Factors Influencing Immunization Status in Primary Care Clinics

Background and Objectives: National standards and goals for childhood immunization rates are well established. Yet, despite clear standards and goals, physicians do not achieve the desired rate (90%) for immunization coverage. This study examined factors related to immunization status for 2-year-old children in pediatric and family practice settings. Methods: Specially trained personnel used computer software to audit 2,552 records from 42 practices in Northeast Florida throughout 1997–1999. Immunization records were judged as either complete or incomplete, and factors related to immunization status were studied. Clinic type and 18 immunization practice standards were reviewed for effect on immunization status. Results: The probability of complete immunization status for children in pediatric clinics was greater than for those in family practice clinics. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that use of semiannual audits (odds ratio [OR]=2.00, confidence interval [CI]=1.65–2.42) was the most important factor for immunization completion. This was followed by availability of discounted immunizations (OR=.44, CI=.27–.73) and the use of an immunization tracking system (OR=1.48, CI=1.18–1.70). Factors that were not found to contribute included clinic type and the remaining 15 practice standards. Conclusions: Considering the significant factors, immunization status was not affected by the type of clinic providing immunizations. Based on this analysis, family physicians should implement tracking systems and should perform semiannual audits to match the success of pediatricians in immunizing children. Neither group met nationally established goals for administration of immunizations for 2-year-old children

The Height of a Giraffe

A minor modification of the arguments of Press and Lightman leads to an estimate of the height of the tallest running, breathing organism on a habitable planet as the Bohr radius multiplied by the three-tenths power of the ratio of the electrical to gravitational forces between two protons (rather than the one-quarter power that Press got for the largest animal that would not break in falling over, after making an assumption of unreasonable brittleness). My new estimate gives a height of about 3.6 meters rather than Press's original estimate of about 2.6 cm. It also implies that the number of atoms in the tallest runner is very roughly of the order of the nine-tenths power of the ratio of the electrical to gravitational forces between two protons, which is about 3 x 10^32.Comment: 12 pages, LaTe

Assessing final-year practical work through group projects; A further study

The use of a group-based approach to project working has been shown to provide significant advantage to students in terms of project outcomes, motivation and engagement. The Department of Chemistry at the University of Reading has recently explored the use of group projects for final year practical work. In this model, students are presented with a research problem that they investigate within a team of three to five students. Students are expected to divide the work and share results in a manner that closely resembles project working in industry. This paper will report the experiences and attitudes of final-year BSc students towards this group-based approach, and outline the self-identified skills development of these students

Planar Two-Loop Five-Parton Amplitudes from Numerical Unitarity

We compute a complete set of independent leading-color two-loop five-parton amplitudes in QCD. These constitute a fundamental ingredient for the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to three-jet production at hadron colliders. We show how to consistently consider helicity amplitudes with external fermions in dimensional regularization, allowing the application of a numerical variant of the unitarity approach. Amplitudes are computed by exploiting a decomposition of the integrand into master and surface terms that is independent of the parton type. Master integral coefficients are numerically computed in either finite-field or floating-point arithmetic and combined with known analytic master integrals. We recompute two-loop leading-color four-parton amplitudes as a check of our implementation. Results are presented for all independent four- and five-parton processes including contributions with massless closed fermion loops.Comment: v3: corrected wrong signs for five-gluon $N_f^2$ amplitudes with vanishing tree

The increased use of trade controls by the industrial countries

The increase in non-tariff barriers to trade in the industrial countries has given rise to much concern. This article attempts to summarize the formal non-tariff measures that have been introduced by the industrial countries to measure roughly how much trade is now affected by them

Advances in Environmental Informatics: Integration of Discrete Event Simulation Methodology with ecological Material Flow Analysis for Modelling eco-efficient Systems

AbstractIn the first section we provide a short review of the rather young field of Environmental Informatics. We argue that Environmental Informatics methods and tools are powerful means in environmental information processing for supporting environmental protection and sustainable development. In the second part we introduce an integrated approach for modeling ecoefficient systems such as complex production systems under an economic as well as an ecological view. This modeling approach allows for the implementation of a combined model representing material and energy flows and bottle necks in machine capacities at the same time (instead of using two different models with different software tools). Finally present a case study from a real waver production site as a proof of concept for this substantial contribution to Environmental Informatics

No Time Asymmetry from Quantum Mechanics

With CPT-invariant initial conditions that commute with CPT-invariant final conditions, the respective probabilities (when defined) of a set of histories and its CPT reverse are equal, giving a CPT-symmetric universe. This leads me to question whether the asymmetry of the Gell-Mann--Hartle decoherence functional for ordinary quantum mechanics should be interpreted as an asymmetry of {\it time} .Comment: 14 pages, Alberta-Thy-11-9

Unifying Parsimonious Tree Reconciliation

Evolution is a process that is influenced by various environmental factors, e.g. the interactions between different species, genes, and biogeographical properties. Hence, it is interesting to study the combined evolutionary history of multiple species, their genes, and the environment they live in. A common approach to address this research problem is to describe each individual evolution as a phylogenetic tree and construct a tree reconciliation which is parsimonious with respect to a given event model. Unfortunately, most of the previous approaches are designed only either for host-parasite systems, for gene tree/species tree reconciliation, or biogeography. Hence, a method is desirable, which addresses the general problem of mapping phylogenetic trees and covering all varieties of coevolving systems, including e.g., predator-prey and symbiotic relationships. To overcome this gap, we introduce a generalized cophylogenetic event model considering the combinatorial complete set of local coevolutionary events. We give a dynamic programming based heuristic for solving the maximum parsimony reconciliation problem in time O(n^2), for two phylogenies each with at most n leaves. Furthermore, we present an exact branch-and-bound algorithm which uses the results from the dynamic programming heuristic for discarding partial reconciliations. The approach has been implemented as a Java application which is freely available from http://pacosy.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/coresym.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013

Observation of infinite-range intensity correlations above, at and below the 3D Anderson localization transition

We investigate long-range intensity correlations on both sides of the Anderson transition of classical waves in a three-dimensional (3D) disordered material. Our ultrasonic experiments are designed to unambiguously detect a recently predicted infinite-range C0 contribution, due to local density of states fluctuations near the source. We find that these C0 correlations, in addition to C2 and C3 contributions, are significantly enhanced near mobility edges. Separate measurements of the inverse participation ratio reveal a link between C0 and the anomalous dimension \Delta_2, implying that C0 may also be used to explore the critical regime of the Anderson transition.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures (main text plus supplemental information). Updated version includes an improved introductory paragraph, minor text revisions, a revised title and additional supplemental information on the experimental detail