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Background Many health conditions perceived to be contagious, dangerous or incurable, or resulting in clearly visible signs, share a common attribute – an association with stigma and discrimination. While the etiology of stigma may differ between conditions and, sometimes, cultural settings, the manifestations and psychosocial consequences of stigma and discrimination are remarkably similar. However, the vast majority of studies measuring stigma or addressing stigma through interventions employ a disease-specific approach. Main body The current paper opposes this siloed approach and advocates a generic concept of ‘health-related stigma’ in both stigma measurement and stigma interventions. Employing a conceptual model adapted from Weiss, the current paper demonstrates the commonalities among several major stigmatized conditions by examining how several stigma measurement instruments, such as the Social Distance Scale, Explanatory Model Interview Catalogue, Internalized Stigma of Mental Illness, and Berger stigma scale, and stigma reduction interventions, such as information-based approaches, contact with affected persons, (peer) counselling, and skills building and empowerment, were used successfully across a variety of conditions to measure or address stigma. The results demonstrate that ‘health-related stigma’ is a viable concept with clearly identifiable characteristics that are similar across a variety of stigmatized health conditions in very diverse cultures. Conclusion A more generic approach to the study of health-related stigma opens up important practical opportunities – cross-cutting measurement and intervention tools are resource saving and easier to use for personnel working with multiple conditions, allow for comparison between conditions, and recognize the intersectionality of many types of stigma. Further research is needed to build additional evidence demonstrating the advantages and effectiveness of cross-condition approaches to stigma measurement and interventions.

An analysis was conducted of the effects of cutting conditions in the cross-cutting of wood using circular saws. Gradual wear of the saw blade cutting wedges impacted the entire cutting process. Two different types of circular saw blades were used. One blade type featured sintered carbide tips and 54 saw blade teeth, whereas the other had high-speed steel with 56 teeth; both saw-blades were 600 mm in diameter with a rake angle of 20°. The two wood species were spruce (Picea abies) and beech (Fagus sylvatica). During sawing, the timber was fed at a velocity of vf = 6 and 12 m·min-1. The cutting speed (vc) was set at 60 m·s-1, 70 m·s-1 and 80 m·s-1. The saw blades were coated with three types of PVD coatings. The least energy intensive saw blade was a sintered carbide-free saw blade with a coating (AlTiN) at a displacement speed of 12 m·min-1 and cutting speed of 60 m·s-1 with a power of 1310,63 W. Any change of a saw blade considerably affected torque for all the wood species, so a particular type of saw blade will always have an impact on torque. Other parameters distinctively and individually influenced the process of wood sawing.

Background Poor child health and hygiene practices are persistent issues in resource-constrained settings, particularly in low-income countries. This study assessed the impact of skill-based health education (SBHE) on school and child hygiene practices in rural Bangladesh. Methods A cluster-randomised-controlled intervention with cross-cutting/factorial design was conducted in 180 randomly selected primary schools, stratified by school type, in Jhenaidah District, Bangladesh. Weekly SBHE sessions were delivered to half of the schools by locally recruited para-teachers for one year. A cross-cutting soap provision treatment was given monthly to half of the SBHE-treatment schools and half of the SBHE-control schools. Treatment assignment was masked to all baseline and endline surveyors. Data were collected at both the school and child levels, with child-level data aggregated at the school level. Outcome measures were grouped into five thematic families. The primary outcome families were school hygiene practice & maintenance , school-aggregated child handwashing and school-aggregated child dentalcare . Utilising the difference-in-differences estimator with seemingly unrelated regression, we estimated the average treatment effect for each family of multiple outcomes. The intervention spillover effect to neighbouring schools along with the time-period effect were also evaluated. The project’s cost-effectiveness was additionally assessed. Results Our findings revealed that SBHE had a positive impact on primary outcomes related to healthy practices and behavioural changes, resulting in a 0.32SD improvement in school hygiene practices and maintenance ( p  < 0.001), a 0.47SD increase in child handwashing ( p  < 0.001), and a 0.43SD enhancement in child dentalcare ( p  < 0.01). Despite its imperfect implementation, the provision of soap itself showed no significant effect. Furthermore, significant spillover effects of healthy practices were observed in neighbouring non-treatment schools. The cost-effectiveness analysis indicated that our SBHE program was cost-effective. Conclusions Our study provides compelling evidence of the positive impact of SBHE on school hygiene and child health practices in rural Bangladesh, with notable spillover effects. The cost-effectiveness analysis underscores the value of SBHE, affirming its potential as an effective intervention method in improving school health and hygiene practices in primary schools and beyond.

Amongst all the working elements of single grip harvesters, the working elements of felling and processing play an important role within the cut-to-length (CTL) harvester’s working phases. This includes the felling cutting and cross-cutting of stems within the felling and processing operation. The detailed investigation of such individual machine activities may help to analyse and improve the performance of forest machines. The objective of this study was to investigate the cutting duration and other performance parameters, including the fuel consumption, of a CTL harvester’s sawing unit under real working conditions. Detailed information on the felling cutting and cross-cutting performance was collected at short intervals using CAN bus data of two single grip harvesters in final felling from two different sites in Eastern Finland. As a result, models for effective time consumption in the work phase of cutting as a function of stem size were developed, both for felling cutting and cross-cutting. Felling cutting and cross-cutting durations were somewhat identical until the cutting diameters of 400–450 mm, depending on the site. Thereafter, the cutting time difference increased and was higher in felling cutting. At the site with large diameters of 550–650 mm, the difference varied between 15% and 28%, between the comparisons of formulae. In addition, other performance parameters, including the respective fuel consumption of this working phase, were part of the study. The study revealed a higher hourly based fuel consumption for the entire guide bar movement time compared to the pure cutting time in cross-cutting with stem diameters below 400 mm. Detailed knowledge of the performance of the sawing unit’s activities might help the planning process of future studies, as well as support the future development of efficient and intelligent machinery.

