Military youth and the deployment cycle: Emotional health consequences and recommendations for intervention.

The United States military force includes over 2.2 million volunteer service members. Three out of five service members who are deployed or are preparing for deployment have spouses and/or children. Stressors associated with the deployment cycle can lead to depression, anxiety, and behavior problems in children, as well as psychological distress in the military spouse. Further, the emotional and behavioral health of family members can affect the psychological functioning of the military service member during the deployment and reintegration periods. Despite widespread acknowledgment of the need for emotional and behavioral health services for youth from military families, many professionals in a position to serve them struggle with how to best respond and select appropriate interventions. The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirically based and theoretically informed review to guide service provision and the development of evidence based treatments for military youth in particular. This review includes an overview of stressors associated with the deployment cycle, emotional and behavioral health consequences of deployment on youth and their caretaking parent, and existing preventative and treatment services for youth from military families. It concludes with treatment recommendations for older children and adolescents experiencing emotional and behavioral health symptoms associated with the deployment cycle. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Light-coloured grey asphalt pavements: from theory to practice

This paper presents the technological development and application of hydrated lime in treating the surface of asphalt concrete to develop light-coloured, grey asphalt pavements. When appropriately applied on the surface of fresh asphalt concrete, hydrated lime makes the surface grey, significantly increases its albedo and effectively reduces the pavement's temperature caused by hot weather. Two application case studies are presented, focusing on how to ensure hydrated lime's long-term effectiveness on the surface of asphalt pavements and take into account the effect of the subsequent reduced temperature on the resilient modulus of asphalt concrete in the design of long-life flexible pavements. The increased asphalt concrete modulus, owing to lowered temperature, can reduce the design thickness of the asphalt concrete without sacrificing pavement performance. This also has a positive influence on reduced pavement heat island effects. It is concluded that the appropriate use of hydrated lime on asphalt pavement surfaces is an effective and economical method to produce light-coloured, grey asphalt pavements.     

Preferred information strategies for food allergic consumers. A study in Germany, Greece, and The Netherlands

Information provided on food packaging is currently the most important method enabling food allergic consumers to eliminate allergens from their diet. This study aimed to identify the preferences of food allergic consumers regarding different information provision scenarios. Respondents (N = 287) filled out a web-based questionnaire on their preferences regarding a food label, an in-store booklet, and an ICT-solution. ICT methods will not replace effective food labelling, but may be used to supplement information provided by labels. Recommendations for information delivery to food allergic patients in the form of labels and booklets, as well as personalised (novel ICT) approaches, are provided.     

Multi-perspective compact explosion diagrams

This article presents a system to automatically generate compact explosion diagrams. Inspired by handmade illustrations, our approach reduces the complexity of an explosion diagram by rendering an exploded view only for a suitable subset of the assemblies of an object. However, the exploded views are chosen so that they allow inferring the remaining unexploded assemblies of the entire 3D model. In particular, our approach demonstrates the assembly of a set of identical groups of parts by presenting an exploded view only for a single representative. In order to identify the representatives, our system automatically searches for recurring subassemblies. It selects representatives depending on a quality evaluation of their potential exploded view. Our system takes into account visibility information of both the exploded view of a potential representative as well as visibility information of the remaining unexploded assemblies. This allows rendering a balanced compact explosion diagram, consisting of a clear presentation of the exploded representatives as well as the unexploded remaining assemblies. Since representatives may interfere with one another, our system furthermore optimizes combinations of representatives. The optimization process also generates good views on the explosion diagram. Labels are added to the explosion diagram to increase the visibility of small or occluded parts. Throughout this article, we show a number of examples, which all have been rendered from unmodified 3D CAD data.     

Light management in PCPDTBT:PC70BM solar cells: A comparison of standard and inverted device structures

We compare standard and inverted bulk heterojunction solar cells composed of PCPDTBT:PC₇₀BM blends. Inverted devices comprising 100 nm thick active layers exhibited short circuit currents of 15 mA/cm², 10% larger than in corresponding standard devices. Modeling of the optical field distribution in the different device stacks proved that this enhancement originates from an increased absorption of incident light in the active layer. Internal quantum efficiencies (IQEs) were obtained from the direct comparison of experimentally derived and modeled currents for different layer thicknesses, yielding IQEs of ∼70% for a layer thickness of 100 nm. Simulations predict a significant increase of the light harvesting efficiency upon increasing the layer thickness to 270 nm. However, a continuous deterioration of the photovoltaic properties with layer thickness was measured for both device architectures, attributed to incomplete charge extraction. On the other hand, our optical modeling suggests that inverted devices based on PCPDTBT should be able to deliver high power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of more than 7% provided that recombination losses can be reduced.     

Procedural architecture using deformation-aware split grammars

With the current state of video games growing in scale, manual content creation may no longer be feasible in the future. Split grammars are a promising technology for large-scale procedural generation of urban structures, which are very common in video games. Buildings with curved parts, however, can currently only be approximated by static pre-modelled assets, and rules apply only to planar surface parts. We present an extension to split grammar systems that allow the creation of curved architecture through integration of free-form deformations at any level in a grammar. Further split rules can then proceed in two different ways. They can either adapt to these deformations so that repetitions can adjust to more or less space, while maintaining length constraints, or they can split the deformed geometry with straight planes to introduce straight structures on deformed geometry.     

Tailoring Cellular Uptake of Gold Nanoparticles Via the Hydrophilic‐to‐Hydrophobic Ratio of their (Co)polymer Coating

It is demonstrated how cellular uptake and protein corona of (co)polymer‐coated gold nanoparticles can be altered by the hydrophilic‐to‐hydrophobic comonomer ratio. A novel, label‐free flow cytometry strategy is developed to investigate particle uptake. These findings offer insight in the design and analysis of hybrid nanomaterials for interfacing with biological systems.