150259 research outputs found
Sort by
The Green Bank Ammonia Survey: Data Release 2
Get PDFWe present an overview of the final data release (DR2) from the Green Bank Ammonia Survey (GAS). GAS is a large program at the Green Bank Telescope to map all Gould Belt star-forming regions with AV ≳ 7 mag visible from the Northern Hemisphere in emission from NH3 and other key molecular tracers. This final release includes the data for all the regions observed: Heiles Cloud 2 and B18 in Taurus; Barnard 1, Barnard 1-E, IC 348, NGC 1333, L1448, L1451, and Per7/34 in Perseus; L1688 and L1689 in Ophiuchus; Orion A (North and South) and Orion B in Orion; Cepheus; B59 in Pipe; Corona Australis East and West; IC 5146; and Serpens Aquila and MWC297 in Serpens. Similar to what was presented in GAS DR1, we find that the NH3 emission and dust continuum emission from Herschel correspond closely. We find that the NH3 emission is generally extended beyond the typical 0.1 pc length scales of dense cores, and we find that the transition between coherent core and turbulent cloud is a common result. This shows that the regions of coherence are common throughout different star-forming regions, with a substantial fraction of the high column density regions displaying subsonic nonthermal velocity dispersions. We produce maps of the gas kinematics, temperature, and NH3 column densities through forward modeling of the hyperfine structure of the NH3 (1,1) and (2,2) lines. We show that the NH3 velocity dispersion, σv, and gas kinetic temperature, TK, vary systematically between the regions included in this release, with an increase in both the mean value and spread of σv and TK with increasing star formation activity. The data presented in this paper are publicly available via doi:10.11570/24.0091
Framework to guide the use of mathematical modelling in evidence-based policy decision-making.
Get PDFINTRODUCTION: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the significance of mathematical modelling in decision-making and the limited capacity in many low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). Thus, we studied how modelling supported policy decision-making processes in LMICs during the pandemic (details in a separate paper).We found that strong researcher-policymaker relationships and co-creation facilitated knowledge translation, while scepticism, political pressures and demand for quick outputs were barriers. We also noted that routine use of modelled evidence for decision-making requires sustained funding, capacity building for policy-facing modelling, robust data infrastructure and dedicated knowledge translation mechanisms.These lessons helped us co-create a framework and policy roadmap for improving the routine use of modelling evidence in public health decision-making. This communication paper describes the framework components and provides an implementation approach and evidence for the recommendations. The components include (1) funding, (2) capacity building, (3) data infrastructure, (4) knowledge translation platforms and (5) a culture of evidence use. KEY ARGUMENTS: Our framework integrates the supply (modellers) and demand (policymakers) sides and contextual factors that enable change. It is designed to be generic and disease-agnostic for any policy decision-making that modelling could support. It is not a decision-making tool but a guiding framework to help build capacity for evidence-based policy decision-making. The target audience is modellers and policymakers, but it could include other partners and implementers in public health decision-making. CONCLUSION: The framework was created through engagements with policymakers and researchers and reflects their real-life experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its purpose is to guide stakeholders, especially in lower-resourced settings, in building modelling capacity, prioritising efforts and creating an enabling environment for using models as part of the evidence base to inform public health decision-making. To validate its robustness and impact, further work is needed to implement and evaluate this framework in diverse settings
An Exploration of the Potential of Augmented and Virtual Reality in Strategic Management: Immersive Visualizations of Future Scenarios
No full textIn environments of rising uncertainty, practitioners in strategic management increasingly turn to digital technologies to augment their limited decision making capabilities. Yet, despite their growing technological maturity and expanding domains of application, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies have received little attention within the digitalisation of strategic management. Their potential to augment strategic, long-term decision making processes remains overlooked.
