoL scores as rated by the carer about themselves and the care recipient were calculated (convergence scores) and multiple regression models were fitted to estimate the association between proxy psychological distress and convergence scores for subjective/objective HRQoL controlling for support needs of the care recipient, carer age and gender of care recipient.ResultsThere was a significant association between psychological distress and subjective HRQoL convergence scores (r = .92; P = 0.03; 95%; CI: −1.76 to −0.09). There was no association between psychological distress and objective HRQoL convergence scores (r = .01; CI −0.02 to 0.001; P = 0.08). The association between psychological distress and HRQoL scores was no longer present when models did not include convergence scores.ConclusionsCarers experiencing more psychological distress tended to rate their own and the care recipients' subjective HRQoL more similarly. Objective HRQoL measures did not show this convergence in scores with increasing carer psychological distress. Findings differed when the analysis approach was changed, suggesting the results above require replication in future studies
VLA monitoring of LS V +44 17 reveals scatter in the X-ray - radio correlation of Be/X-ray binaries
Get PDFLS V +44 17 is a persistent Be/X-ray binary (BeXRB) that displayed a bright, double-peaked period of X-ray activity in late 2022/early 2023. We present a radio monitoring campaign of this outburst using the Very Large Array. Radio emission was detected, but only during the second, X-ray brightest, peak, where the radio emission followed the rise and decay of the X-ray outburst. LS V +44 17 is therefore the third neutron star BeXRB with a radio counterpart. Similar to the other two systems (Swift J0243.6+6124 and 1A 0535+262), its X-ray and radio luminosity are correlated: we measure a power-law slope
and a radio luminosity of LR = (1.6 ± 0.2) × 1026 erg s−1 at a 0.5–10 keV X-ray luminosity of 2 × 1036 erg s−1 (i.e.
LEdd). This correlation index is slightly steeper than measured for the other two sources, while its radio luminosity is higher. We discuss the origin of the radio emission, specifically in the context of jet launching. The enhanced radio brightness compared to the other two BeXRBs is the first evidence of scatter in the giant BeXRB outburst X-ray–radio correlation, similar to the scatter observed in subclasses of low-mass X-ray binaries. While a universal explanation for such scatter is not known, we explore several options: we conclude that the three sources do not follow proposed scalings between jet power and neutron star spin or magnetic field, and instead briefly explore the effects that ambient stellar wind density may have on BeXRB jet luminosity
Effect of rider position on the energy consumption of an electric motorcycle
Get PDFUnlike other transport vehicles, the rider of a motorcycle contributes to the change of frontal area and drag coefficient during riding as their position changes, and therefore, rider position can directly affect energy consumption. This manuscript systematically investigates the effects of variations in combined drag coefficient and frontal area on electric motorcycle (EM) range over the World Motorcycle Test Cycle (WMTC) 3.2 standard drive cycle. The combined drag coefficient and frontal area (CdA) values were measured in a full-scale wind tunnel using a rider who was fully kitted in separate leathers as opposed to single piece race suits. A vehicle longitudinal backwards-facing model was used to estimate the effect of different riding position on motorcycle energy consumption. A decrease of 30% in the product of drag coefficient (Cd) and frontal area (A) through changing from an upright to a tucked-in position leads to a decrease of up to 19% in terms of energy consumption
New models for old rolling : generalized slab theory and slip lines for fast predictions without finite elements
No full textIn this work, a new mathematical model for cold rolling processes is presented. Starting from the governing equations and assuming only a narrow roll gap aspect ratio (in effect, large rolls on a thin strip), we find a solution by introducing two length scales inherent to the problem. The solution consists of a large scale, along with small (next order) correction at a small scale. The leading-order solution depends on the large length scale and matches with slab theory. The next-order correction depends on both the large and small length scales, and reveals rapid stress and strain oscillation. These oscillations are also seen in preliminary FE simulations. The oscillations resemble the slip-line fields, and the FE simulations suggest a strong connection between these oscillations and the residual stress in the resulting strip. The modelling approach used here has potential applications for modelling many metal forming processes, just as the slip-line theory itself did, but with the distinct advantage of simplicity and quick computation
EV-Perturb : event-stream perturbation for privacy-preserving classification with dynamic vision sensors
No full textThe dynamic vision sensors or event-cameras are bio-inspired vision platforms with independent and asynchronous pixels. Their unique design enables a number of advantages over traditional RGB cameras, including high temporal resolution for capturing high speed motion without blur and high dynamic range for sensing under challenging lighting conditions. As the outputs of the event-cameras are discrete and asynchronous events, termed as event-streams, rather than traditional high-quality video frames, they are regarded as low privacy-intrusive. However, research on reconstruction from events has revealed that event-streams can be converted to high quality video frames by sophisticated reconstruction algorithms, so that the claim on privacy-preserving does not hold anymore. In this paper, we focus on the privacy issue of event-streams used in EV-based classification tasks and propose, EV-Perturb, an event-stream perturbation mechanism to protect event-streams from reconstruction attacks. EV-Perturb flips polarities of events in a random manner and the theoretical proof shows that it provides differential-private guarantee on the perturbed event-streams. We also evaluate the utility (classification accuracy) and privacy (video reconstruction error) of EV-Perturb on EV-based classification tasks with multiple publicly available datasets using deep learning models. In summary, this work has several technical contributions. First, by proposing EV-Perturb, we consider the privacy issue of event-streams under reconstruction attack, which is the first piece of work focusing on solving this specific privacy issue. The approach is based on randomized response, which is both efficient and effective, shown as our evaluation. We also provide a theoretical proof that EV-Perturb is differential-private and derive the strict privacy guarantee with respect to the probability of change. Lastly, the results of the extensive evaluations show that EV-Perturb is can effectively protect event-streams from reconstruction attacks while preserving comparable accuracy on classification
Metabolic changes following intermittent fasting
Get PDFBackground:
The prevalence of obesity is rising globally and effective strategies to treat obesity are needed. Intermittent fasting, a dietary intervention for weight management, has received growing interest from the general public, as well as healthcare professionals, as a form of lifestyle intervention.
Methods:
We executed a rapid review using PUBMED database to identify systematic reviews that examined the impact of intermittent fasting on metabolic indices, published between 2011 and 2022.
Results:
Intermittent fasting leads to weight loss of a similar magnitude to continuous energy restriction. Most of the evidence shows that intermittent fasting leads to greater fat loss as measured by fat mass (kg) or body fat percentage compared to an ad libitum diet, but fat loss attained during intermittent fasting is not significantly different to continuous energy restriction, although recent evidence shows intermittent fasting to be superior. There is mixed evidence for the impact of intermittent fasting on insulin resistance, fasting glucose and lipid profile. Some studies focused on populations of Muslim people, which showed that Ramadan fasting may lead to weight loss and improvement of metabolic parameters during fasting, although the effects are reversed when fasting is finished.
Conclusions:
Intermittent fasting is more effective than an ad libitum dietary intake, and equally or more effective as continuous energy restriction, for weight management. However, there is inconclusive evidence on whether intermittent fasting has a clinically beneficial effect on glucose and lipid metabolism