Getting attached to a classic Mustang. Use, maintenance and the burden of authenticity

This paper investigates the relationships consumers cultivate with mass-market commodities while caring for their authenticity. Drawing on a six-year ethnography of classic Mustang owners communities in France, Switzerland and Belgium, the authors show that, far from being a symbolic value only, or a resource into which people can “invest” in a mechanism of social distinction, authenticity can also appear as a burden that weighs constantly on the relationship between people and things. Indeed, throughout their uses and maintenance, the material integrity of classic Mustangs is of great concern for their owners, who apprehend every breakdown or maintenance intervention as threats that could jeopardize their car's authenticity. For the sake of security, comfort or health, because new regulations come up, or because some original parts are not available anymore, classic Mustangs owners compose with heterogeneous elements, constantlyreshaping both their cars and their concerns for authenticity. The authors draw on Hennion's notion of “attachement” to describe the intimate relationship that grows through these arrangements. The notion particularly helps to grasp the ambivalence of the bonds between people and things: while they get more and more attached to their classic Mustang, owners are getting more and more worried. Moreover, throughout this growing relationship and the recurrent material interventions it draws on, the car does not remain passive. It progressively reveals itself, sometimes surprising its owner. Therefore, not only is authenticity “in the making” in this process, the contours of the thing itself evolve, as well as the knowledge of its owner.

Study Protocol for Evaluation of an Extended Maintenance Intervention on Life Satisfaction and BMI Among 7–14-Year-Old Children Following a Stay at a Residential Health Camp in Denmark

Background: It is challenging to maintain effects of public health interventions. For residential health camps benefits often disappear as the child returns home. Furthermore, long-term effects are often not measured or reported. This paper presents the study protocol for an evaluation of an extended maintenance intervention offered to children who have completed a 10-week residential health camp at one of the five Danish Christmas Seal Houses (DCSH). The target group of DSCH is 7–14-year-olds with social, mental, and/or overweight issues and the overall aim of the camp is to increase life satisfaction and a healthy lifestyle. The primary aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of the maintenance intervention on children's life satisfaction (primary outcome) and BMI Z-score (secondary outcome) 1 year after health camp.Methods: The extended maintenance intervention is developed by DCSH and delivered to each child and family individually by an intervention coordinator to help children maintain positive benefits of the health camp on life satisfaction and health behaviors after returning to their homes. Intervention activities target the child and the family. The effect will be tested in a quasi-experimental design: The intervention is offered to half of the children at one of the five DSCH (intervention group, N~144) while the other half and the children at the other four DSCH receive a standard maintenance intervention (control group, N~894). Children will complete questionnaires on life satisfaction measured by an adapted version of the Cantril ladder and height and weight prior to health camp, at the end of health camp, 3 months and 1 year after the end of health camp. To enable per protocol analysis and nuanced interpretation of effect estimates, we will monitor the implementation of the intervention by a process evaluation study among children, parents, and follow up coordinators using qualitative and quantitative methods.Discussion: We present a systematic approach to evaluating practice-based interventions in a research design. The study will provide new knowledge on the effectiveness of individualized maintenance interventions on long-term effects on life satisfaction and weight loss among children.Trial registration: Prospectively registered at Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN 13011465 https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN13011465

Remediation of leakage of the hydraulic block presses MAC Master

The best way to prevent unplanned downtime of production machines is certainly adherence to the principles of preventive maintenance. In case of extremely difficult working conditions and the contaminated working environment of the machine, a major maintenance intervention is required. This involves not only the replacement of worn parts, but also design changes, the use of other materials or shapes, such as hydraulic cylinder seals. Such a major intervention often also presents a major logistical and organizational challenge. As such an example, the paper presents the reconstruction of an older special press for the production of molds for casting and is still of key importance for the production of the company. The challenge was to renovate a special hydraulic block with 63 hydraulic rollers mounted in a 9 x 7 matrix, which, in addition to the appropriate force for sand compaction in all molds, must also ensure flawless compression parallelism.

