The Partner Study: Sexual Risks

poster abstractThe Partner Study is a five-year, NIH-Funded research project focused on the potential sexual transmission of HIV from those with the disease to their partners without the disease and on to other sex partners. The project interviewed 114 people with HIV (HIV+), 114 of their sex partners without HIV (HIV-), and also 146 HIV- persons without an HIV+ partner. The project focuses on the reasons why people protect themselves and others. It thus examines such factors as knowledge of HIV, concern about getting or giving the disease, the impact of social norms, partners’ disclosure of HIV status, and ability to communicate with one’s sex partner(s). The findings to be presented include: • A test of the AIDS Risk Reduction Model that is designed to identify the critical factors that determine the activation of a person’s self protection motivation. • An examination of the relevance of social norms to HIV-protection behaviors. Though social scientists have relied on social norms as explanations for behavior since Durkheim, in these findings (1) social norms appear to have a modest effect on behavior even in areas where norms of protection had been thought to be strong and (2) enforcement of social norms is unrelated to eventual behavior. • An examination of multiple reasons people give for using or not using condoms and what those reasons say about their motivations and actual condom use. • An examination of how privacy rules regulate the disclosure of information about HIV to sex partners. Using the Communication Privacy Management perspective (Petronio, 2002), this study examines the privacy boundary surrounding information about HIV status by both the HIV+ partner and the HIV- partner

Assumptions for a Market Share Theorem

Many marketing models use variants of the relationship: market share equals marketing effort divided by total marketing effort. Usually, share is defined within a customer group presumed to be reasonably homogeneous and overall share is obtained by weighting for the number in the group. Although the basic relationship can be assumed directly, certain insight is gained by deriving it from more fundamental assumptions as follows: For the given customer group, each competitive seller has a real-valued "attraction" with the following properties: (1) attraction is non-negative; (2) the attraction of a set of sellers is the sum of the attractions of the individual sellers; and (3) if the attractions of two sets of sellers are equal, the sellers have equal market shares in the customer groups. It is shown that, if the relation between share and attraction satisfies the above assumptions, is a continuous function, and is required to hold for arbitrary values of attraction and sets of sellers, then the relation is: Share equals attraction divided by total attraction. Insofar as various factors can be assembled into an attraction function that satisfies the assumptions of the theorem, the method for calculating share follows directly

Mechanisms of Disease: Host-Pathogen Interactions between Burkholderia Species and Lung Epithelial Cells

Members of the Burkholderia species can cause a range of severe, often fatal, respiratory diseases. A variety of in vitro models of infection have been developed in an attempt to elucidate the mechanism by which Burkholderia spp. gain entry to and interact with the body. The majority of studies have tended to focus on the interaction of bacteria with phagocytic cells with a paucity of information available with regard to the lung epithelium. However, the lung epithelium is becoming more widely recognized as an important player in innate immunity and the early response to infections. Here we review the complex relationship between Burkholderia species and epithelial cells with an emphasis on the most pathogenic species, Burkholderia pseudomallei and Burkholderia mallei. The current gaps in knowledge in our understanding are highlighted along with the epithelial host-pathogen interactions that offer potential opportunities for therapeutic intervention

Final Report: Lake Vostok: A Curiosity or a Focus for Interdisciplinary Study?

The goal of the NSF-sponsored workshop, held in held in Washington, D.C., on November 7-8, 1998, was to stimulate discussion within the U.S. science community on Lake Vostok, specifically addressing the question: "Is Lake Vostok a natural curiosity or an opportunity for uniquely posed interdisciplinary scientific programs?" The workshop was designed to outline an interdisciplinary science plan for studies of the lake

Reasons People Give for Using (or not Using) Condoms

Study participants (N = 348) were asked about 46 reasons that have been suggested for why people use or do not use condoms. Participants were asked which of these reasons motivated them when they were deciding whether to use condoms in 503 sexual relationships. Participants were classified into one of three roles based on their HIV status and the status of each sexual partner: HIV+ people with HIV− partners; HIV− people with HIV+ partners; and HIV− people with HIV− partners. Motivations were looked at in the context of each of these roles. Of the 46 reasons, only 15 were selected by at least 1/3 of the participants, and only seven were selected by at least half. Frequently reported reasons primarily concern protecting self and partner from STDs including HIV. Less frequently reported reasons involved social norms, effects of condoms on sex, and concern for the relationship. These findings have implications for clinical interventions

Center Review Procedures

Revised report of the Subcommittee on Review Procedures prepared by Subcommittee Chair David Bell, and Lowell Hardin following discussion of an earlier draft at the November 1973 meeting of the CGIAR. The report covers both the review of the annual program and budget documents prepared by centers, and the arrangements for periodic external reviews to be made by TAC. Marked "draft," this version was circulated to the CGIAR members, center directors and TAC for comment. No revisions were made as a result of comments received, so the November 5, 1973 document was allowed to stand. It was often referred to as "The Bell Report." Agenda item discussed at CGIAR meeting, November 1973 and at TAC Seventh Meeting, February 1974

Evolutionary Processes a Focus of Decade-Long Ecosystem Study of Antarctic's Lake Vostok

As scientists probe for life in new habitats and try to understand the processes that triggered the origin and guided the evolution of life on Earth, environments beneath large ice sheets are beginning to emerge as key ecosystems. Modern subglacial environments are analogues both for the icy moons of Jupiter and the environmental stresses that led to widespread evolutionary radiation following the Neoproterozoic "snowball" Earth. The largest modern analogue to these distant systems is Lake Vostok, a great Antarctic subglacial lake, and the international science community is developing a plan to systematically survey and explore this complex system over the next decade. Approximately the size of Lake Ontario, Lake Vostok lies beneath the 4 km thick East Antarctic ice sheet (Figure 1). The lake is much deeper than Lake Ontario—remotely measured water depths reach 670 m

Explaining Society: An Expanded Toolbox for Social Scientists

We propose for social scientists a theoretical toolbox containing a set of motivations that neurobiologists have recently validated. We show how these motivations can be used to create a theory of society recognizably similar to existing stable societies (sustainable, self-reproducing, and largely peaceful). Using this toolbox, we describe society in terms of three institutions: economy (a source of sustainability), government (peace), and the family (reproducibility). Conducting a thought experiment in three parts, we begin with a simple theory with only two motivations. We then create successive theories that systematically add motivations, showing that each element in the toolbox makes its own contribution to explain the workings of a stable society and that the family has a critical role in this process

The thermodynamics of prediction

A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations, and a fraction of this information is predictive of future ones. The remaining nonpredictive information reflects model complexity that does not improve predictive power, and thus represents the ineffectiveness of the model. We expose the fundamental equivalence between this model inefficiency and thermodynamic inefficiency, measured by dissipation. Our results hold arbitrarily far from thermodynamic equilibrium and are applicable to a wide range of systems, including biomolecular machines. They highlight a profound connection between the effective use of information and efficient thermodynamic operation: any system constructed to keep memory about its environment and to operate with maximal energetic efficiency has to be predictive.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur