Short-term spectral analysis of ODP Hole 114-704B

Short-term spectral analysis was carried out on geochemical logging data from ODP Site 704. The FFT was used to compute the amplitude spectra of short-term overlapping segments to produce depth-period-amplitude spectrograms of the logging data. The spectrograms provided a means of evaluating the significance of the observed periodic components. The periodic components that were consistently present and prominent across a given record interval were considered to be significant. Changes in the spectrogram characteristics seem to reflect changes in either lithology, sedimentation rates, or hiatuses and may therefore provide useful information to aid in stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental studies. The dominant periodicity during the late Pleistocene and Brunhes Chron (0.97 to 0.47 Ma) was determined to be > 100,000 yr whereas the upper Matuyama Chron was dominated by the 41,000-yr periodicity. These periodicities suggest that the sedimentation patterns within the upper Matuyama Chron (0.98-1.78 Ma) were influenced by the Milankovitch obliquity cycle and those within the latest Matuyama-Brunhes Chron (<0.98 Ma) by the eccentricity cycle. The Brunhes/Matuyama boundary therefore represents a major discontinuity. Periodicities observed within the lower Matuyama and the upper Gauss Chron did not correlate with any of the periodicities within the Milankovitch frequency bands.

Short-term effects of carbon source on the competition of polyphosphate accumulating organisms and glycogen accumulating organisms

The effectiveness of enhanced biological phosphorus removal (ESPR) systems is directly affected by the competition of polyphosphate accumulating organisms (PAOs) and glycogen accumulating organisms (GAOs). This study investigated the short-term effects of carbon source on PAO and GAO performance. The tests were designed to clearly determine the impact of volatile fatty acid (VFA) composition on the performance of two types of biomass, one enriched for PAOs and the other for GAOs. The two populations were enriched in separate reactors using identical operating conditions and very similar influent compositions with acetate as the sole carbon source. The only difference was that a very tow level of phosphorus was present in the influent to the GAO reactor. The abundance of PAOs and GAOs was quantified using fluorescence in-situ hybridisation. The results clearly show that there are some very distinctive differences between PAOs and GAOs in their ability to utilise different carbon substrates. While both are able to take up acetate rapidly and completely, the GAOs are far slower at consuming propionate than the PAOs during short-term substrate changes. This provides a potentially highly valuable avenue to influence the competition between PAOs and GAOs. Other VFAs studied seem to be less usable in the short term by both PAOs and GAOs; as indicated by their much lower uptake rates.

Reduced between-hospital variation in short term survival after acute myocardial infarction: the result of improved cardiac care?

Objectives: To re-examine interhospital variation in 30 day survival after acute myocardial infarction ( AMI) 10 years on to see whether the appointment of new cardiologists and their involvement in emergency care has improved outcome after AMI. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Acute hospitals in Scotland. Participants: 61 484 patients with a first AMI over two time periods: 1988 - 1991; and 1998 - 2001. Main outcome measures: 30 day survival. Results: Between 1988 and 1991, median 30 day survival was 79.2% ( interhospital range 72.1 - 85.1%). The difference between highest and lowest was 13.0 percentage points ( age and sex adjusted, 12.1 percentage points). Between 1998 and 2001, median survival rose to 81.6% ( and range decreased to 78.0 - 85.6%) with a difference of 7.6 ( adjusted 8.8) percentage points. Admission hospital was an independent predictor of outcome at 30 days during the two time periods ( p< 0.001). Over the period 1988 - 1991, the odds ratio for death ranged, between hospitals, from 0.71 ( 95% confidence interval ( CI) 0.58 to 0.88) to 1.50 ( 95% CI 1.19 to 1.89) and for the period 1998 - 2001 from 0.82 ( 95% CI 0.60 to 1.13) to 1.46 ( 95% CI 1.07 to 1.99). The adjusted risk of death was significantly higher than average in nine of 26 hospitals between 1988 and 1991 but in only two hospitals between 1998 and 2001. Conclusions: The average 30 day case fatality rate after admission with an AMI has fallen substantially over the past 10 years in Scotland. Between-hospital variation is also considerably less notable because of better survival in the previously poorly performing hospitals. This suggests that the greater involvement of cardiologists in the management of AMI has paid dividends.

Short-term metabolic and growth responses of the cold-water coral lophelia pertusa to ocean acidification

Cold-water corals are amongst the most three-dimensionally complex deep-sea habitats known and are associated with high local biodiversity. Despite their importance as ecosystem engineers, little is known about how these organisms will respond to projected ocean acidification. Since preindustrial times, average ocean pH has already decreased from 8.2 to ~ 8.1. Predicted CO2 emissions will decrease this by up to another 0.3 pH units by the end of the century. This decrease in pH may have a wide range of impacts upon marine life, and in particular upon calcifiers such as cold-water corals. Lophelia pertusa is the most widespread cold-water coral (CWC) species, frequently found in the North Atlantic. Data here relate to a short term data set (21 days) on metabolism and net calcification rates of freshly collected L. pertusa from Mingulay Reef Complex, Scotland. These data from freshly collected L. pertusa from the Mingulay Reef Complex will help define the impact of ocean acidification upon the growth, physiology and structural integrity of this key reef framework forming species.

