Alien Registration- Brown, Thomas N. (Baldwin, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/32882/thumbnail.jp

You Can Change the World With a Haircut”: Evaluating the Feasibility of a Barber-led Intervention for Men of Black and Ethnic Minority Heritage to Manage High Blood Pressure

Background: People of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) heritage have a higher-than-average incidence of, and mortality from hypertension and stroke. Therefore, it is important to identify new settings for engaging people at risk of high blood pressure (BP). Aim: This feasibility study aimed to evaluate if barbers in a London borough can support and educate men of BAME heritage to manage their BP. Following UK Medical Research Council guidance, the RE-AIM (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance) framework was used to guide study objectives and feasibility outcomes. Methods: We collaborated with 8 barbers who were part of an existing BAME barber network. Barbers were trained online (1.5 h) and face-to-face (3 h) to provide BP healthcare advice and take customers BP readings. Qualitative field notes were collected to assess how best to recruit and train barbers, and to understand how to maintain motivation and retention of barbers. BP readings were recorded between June 2021 and March 2022. Results: Both online and face-to-face training were effective, however, greater focus on how to start conversations about BP with clients was needed. We found that motivation, incentivization and regular contact with barbers were important for recruitment, retention, and sustained BP measurement. Obtaining BP readings was challenging due to client concerns about recording their data and the impracticalities of recording results. We captured 236 BP recordings, of which 39 (16.53%) were over 140/90 mmHg; of these, 5 were over 180/100 mmHg. Conclusion: The combined data showed that educating barbers to take BP readings and deliver healthcare advice about BP is a viable intervention for rollout in a large-scale study. It has demonstrated the need to identify strategies to motivate barbers for sustained recruitment and retention, as well as further efforts to build trust among customers for long-term BP surveillance

Spin characterization of systematics in CMB surveys – a comprehensive formalism

The CMB B-mode polarization signal – both the primordial gravitational wave signature and the signal sourced by lensing – is subject to many contaminants from systematic effects. Of particular concern are systematics that result in mixing of signals of different ‘spin’, particularly leakage from the much larger spin-0 intensity signal to the spin-2 polarization signal. We present a general formalism, which can be applied to arbitrary focal plane setups, that characterizes signals in terms of their spin. We provide general expressions to describe how spin-coupled signals observed by the detectors manifest at map-level, in the harmonic domain, and in the power spectra, focusing on the polarization spectra – the signals of interest for upcoming CMB surveys. We demonstrate the presence of a previously unidentified cross-term between the systematic and the intrinsic sky signal in the power spectrum, which in some cases can be the dominant source of contamination. The formalism is not restricted to intensity to polarization leakage but provides a complete elucidation of all leakage including polarization mixing, and applies to both full and partial (masked) sky surveys, thus covering space-based, balloon-borne, and ground-based experiments. Using a pair-differenced setup, we demonstrate the formalism by using it to completely characterize the effects of differential gain and pointing systematics, incorporating both intensity leakage and polarization mixing. We validate our results with full time ordered data simulations. Finally, we show in an Appendix that an extension of simple binning map-making to include additional spin information is capable of removing spin-coupled systematics during the map-making process

Spin-based removal of instrumental systematics in 21cm intensity mapping surveys

Upcoming cosmological intensity mapping surveys will open new windows on the Universe, but they must first overcome a number of significant systematic effects, including polarization leakage. We present a formalism that uses scan strategy information to model the effect of different instrumental systematics on the recovered cosmological intensity signal for `single-dish' (autocorrelation) surveys. This modelling classifies different systematics according to their spin symmetry, making it particularly relevant for dealing with polarization leakage. We show how to use this formalism to calculate the expected contamination from different systematics as a function of the scanning strategy. Most importantly, we show how systematics can be disentangled from the intensity signal based on their spin properties via map-making. We illustrate this, using a set of toy models, for some simple instrumental systematics, demonstrating the ability to significantly reduce the contamination to the observed intensity signal. Crucially, unlike existing foreground removal techniques, this approach works for signals that are non-smooth in frequency, e.g. polarized foregrounds. These map-making approaches are simple to apply and represent an orthogonal and complementary approach to existing techniques for removing systematics from upcoming 21cm intensity mapping surveys.Comment: 19 pages, 14 Figures, 2 Tables, published in MNRA

Prevalence of Inherited Hemoglobin Disorders and Relationships with Anemia and Micronutrient Status among Children in Yaoundé and Douala, Cameroon.

Information on the etiology of anemia is necessary to design effective anemia control programs. Our objective was to measure the prevalence of inherited hemoglobin disorders (IHD) in a representative sample of children in urban Cameroon, and examine the relationships between IHD and anemia. In a cluster survey of children 12-59 months of age (n = 291) in Yaoundé and Douala, we assessed hemoglobin (Hb), malaria infection, and plasma indicators of inflammation and micronutrient status. Hb S was detected by HPLC, and α⁺thalassemia (3.7 kb deletions) by PCR. Anemia (Hb < 110 g/L), inflammation, and malaria were present in 45%, 46%, and 8% of children. A total of 13.7% of children had HbAS, 1.6% had HbSS, and 30.6% and 3.1% had heterozygous and homozygous α⁺thalassemia. The prevalence of anemia was greater among HbAS compared to HbAA children (60.3 vs. 42.0%, p = 0.038), although mean Hb concentrations did not differ, p = 0.38). Hb and anemia prevalence did not differ among children with or without single gene deletion α⁺thalassemia. In multi-variable models, anemia was independently predicted by HbAS, HbSS, malaria, iron deficiency (ID; inflammation-adjusted ferritin <12 µg/L), higher C-reactive protein, lower plasma folate, and younger age. Elevated soluble transferrin receptor concentration (>8.3 mg/L) was associated with younger age, malaria, greater mean reticulocyte counts, inflammation, HbSS genotype, and ID. IHD are prevalent but contribute modestly to anemia among children in urban Cameroon

Positivity of Entropy in the Semi-Classical Theory of Black Holes and Radiation

Quantum stress-energy tensors of fields renormalized on a Schwarzschild background violate the classical energy conditions near the black hole. Nevertheless, the associated equilibrium thermodynamical entropy $\Delta S$ by which such fields augment the usual black hole entropy is found to be positive. More precisely, the derivative of $\Delta S$ with respect to radius, at fixed black hole mass, is found to vanish at the horizon for {\it all} regular renormalized stress-energy quantum tensors. For the cases of conformal scalar fields and U(1) gauge fields, the corresponding second derivative is positive, indicating that $\Delta S$ has a local minimum there. Explicit calculation shows that indeed $\Delta S$ increases monotonically for increasing radius and is positive. (The same conclusions hold for a massless spin 1/2 field, but the accuracy of the stress-energy tensor we employ has not been confirmed, in contrast to the scalar and vector cases). None of these results would hold if the back-reaction of the radiation on the spacetime geometry were ignored; consequently, one must regard $\Delta S$ as arising from both the radiation fields and their effects on the gravitational field. The back-reaction, no matter how "small",Comment: 19 pages, RevTe

RPL-based routing protocols for multi-sink wireless sensor networks

Recent studies demonstrate that the performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) can be improved by deploying multiple sinks in the network. Therefore, in this paper we present different routing protocols for multi-sink WSNs based on the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). Our protocols use different routing metrics and objective functions (OFs). We use the available bandwidth, delay, MAC layer queue occupancy, and expected transmission count (ETX) as the tie-breaking metrics in conjunction with the shortest hop-count metric. Our OFs use the tie-breaking metrics on a greedy or end-to-end basis. Our simulation results demonstrate that the protocols based on the delay, buffer occupancy, and ETX metrics demonstrate best performance, increasing the packet delivery ratio by up to 25% and decreasing the number of retransmissions by up to 65%, compared to a version of the RPL protocol that only uses the hop-count metric. Another key insight is that, using the tie-breaking metrics on a greedy basis demonstrates a slight performance improvement compared to using the metrics on an end-to-end basis. Finally, our results also demonstrate that multiple sinks inside a WSN improve the RPL-based protocol performance

Evaluation of available bandwidth as a routing metric for delay-sensitive IEEE 802.15.4-based ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we evaluate available bandwidth as a routing metric for IEEE 802.15.4-based ad-hoc networks. The available bandwidth on a data forwarding path is an approximation of the forwarding path’s residual data relaying capacity. High available bandwidth on a data forwarding path implies low data traffic load on the path, therefore data flows may experience low delay and high packet delivery ratio (PDR). Our aim is to evaluate available bandwidth as a routing metric. We present different available-bandwidth-based routing protocols for IEEE 802.15.40-based networks, namely: end-to-end available-bandwidth-based routing protocol (ABR), available bandwidth and contention-aware routing protocol (ABCR), and shortest hop-count and available-bandwidth-based opportunistic routing protocol (ABOR). Moreover, we also present variants of ABR and ABCR capable of distributing a flow’s data packets on multiple paths by maintaining the top K downstream nodes (the downstream nodes that advertised best data forwarding paths towards a sink node) corresponding to each sink node in a routing table. We focus on both single-sink and multi-sink networks. We performed extensive simulations, and the simulation results demonstrate that the available bandwidth routing metric shows better results when combined with a routing metric that helps to limit a data forwarding path’s length, i.e., shortest hop-count or intra-flow contention count. For multi-path data forwarding towards the same sink node, and at high traffic volumes, the available bandwidth metric demonstrates best performance when combined with the shortest hop-count routing metric

The beta-decay of 22Al

In an experiment performed at the LISE3 facility of GANIL, we studied the decay of 22Al produced by the fragmentation of a 36Ar primary beam. A beta-decay half-life of 91.1 +- 0.5 ms was measured. The beta-delayed one- and two-proton emission as well as beta-alpha and beta-delayed gamma decays were measured and allowed us to establish a partial decay scheme for this nucleus. New levels were determined in the daughter nucleus 22Mg. The comparison with model calculations strongly favours a spin-parity of 4+ for the ground state of 22Al

Quark condensates in the chiral bag with the NJL interaction

We discuss the quark condensate of the vacuum inside the baryon. We analyze the 1+1 dimensional chiral bag in analogy with the realistic 3+1 dimensional one. The Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) type interaction is used to investigate the quark condensate in the chiral bag. Considering the strong meson-quark coupling, we solve the mean field solution to the scalar and pseudoscalar channels by including the chiral Casimir effects. The self-consistent equation allows a finite value of the quark condensate and hence a finite dynamical quark mass inside the bag. It is shown that an approximate Cheshire Cat picture holds for massive quarks