Barriers to recovery and recommendations for change: the Pennsylvania Consensus Conference on psychiatry\u27s role.

OBJECTIVE: Recovery has emerged over the past decade as a dominant theme in public mental health care. METHODS: The 2006 Pennsylvania Consensus Conference brought together 24 community psychiatrists to explore the barriers they experienced in promoting recovery and their recommendations for change. RESULTS: Twelve barriers were identified and classified into one of three categories: psychiatry knowledge, roles, and training; the need to transform public mental health systems and services; and environmental barriers to opportunity. Participants made 22 recommendations to address these barriers through changes in policies, programs, and psychiatric knowledge and practice. CONCLUSIONS: The recommendations identify areas for change that can be accomplished through individual psychiatrist action and organized group efforts

Radio line and continuum observations of quasar-galaxy pairs and the origin of low reshift quasar absorption line systems

There are a number of known quasars for which our line of sight to the high redshift quasar passes within a few Holmberg radii of a low redshift galaxy. In a few of these cases, spectra of the quasar reveal absorption by gas associated with the low redshift galaxy. A number of these pairs imply absorption by gas which lies well outside the optical disk of the associated galaxy, leading to models of galaxies with 'halos' or 'disks' of gas extending to large radii. The authors present observations of 4 such pairs. In three of the four cases, they find that the associated galaxy is highly disturbed, typically due to a gravitational interaction with a companion galaxy, while in the fourth case the absorption can be explained by clouds in the optical disk of the associated galaxy. They are led to an alternative hypothesis concerning the origin of the low redshift absorption line systems: the absorption is by gas clouds which have been gravitationally stripped from the associated galaxy. These galaxies are rapidly evolving, and should not be used as examples of absorption by clouds in halos of field spirals. The authors conclude by considering the role extended gas in interacting systems plays in the origin of higher redshift quasar absorption line systems

PISA 2015: how big is the ‘mode effect’ and what has been done about it?

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important cross-national study of 15-year-olds’ academic knowledge and skills. Educationalists and public policymakers eagerly await the tri-annual results, with particular interest in whether their country has moved up or slid down the international rankings, as compared to earlier rounds. In 2015 a major change was implemented in PISA, with the introduction of computer-based assessment. This has the potential to reduce comparability of PISA test scores across countries and over time. We investigate this issue using PISA 2015 field trial data for three countries: Germany, Sweden, and Ireland. We show how, if left unaccounted for, the change to computer-based testing could limit the comparability of PISA test scores. We then describe the methodology the study organisers have used to account for such mode effects. Our key conclusion is that although the adjustment made is unlikely to overcome all the potential challenges of switching to computer-based tests, it represents an improvement over the alternative of making no adjustment at all

HI Properties of Low Luminosity Star-Forming Galaxies in the KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey

New HI observations are presented for a complete sample of 109 low luminosity star-forming galaxies taken from the KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey (KISS), the first CCD-based wide-field objective-prism survey for emission-line galaxies. This sample consists of all star-forming galaxies with M_B > -18.0 and cz < 11,000 km/s from the first Halpha-selected survey list. Overall, 97 out of 109 galaxies have been detected in HI. We confirm the weak trend of increasing gas richness with decreasing luminosity found by previous authors. Gas richness is also shown to be weakly anti-correlated with metallicity. The dependence of star formation rates (SFRs) and HI gas depletion timescales on metallicity is examined. The median solar metallicity based SFR and gas depletion timescale are 0.1639 M_sun/yr and 5 Gyrs, respectively. Corrections for variations in metallicity decreases SFRs by about 0.5 dex and increases gas depletion timescales by an average of about 8 Gyrs. The majority of galaxies in this sample still have large reservoirs of HI gas, and despite their large current star formation rates, could have formed stars in a quasi-continuous manner for a Hubble time. Finally, we present the first HI mass function for low luminosity star-forming galaxies and show that this subpopulation contributes 10-15% of the overall HI density in the local universe. We conclude that if the HI mass function of the Universe does indeed have a steeply rising low-mass slope as suggested by previous authors, it is not due to the population of low luminosity star-forming galaxies.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

Metal Abundances of KISS Galaxies III. Nebular Abundances for Fourteen Galaxies and the Luminosity-Metallicity Relationship for HII Galaxies

We report results from the third in a series of nebular abundance studies of emission-line galaxies from the KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey (KISS). Galaxies with coarse metallicity estimates of 12 + log(O/H) less than 8.2 dex were selected for observation. Spectra of 14 galaxies, which cover the full optical region from [OII]3727,3729 to beyond [SII]6717,6731, are presented, and abundance ratios of N, O, Ne, S, and Ar are computed. The auroral [OIII]4363 line is detected in all 14 galaxies. Oxygen abundances determined through the direct electron temperature T_e method confirm that the sample is metal-poor with 7.61 <= 12 + log(O/H) <= 8.32. By using these abundances in conjunction with other T_e-based measurements from the literature, we demonstrate that HII galaxies and more quiescent dwarf irregular galaxies follow similar metallicity-luminosity (L-Z) relationships. The primary difference is a zero-point shift between the correlations such that HII galaxies are brighter by an average of 0.8 B magnitudes at a given metallicity. This offset can be used as evidence to argue that low-luminosity HII galaxies typically undergo factor of two luminosity enhancements, and starbursts that elevate the luminosities of their host galaxies by 2 to 3 magnitudes are not as common. We also demonstrate that the inclusion of interacting galaxies can increase the scatter in the L-Z relation and may force the observed correlation towards lower metallicities and/or larger luminosities. This must be taken into account when attempting to infer metal abundance evolution by comparing local L-Z relations with ones based on higher redshift samples since the fraction of interacting galaxies should increase with look-back time.Comment: 36 pages, 5 figures. ApJ, in pres