Metallic glass/PVDF magnetoelectric energy harvester working up to the radiofrequency range

Companies and researchers involved in developing miniaturized electronic devices face the basic problem of the needed batteries size, finite life of time and environmental pollution caused by their final deposition. The current trends to overcome this situation point towards Energy Harvesting technology. These harvesters (or scavengers) store the energy from sources present in the ambient (as wind, solar, electromagnetic, etc) and are costless for us. Piezoelectric devices are the ones that show a higher power density, and materials as ceramic PZT or polymeric PVDF have already demonstrated their ability to act as such energy harvester elements. Combinations between piezoelectric and electromagnetic mechanism have been also extensively investigated. Nevertheless, the power generated by these combinations is limited under the application of small magnetic fields, reducing the performance of the energy harvester [1]. In the last years the appearance of magnetoelectric (ME) devices, in which the piezoelectric deformation is driven by the magnetostrictive element, enables to extract the energy of very small electromagnetic signals through the generated magnetoelectric voltage at the piezoelectric element. However, very little work has been done testing PVDF polymer as piezoelectric constituent of the ME energy harvester device, and only to be proposed as a possibility of application [2]. Among the advantages of using piezopolymers for vibrational energy harvesting we can remember that they are ductile, resilient to shock, deformable and lightweight. In this work we demonstrate the feasibility of using magnetostrictive Fe-rich magnetic amorphous alloys/piezoelectric PVDF sandwich-type laminated ME devices as energy harvesters. A very simple experimental set-up will show how these laminates can extract energy, in amounts of μW, from an external AC field.

Does the provision of full day care improve the quality of life for children and their parents

This study sought to explore and examine if the provision of full day care improves the quality of life for children and their parents. Owing to the effects of the Celtic Tiger, life in Ireland has changed considerably over the past five to ten years. Because of the booming economy there are now 60.8% of women employed in the workforce. This means many changes for children, parents and families. Findings in the literature review are based on international studies. The researcher utilised both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies for the study. She interviewed 31 respondents; 27 childcare managers; 3 politicians and the chairperson of a childcare committee. Furthermore, 325 questionnaires were completed in a survey by working parents in the statutory and voluntary sectors in and around Sligo town and in two childcare facilities in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal. Babies as young as 4 months are being cared for in childcare facilities from 6.45am until 6.pm daily, 5 days per week. Some children are spending up to 11 hours per day in childcare facilities. The study has not categorically concluded that full day care is either positive or negative for children. Childcare facilities are providing good quality childcare encompassing various services; however, 25 out of 27 childcare managers reported to the researcher that they would not leave their child in full day care. Parents are finding it difficult to manage work life balance. Health dominated quality of life issues. Two hundred and thirty five (235) parents reported being stressed. The study also found that 315 working parents feel that the government is not doing enough to support working parents. On a positive note, 241 parents said they are happy in general with the quality of life for them, their family and their children. In addition, the researcher has identified a number of recommendations for future changes in policy and further study.

Firms in Scottish High Technology Clusters: software, life sciences, microelectronics, optoelectronics and digital media – preliminary evidence and analysis on firm size, growth and optimality

This paper reports on: (a) new primary source evidence on; and (b) statistical and econometric analysis of high technology clusters in Scotland. It focuses on the following sectors: software, life sciences, microelectronics, optoelectronics, and digital media. Evidence on a postal and e-mailed questionnaire is presented and discussed under the headings of: performance, resources, collaboration & cooperation, embeddedness, and innovation. The sampled firms are characterised as being small (viz. micro-firms and SMEs), knowledge intensive (largely graduate staff), research intensive (mean spend on R&D GBP 842k), and internationalised (mainly selling to markets beyond Europe). Preliminary statistical evidence is presented on Gibrat’s Law (independence of growth and size) and the Schumpeterian Hypothesis (scale economies in R&D). Estimates suggest a short-run equilibrium size of just 100 employees, but a long-run equilibrium size of 1000 employees. Further, to achieve the Schumpeterian effect (of marked scale economies in R&D), estimates suggest that firms have to grow to very much larger sizes of beyond 3,000 employees. We argue that the principal way of achieving the latter scale may need to be by takeovers and mergers, rather than by internally driven growth.

An Archival Case Study: Revisiting The Life and Political Economy of Lauchlin Currie

This paper forms part of a wider project to show the significance of archival material on distinguished economists, in this case Lauchlin Currie (1902-93), who studied and taught at Harvard before entering government service at the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Board as the intellectual leader of Roosevelt’s New Deal, 1934-39, as FDR’s White House economic adviser in peace and war, 1939-45, and as a post-war development economist. It discusses the uses made of the written and oral material available when the author was writing his intellectual biography of Currie (Duke University Press 1990) while Currie was still alive, and the significance of the material that has come to light after Currie’s death.

