Stress Reduction: A neighborhood introduction

Responding to reported health concerns a stress reduction program was developed for residents of an urban Latino neighborhood struggling with poverty, crime, and limited access to healthcare. The revised Health Promotion Model (HPM) was used as a framework (Pender, 1996). A qualitative study testing a 5-week Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention was imbedded into the program 18 months after its implementation. Utilizing a pre/post test design participants were predicted to demonstrate significant reductions in post-intervention mean scores for 3 self-report measures, the Cohen Perceived Stress Scale, General Sleep Disturbance Scale, and a modified Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale. A 91% drop in participation compared to prior attendance levels precluded measuring the dependent variables. Comparing the MBSR intervention with prior instruction attempts to explicate this unexpected outcome, supporting the potential explanatory possibilities of the HPM and informing the need for further studies ofMBSR in cultural contexts

Transforming Library Service Through Information Commons: Part 1 - Introduction

An introduction to the concept of the Information Commons in libraries

Transforming Library Service Through Information Commons: Part 2 - Definitions

Definitions of the Information Commons and Learning Commons models in libraries

Efficient excitation of cavity resonances of subwavelength metallic gratings

One dimensional rectangular metallic gratings enable enhanced transmission of light for specific resonance frequencies. Two kinds of modes participating to enhanced transmission have already been demonstrated : (i) waveguide modes and (ii) surface plasmon polaritons (SPP). Since the original paper of Hessel and Oliner \cite{hessel} pointing out the existence of (i), no progress was made in their understanding. We present here a carefull analysis, and show that the coupling between the light and such resonances can be tremendously improved using an {\it evanescent} wave. This leads to enhanced localisation of light in cavities, yielding, in particular, to a very selective light transmission through these gratings.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Learning Features that Predict Cue Usage

Our goal is to identify the features that predict the occurrence and placement of discourse cues in tutorial explanations in order to aid in the automatic generation of explanations. Previous attempts to devise rules for text generation were based on intuition or small numbers of constructed examples. We apply a machine learning program, C4.5, to induce decision trees for cue occurrence and placement from a corpus of data coded for a variety of features previously thought to affect cue usage. Our experiments enable us to identify the features with most predictive power, and show that machine learning can be used to induce decision trees useful for text generation.Comment: 10 pages, 2 Postscript figures, uses aclap.sty, psfig.te

Resonant photon absorption in the low spin molecule V15

We report the first study of the micro-SQUID response of a molecular system to electromagnetic radiation. The advantages of our micro-SQUID technique in respect to pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) techniques consist in the possibility to perform time-resolved experiments (below 1 ns) on submicrometer sizes samples (about 1000 spins) at low temperature (below 100 mK). Resonant photon absorption in the GHz range was observed via low temperature micro-SQUID magnetization measurements of the spin ground state S = 1/2 of the molecular complex V15. The line-width essentially results from intra-molecular hyperfine interaction. The results point out that observing Rabi oscillations in molecular nanomagnets requires well isolated low spin systems and high radiation power. Our first results open the way for time-resolved observations of quantum superposition of spin-up and spin-down states in SMMs.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure