Electron impact promoted fragmentation of alkyl-N-(1-Phenylethyl)-carbamates of primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols

Mass spectra of alkyl carbamates derived from primary, secondary, and teriary alcohols by use of deuterium labeling and high resolution mass spectroscop

Application of remote sensing to state and regional problems

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Marketing Percolation

A percolation model is presented, with computer simulations for illustrations, to show how the sales of a new product may penetrate the consumer market. We review the traditional approach in the marketing literature, which is based on differential or difference equations similar to the logistic equation (Bass 1969). This mean field approach is contrasted with the discrete percolation on a lattice, with simulations of "social percolation" (Solomon et al 2000) in two to five dimensions giving power laws instead of exponential growth, and strong fluctuations right at the percolation threshold.Comment: to appear in Physica

Application of remote sensing to state and regional problems

The author has identified the following significant results. The Lowndes County data base is essentially complete with 18 primary variables and 16 proximity variables encoded into the geo-information system. The single purpose, decision tree classifier is now operational. Signatures for the thematic extraction of strip mines from LANDSAT Digital data were obtained by employing both supervised and nonsupervised procedures. Dry, blowing sand areas of beach were also identified from the LANDSAT data. The primary procedure was the analysis of analog data on the I2S signal slicer

STOCHASTIC WEALTH DYNAMICS AND RISK MANAGEMENT AMONG A POOR POPULATION

The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth dynamics among a very poor population. These data yield several novel findings. Although covariate rainfall shocks plainly matter, household-specific factors, including own herd size, account for most observed variability in wealth dynamics. Despite longstanding conventional wisdom about common property grazing lands, we find no statistical support for the tragedy of the commons hypothesis. It appears that past studies may have conflated costly self-insurance with stocking rate externalities. Such self-insurance is important in this setting because weak livestock markets and meager social insurance cause wealth to fluctuate largely in response to biophysical shocks. These shocks move households between multiple dynamic wealth equilibria toward which households converge following nonconvex path dynamics. The lowest equilibrium is consistent with the notion of a poverty trap. These findings have broad implications for the design of development and relief strategies among a poor population extraordinarily vulnerable to climatic shocks.common property, covariate risk, Ethiopia, idiosyncratic risk, poverty traps, social insurance, Risk and Uncertainty, O1, Q12,

Acute military psychiatric casualties from the war in Iraq

Background: The view that most military personnel evacuated from war zones are suffering from combat stress reactions, or are otherwise traumatised by the horrors of war, has an impact on all aspects of military psychiatry. Aims: To delineate the reasons for psychiatric aeromedical evacuation from Iraq from the start of build-up of UK forces in January 2003 until the end of October that year, 6 months after the end of formal hostilities. Method: A retrospective study was conducted of field and in-patient psychiatric assessments of 116 military personnel evacuated to the UK military psychiatric in-patient facility in Catterick Garrison. Results: Evacuees were mainly non-combatants (69%). A significant proportion were in reserve service (21%) and had a history of contact with mental health services (37%). Only 3% had a combat stress reaction. In over 85% of cases evacuation was for low mood attributed to separation from friends or family, or difficulties adjusting to the environment. Conclusions: These findings have implications especially for screening for suitability for deployment, and for understanding any longer-term mental health problems arising in veterans from Iraq

Development of a tool to measure women’s perception of respectful maternity care in public health facilities

BACKGROUND: Maternal mortality continues to be the biggest challenge facing Ethiopia and other developing countries. Although progress has been made in making maternity services available closer to the community, the rate of deliveries attended by skilled birth attendants has remained very low. Absence of respectful maternity care (RMC) is believed to have contributed to low utilization of facility delivery services. This study outlines steps undertaken to construct and validate a scale that measures women’s perception of respectful maternity care provided in health facilities. METHODS: An inductive item generation process that included a literature review and in-depth interviews with labor and delivery clients, followed by an expert review, assured face validity and content validity of the tool. A draft RMC scale with 37 items and two additional measures of global satisfaction items, measured on a five-point Likert scale, were administered to a developmental sample of 509 postnatal care clients visiting facilities immediately after childbirth to 7 weeks postpartum. IBM SPSS 20 was used to perform exploratory factor analysis (EFA) using principal component analysis (PCA) with oblique rotation method. RESULTS: The final RMC scale with 15 items was loaded on four components. The extracted components were labeled as friendly care, abuse-free care, timely care, and discrimination-free care. The final RMC scale correlated strongly with the global satisfaction measures, indicating criterion-related validity of the scale. Content-related validity was assured by the process of item generation. Construct validity of the RMC scale was confirmed by high average factor loading of the four components ranging from 0.76 to 0.82 and low correlation between the components. Stability of the scale was confirmed by running PCA in a randomly selected split sample of 320 samples from the validation sample. The final 15-item scale showed an adequate reliability with α = 0.845. CONCLUSION: The 15-item RMC scale is a valid and reliable measure of women’s perception of RMC received in health facilities. We recommend that health facilities use the RMC scale in urban public health facilities and that other researchers conduct further exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis in different geographic areas

Giant molecular clouds in the galaxy: distribution, mass, size and age

Millimeter wave observations of emission from the CO molecule have become, over the past eight years, the dominant method for determining the physical properties of dense interstellar clouds, composed primarily of molecular hydrogen and for exploring the structure and kinematics of the galactic disk. In this paper we briefly review the CO survey results in the literature (Section 2) and then present new results (Section 3-7) of an extensive ^(13)CO and ^(12)CO survey of the galactic distribution, size, mass and age of molecular clouds. The interpretation of this survey leads to a new picture of the interstellar medium dominated by very massive stable long-lived clouds which we refer to as Giant Molecular Clouds. We find that Giant Molecular Clouds (GMC's) with M = 10^5–3 × 10^6 M⊙ are a major constituent of the galactic disk, the dominant component of the interstellar medium in the galaxy interior to the sun and the most massive objects in the galaxy. We find that the interstellar medium and star formation are dominated by massive gravitationally bound clouds in which stars and associations are forming but at a very low rate in comparison to the free fall time. The galactic distribution of the molecules as traced by CO emission is interpreted as the distribution of GMC's. As the most massive objects in the galaxy they are also basic to the dynamics of the disk

Martian surface physical properties to be derived by radar altimeter on the Mars observer spacecraft

The potential is described of a candidate Mars Observer altimeter for determining dielectric properties of Mars regolith. It is pointed out that it is straightforward to use the time between altimeter pulse trains for passive radiometry (hence dielectric properties) and roughness can be derived. Given the mission plan the whole surface can be mapped at least three times, yielding data on seasonal variability