How Young Is Too Young: Marketing To The Tween Generation

A girl yanks on a pair of hipster jeans.  Her mother is aghast, “You can’t go to school looking like that,” the mother says sternly.  The mom then pulls the pants lower, proving she is hip to the current styles

The Use Of Automated Telephone Interfaces With Customers By Local Organizations: Best Practices And Exploratory Investigation Of Usage

Automated telephone systems (ATS) have been criticized by customers as a frustrating way to interact with an organization.  This study seeks to discover ATS best practices, assess how many local organizations (as opposed to 1-800 call centers) are utilizing various ATSs, and determine which ATS best practices these local organizations are adopting.  A list of 35 best practices were found.  An exploratory examination of 400 organizations in a mid-sized mid-western city revealed that very few use an advanced ATS, with 51% using a simple answering machine. The adoption of best practices by these organizations was quite varied.  Managerial recommendations as well as future research suggestions are offered

We've Got A Cure For You! Disease Awareness Campaigns

Over the last twenty years, the use of disease awareness campaigns has become predominant in our everyday lives. What started out as a technique to market lifestyle drugs for cosmetics and sexual enhancements in the 1980s and 1990s, has now increased in usage to include many other areas of medicine. Its not uncommon to see drug advertisements in consumer magazines and on television for everything from psychotropic drugs, to drugs that are intended to improve the quality of everyday life for more average Americans. Indeed, its hard to find a popular press magazine that doesnt have at least one such advertisement, while most magazine issues have many such advertisements

The Effect of Ubiquitous Information on Algorithms

Recent advances in replicated epistemologies and scalable modalities have paved the way for Moore's Law. After years of essential research into write-back caches, we validate the compelling unification of IPv7 and expert systems, which embodies the technical principles of software engineering. In this paper, we concentrate our efforts on disproving that the much-touted decentralized algorithm for the visualization of IPv4 by Sun and Watanabe is in Co-NP

Pharmacists’ opinions of the value of CAPE Outcomes in hiring decisions

Objective. The Hiring Intent Reasoning Examination (HIRE) was designed to explore the utility of the CAPE 2013 outcomes attributes from the perspective of practicing pharmacists, examine how each attribute influences hiring decisions, and identify which of the attributes are perceived as most and least valuable by practicing pharmacists. Methods. An electronic questionnaire was developed and distributed to licensed pharmacists in four states to collect their opinions about 15 CAPE subdomains plus five additional business related attributes. The attributes that respondents identified were: necessary to be a good pharmacist, would impact hiring decisions, most important to them, and in short supply in the applicant pool. Data were analyzed using statistical analysis software to determine the relative importance of each to practicing pharmacists and various subsets of pharmacists. Results. The CAPE subdomains were considered necessary for most jobs by 51% or more of the 3723 respondents (range, 51% to 99%). The necessity for business-related attributes ranged from 21% to 92%. The percentage who would not hire an applicant who did not possess the attribute ranged from 2% to 71.5%; the percentage who considered the attribute most valuable ranged from 0.3% to 35%; and the percentage who felt the attribute was in short supply ranged from 5% to 36%. Opinions varied depending upon gender, practice setting and whether the pharmacist was an employee or employer. Conclusion. The results of this study can be used by faculty and administrators to inform curricular design and emphasis on CAPE domains and business-related education in pharmacy programs

The Influence of Land Use on Aquatic Macroinvertebrates in Streams and Rivers of South Carolina

2008 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Addressing Water Challenges Facing the State and Regio

Discrete Improvement in Racial Disparity in Survival among Patients with Stage IV Colorectal Cancer: a 21-Year Population-Based Analysis

Purpose Recently, multiple clinical trials have demonstrated improved outcomes in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. This study investigated if the improved survival is race dependent. Patients and Methods Overall and cancer-specific survival of 77,490 White and Black patients with metastatic colorectal cancer from the 1988–2008 Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results registry were compared using unadjusted and multivariable adjusted Cox proportional hazard regression as well as competing risk analyses. Results Median age was 69 years, 47.4 % were female and 86.0 % White. Median survival was 11 months overall, with an overall increase from 8 to 14 months between 1988 and 2008. Overall survival increased from 8 to 14 months for White, and from 6 to 13 months for Black patients. After multivariable adjustment, the following parameters were associated with better survival: White, female, younger, better educated and married patients, patients with higher income and living in urban areas, patients with rectosigmoid junction and rectal cancer, undergoing cancer-directed surgery, having well/moderately differentiated, and N0 tumors (p<0.05 for all covariates). Discrepancies in overall survival based on race did not change significantly over time; however, there was a significant decrease of cancer-specific survival discrepancies over time between White and Black patients with a hazard ratio of 0.995 (95 % confidence interval 0.991–1.000) per year (p=0.03). Conclusion A clinically relevant overall survival increase was found from 1988 to 2008 in this population-based analysis for both White and Black patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. Although both White and Black patients benefitted from this improvement, a slight discrepancy between the two groups remained

Agmatidine, a modified cytidine in the anticodon of archaeal tRNA\u3csup\u3eIle\u3c/sup\u3e, base pairs with adenosine but not with guanosine

Modification of the cytidine in the first anticodon position of the AUA decoding tRNAIle (tRNAIle 2 ) of bacteria and archaea is essential for this tRNA to read the isoleucine codon AUA and to differentiate between AUA and the methionine codon AUG. To identify the modified cytidine in archaea, we have purified this tRNA species from Haloarcula marismortui, established its codon reading properties, used liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) to map RNase A and T1 digestion products onto the tRNA, and used LC-MS/MS to sequence the oligonucleotides in RNase A digests. These analyses revealed that the modification of cytidine in the anticodon of tRNAIle 2 adds 112 mass units to its molecular mass and makes the glycosidic bond unusually labile during mass spectral analyses. Accurate mass LC-MS and LC-MS/MS analysis of total nucleoside digests of the tRNAIle 2 demonstrated the absence in the modified cytidine of the C2-oxo group and its replacement by agmatine (decarboxy-arginine) through a secondary amine linkage. We propose the name agmatidine, abbreviation C+, for this modified cytidine. Agmatidine is also present in Methanococcus maripaludis tRNAIle 2 and in Sulfolobus solfataricus total tRNA, indicating its probable occurrence in the AUA decoding tRNAIle of euryarchaea and crenarchaea. The identification of agmatidine shows that bacteria and archaea have developed very similar strategies for reading the isoleucine codon AUA while discriminating against the methionine codon AUG

If it won't explode, hit it with a hammer: Facilitating chemical reactions at a liquid surface

Abstract only availableCollisional energy transfer at a gas-liquid interface may play an important role in the initial decomposition of multiphase combustibles. The energy feedback of hot, energetic, gaseous atoms, in this case Ar, striking the liquid surface can potentially impart enough energy to break one of the liquid's bonds in a homolytic fashion thus creating radicals necessary for a resulting explosive chain reaction. Liquid nitromethane (CH3NO2) is a prototypical explosive and is modeled here as a simple diatomic consisting of one methyl (CH3) and one nitro (NO2) groups. The methyl and nitro groups are shown through MP2 6-311+G (2d, 2p) calculations to be the most likely resulting decomposition fragments; as such, focus is placed on the breaking of the C-N bond. For this study, the attractive term of the gas-liquid interaction potential is assumed to be zero to find the limit of Ar-nitromethane interaction. The energy transfer is studied by running simulations, using the DL_Poly_2 program, of Ar impinging the liquid nitromethane from zero degrees to the surface normal and over multiple incident energies. The results are then analyzed for energy transfer and C-N bond breakage.Stevens' Chemistry Progra