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Acute and chronic pain affects more Americans than heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined. Conservative estimates suggest the total economic cost of pain in the United States is $600 billion, and more than half of this cost is due to lost productivity, such as absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. In addition, an escalating opioid epidemic in the United States and abroad spurred by a lack of safe and effective pain management has magnified challenges to address pain in the workforce, particularly the military. Thus, it is imperative to investigate the organizational antecedents and consequences of pain and prescription opioid misuse (POM). This chapter provides a brief introduction to pain processing and the biopsychosocial model of pain, emphasizing the relationship between stress, emotional well-being, and pain in the military workforce. We review personal and organizational risk and protective factors for pain, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, optimism, perceived organizational support, and job strain. Further, we discuss the potential adverse impact of pain on organizational outcomes, the rise of POM in military personnel, and risk factors for POM in civilian and military populations. Lastly, we propose potential organizational interventions to mitigate pain and provide the future directions for work, stress, and pain research.

Although markets are intensely social, stock markets are peculiar in that they are normatively anonymous spaces. Anonymity is a difficult-to-achieve social accomplishment in which material identity information is successfully stripped from participants. The academic literature is conflicted regarding the degree to which equity markets are anonymous and how this influences traders’ behavior.

Based on focused, tape-recorded ethnographic interviews, this chapter investigates the work practices of professional investors and brokers to describe the conditions under which brokers veil or reveal investors’ identities to their competitors, and thereby shed light on how anonymity is socially produced (or eroded) in global stock markets.

The social structure of brokered financial markets places brokers in the awkward situation of sitting in an information-poor structural location for so-called “fundamental information” while being paid to share information with professional investors who sit in an information-rich structural location. A resolution to this material and social dilemma is that brokers can erode the market’s anonymity by gifting identity information (“order flow”) – the previous, prospective, or pending trades of their clients’ competitors – thereby providing traders a competitive advantage. They share identity information in three types of performances: transparent relationships, masked relationships, and the transformation of illicit material identity information into licit and sharable “fundamental” information. Each performance partly erodes transaction-level and market-level anonymity while simultaneously partially supporting anonymity.

Laws and regulations requiring brokers’ confidentiality of their clients’ trades are easily and systematically eluded. Policy makers and regulators may opt to respond by increasing surveillance and mechanization of brokers’ work so as to promote a normatively anonymous market. Alternatively, they may opt to question the value of promoting and policing anonymity in financial markets by revising insider trading regulations.

Even well-regulated markets are semi-anonymous spaces due to the systematic exposure of investors’ identities to competitors by their shared brokers on a daily basis. This finding provides an additional explanation for how professional investors can imitate one another (“herd”) as well as why subpopulations of investors often trade so similarly to one another.

The increasing accumulation of synthetic plastic waste in oceans and landfills, along with the depletion of non-renewable fossil-based resources, has sparked environmental concerns and prompted the search for environmentally friendly alternatives. Biodegradable plastics derived from lignocellulosic materials are emerging as substitutes for synthetic plastics, offering significant potential to reduce landfill stress and minimise environmental impacts. This study highlights a sustainable and cost-effective solution by utilising agricultural residues and invasive plant materials as carbon substrates for the production of biopolymers, particularly polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), through microbiological processes. Locally sourced residual materials were preferred to reduce transportation costs and ensure accessibility. The selection of suitable residue streams was based on various criteria, including strength properties, cellulose content, low ash and lignin content, affordability, non-toxicity, biocompatibility, shelf-life, mechanical and physical properties, short maturation period, antibacterial properties and compatibility with global food security. Life cycle assessments confirm that PHB dramatically lowers CO₂ emissions compared to traditional plastics, while the growing use of lignocellulosic biomass in biopolymeric applications offers renewable and readily available resources. Governments worldwide are increasingly inclined to develop comprehensive bioeconomy policies and specialised bioplastics initiatives, driven by customer acceptability and the rising demand for environmentally friendly solutions. The implications of climate change, price volatility in fossil materials, and the imperative to reduce dependence on fossil resources further contribute to the desirability of biopolymers. The study involves fermentation, turbidity measurements, extraction and purification of PHB, and the manufacturing and testing of composite biopolymers using various physical, mechanical and chemical tests.

The purpose of this paper is to consider double‐diffusive convection in a heated porous medium saturated with a fluid. Of particular interest is the case where the fluid has a stabilizing concentration gradient and small diffusivity.

A fully‐coupled stabilized finite element scheme and adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) methodology are introduced to solve the resulting coupled multiphysics application and resolve fine scale solution features. The code is written on top of the open source finite element library LibMesh, and is suitable for parallel, high‐performance simulations of large‐scale problems.

The stabilized adaptive finite element scheme is used to compute steady and unsteady onset of convection in a generalized Horton‐Rogers‐Lapwood problem in both two and three‐dimensional domains. A detailed study confirming the applicability of AMR in obtaining the predicted dependence of solutal Nusselt number on Lewis number is given. A semi‐permeable barrier version of the generalized HRL problem is also studied and is believed to present an interesting benchmark for AMR codes owing to the different boundary and internal layers present in the problem. Finally, some representative adaptive results in a complex 3D heated‐pipe geometry are presented.

