Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership (United Kingdom)

Activity of daily living stages and instrumental activity of daily living stages demonstrated ordered associations with mortality, risk of hospitalization, and receipt of recommended care. This article explores the associations of stages with the following three dimensions of patient activation: self-care efficacy, patient-doctor communication, and health-information seeking. We hypothesized that higher activity of daily living and instrumental activity of daily living stages (greater limitation) are associated with a lower level of patient activation. Patient activation factors were derived from the 2004 and 2009 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. In this cross-sectional study (N = 8981), the associations of activity limitation stages with patient activation factors were assessed in latent factor models. Greater activity limitation was in general inversely associated with self-efficacy, patient-doctor communication, and health information seeking, even after adjusting for sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. For instance, the mean of self-care efficacy across activity of daily living stages I-IV (mild, moderate, severe, and complete limitation) compared with stage 0 (no limitation) decreased significantly by 0.17, 0.29, 0.34, and 0.60, respectively. Covariates associated with suboptimal patient activation were also identified. Our study identified multiple opportunities to improve patient activation, including providing support for older adults with physical impairments, at socioeconomic disadvantages, or with psychological or cognitive impairment.

The oral microbiome delivers important benefits to the host (symbiosis). Changes to the oral environment drive deleterious shifts in this microbiome (dysbiosis). Low biofilm pH from dietary sugar catabolism selects for acidogenic/acid-tolerating species and promotes dental caries, while inflammation following biofilm accumulation enriches for the proteolytic and anaerobic microbial communities associated with periodontal disease. Prevention depends not only on biofilm control but also on eliminating drivers of dysbiosis, i.e., an ecological approach to disease prevention.

German women were working within a context strikingly different from either the USA or the UK following the granting of suffrage in 1918. Focusing on the largest of the bourgeois women's organisations, the Federation of Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), this article situates the post-suffrage strategies and priorities of the German women's movement within their particular national context. The BDF have been accused of failing to fully utilise the vote as a tool for change, but a study of their journal, Die Frau, shows that it was the weight of external factors that reduced the BDF's impact, rather than any failure of courage or commitment by the women. An overview of German press coverage of female suffrage before, during and after the war sets out the mental landscape within which the women were operating and gives for the first time a much-needed indication of public response to the issue.

By examining British and Japanese archival sources, this article brings alive the discourse on Japan–Africa relations in the early 1960s and evokes, on the one hand, the dilemmas surrounding Japan's attempts to expand its economic interests in a decolonising Africa and, on the other hand, the efforts of Britain to hold on to its interests in the region. In essence, the research shows how Japan kick-started its economic relations with the African countries in the post-war era and the initiative to ‘enrol’ the services of Britain in the process. This article also shows how keen Whitehall, on the whole, was about collaborating with Japan about Africa in search of complementary interests, perhaps along the same lines as in Southeast Asia in the 1950s. Eventually, Whitehall became exasperated about the initiative, not least because it felt that it had made all the running and the Japanese had contributed nothing.

We have found no way to replace capitalism as an effective mode of production, and yet that capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible conceptions of a rational moral order...

This paper treats the responses of a controlled system to step and pulse disturbances where the rate of change of the controlling variable is bounded. Optimum transients in the sense of minimizing the maximum error, response duration, and other variables are derived for step and pulse disturbances whose parameters, i.e., magnitude, sense of change, instant of occurrence and pulse duration, are either completely known in advance, or known at the instant the disturbance starts, or not known in advance at all. It is shown that the more that is known about the disturbance beforehand, the better the response that can be obtained. The improvement may be very great. The optimum control function for a pulse disturbance known at the initiation of the pulse contains disturbance parameters. A practical control function can be derived by eliminating these parameters so that no advance information about the disturbance is required. The resulting control function will yield optimum transients and will depend entirely on the system error and its derivatives. This practical control function yields improved response over classical theory to a train of pulse-load disturbances.

The united States Government exhibit for the 1958 Geneva Conference included a simulation of the main portion of the entire Experimental Boiling Water Reactor (EBWR) plant. The total simulation consisted of two operating panels similar to the EBWR control panels and an animated model of the plant. This discussion is limited to the computer technique utilized to accomplish a linear simulation of the neutron kinetics of the reactor over a full operating range of 8 decades.

The future of computer control for the process industries looks bright, but its full potential will not be realized until the process itself is susceptible to such control. Computer control, it is stressed, is not a substitute for present conventional control but a refinement.

Because of the characteristics of a nuclear power plant, much effort must be expended to insure that the plant will not create a public hazard. Thus, the safety instrumentation system is one of its most important features. The proposed system for the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant is described.

The bridge principle was first introduced by S. H. Christie in 1833. Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1843 called attention to Christie's work and applied the bridge to the comparison of resistances.1 Since that time, the network has been known as a Wheatstone bridge.