This thesis addresses this gap in two parts. The first, theoretical part explores the unique potential of AR/VR to deliver cognitive augmentations. It begins by analysing how digital tools are used in the field of Augmented Cognition (AC) to overcome cognitive limitations, deriving a technology-agnostic framework of cognitive augmentations. It then identifies which of these cognitive augmentations are uniquely enabled – in ways or to degrees that other digital tools cannot achieve – by the main features of AR and VR: immersivity, interactivity, and situated visualization. It proposes that AR/VR are uniquely valuable for (I-II) the immersive consumption of simulated and recorded experiences, (III) gamified interactions, and (IV) in-context data ergonomics, thereby establishing the case for adopting immersive technologies. Finally, it applies the unique augmentation potential of AR/VR to challenges in roadmapping practices, adopted here as a proxy for strategic management more broadly, therefore exemplifying the potential of immersive tools in augmenting strategic decision making.
The second part of the thesis focuses on VR. It provides empirical evidence through two studies on its effects on perception and decision making when it is used to visualise future scenarios. The first study, a between-subjects experiment, compared 2D video with a basic VR experience. Results shows that basic VR can enhance perceived scenario qualities when the scenario aligns with participants’ prior beliefs about the future, but may backfire, reducing perceived quality when the scenario conflicts with them. This effect on scenario perception did not translate into significant differences between the two media in strategic reorientation decisions, suggesting that more complex, prolonged or repeated VR exposures may be necessary to elicit measurable effects on strategic decision making. The second study, an exploratory observation with eye-tracking, investigated how participants engaged with immersive visualizations of scenarios. Findings indicate that participants’ attention focused on specific elements and areas (e.g. human figures, backgrounds, initial viewpoints). VR novices showed greater effort in exploring the immersive scenarios. Limited exploration of the scene, observed in several participants, did not depend on prior VR experience.
These insights are distilled into preliminary design guidelines for visualising scenarios using VR and propositions for future research.
Overall, this thesis advances our understanding of how digital technologies can address human cognitive limitations. Specifically, it represents the first exploration of how AR/VR can augment cognition in the context of strategic management. Its practical contributions include a framework to support the design of cognitive augmentations, and empirically grounded guidelines for implementing VR in the visualization of future scenarios
Severe viral infections requiring intensive care unit admissions- aetiology, co-infections, respiratory interventions and outcomes.
Get PDFINTRODUCTION: Severe viral infections are common in patients requiring admission to intensive care units (ICU). Furthermore, these patients often have additional secondary or co-infections. Despite their prevalence, it remains uncertain to what extent those additional infections contribute to worse outcomes for patients with severe viral infections requiring ICU admission. This study aims to characterise severe viral infections requiring admission to intensive care, and describe their viral aetiology, the incidence of additional infections, and their clinical outcomes. METHODS: This retrospective single-centre cohort included consecutive adults admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) with a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for viral infection from 2015 to 2024. Patients with SARS-CoV-2 were not included in this analysis. The data were retrieved from all available electronic databases. Patients were further stratified to compare severe viral infections alone to those with other microbiology confirmed co-infection (within 48 h of admission) and secondary infection (48 h after ICU admission). RESULTS: We identified 222 with positive PCR for viral infection admitted to ICU. The majority were admitted with radiographic evidence of pneumonia (73.0%). Rhinovirus (28.4%), influenza A (18.5%), and RSV (16.2%) were the most common viral pathogens. Of the total, 149 patients had viral infection alone, 50 had co-infections, and 23 developed secondary infections. 30-day and ICU mortality were similar for viral alone, co-infection and secondary infection groups. Although those with secondary infection had a greater hospital and ICU length of stay, this was not reflected in the duration of mechanical ventilation or 30-day hospital mortality. CONCLUSION: In our large cohort of severe viral infections where Rhinovirus was the most common pathogen. This patient population constitute a high burden of respiratory support. The study also characterised 22.5% had co-infection, and 10% had subsequent secondary infection. While patients with secondary infections had prolonged ICU and hospital stay, the 30-day mortality was similar between all groups
Monetary reform under the Sufyanids: the papyrological evidence
Get PDFAbstract
For the past fifty years, there has been a debate over whether the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya introduced a short-lived gold coinage in Syria. After reappraising the literary evidence, this study argues that an enigmatic phrase in a papyrus from this period constitutes evidence for state enforcement of the circulation of a new kind of gold coinage issued under Muʿāwiya. A die-study of the extant specimens of a peculiar imitation of Byzantine gold which has had its crosses effaced, and has been attributed to Muʿāwiya on the basis of the testimony of literary sources, confirms them to be the result of a large-scale, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, initiative. This demonstrates that, in addition to the east, there also existed a separate drive towards an expansion of the money supply in Syria-Egypt during the latter half of Muʿāwiya's caliphate, a development which testifies to a relatively substantial programme of state-building by the caliph
Townscapes: England’s health inequalities
Get PDFThis is the fourth in a series of papers analysing the fortunes of towns across Britain. The analysis draws upon data relating to public service provision, economic outcomes and demographic changes.