Measuring Avoidable Health Inequality with Realization of Conditional Potential Life Years (RCPLY)

In a series of papers (Tang, Chin and Rao, 2008; and Tang, Petrie and Rao 2006 & 2007), we have tried to improve on a mortality-based health status indicator, namely age-at-death (AAD), and its associated health inequality indicators that measure the distribution of AAD. The main contribution of these papers is to propose a frontier method to separate avoidable and unavoidable mortality risks. This has facilitated the development of a new indicator of health status, namely the Realization of Potential Life Years (RePLY). The RePLY measure is based on the concept of a “frontier country” that, by construction, has the lowest mortality risks for each age-sex group amongst all countries. The mortality rates of the frontier country are used as a proxy for the unavoidable mortality rates, and the residual between the observed mortality rates and the unavoidable mortality rates are considered as avoidable morality rates. In this approach, however, countries at different levels of development are benchmarked against the same frontier country without considering their heterogeneity. The main objective of the current paper is to control for national resources in estimating (conditional) unavoidable and avoidable mortality risks for individual countries. This allows us to construct a new indicator of health status – Realization of Conditional Potential Life Years (RCPLY). The paper presents empirical results from a dataset of life tables for 167 countries from the year 2000, compiled and updated by the World Health Organization. Measures of national average health status and health inequality based on RePLY and RCPLY are presented and compared.

The Greying Church: The Impact of Life Expectancy on Religiosity

Many churches are concerned about older and dwindling congregations. We develop a theoretical framework to explain not only the downward trend in church attendance, but also the increase in the proportion of older people in the congregations. Religiosity depends positively on the expected social and spiritual benefits attached to religious adherence, as well as the probability of entering heaven in the afterlife. While otherworldly compensation in terms of salvation and spiritual benefits motivates religiosity, the costs of formal religion in terms of time allocated to communal activities and foregone income work in the opposite direction. We show that higher life expectancy discounts expected benefits in the afterlife and is hence likely to lead to postponement of religiosity. For this reason, religious organizations should be prepared to attract older members to their congregations, while emphasizing contemporaneous religious benefits to increase overall church attendance.

Adaptation and anticipation effects to life events in the United Kingdom

We analyze how individual happiness is affected over time by nine major life events using a panel of British individuals. Our aim is to test for the existence of adaptation and anticipation effects. Adaptation effects are found for all the life events considered with the possible exception of unemployment. Anticipation effects precede events that are easily predicted such as marriage, separation and the birth of a child.

Life-Cycle, Effort and Academic Inactivity

It has been observed that university professors sometimes become less research active in their later years. This paper models the decision to become inactive as a utility maximising problem under conditions of uncertainty and derives an age-dependent activity condition for the level of research productivity. The model implies that professors who are close to retirement age are more likely to become inactive when faced with setbacks in their research while those who continue research do not lower their activity levels. Using data from the University of Iceland, we find support for the model’s predictions. The model suggests that universities should induce their older faculty to remain research active by striving to make their research more productive and enjoyable, maintaining peer pressure, reducing job security and offering higher performance related pay.

Age, Life-satisfaction, and Relative Income – Insights from the UK and Germany

We first confirm previous results with the German Socio-Economic Panel by Layard et al. (2010), and obtain strong negative effects of comparison income. However, when we split the sample by age, we find quite different results for reference income. The effects on lifesatisfaction are positive and significant for those under 45, consistent with Hirschman’s (1973) ‘tunnel effect’, and only negative (and larger than in the full sample) for those over 45, when relative deprivation dominates. Thus for young respondents, reference income’s signalling role, indicating potential future prospects, can outweigh relative deprivation effects. Own-income effects are also larger for the older sample, and of greater magnitude than the comparison income effect. In East Germany the reference income effects are insignificant for all. With data from the British Household Panel Survey, we confirm standard results when encompassing all ages, but reference income loses significance in both age groups, and most surprisingly, even own income becomes insignificant for those over 45, while education has significant negative effects.

