Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Inheriting the Goddess – continuity or change? Have the values and beliefs of the Goddess movement that formed the spiritual foundation of Greenham Common women’s peace camp in the nineteen-eighties, informed women’s climate change activism in the contemporary Extinction Rebellion movement?

This thesis provides an ethnographic exploration of the British Feminist movement as it has evolved over the last forty years. Specifically, this research examines the Goddess movement that underpinned women’s anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common women’s peace camp in the nineteen-eighties and considers whether it has continued to inform the spiritual world of female climate change activists involved in Extinction Rebellion (hereafter referred to as XR) since two-thousand-and-eighteen. This reflective ethnographic approach, based on focused field research among women directly involved in related activism, has been framed by the works of Robert A Orsi (2007, 2008, 2013) and suggests that the presence of the Goddess during the Greenham actions was very much part of the overall spiritual experience and, indeed, motivation to act. Furthermore, I will draw on the work of Donovan O Schaefer (2015) and examine the role of grief in relation to affect theory as it has underpinned women’s activism from anti-nuclear to climate change crisis over the past four decades. I have approached this thesis primarily as a historical enquiry into Goddess feminism at Greenham Common women’s peace camp, comparing it with Goddess feminism in XR, expecting to find that the values and spiritual beliefs in relation to the Goddess would be little changed in forty years. I have used a reflexive ethnographic approach with the collection of qualitative data through recorded interviews, to understand the lives and similarities between Goddess feminists four decades apart. These interviews and observations, which provide the backbone of my research, have revealed rich and informative testimony from my informants, which I hope will add considerably to the fairly limited body of work on the Goddess at Greenham and, to a lesser extent, in XR

Council tax valuation band predicts breast feeding and socio-economic status in the ALSPAC study population

BACKGROUND: Breast-feeding rates in the UK are known to vary by maternal socio-economic status but the latter function is imperfectly defined. We test if CTVB (Council Tax Valuation Band – a categorical assessment of UK property values and amenities governing local tax levies) of maternal address predicts, in a large UK regional sample of births, (a) breast-feeding (b) personal and socio-economic attributes of the mothers. METHODS: Retrospective study of a subset (n.1390 selected at random) of the ALSPAC sample (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children), a large, geographically defined cohort of mothers followed from early pregnancy to 8 weeks post-delivery. Outcome measures are attitudes to breast-feeding prior to delivery, breast-feeding intention and uptake, demographic and socio-economic attributes of the mothers, CTVB of maternal home address at the time of each birth. Logistic regression analysis, categorical tests. RESULTS: Study sample: 1360 women divided across the CTVBs – at least 155 in any band or band aggregation. CTVB predicted only one belief or attitude – that bottle-feeding was more convenient for the mother. However only 31% of 'CTVB A infants' are fully breast fed at 4 weeks of life whereas for 'CTVB E+ infants' the rate is 57%. CTVB is also strongly associated with maternal social class, home conditions, parental educational attainment, family income and smoking habit. CONCLUSION: CTVB predicts breast-feeding rates and links them with social circumstances. CTVB could be used as the basis for accurate resource allocation for community paediatric services: UK breast-feeding rates are low and merit targeted promotion

Astronomy below the survey threshold in the SKA era

Astronomy at or below the 'survey threshold' has expanded significantly since the publication of the original 'Science with the Square Kilometer Array' in 1999 and its update in 2004. The techniques in this regime may be broadly (but far from exclusively) defined as 'confusion' or 'P(D)' analyses (analyses of one-point statistics), and 'stacking', accounting for the flux-density distribution of noise-limited images co-added at the positions of objects detected/isolated in a different waveband. Here we discuss the relevant issues, present some examples of recent analyses, and consider some of the consequences for the design and use of surveys with the SKA and its pathfinders

Community-Based Provision of Statin and Aspirin After the Detection of Coronary Artery Calcium Within a Community-Based Screening Cohort

ObjectivesWe examined the association of coronary artery calcium (CAC) detected on a screening exam with subsequent statin and aspirin usage in a healthy male screening cohort.BackgroundWhether the presence of CAC, an independent predictor of coronary heart disease outcomes, alters clinical management, such as the use of preventive medications, is unknown.MethodsMen (n = 1,640) ages 40 to 50 years (mean 42 years) were screened for coronary heart disease risk factors and CAC. The CAC scores and risk factors were reported to patients, and results were made available in the electronic medical record; however, medications were not prescribed or recommended by the study. During up to 6 years of subsequent annual structured telephone follow-up, we observed the community-based initiation and persistence of aspirin and statin therapy.ResultsA progressive increase in the incidence of pharmacotherapy was noted over time such that those with CAC were 3 times more likely to receive a statin (48.5% vs. 15.5%, p < 0.001) and also significantly more likely to receive aspirin (53.0% vs. 32.3%; p < 0.001) than those without CAC. In multivariable models controlling for National Cholesterol Education Program risk variables and baseline medication use, CAC was strongly and independently associated with use of either statin (odds ratio [OR] 3.53; 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.66 to 4.69), aspirin (OR 3.05; 95% CI 2.30 to 4.05) or both (OR 6.97; 95% CI 4.81 to 10.10).ConclusionsIn this prospective cohort, the presence of coronary calcification was associated with an independent 3-fold greater likelihood of statin and aspirin usage

Rapid Diagnostic Test Performance Assessed Using Latent Class Analysis for the Diagnosis of Plasmodium falciparum Placental Malaria.

Placental malaria causes low birth weight and neonatal mortality in malaria-endemic areas. The diagnosis of placental malaria is important for program evaluation and clinical care, but is compromised by the suboptimal performance of current diagnostics. Using placental and peripheral blood specimens collected from delivering women in Malawi, we compared estimation of the operating characteristics of microscopy, rapid diagnostic test (RDT), polymerase chain reaction, and histopathology using both a traditional contingency table and a latent class analysis (LCA) approach. The prevalence of placental malaria by histopathology was 13.8%; concordance between tests was generally poor. Relative to histopathology, RDT sensitivity was 79.5% in peripheral and 66.2% in placental blood; using LCA, RDT sensitivities increased to 93.7% and 80.2%, respectively. Our results, if replicated in other cohorts, indicate that RDT testing of peripheral or placental blood may be suitable approaches to detect placental malaria for surveillance programs, including areas where intermittent preventive therapy in pregnancy is not used

Childhood IQ and marriage by mid-life: the Scottish Mental Survey 1932 and the Midspan Studies

The study examined the influence of IQ at age 11 years on marital status by mid-adulthood. The combined databases of the Scottish Mental Survey 1932 and the Midspan studies provided data from 883 subjects. With regard to IQ at age 11, there was an interaction between sex and marital status by mid-adulthood (p &#61; 0.0001). Women who had ever-married achieved mean lower childhood IQ scores than women who had never-married (p &#60; 0.001). Conversely, there was a trend for men who had ever-married to achieve higher childhood IQ scores than men who had never-married (p &#61; 0.07). In men, the odds ratio of ever marrying was 1.35 (95&#37; CI 0.98–1.86&#59; p &#61; 0.07) for each standard deviation increase in childhood IQ. Among women, the odds ratio of ever marrying by mid-life was 0.42 (95&#37; CI 0.27–0.64; p &#61; 0.0001) for each standard deviation increase in childhood IQ. Mid-life social class had a similar association with marriage, with women in more professional jobs and men in more manual jobs being less likely to have ever-married by mid-life. Adjustment for the effects of mid-life social class and height on the association between childhood IQ and later marriage, and vice versa, attenuated the effects somewhat, but suggested that IQ, height and social class acted partly independently