Tobacco smoking is highly prevalent among patients with serious mental illness (SMI), with known deleterious consequences. Smoking cessation is therefore a prioritary public health challenge in SMI. In recent years, several smoking cessation digital interventions have been developed for non-clinical populations. However, their impact in patients with SMI remains uncertain. We conducted a systematic review to describe and evaluate effectiveness, acceptability, adherence, usability and safety of digital interventions for smoking cessation in patients with SMI. PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, Web of Science, PsychINFO and the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group Specialized Register were searched. Studies matching inclusion criteria were included and their information systematically extracted by independent investigators. Thirteen articles were included, which reported data on nine different digital interventions. Intervention theoretical approaches ranged from mobile contingency management to mindfulness. Outcome measures varied widely between studies. The highest abstinence rates were found for mSMART MIND (7-day point-prevalent abstinence: 16–40%). Let's Talk About Quitting Smoking reported greater acceptability ratings, although this was not evaluated with standardized measures. Regarding usability, Learn to Quit showed the highest System Usability Scale scores [mean (s.d.) 85.2 (15.5)]. Adverse events were rare and not systematically reported. Overall, the quality of the studies was fair to good. Digitally delivered health interventions for smoking cessation show promise for improving outcomes for patients with SMI, but lack of availability remains a concern. Larger trials with harmonized assessment measures are needed to generate more definitive evidence and specific recommendations.

Transitivity is the assumption that if a person prefers A to B and B to C, then that person should prefer A to C. This article explores a paradigm in which Birnbaum, Patton and Lott (1999) thought people might be systematically intransitive. Many undergraduates choose C = ($96, .85; $90, .05; $12, .10) over A = ($96, .9; $14, .05; $12, .05), violating dominance. Perhaps people would detect dominance in simpler choices, such as A versus B = ($96, .9; $12, .10) and B versus C, and yet continue to violate it in the choice between A and C, which would violate transitivity. In this study we apply a true and error model to test intransitive preferences predicted by a partially effective editing mechanism. The results replicated previous findings quite well; however, the true and error model indicated that very few, if any, participants exhibited true intransitive preferences. In addition, violations of stochastic dominance showed a strong and systematic decrease in prevalence over time and violated response independence, thus violating key assumptions of standard random preference models for analysis of transitivity.

Previous literature and conventional wisdom have led researchers to believe that boredom increases economic risk taking, but the evidence in support of this conclusion is limited and has important shortcomings. In four experiments (including more than 1,300 subjects), we systematically studied the effects of boredom on economic risk preferences. Across different risk elicitation tasks, boredom inductions, incentive schemes, subject pools, and using both reduced form and structural analyses, we consistently failed to find an effect of boredom on risky decisions. Our results disprove that boredom leads to even small increments in risk taking in one-shot elicitation tasks, and small to medium increases in multiple-choice elicitations. These findings question an important established belief, contribute to better understand the consequences of boredom, and have substantive implications for experiments on economic decision making.

Previous research has focused on studying the endowment effect for transactions that take place in the present. Many real-world transactions, however, are delayed into the future (i.e., people agree to buy or sell, but the actual transaction does not materialize until a later time). Here we investigate how transaction timing affects the endowment effect. In five studies, we show that the endowment effect systematically increases as transactions are delayed into the future. Specifically, buying prices significantly decrease as the transaction is delayed, while selling prices remain constant, resulting in an amplified endowment effect (Experiment 1). This pattern is not produced by a discounting of the money involved in the transaction (Experiment 2), and it holds across different types of items (Experiment 3). We also show that the phenomenon cannot be explained by sellers anticipating becoming increasingly attached to the items over time (Experiment 4). Finally, we demonstrate that this increased endowment effect in the future holds in the field, in the context of a real market and with real transactions (Experiment 5).

The NOVA classification of food items has become increasingly popular and is being used in several observational studies as well as in nutritional guidelines and recommendations. We propose that there is a need for this classification and its use in the formulation of public health policies to be critically discussed and re-appraised. The terms ‘processing’ and ‘ultra-processing’, which are crucial to the NOVA classification, are ill-defined, as no scientific, measurable or precise reference parameters exist for them. Likewise, the theoretical grounds of the NOVA classification are unclear and inaccurate. Overall, the NOVA classification conflicts with the classic, evidence-based evaluation of foods based on composition and portion size because NOVA postulates that the food itself (or how much of it is eaten) is unimportant, but rather that dietary effects are due to how the food is produced. We contend that the NOVA system suffers from a lack of biological plausibility so the assertion that ultra-processed foods are intrinsically unhealthful is largely unproven, and needs further examination and elaboration.

This contribution describes the design and simulations of a multibeam 1.8 m parabolic reflectarray antenna for geostationary high throughput satellites (HTS) in Ka-band. The parabolic reflectarray generates two orthogonal circularly polarized beams per feed simultaneously at 19.7 and 29.5 GHz, by the variable rotation technique. The antenna is made of 62 654 reflectarray cells, which include two types of printed elements independently rotated and adjusted. The elements have been optimized one by one to ensure the required phase-shift at each frequency. A novel design approach has made it possible to promptly obtain an initial layout of every element with a very low computational cost. The simulated radiation patterns show that the parabolic reflectarray, illuminated by 27 dual-circularly polarized feeds, can generate 54 spot-beams in two orthogonal polarizations, with a beam spacing of 0.56° between adjacent beams. The design and simulation tools have been validated by a parabolic reflectarray scaled in a factor of 0.5, which has been manufactured and tested. The proposed reflectarray would allow to generate a complete multi-spot coverage from a geostationary HTS with only two parabolic reflectarrays, instead of four reflector antennas, also reducing the number of feeds by half, since every feed generates two beams.