Reframing Scottish Football: Strategy and the short-term nature of the football industry.

Despite football being deeply entrenched in Scottish culture it is under-researched from a business perspective. This research develops a conceptual framework that views professional football clubs from a number of different perspectives. It draws on strategic management literature since this views the firm as the intersection between internal competence, customer perception and competition within an industry. A review of previous sports business research highlighted five main themes that were used to create a structure for the analysis: on-field performance, attendance, finance, the playing squad and the manager. These themes were used as frames to view the firms within the industry from a number of different perspectives. Each frame allows a different aspect of the firm to be considered singly in turn and then collectively to develop a deeper understanding of the existing frames in use within the industry. The research is based on a pragmatic philosophy that allows mixed methods to be combined to provide both an objective and subjective view of the industry. The subjective view was drawn from five interviews with senior figures within Scottish professional football. These participants were from a number of different roles and organisations within the industry to provide a balance of experiences. The views were triangulated with a descriptive analysis of secondary data from a number of industry sources to establish patterns within and between these frames. A peer group of six clubs was selected as they competed in the Scottish Premier League in each of the seasons within an eleven-year period (2000-2011). The peer group clubs selected were: Aberdeen, Dundee United, Heart of Midlothian (Hearts), Hibernian, Kilmarnock and Motherwell. By focussing on a small group of clubs with a similar on-field record a broad study across the five frames could be carried out in detail without the findings being influenced by the impact of relegation to a lower division or sustained participation in European football. Within each of the original five frames a number of sub-components were identified and linked to the framework; this expanded the content to reflect the findings of this project. There appeared to be little link between on-field performance and attendance although progress to the later stages of cup competitions allowed clubs to connect with fans who do not regularly attend. The relationship between a club’s income and wage bill should be expanded to include interest repayments since this expenditure can be used to highlight future financial problems caused by increased debt levels. Although all of the interview participants spoke with pride of the players that had progressed from the club’s youth academy to success at the highest level the peer group clubs only produced one player each season that played more than ten matches for the club. Almost half of the players signed from the youth academy left the club without playing for the 1st Team. The importance of the relationship between the manager and club chairman was highlighted, although the speed with which managers were appointed suggests that little consideration was given to this before offering a contract. Once appointed there appeared to be little clarity over the job description and areas of responsibility. Several of the interviewees brought experience from other businesses to football but admitted that short-term decision making and entrenched behaviour made change difficult. The conclusion of the research is that by taking a firm-wide view of the club, longer-term decisions can be taken within football. Player development and supporter relationships were both identified as long-term processes that are impacted by the current short-termism. With greater role clarity for managers and a mixture of short and long-term objectives those involved in the industry are more likely to have opportunities to learn from experience and performance, across the different frames, will improve as a result.

A distributed spatial-temporal weighted model on MapReduce for short-term traffic flow forecasting

Accurate and timely traffic flow prediction is crucial to proactive traffic management and control in data-driven intelligent transportation systems (D2ITS), which has attracted great research interest in the last few years. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Weighted K-Nearest Neighbor model, named STW-KNN, in a general MapReduce framework of distributed modeling on a Hadoop platform, to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of short-term traffic flow forecasting. More specifically, STW-KNN considers the spatial-temporal correlation and weight of traffic flow with trend adjustment features, to optimize the search mechanisms containing state vector, proximity measure, prediction function, and K selection. urthermore, STW-KNN is implemented on a widely adopted Hadoop distributed computing platform with the MapReduce parallel processing paradigm, for parallel prediction of traffic flow in real time. inally, with extensive experiments on real-world big taxi trajectory data, STW-KNN is compared with the state-of-the-art prediction models including conventional K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Naïve Bayes (NB), Random orest (R), and C4.. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to existing models on accuracy by decreasing the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) value more than 11.9% only in time domain and even achieves 89.71% accuracy improvement with the MAPEs of between 4% and 6.% in both space and time domains, and also significantly improves the efficiency and scalability of short-term traffic flow forecasting over existing approaches.

