433 research outputs found
School-based targeted prevention compared to specialist mental health treatment for youth anxiety
Background
The âFRIENDS for lifeâ program (FRIENDS) is a 10-session cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) program used for prevention and treatment of youth anxiety. There is discussion about whether FRIENDS is best applied as prevention or as treatment.
Methods
We compared FRIENDS delivered in schools as targeted prevention to a previous specialist mental health clinic trial. The targeted prevention sample (N = 82; Mage = 11.6 years, SD = 2.1; 75.0% girls) was identified and recruited by school nurses in collaboration with a community psychologist. The clinical sample (N = 88, Mage = 11.7 years, SD = 2.1; 54.5% girls) was recruited for a randomized controlled trial from community child- and adolescent psychiatric outpatient clinics and was diagnosed with anxiety disorders.
Results
Both samples showed significantly reduced anxiety symptoms from baseline to postintervention, with medium mean effect sizes across raters (youths and parents) and timepoints (post; 12-months follow-up). Baseline youth-reported anxiety symptom levels were similar between the samples, whereas parent-reported youth anxiety was higher in the clinical sample.
Conclusions
The study suggests that self-reported anxiety levels may not differ between youth recruited in schools and in clinic settings. The results indicate promising results of the FRIENDS program when delivered in schools by less specialized health personnel from the school health services, as well as when delivered in clinics by trained mental health professionals.publishedVersio
Paradigm shift or business as usual? Workers' views on multi-stakeholder initiatives in Bangladesh
The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workersâ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multiâstakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the readyâmade garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyerâdriven, complianceâbased model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperationâbased approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a âparadigm shiftâ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers
Perturbed angular correlations for Gd in gadolinium: in-beam comparisons of relative magnetizations
Perturbed angular correlations were measured for Gd ions implanted into
gadolinium foils following Coulomb excitation with 40 MeV O-16 beams. A
technique for measuring the relative magnetizations of ferromagnetic gadolinium
hosts under in-beam conditions is described and discussed. The combined
electric-quadrupole and magnetic-dipole interaction is evaluated. The effect of
nuclei implanted onto damaged or non-substitutional sites is assessed, as is
the effect of misalignment between the internal hyperfine field and the
external polarizing field. Thermal effects due to beam heating are discussed.Comment: 37 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in NIM
Darkness visible: reflections on underground ecology
1 Soil science and ecology have developed independently, making it difficult for ecologists to contribute to urgent current debates on the destruction of the global soil resource and its key role in the global carbon cycle. Soils are believed to be exceptionally biodiverse parts of ecosystems, a view confirmed by recent data from the UK Soil Biodiversity Programme at Sourhope, Scotland, where high diversity was a characteristic of small organisms, but not of larger ones. Explaining this difference requires knowledge that we currently lack about the basic biology and biogeography of micro-organisms. 2 It seems inherently plausible that the high levels of biological diversity in soil play some part in determining the ability of soils to undertake ecosystem-level processes, such as carbon and mineral cycling. However, we lack conceptual models to address this issue, and debate about the role of biodiversity in ecosystem processes has centred around the concept of functional redundancy, and has consequently been largely semantic. More precise construction of our experimental questions is needed to advance understanding. 3 These issues are well illustrated by the fungi that form arbuscular mycorrhizas, the Glomeromycota. This ancient symbiosis of plants and fungi is responsible for phosphate uptake in most land plants, and the phylum is generally held to be species-poor and non-specific, with most members readily colonizing any plant species. Molecular techniques have shown both those assumptions to be unsafe, raising questions about what factors have promoted diversification in these fungi. One source of this genetic diversity may be functional diversity. 4 Specificity of the mycorrhizal interaction between plants and fungi would have important ecosystem consequences. One example would be in the control of invasiveness in introduced plant species: surprisingly, naturalized plant species in Britain are disproportionately from mycorrhizal families, suggesting that these fungi may play a role in assisting invasion. 5 What emerges from an attempt to relate biodiversity and ecosystem processes in soil is our extraordinary ignorance about the organisms involved. There are fundamental questions that are now answerable with new techniques and sufficient will, such as how biodiverse are natural soils? Do microbes have biogeography? Are there rare or even endangered microbes
Initial State Interactions for -Proton Radiative Capture
The effects of the initial state interactions on the radiative
capture branching ratios are examined and found to be quite sizable. A general
coupled-channel formalism for both strong and electromagnetic channels using a
particle basis is presented, and applied to all the low energy data
with the exception of the {\it 1s} atomic level shift. Satisfactory fits are
obtained using vertex coupling constants for the electromagnetic channels that
are close to their expected SU(3) values.Comment: 16 pages, uses revte
Search for the Proton Decay Mode proton to neutrino K+ in Soudan 2
We have searched for the proton decay mode proton to neutrino K+ using the
one-kiloton Soudan 2 high resolution calorimeter. Contained events obtained
from a 3.56 kiloton-year fiducial exposure through June 1997 are examined for
occurrence of a visible K+ track which decays at rest into mu+ nu or pi+ pi0.