Directed Search over the Life Cycle

We develop a life-cycle model of the labor market in which different worker-firm matches have different quality and the assignment of the right workers to the right firms is time consuming because of search and learning frictions. The rate at which workers move between unemployment, employment and across different firms is endogenous because search is directed and, hence, workers can choose whether to seek low-wage jobs that are easy to find or high-wage jobs that are hard to find. We calibrate our theory using data on labor market transitions aggregated across workers of different ages. We validate our theory by showing that it predicts quite well the pattern of labor market transitions for workers of different ages. Finally, we use our theory to decompose the age profiles of transition rates, wages and productivity into the effects of age variation in work-life expectancy, human capital and match quality.

Halipegus dubius Klein, 1905 (Trematoda, Hemiuridae): a redescription, with notes on the working of the ovarian complex

A redescription of Halipegus dubius Klein, 1905, of Brazilian frogs Leptodactylus pentadactylus and L. ocellatus, is presented. The parasite was found exclusively in the buccal cavity, in number varying from 1 (in most instances) to 3, and exceptionally 25 (one instance). Morphological data were based on 40 whole-mounted specimens and 4 serially sectioned ones. Larval development takes place in planorbid snails (Biomphalaria glabrata and B. tenagophila) and in an undetermined species of cyclops. Working of the ovarian complex was followed by microscopical observation of life specimens. Constrating with the similarity of the four American species of Halipegus currently recognized as valid, they can be easily separated by the characters of their cercariae.

Ant brood function as life preservers during floods.

Social organisms can surmount many ecological challenges by working collectively. An impressive example of such collective behavior occurs when ants physically link together into floating 'rafts' to escape from flooded habitat. However, raft formation may represent a social dilemma, with some positions posing greater individual risks than others. Here, we investigate the position and function of different colony members, and the costs and benefits of this functional geometry in rafts of the floodplain-dwelling ant Formica selysi. By causing groups of ants to raft in the laboratory, we observe that workers are distributed throughout the raft, queens are always in the center, and 100% of brood items are placed on the base. Through a series of experiments, we show that workers and brood are extremely resistant to submersion. Both workers and brood exhibit high survival rates after they have rafted, suggesting that occupying the base of the raft is not as costly as expected. The placement of all brood on the base of one cohesive raft confers several benefits: it preserves colony integrity, takes advantage of brood buoyancy, and increases the proportion of workers that immediately recover after rafting.

Änderung des Therapieziels am Lebensende: Effekte einer Klinik-Leitlinie [Changing the treatment goal at the end of life: effects of a guideline at a hospital].

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Deciding about treatment goals at the end of life is a frequent and difficult challenge to medical staff. As more health care institutions issue ethico-legal guidelines to their staff the effects of such a guideline should be investigated in a pilot project.¦PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: Prospective evaluation study using the pre-post method. Physicians and nurses working in ten intensive care units of a university medical center in Germany answered a specially designed questionnaire before and one year after issuance of the guideline.¦RESULTS: 197 analyzable answers were obtained from the first (pre-guideline) and 251 from the second (post-guideline) survey (54 % and 58 % response rate, respectively). Initially the clinicians expressed their need for guidelines, advice on ethical problems, and continuing education. One year after introduction of the guideline one third of the clinicians was familiar with the guideline's content and another third was aware of its existence. 90% of those who knew the document welcomed it. Explanation of the legal aspects was seen as its most useful element. The pre- and post-guideline comparison demonstrated that uncertainty in decision making and fear of legal consequences were reduced, while knowledge of legal aspects and the value given to advance directives increased. The residents had derived the greatest benefit.¦CONCLUSION: By promoting the knowledge of legal aspects and ethical considerations, guidelines given to medical staff can lead to more certainty when making in end of life decision.

Preparing for Life Northside Partnership

Outline of Presentation 1 What is Preparing for Life (PFL)? 2 Design and delivery of PFL 3 Researching PFL 4 Conducting an RCT in a community setting 5 Making research and implementation work together cohesively 6 Benefits of working together 7 What have we learned  

Effectiveness of career counseling and the impact of the working alliance.

This study analyzes the role of the working alliance on the life satisfaction and career decision difficulties of clients participating in career counseling in Switzerland. The study also compares these career counseling clients to a group of students who did not seek counseling, to explore the overall effectiveness of a face-to-face career counseling intervention, using a pre-post design. Results indicated that the working alliance was positively associated with clients' satisfaction with the intervention and with the final level of their life satisfaction. Working alliance was also negatively associated with the final levels of career decision difficulties. Moreover, clients' career decision difficulties significantly decreased and their life satisfaction increased throughout the intervention. These findings suggest that working alliance represents an important variable to better understand career interventions' underlying mechanisms. Moreover, face-to-face career counseling is effective considering career-specific as well as broader, life-related indicators.