Cutting wood in the transverse direction is the most widespread in the logging process, and it is used in felling trees, shortening the length of trunks, and assortment production. In practice, it is particularly important that the entire wood processing process starts with the least energy-intensive process (i.e., the energy demand of the entire process). The aim of the study is to determine the effect of coatings on the energy demand of saw blades. The conditions of the experiment were taken from previous experiments. In the experiment, two types of saw blades of the same type, EN 41 9418 or 75 Cr1 (DIN 1.2003), were selected. Two types of saw blades (SB with SC (cemented carbide) slices and PK without SC (cemented carbide) slices) and two types of wood (beech and spruce) were used in the experiments. The saw blades were coated with three types of PVD coatings (physical method of layer deposition). The results show that the least energy-demanding saw blade is HSS_M (tool steel saw blade without SK blades with Maximizer coating) at a feed speed of 12 m·min−1 and a cutting speed of 60 ms−1, with a power of 1310.63 W. When sawing spruce wood, it was proven that the most energy-demanding saw blade is HSS_K_I at a feed rate of 12 m·min−1 and a cutting speed of 60 ms−1, with a power of 2113.56 W. The least energy-consuming saw blade is HSS_M at a feed rate of 12 m·min−1 and a cutting speed of 60 m·s−1, with a power of 1251.54 W. The results provide a comparison of the measured values of the performances of the cross-cutting wood process using a statistical program.

Constraints play an important role in Model-Driven Software Engineering. Industrial systems commonly exhibit cross-cutting behaviors in design artifacts. Aspect-orientation is a well-established approach to deal with cross-cutting behaviors and has been successfully used for programming and design languages. In model-driven software engineering, the presence of cross-cutting constraints makes it difficult to maintain constraints defined on the models of large-scale industrial systems. In this work, we improve our previous work on AspectOCL, which is an extension of OCL that allows modeling of cross-cutting constraints. We provide the abstract and concrete syntax of the language. We add support for new constructs such as composite aspects and invariant specification on a package. We also provide tool support for writing cross-cutting constraints using AspectOCL. To evaluate AspectOCL, we apply it on benchmark case studies from the OCL repository. The results show that by separating the cross-cutting constraints, the number of constructs in the constraint specifications can be reduced to a large amount. AspectOCL reduces the maintenance effort by up to 55% in one case study. To explore the impact on maintenance time and accuracy, we also perform a controlled experiment with 90 student subjects. The results show that AspectOCL has a small magnitude of improvement in terms of maintenance time when compared to OCL, whereas modifications to OCL specification are more accurate. The post-experiment survey indicates that the majority of subjects favored AspectOCL, but faced challenges in applying aspect-orientation to constraint specification due to a lack of prior exposure.

This proceedings collects papers selected from the 26th Annual Conference & 15th International Conference of the Chinese Society of Micro-Nano Technology (CSMNT2024).CSMNT2024 took place in Taiyuan, China, from the 20th to the 23rd of September, 2023, which was hosted by CSMNT, organized by North University of China, and co-organized by Department of Precision Instrumentation of Tsinghua University, State Key Laboratory of Dynamic Measurement Technology and Key Laboratory of Electromechanical Dynamic Control.With the topic “Technology Empowers New Jinyang, Micro-Nano Continues a New Chapter”, CSMNT2024 was aimed to built a platform for micro/nano technology workers at home and abroad, to promote the cross-cutting interaction among various disciplines, and lead micro/nano’s innovative development.List of Conference organizing committee and Peer review statement are available in this PDF.

Politics has in recent decades entered an era of intense polarization. Explanations have implicated digital media, with the so-called echo chamber remaining a dominant causal hypothesis despite growing challenge by empirical evidence. This paper suggests that this mounting evidence provides not only reason to reject the echo chamber hypothesis but also the foundation for an alternative causal mechanism. To propose such a mechanism, the paper draws on the literatures on affective polarization, digital media, and opinion dynamics. From the affective polarization literature, we follow the move from seeing polarization as diverging issue positions to rooted in sorting: an alignment of differences which is effectively dividing the electorate into two increasingly homogeneous megaparties. To explain the rise in sorting, the paper draws on opinion dynamics and digital media research to present a model which essentially turns the echo chamber on its head: it is not isolation from opposing views that drives polarization but precisely the fact that digital media bring us to interact outside our local bubble. When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division.

This research established the time consumption, work time structure, and productivity for primary processing in felling areas of coniferous trees felled with a chainsaw. Delimbing and partial cross-cutting were taken into consideration. The research was conducted in a mixed spruce and fir tree stand situated in the Carpathian Mountains. The team of workers consisted of a chainsaw operator and assistant with over 10 years of experience. The results indicated a total time of 536.32 s·m−3 (1145.26 s·tree−1), work performance (including delays) of 6.716 m3·h−1 (3.14 tree·h−1), and work productivity (without delays) of 35.459 m3·h−1 (16.58 tree·h−1). The chainsaw productivity during tree cross-cutting was 82.29 cm2·s−1. Delimbing accounted for 96.18% of the real work time, while cross-cutting accounted for 3.82%. The time consumption for delimbing and cross-cutting, as well as the work productivity and performance in the primary processing of coniferous trees in the felling area, were influenced by the breast height diameter, stem length, and tree volume, while the chainsaw productivity was influenced by the diameter of the cross-cut sections. The relationships between the aforementioned dependent and independent variables were determined by simple and linear multiple regression equations.