Thermodynamics and efficiency of sequentially collisional Brownian particles: The role of drivings.

Brownian particles placed sequentially in contact with distinct thermal reservoirs and subjected to external driving forces are promising candidates for the construction of reliable engine setups. In this contribution, we address the role of driving forces for enhancing the collisional machine performance. Analytical expressions for thermodynamic quantities such as power output and efficiency are obtained for general driving schemes.

A mixed-methods study on evaluating an updated, francophone version of ETAT+ training in Madagascar.

Background: Madagascar needs major efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, despite the considerable reduction of child mortality during past years. In this context, implementation of emergency triage assessment and treatment (ETAT) plays an important role. In recent years, ETAT training activities rarely took place in Madagascar.

Current fluctuations in nonequilibrium discontinuous phase transitions.

Discontinuous phase transitions out of equilibrium can be characterized by the behavior of macroscopic stochastic currents. But while much is known about the average current, the situation is much less understood for higher statistics. In this paper, we address the consequences of the diverging metastability lifetime-a hallmark of discontinuous transitions-in the fluctuations of arbitrary thermodynamic currents, including the entropy production.

"It is a matter of life or death": Spotlighting Children in the Context of HIPD as Perceived by Frontline Practitioners.

It is a wide consensus that high-intensity parental disputes (HIPD) might result in negative ramifications for children. The current study wishes to advance the knowledge regarding what children undergo during the acute time of the dispute, as portrayed by experienced frontline social workers mandated by the court to intervene with parents and their children in the context of HIPD. Ninety-four social workers participated in ten focus groups and five in-depth interviews.

Entropy production as a tool for characterizing nonequilibrium phase transitions.

Nonequilibrium phase transitions can be typified in a similar way to equilibrium systems, for instance, by the use of the order parameter. However, this characterization hides the irreversible character of the dynamics as well as its influence on the phase transition properties. Entropy production has been revealed to be an important concept for filling this gap since it vanishes identically for equilibrium systems and is positive for the nonequilibrium case.