This report examines the health inequalities between English towns.
Key Findings:
Health outcomes in towns are, compared with cities, moving in a worse direction in the last few years – the previous pattern of rising life expectancy has stalled or gone into reverse in many English towns.
But we should be much more aware of the markedly different health experiences and outcomes between towns; on some measures inequalities between them are much greater than the average difference between towns and cities.
The most deprived set of towns is much worse off than the least deprived on a number of key measures such as life expectancy, child obesity rates and the prevalence of lung cancer.
The built environment of towns, including their provision of green spaces and the kinds of retail options they provide, including fast food outlets, are closely linked to their inhabitants’ health outcomes.
GPs play a key role within local health provision; yet there are some notable divergences between a town’s level of need and the medications prescribed for its residents.
The COVID-19 crisis is having a major impact upon England’s towns. Access to green space, which is crucial to the mental and physical health of a population, especially during lockdown, is very unevenly distributed within them. There is an overriding need for policies to address the large and widening gaps in the health and economic fortunes of many towns, and these should be integral to the ‘levelling up’ and economic recovery agendas
Time in mind: a multidisciplinary review on temporal perception, cognition, and memory
Get PDFThis review examines temporal cognition through the lens of Mental Time Travel (MTT): the subjective experience of recalling past events and using them to construct future scenarios. The analysis specifically addresses how language and cultural context affect these abilities, integrating psychology, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology. Findings from comparative cognition challenge whether they are uniquely human. Although such an approach was traditionally taken in non-human primates, the field of comparative cognition has become much more diverse. Comparative insights derived from studies of corvid and cephalopod cognition are particularly pertinent, as they suggest these abilities have evolved more widely within the animal kingdom, especially in groups with very different neural architectures, raising questions about whether these abilities have evolved convergently in species undergoing similar selection pressures or independently in those subject to different selection pressures, as opposed to homologous evolution widespread amongst these animal taxa. These evolutionary perspectives inform theories of human temporal cognition and Mental Time Travel, influencing memory encoding and retrieval processes, false memory production, as well as the mechanisms underlying temporal cognition, such as episodic memory formation, interval timing, and circadian modulation of memory consolidation. Additionally, the review evaluates evidence on the cognitive impact of technological tools (calendars, clocks, and other technologies) used to externalize and standardize temporal frameworks, including implications for subjective perception and memory accuracy, and identifies directions for future interdisciplinary research. Building on this synthesis, we advance five core claims: that elements of temporal cognition likely arise under convergent evolutionary pressures; that language, culture, and social organization tune how people represent and use time; that technologies which externalize time can reshape behavior by aligning with or pulling against internally constructed event time; that memory is adaptively biased toward flexible, future-oriented construction rather than veridical record; and that these processes are structured by “mind time” and extended via transpersonal extended mental time travel, whereby shared representations support the projection and coordination of futures across individuals and generations
Modelling chemotaxis of branched cells in complex environments provides insights into immune cell navigation.