We found one candidate event consistent with background, yielding a limit,
tau/B > 4.3 10^{31} years at 90% CL with no background subtraction.Comment: 13 pages, Latex, 3 tables and 3 figures, Accepted by Physics Letters
Charged pion form factor between Q^2=0.60 and 2.45 GeV^2. II. Determination of, and results for, the pion form factor
The charged pion form factor, Fpi(Q^2), is an important quantity which can be
used to advance our knowledge of hadronic structure. However, the extraction of
Fpi from data requires a model of the 1H(e,e'pi+)n reaction, and thus is
inherently model dependent. Therefore, a detailed description of the extraction
of the charged pion form factor from electroproduction data obtained recently
at Jefferson Lab is presented, with particular focus given to the dominant
uncertainties in this procedure. Results for Fpi are presented for
Q^2=0.60-2.45 GeV^2. Above Q^2=1.5 GeV^2, the Fpi values are systematically
below the monopole parameterization that describes the low Q^2 data used to
determine the pion charge radius. The pion form factor can be calculated in a
wide variety of theoretical approaches, and the experimental results are
compared to a number of calculations. This comparison is helpful in
understanding the role of soft versus hard contributions to hadronic structure
in the intermediate Q^2 regime.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure
Hamiltonian Description of Composite Fermions: Magnetoexciton Dispersions
A microscopic Hamiltonian theory of the FQHE, developed by Shankar and myself
based on the fermionic Chern-Simons approach, has recently been quite
successful in calculating gaps in Fractional Quantum Hall states, and in
predicting approximate scaling relations between the gaps of different
fractions. I now apply this formalism towards computing magnetoexciton
dispersions (including spin-flip dispersions) in the , 2/5, and 3/7
gapped fractions, and find approximate agreement with numerical results. I also
analyse the evolution of these dispersions with increasing sample thickness,
modelled by a potential soft at high momenta. New results are obtained for
instabilities as a function of thickness for 2/5 and 3/7, and it is shown that
the spin-polarized 2/5 state, in contrast to the spin-polarized 1/3 state,
cannot be described as a simple quantum ferromagnet.Comment: 18 pages, 18 encapsulated ps figure
Quantitative Treatment of Decoherence
We outline different approaches to define and quantify decoherence. We argue
that a measure based on a properly defined norm of deviation of the density
matrix is appropriate for quantifying decoherence in quantum registers. For a
semiconductor double quantum dot qubit, evaluation of this measure is reviewed.
For a general class of decoherence processes, including those occurring in
semiconductor qubits, we argue that this measure is additive: It scales
linearly with the number of qubits.Comment: Revised version, 26 pages, in LaTeX, 3 EPS figure
Search for the standard model Higgs boson decaying into two photons in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV
A search for a Higgs boson decaying into two photons is described. The
analysis is performed using a dataset recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC
from pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, which corresponds to an
integrated luminosity of 4.8 inverse femtobarns. Limits are set on the cross
section of the standard model Higgs boson decaying to two photons. The expected
exclusion limit at 95% confidence level is between 1.4 and 2.4 times the
standard model cross section in the mass range between 110 and 150 GeV. The
analysis of the data excludes, at 95% confidence level, the standard model
Higgs boson decaying into two photons in the mass range 128 to 132 GeV. The
largest excess of events above the expected standard model background is
observed for a Higgs boson mass hypothesis of 124 GeV with a local significance
of 3.1 sigma. The global significance of observing an excess with a local
significance greater than 3.1 sigma anywhere in the search range 110-150 GeV is
estimated to be 1.8 sigma. More data are required to ascertain the origin of
this excess.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters
- âŠ