Redesigning pictographs for patients with low health literacy and establishing preliminary steps for delivery via smart phones.

BackgroundPictographs (or pictograms) have been widely utilized to convey medication related messages and to address nonadherence among patients with low health literacy. Yet, patients do not always interpret the intended messages on commonly used pictographs correctly and there are questions how they may be delivered on mobile devices.ObjectiveOur objectives are to refine a set of pictographs to use as medication reminders and to establish preliminary steps for delivery via smart phones.MethodsCard sorting was used to identify existing pictographs that focus group members found "not easy" to understand. Participants then explored improvements to these pictographs while iterations were sketched in real-time by a graphic artist. Feedback was also solicited on how selected pictographs might be delivered via smart phones in a sequential reminder message. The study was conducted at a community learning center that provides literacy services to underserved populations in Seattle, WA. Participants aged 18 years and older who met the criteria for low health literacy using S-TOFHLA were recruited.ResultsAmong the 45 participants screened for health literacy, 29 were eligible and consented to participate. Across four focus group sessions, participants examined 91 commonly used pictographs, 20 of these were ultimately refined to improve comprehensibility using participatory design approaches. All participants in the fifth focus group owned and used cell phones and provided feedback on preferred sequencing of pictographs to represent medication messages.ConclusionLow literacy adults found a substantial number of common medication label pictographs difficult to understand. Participative design processes helped generate new pictographs, as well as feedback on the sequencing of messages on cell phones, that may be evaluated in future research

Bayesian Nonparametric Bandits

1 online resource (PDF, 28 pages

Evolutionary biology and computational grids

The global high performance computing community has seen two overarching changes in the past five years. One of these changes was the consolidation toward SMP clusters as the predominant HPC system architecture. The other change was the emergence of computing grids as an important architecture in high performance computing. Several major national and international projects are now underway to develop grid technologies. Computational grids will increase the resources available to the most advanced computational scientists and encourage the use of advanced techniques by researchers who have not traditionally employed such technologies. In the latter camp are bioinformaticists in general and evolutionary biologists in particular, although this situation is changing rapidly.This work was greatly facilitated by IBM Shared University Research grants to Indiana University in 1998 and 1999

Molecular Heterogeneity and Response to Neoadjuvant Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2 Targeting in CALGB 40601, a Randomized Phase III Trial of Paclitaxel Plus Trastuzumab With or Without Lapatinib

Dual human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) targeting can increase pathologic complete response rates (pCRs) to neoadjuvant therapy and improve progression-free survival in metastatic disease. CALGB 40601 examined the impact of dual HER2 blockade consisting of trastuzumab and lapatinib added to paclitaxel, considering tumor and microenvironment molecular features

Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical

Decoherence is caused by the interaction with the environment. Environment monitors certain observables of the system, destroying interference between the pointer states corresponding to their eigenvalues. This leads to environment-induced superselection or einselection, a quantum process associated with selective loss of information. Einselected pointer states are stable. They can retain correlations with the rest of the Universe in spite of the environment. Einselection enforces classicality by imposing an effective ban on the vast majority of the Hilbert space, eliminating especially the flagrantly non-local "Schr\"odinger cat" states. Classical structure of phase space emerges from the quantum Hilbert space in the appropriate macroscopic limit: Combination of einselection with dynamics leads to the idealizations of a point and of a classical trajectory. In measurements, einselection replaces quantum entanglement between the apparatus and the measured system with the classical correlation.Comment: Final version of the review, with brutally compressed figures. Apart from the changes introduced in the editorial process the text is identical with that in the Rev. Mod. Phys. July issue. Also available from http://www.vjquantuminfo.or

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011

Measurements of Higgs boson production and couplings in diboson final states with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements are presented of production properties and couplings of the recently discovered Higgs boson using the decays into boson pairs, H →γ γ, H → Z Z∗ →4l and H →W W∗ →lνlν. The results are based on the complete pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 25 fb−1. Evidence for Higgs boson production through vector-boson fusion is reported. Results of combined fits probing Higgs boson couplings to fermions and bosons, as well as anomalous contributions to loop-induced production and decay modes, are presented. All measurements are consistent with expectations for the Standard Model Higgs boson

Measurement of the flavour composition of dijet events in pp collisions at root s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper describes a measurement of the flavour composition of dijet events produced in pp collisions at √s=7 TeV using the ATLAS detector. The measurement uses the full 2010 data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 39 pb−1. Six possible combinations of light, charm and bottom jets are identified in the dijet events, where the jet flavour is defined by the presence of bottom, charm or solely light flavour hadrons in the jet. Kinematic variables, based on the properties of displaced decay vertices and optimised for jet flavour identification, are used in a multidimensional template fit to measure the fractions of these dijet flavour states as functions of the leading jet transverse momentum in the range 40 GeV to 500 GeV and jet rapidity |y|<2.1. The fit results agree with the predictions of leading- and next-to-leading-order calculations, with the exception of the dijet fraction composed of bottom and light flavour jets, which is underestimated by all models at large transverse jet momenta. The ability to identify jets containing two b-hadrons, originating from e.g. gluon splitting, is demonstrated. The difference between bottom jet production rates in leading and subleading jets is consistent with the next-to-leading-order predictions

Measurement of the top quark-pair production cross section with ATLAS in pp collisions at \sqrt{s}=7\TeV

A measurement of the production cross-section for top quark pairs(\ttbar) in $pp$ collisions at \sqrt{s}=7 \TeV is presented using data recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events are selected in two different topologies: single lepton (electron $e$ or muon $\mu$) with large missing transverse energy and at least four jets, and dilepton ($ee$, $\mu\mu$ or $e\mu$) with large missing transverse energy and at least two jets. In a data sample of 2.9 pb-1, 37 candidate events are observed in the single-lepton topology and 9 events in the dilepton topology. The corresponding expected backgrounds from non-\ttbar Standard Model processes are estimated using data-driven methods and determined to be $12.2 \pm 3.9$ events and $2.5 \pm 0.6$ events, respectively. The kinematic properties of the selected events are consistent with SM \ttbar production. The inclusive top quark pair production cross-section is measured to be \sigmattbar=145 \pm 31 ^{+42}_{-27} pb where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. The measurement agrees with perturbative QCD calculations.Comment: 30 pages plus author list (50 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, CERN-PH number and final journal adde