This work demonstrates the feasibility of stabilized, adaptive finite element schemes for computing simple double‐diffusive flow models, and it represents an easily‐generalizable starting point for more complex calculations since it is based on a highly‐general finite element library. The complementary nature of h‐adaptivity and stabilized finite element techniques for this class of problem is demonstrated using particularly simple error indicators and stabilization parameters. Finally, an interesting double‐diffusive convection benchmark problem having a semi‐permeable barrier is suggested.

National differences in the demand for voluntary external audits have been linked to multiple factors, such as differences in a country's rate of growth, access to external credit, and institutional quality. Audits, however, also have a psychological cost, whose intensity is genetically and culturally hereditary. Using a sample of 3,072 private firms across 34 industries in seven countries, including five countries or regions from the former Soviet Comecon, we find that a country's share of firms choosing to undergo external audits is negatively related to the prevalence of carriers of the G allele in the mu-opioid receptor gene's A118G polymorphism, also known as the “social sensitivity” gene. Furthermore, the relationship between the prevalence of the social sensitivity gene and audits is fully mediated by a national culture's degree of collectivism. The results are statistically and economically highly significant and remain robust to the introduction of a set of confounding factors at the firm and country levels. Our results have practical relevance in recognizing psychological diversity when conducting audits and, more generally, preventing burnout in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to explore factors influencing early implementation and intermediate outcomes of a healthcare-academia partnership in a primary healthcare setting.

The Academic Primary Healthcare Network (APHN) initiative was launched in 2011 in Stockholm County, Sweden and included 201 primary healthcare centres. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2013-2014 with all coordinating managers (n=8) and coordinators (n=4). A strategic change model framework was used to collect and analyse data.

Several factors were identified to aid early implementation: assignment and guidelines that allowed flexibility; supportive management; dedicated staff; facilities that enabled APHN actions to be integrated into healthcare practice; and positive experiences from research and educational activities. Implementation was hindered by: discrepancies between objectives and resources; underspecified guidelines that trigger passivity; limited research and educational activities; a conflicting non-supportive reimbursement system; limited planning; and organisational fragmentation. Intermediate outcomes revealed that various actions, informed by the APHN assignment, were launched in all APHNs.

The findings can be rendered applicable by preparing stakeholders in healthcare services to optimise early implementation of healthcare-academia partnerships.

This study increases understanding of interactions between factors that influence early stage partnerships between healthcare services and academia in primary healthcare settings.

This paper’s aim is modeling and simulation of an advanced controller design for a novel mechatronics system that consists of a hydrostatic journal bearing with servo control. The proposed mechatronic system has more worth in tribology applications as compared to the traditional hydrostatic bearing which has limited efficiency and poor performance because of lower stiffness and load-carrying capacity. The proposed mechatronic system takes advantage of active lubrication to improve stiffness, rotor’s stability and load-carrying capacity.

The current work proposes extended state observer-based controller to control the active lubrication for hydrostatic journal bearing. The advantage of using observer is to estimate unknown state variables and lumped effects because of unmodeled dynamics, model uncertainties, and unknown external disturbances. The effectiveness of the proposed mechatronic system is checked against the traditional hydrostatic bearing.

Proposed mechatronics active hydrostatic journal bearing system is checked against traditional hydrostatic journal bearing. It is found that novel active hydrostatic journal bearing with servo control has good tribology performance factors such as stiffness, less rotor vibration, no wear and friction under starting conditions and high load-carrying capacity under different conditions of spindle speed, temperature, initial oil pressure and external disturbance. The result shows that proposed mechatronics system has more worth in rotary tribology applications.

The current manuscript designs a novel active hydrostatic journal bearing system with servo control. The mathematical model has advantages in term of estimating unknown state variables and lumped effects because of unmodeled dynamics, model uncertainties and unknown external disturbances. The result shows improvement in dynamic characteristics of a hydrostatic journal bearing under different dynamic conditions.

Natural gas leak from underground pipelines could lead to serious damage and global warming, whose spreading in soil should be systematically investigated. This paper aims to propose a three-dimensional numerical model to analyze the methane–air transportation in soil. The results could help understand the diffusion process of natural gas in soil, which is essential for locating leak source and reducing damage after leak accident.

A numerical model using finite element method is proposed to simulate the methane spreading process in porous media after leaking from an underground pipe. Physical models, including fluids transportation in porous media, water evaporation and heat transfer, are taken into account. The numerical results are compared with experimental data to validate the reliability of the simulation model. The effects of methane leaking direction, non-uniform soil porosity, leaking pressure and convective mass transfer coefficient on ground surface are analyzed.

The methane mole fraction distribution in soil is significantly affected by the leaking direction. Horizontally and vertically non-uniform soil porosity has a stronger effect. Increasing leaking pressure causes increasing methane mole flux and flow rate on the ground surface.

Most existing gas diffusion models in porous media are for one- or two-dimensional simulation, which is not enough for predicting three-dimensional diffusion process after natural gas leak in soil. The heat transfer between gas and soil was also neglected by most researchers, which is very important for predicting the gas-spreading process affected by the soil moisture variation because of water evaporation. In this paper, a three-dimensional numerical model is proposed to further analyze the methane–air transportation in soil using finite element method, with the presence of water evaporation and heat transfer in soil.