Guided by principles from life-history theory, theories of adaptive calibration provide an overarching theoretical framework for understanding the developmental roots of impulsivity and externalizing psychopathology. The current research provides evidence for robust associations between perceptions of childhood unpredictability, delay discounting (Studies 1a and 1b), and adult externalizing traits and behaviors (Study 2). Both associations were observed while controlling for perceptions of the harshness of childhood environments, as well as a range of demographic characteristics. The association with externalizing traits and behavior was observed over and above current mood and depressive symptoms. Study 2 also replicated a previously documented association between changes in maternal employment, residence, and cohabitation during childhood and externalizing behavior and, furthermore, suggested that this association was mediated by perceptions of unpredictability. These studies provided no evidence for links between perceived childhood unpredictability and basic forms of risk-taking (Studies 1a and 1c). This research adds to a growing body of work leveraging principles from life-history theory to demonstrate links between childhood experiences, impulsivity, and potentially debilitating forms of mental illness. This work also highlights the value of assessing people’s perceptions of their childhood environments.

This paper presents an experimental study of the influence of heat losses on the onset of thermoacoustic instabilities in methane–air premixed flames propagating in a horizontal tube of diameter, $D = 10$ mm. Flames are ignited at the open end of the tube and propagate towards the closed end undergoing strong oscillations of different features owing to the interaction with acoustic waves. The frequency of oscillation and its axial location are controlled through the tube length $L$ and the intensity of heat losses. These parameters are respectively modified in the experiments by a moveable piston and a circulating thermal bath of water prescribing temperature conditions. Main experimental observations show that classical one-dimensional predictions of the oscillation frequency do not accurately describe the phenomena under non-adiabatic real scenarios. In addition to the experimental measurements, a quasi-one-dimensional analysis of the burnt gases is provided, which introduces the effect of heat losses at the wall of the tube on the interplay between the acoustic field and the reaction sheet. As a result, this analysis provides an improved description of the interaction and accurately predicts the excited flame-oscillation harmonics through the eigenvalues of the non-adiabatic acoustics model. Unlike the original one-dimensional analysis, the comparison between the flame oscillation frequency provided by the non-adiabatic extended theory and the frequencies measured in our experiments is in excellent agreement in the whole range of temperatures considered. This confirms the importance of heat losses in the modulation of the instabilities and the transition between different flame oscillation regimes.

Mass vaccination campaigns have been used effectively to limit the impact of communicable disease on public health. However, the scale of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccination campaign is unprecedented. Mass vaccination sites consolidate resources and experience into a single entity and are essential to achieving community (“herd”) immunity rapidly, efficiently, and equitably. Health care systems, local and regional public health entities, emergency medical services, and private organizations can rapidly come together to solve problems and achieve success. As medical directors at several mass vaccination sites across the United States, we describe key mass vaccination site concepts, including site selection, operational models, patient flow, inventory management, staffing, technology, reporting, medical oversight, communication, and equity. Lessons learned from experience operating a diverse group of mass vaccination sites will help inform not only sites operating during the current pandemic, but also may serve as a blueprint for future outbreaks of highly infectious communicable disease.

We present a theoretical stability analysis for an expanding accretion shock that does not involve a rarefaction wave behind it. The dispersion equation that determines the eigenvalues of the problem and the explicit formulae for the corresponding eigenfunction profiles are presented for an arbitrary equation of state and finite-strength shocks. For spherically and cylindrically expanding steady shock waves, we demonstrate the possibility of instability in a literal sense, a power-law growth of shock-front perturbations with time, in the range of $h_c< h<1+2 {\mathcal {M}}_2$, where $h$ is the D'yakov-Kontorovich parameter, $h_c$ is its critical value corresponding to the onset of the instability and ${\mathcal {M}}_2$ is the downstream Mach number. Shock divergence is a stabilizing factor and, therefore, instability is found for high angular mode numbers. As the parameter $h$ increases from $h_c$ to $1+2 {\mathcal {M}}_2$, the instability power index grows from zero to infinity. This result contrasts with the classic theory applicable to planar isolated shocks, which predicts spontaneous acoustic emission associated with constant-amplitude oscillations of the perturbed shock in the range $h_c< h<1+2 {\mathcal {M}}_2$. Examples are given for three different equations of state: ideal gas, van der Waals gas and three-terms constitutive equation for simple metals.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global challenge for humanity, in which a large number of resources are invested to develop effective vaccines and treatments. At the same time, governments try to manage the spread of the disease while alleviating the strong impact derived from the slowdown in economic activity. Governments were forced to impose strict lockdown measures to tackle the pandemic. This significantly changed people’s mobility and habits, subsequently impacting the economy. In this context, the availability of tools to effectively monitor and quantify mobility was key for public institutions to decide which policies to implement and for how long. Telefonica has promoted different initiatives to offer governments mobility insights throughout many of the countries where it operates in Europe and Latin America. Mobility indicators with high spatial granularity and frequency of updates were successfully deployed in different formats. However, Telefonica faced many challenges (not only technical) to put these tools into service in a short timing: from reducing latency in insights to ensuring the security and privacy of information. In this article, we provide details on how Telefonica engaged with governments and other stakeholders in different countries as a response to the pandemic. We also cover the challenges faced and the shared learnings from Telefonica’s experience in those countries.

This study looks at human capital in Spain during the early stages of modern economic growth. We have assembled a new dataset for age-heaping and literacy in Spain with information about men and women from six population censuses and forty-nine provinces between 1877 and 1930. Our results show that, although age-heaping was less prevalent during the second half of the 19th century than previously thought, it did not decline until the early 20th century. Given that literacy increased throughout the whole period, our study thus unveils stark differences between age-heaping and literacy, which raises further questions regarding sources, methods and interpretation.