Short-term hooking mortality of three marine fish species (Sparidae) caught by recreational angling in the south Portugal

Short-term hooking mortality was evaluated for three sparid species [Diplodus vulgaris (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire), Spar-us aurata L. and Spondyliosoma cantharus (L.)] in the Algarve, south Portugal. Fishes were caught from the shore during October 2009 at a fish farm reservoir (Ria Formosa), using three different hook sizes. The relationships between hooking mortality and seven independent variables were analyzed using logistic regression models. In all,384 fishes representing the three target species were caught during the angling sessions. The most caught species was S. cantharus (n = 181; 100% undersized), followed by S. aurata (n = 137; 89% undersized) and D. vulgaris (n = 66; 97% undersized). Mortalities ranged between 0% for D. vulgaris and 12% for S. aurata (S. cantharus, 3%). For S. aurora, anatomical hooking location was the main predictor of mortality, with 63% of the fishes that died being deeply hooked. Our results support the current mandatory practices of releasing undersized fish for the studied species, given the low post-release mortality rates observed. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Retiring to the good life? The short-term effects of retirement on health

We estimate the impact of retirement on three subjective and objective measures of health using a regression discontinuity design. The results indicate that retirement increases an individual's sense of well-being and their mental health but not necessarily their physical health. Specifications tests suggest that the results are robust.

Randomized controlled trial of cognitive-behavioural therapy for coexisting depression and alcohol problems : short-term outcome

AIMS: Alcohol use disorders and depression co-occur frequently and are associated with poorer outcomes than when either condition occurs alone. The present study (Depression and Alcohol Integrated and Single-focused Interventions; DAISI) aimed to compare the effectiveness of brief intervention, single-focused and integrated psychological interventions for treatment of coexisting depression and alcohol use problems. METHODS: Participants (n = 284) with current depressive symptoms and hazardous alcohol use were assessed and randomly allocated to one of four individually delivered interventions: (i) a brief intervention only (single 90-minute session) with an integrated focus on depression and alcohol, or followed by a further nine 1-hour sessions with (ii) an alcohol focus; (iii) a depression focus; or (iv) an integrated focus. Follow-up assessments occurred 18 weeks after baseline. RESULTS: Compared with the brief intervention, 10 sessions were associated with greater reductions in average drinks per week, average drinking days per week and maximum consumption on 1 day. No difference in duration of treatment was found for depression outcomes. Compared with single-focused interventions, integrated treatment was associated with a greater reduction in drinking days and level of depression. For men, the alcohol-focused rather than depression-focused intervention was associated with a greater reduction in average drinks per day and drinks per week and an increased level of general functioning. Women showed greater improvements on each of these variables when they received depression-focused rather than alcohol-focused treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Integrated treatment may be superior to single-focused treatment for coexisting depression and alcohol problems, at least in the short term. Gender differences between single-focused depression and alcohol treatments warrant further study.

A short-term evaluation of a school-based early adolescent injury prevention program

This paper reports on the development of a school-based intervention to reduce risk-taking and associated injuries. There is limited but important evidence that intervention design should ensure participation does not lead to an increase in target risk behaviors with some studies in alcohol and drug prevention finding unexpected negative effects. The short-term evaluation of Skills for Preventing Injury in Youth (SPIY) examined change in interpersonal violence, alcohol and transport-related risks. Intervention (n = 360) and comparison (n = 180) students were surveyed pre/post-intervention. A qualitative analysis based on focus groups (70 students) explored experiences of change. Findings indicate significant positive changes reinforced by students’ reports. A decrease in reported risk-taking for the intervention group and an increase in the comparison group were observed. These findings endorse SPIY as a useful curriculum approach to reducing injuries and lend support to the future conduct of a long-term outcome evaluation.

The short-term effect of air pollution on cardiovascular mortality in Tianjin, China : comparison of time series and case–crossover analyses

Background: Many studies have illustrated that ambient air pollution negatively impacts on health. However, little evidence is available for the effects of air pollution on cardiovascular mortality (CVM) in Tianjin, China. Also, no study has examined which strata length for the time-stratified case–crossover analysis gives estimates that most closely match the estimates from time series analysis. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to estimate the effects of air pollutants on CVM in Tianjin, China, and compare time-stratified case–crossover and time series analyses. Method: A time-stratified case–crossover and generalized additive model (time series) were applied to examine the impact of air pollution on CVM from 2005 to 2007. Four time-stratified case–crossover analyses were used by varying the stratum length (Calendar month, 28, 21 or 14 days). Jackknifing was used to compare the methods. Residual analysis was used to check whether the models fitted well. Results: Both case–crossover and time series analyses show that air pollutants (PM10, SO2 and NO2) were positively associated with CVM. The estimates from the time-stratified case–crossover varied greatly with changing strata length. The estimates from the time series analyses varied slightly with changing degrees of freedom per year for time. The residuals from the time series analyses had less autocorrelation than those from the case–crossover analyses indicating a better fit. Conclusion: Air pollution was associated with an increased risk of CVM in Tianjin, China. Time series analyses performed better than the time-stratified case–crossover analyses in terms of residual checking.