University of Salford

About: University of Salford is a education organization based out in Salford, Manchester, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Thin film. The organization has 13049 authors who have published 22957 publications receiving 537330 citations. The organization is also known as: University of Salford Manchester & The University of Salford Manchester.

Prevalence, characteristics and factors associated with falls among the elderly living at home

Abstract: Attempts to determine the underlying causes of falls have come to conflicting conclusions, partly because subject groups studied have not been representative of all elderly people. Two hundred and three randomly selected people of 75 years and over, living at home, were visited and questioned about falls experienced in the previous 12 months, and about factors that might be related to falling. Eighty-six subjects (42.4%) had suffered one or more falls during this time, and of fallers, 49 (59.3%) were injured, 9 of them seriously. Women were slightly more likely to have had falls and were more likely to have suffered injury, but no increase in frequency of falls with age was demonstrated. Only a minority of fallers (43.0%) sought medical attention following their fall. Falls outside the home accounted for 39.5% of falls and these were more likely to be due to simple trips or slips. Analysis of the factors related to falls showed a considerable overlap between fallers and non-fallers. Fallers had significantly greater dependency and cognitive impairment, more physical symptoms, and higher scores for anxiety and depression, but there was no association with postural hypotension, neurological abnormalities, or measurements relating to nutritional state. The factors found to be significant on discriminant analysis were combined to determine a "fall risk score". This type of easily calculated score might be of use to medical and paramedical personnel for assessing the risk of falling among the elderly living at home.

A speculative approach to spatial-temporal efficiency with multi-objective optimization in a heterogeneous cloud environment

Abstract: A heterogeneous cloud system, for example, a Hadoop 2.6.0 platform, provides distributed but cohesive services with rich features on large-scale management, reliability, and error tolerance. As big data processing is concerned, newly built cloud clusters meet the challenges of performance optimization focusing on faster task execution and more efficient usage of computing resources. Presently proposed approaches concentrate on temporal improvement, that is, shortening MapReduce time, but seldom focus on storage occupation; however, unbalanced cloud storage strategies could exhaust those nodes with heavy MapReduce cycles and further challenge the security and stability of the entire cluster. In this paper, an adaptive method is presented aiming at spatial-temporal efficiency in a heterogeneous cloud environment. A prediction model based on an optimized Kernel-based Extreme Learning Machine algorithm is proposed for faster forecast of job execution duration and space occupation, which consequently facilitates the process of task scheduling through a multi-objective algorithm called time and space optimized NSGA-II TS-NSGA-II. Experiment results have shown that compared with the original load-balancing scheme, our approach can save approximate 47-55i¾źs averagely on each task execution. Simultaneously, 1.254i¾ź of differences on hard disk occupation were made among all scheduled reducers, which achieves 26.6% improvement over the original scheme. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evidence for two kinds of hydrogen bond in ice

Abstract: DESPITE its simplicity at the molecular level, water is a complex and poorly understood liquid1. The reasons for this centre around the existence of a dynamic hydrogen-bonded network throughout the liquid. Attempts to describe the structure of liquid water have tended to invoke either continuum models such as the 'distortedbond' model2, which assumes that the hydrogen-bonded structure relaxes on a timescale similar to that in other liquids, and mixture models, such as the 'flickering-cluster' model3, which postulate the coexistence of two or more long-lived structures in the liquid. Here we analyse inelastic neutron-scattering spectra for the ice I solid phase of water, which provide evidence for the existence of two different kinds of hydrogen-bond, of different strengths, in the solid. A model in which strong and weak hydrogen-bonds in the ratio of about 2:1 are randomly distributed throughout the network is able to reproduce the neutron spectra. If we can assume that the same kind of bimodal hydrogen-bonding exists in the liquid state, our model may be able to explain several of the anomalous properties of liquid water, such as the large specific heat and the unusual behaviour of water in thin films and clusters.