Content validation of the nursing intervention Dialysis Access Maintenance

Objective: to validate the content of the Dialysis Access Maintenance intervention. Methods: methodological validation study, composed of 28 participants who analyzed each activity of the intervention through the Likert scale, considering the importance and objectivity, which provided the calculation of the index of validity of content and frequency to assess the realization of the activities. Results: the 11 intervention activities were validated. Of these, seven obtained a content validity index ≥ 0.8 and four, > 0.5 and < 0.8. In the qualitative part, three categories emerged: 1) Positive reinforcement of the Nursing Interventions Classification activity; 2) Contribution to improve the Nursing Interventions Classification activity; and 3) Disagreement regarding the activity proposed by the Nursing Interventions Classification. Conclusion: all activities were considered important and objective, validating the intervention.

Maintenance intervention to improve survival in patients with metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma who benefit from first-line treatment: A prospective multicenter randomized controlled clinical study.

6035 Background: The role of drug maintenance intervention in improving survival outcomes remains controversial.To investigate the safety and effect of Tegafur(S1) maintenance intervention in patients with metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma who benefit from the first-line treatment in a multicenter randomized controlled study, and to identify the related biological prognostic factors and guide the individualized treatment choice. Methods: Patients with metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma in the Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University and other cancer centers who met the inclusion criteria were randomly divided into maintenance therapy group: S1 maintenance therapy until disease progression or intolerance; Observation group: follow-up to disease progression. PFS, overall survival (OS) and adverse reactions of S1 maintenance therapy were compared between the two groups. The correlation between EBV-DNA, human serum amyloid A (SAA) and prognosis was evaluated. Results: Follow-up was conducted to May 2020, with a median follow-up of 19.8 months (6.1-51.3 months), 183 cases were evaluable (88 cases in S1 maintenance treatment group, 95 cases in observation group). Compared with the observation group, the S1 maintenance treatment group significantly increased patients' median PFS (16.2 months vs. 8.7 months, P < 0.001) and median OS (32.1 months vs. 18.2 months, P < 0.001). Reduced the risk of poor prognosis for PFS and OS (PFS: HR 0.305, 95%CI 0.211-0.441, < 0.001; OS: HR 0.363, 95%CI 0.238-0.553, P < 0.001). In the maintenance treatment group, the median S1 treatment lasted for 14 courses (4-58 courses), and the main adverse reactions were grade 1 skin pigmentation, oral mucositis, hand-foot syndrome, nausea, etc. No grade 4 toxic reaction occurred, and it was well tolerated. Compared with observation patients with negative EBV-DNA, observation patients with positive EBV-DNA had a higher risk of poor prognosis for PFS (HR 1.764, 95%CI 1.078-2.887, P = 0.024). The risk of poor prognosis in patients with positive EBV-NDA was significantly reduced by 61.1% ( < 0.001) for PFS and 65.5% (P = 0.001) for OS (P = 0.001). Compared with the observation group with stable SAA expression, S1 maintenance therapy significantly improved the prognosis of patients. Patients with continuous decline in SAA had a 61.9% lower risk of poor prognosis in PFS (P < 0.001) and a 60.2% lower risk of poor prognosis in OS (P = 0.007). Conclusions: For patients with metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma who benefit from first-line treatment, maintenance therapy of S1 can significantly improve the survival prognosis and is well tolerated. Patients with positive EBV-DNA and continuous decline in SAA may benefit more from maintenance intervention. Clinical trial information: ChiCTR-IOR-16007939.

Performance Indicators for Spare Parts and Maintenance Management: An Analytical Study

A properly implemented maintenance management system has an impact at different levels. Maintenance is defined as the set of actions to maintain a property in a specified state. The unavailability of the spare parts required, to carry out the maintenance intervention, causes an extension of the inactivity time of the installation. On the contrary, an excessive stock of spare parts confines enormous capital and entails an enormous cost of ownership. According to the literature already made, we have directed in our work to propose a model of joint management of maintenance and spare parts based on stochastic-deterministic batch Petri networks. We studied this model by simulation using a graphical interface dedicated to the graphical tool used. So, we present, in this paper, the analytical study of the model by defining the performance indicators and viewing the influence of system parameters on these indicators. The main stages of the analytical study are developing the μ-marking graph, the associated Markov process which gives the associated transition matrix, and the definition of performance indicators using the probability distribution of the states. We deal with an application of the analytical evaluation of the proposed model. We end this article with an analysis and synthesis.