Get PDFCell migration in vivo is often guided by chemical signaling, i.e., chemotaxis. For immune cells performing chemotaxis in the organism, this process is influenced by the complex geometry of the tissue environment. In this study, we use a theoretical model of branched cell migration on a network to explore the cellular response to chemical gradients. The model predicts the response of a branched cell to a chemical gradient: how the cell reorients its internal polarity and how it navigates through a complex environment up a chemical gradient. We then compare the model's predictions with experimental observations of neutrophils migrating to the site of a laser-inflicted wound in a zebrafish larva fin, and neutrophils migrating in vitro inside a regular lattice of pillars. We find that the model captures the details of the subcellular response to the chemokine gradient, as well as qualitative characteristics of the large-scale migration, suggesting that the neutrophils behave as fast cells, which explains the functionality of these immune cells
Green but not altruistic warm‐glow predicts conservation behavior
Get PDFAbstract Environmental policies frequently assume that people only act to help the environment if such behavior is in their self‐interest. A growing amount of literature, however, shows that people also derive positive emotional benefits or “warm‐glow from acting green. Yet, it remains unclear to what extent this motivation is derived from classical accounts of altruistic concern. In the current study, we leveraged a prospective design of a unique sample ( N 1 = 341, N 2 = 251) of customers who subscribe to a local sustainable food store. We measured altruistic and green warm‐glow at T 1 and predicted to what extent such prospective warm‐glow predicted a range of self‐reported conservation behaviors 4 weeks later ( T 2 ). Results suggest that the anticipated warm‐glow from helping other people did not significantly predict green intentions nor green behavior despite being highly correlated with green warm‐glow. In fact, only green warm‐glow significantly predicted conservation behavior over time. These findings are important because they elucidate a basic differential motivation between helping other people versus protecting the planet. This differentiation is critical to the design of effective conservation interventions
Melodic Contour Identification by Cochlear-Implant Listeners With Asymmetric Phantom Pulses Presented to Apical Electrodes.
Get PDFOBJECTIVES: (a) To compare performance by cochlear-implant listeners on a melodic contour identification task when the fundamental frequency (F0) is encoded explicitly by single-pulse-per-period (SPP) pulse trains presented to an apical channel, by amplitude modulation of high-rate pulse trains presented to several electrodes, and by these two methods combined, (b) to measure melodic contour identification as a function of the range of F0s tested, (c) to determine whether so-called asymmetric phantom stimulation improves melodic contour identification relative to monopolar stimulation, as has been shown previously using pitch-ranking tasks. DESIGN: Three experiments measured melodic contour identification by cochlear-implant listeners with two different methods of encoding fundamental frequency (F0), both singly and in combination. One method presented SPP pulse trains at the F0 rate to an apical channel in either partial-bipolar or monopolar mode. The second method applied amplitude modulation at F0 to high-rate (~2000 pulses per second) pulse trains on six adjacent electrodes. For this "MOD" stimulation, the channel envelopes were misaligned so as to simulate the effects of the bandpass filters in the commercial signal-processing strategy. RESULTS: In experiment 1, the SPP stimulation used the asymmetric phantom method: pseudomonophasic pulses were applied in partial-bipolar mode to electrodes 1 and 3, with 25% of current returned via an extra-cochlear electrode, and with the short high-amplitude phase anodic with respect to electrode 1. The MOD stimuli were presented to a set of basal electrodes. Performance for SPP stimulation was better, both when presented alone and when combined with MOD stimulation, relative to MOD stimulation alone. Performance was also better when the range of F0s present in the stimuli spanned a low range (97 to 194 Hz) than when they spanned a medium (161 to 322 Hz) or a high range (242 to 484 Hz). Experiment 2 was similar to experiment 1 except that the MOD stimuli were presented to a set of six apical electrodes. Performance with SPP stimulation alone was again significantly better than with MOD stimulation, but the difference between combined and MOD stimulation was not significant. Experiment 3 compared performance of SPP stimulation applied in asymmetric phantom mode to monopolar stimulation of the most-apical electrode using symmetric biphasic pulses. No differences were found between these two types of stimulation, either presented in isolation or with MOD stimulation of nearby apical electrodes. CONCLUSIONS: The results show that F0 encoding by SPP stimulation was better than with MOD stimulation, that it was robust to possible interference from MOD-stimulated electrodes, but that performance with combined stimulation was not better than with SPP alone. Contrary to previous data from pitch-ranking studies, we found no evidence that asymmetric phantom improved melodic contour identification compared with the monopolar stimulation used in commercial strategies