Fragmented Communities: Addressing War and Injury-Related Trauma through Community Building among Iraqi Women Refugees in Connecticut

For Iraqi refugee women in Connecticut, trauma is a pervasive and debilitating force that affects their everyday lives. Although these women escaped the persecution and ongoing violence in Iraq, they suffer from feelings of loneliness and anxiety and are haunted by flashbacks, nightmares and memories of their traumatic experiences. Coupled with fears for their relatives who still have to endure the worsening situation in Iraq, Iraqi refugee women are caught between dealing with a trauma of the past and a trauma that permeates their lives in America. Aside from medical institutions, social capital networks including ethnic communities, mosques, refugee resettlement organizations, and faith-based associations can have a significant impact on the coping mechanisms of this vulnerable population. What resources do Iraqi refugee women in particular use to tackle their mental health related issues and feelings of loneliness, stress and loss? An ethnographic approach to interviewing these women over the course of a year provided insight to this question. My project revealed that Iraqi refugee women confront their traumatic experiences through transnational ties to family members by: a) speaking about their traumatic stories as a means to remember or to forget, and b) being able to relate to an individual who has undergone and may still be undergoing trauma within the specific sociocultural and historical context of Iraq. Transnational networks accomplish a) and b) through preserving contact by means of communication over the Internet. In the conclusion, I note that a dual approach needs to occur which promotes awareness around mental illness in various communities and the incorporation of more culturally appropriate mental health services to allow Iraqi refugees to heal from their trauma

Assessment of Vessel Density on Non-Contrast Computed Tomography to Detect Basilar Artery Occlusion

Introduction: Basilar artery occlusion (BAO) may be clinically occult due to variable and non-specific symptomatology. We evaluated the qualitative and quantitative determination of a hyperdense basilar artery (HDBA) on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) brain for the diagnosis of BAO.Methods: We conducted a case control study of patients with confirmed acute BAO vs a control group of suspected acute stroke patients without BAO. Two EM attending physicians, one third-year EM resident, and one medical student performed qualitative and quantitative assessments for the presence of a HDBA on axial NCCT images. Our primary outcome measures were sensitivity and specificity for BAO. Our secondary outcomes were inter-rater and intra-rater reliability of the qualitative and quantitative assessments.Results: We included 60 BAO and 65 control patients in our analysis. Qualitative assessment of the hyperdense basilar artery sign was poorly sensitive (54%–72%) and specific (55%–89%). Quantitative measurement improved the specificity of hyperdense basilar artery assessment for diagnosing BAO, with a threshold of 61.0–63.8 Hounsfield units demonstrating relatively high specificity of 85%–94%. There was moderate inter-rater agreement for the qualitative assessment of HDBA (Fleiss’ kappa statistic 0.508, 95% confidence interval: 0.435–0.581). Agreement improved for quantitative assessments, but still fell in the moderate range (Shrout-Fleiss intraclass correlation coefficient: 0.635). Intra-rater reliability for the quantitative assessments of the two attending physician reviewers demonstrated substantial consistency.Conclusion: Our results highlight the importance of carefully examining basilar artery density when interpreting the NCCT of patients with altered consciousness or other signs and symptoms concerning for an acute basilar artery occlusion. If the Hounsfield unit density of the basilar artery exceeds 61 Hounsfield units, BAO should be highly suspected

Optimization of an ih-cavity based high energy heavy-ion LINAC at GSI

A new high energy heavy-ion injector (HE-Linac) for the FAIR project was proposedas replacement for the existing post-stripper linac at the GSI UNILAC. Six 108 MHz IH-type drift-tube linac cavities within a total length of about 24m accelerate the ions (up to U28+) from1.4 MeV/u up to 11.4 MeV/u. Fast pulsed quadrupole triplet lenses are used for transverse focusing in between the IH cavities. The optimization of the HE linac with respect to the emittance growth reductionis investigated

Cómo valoran y usan las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC) los profesores de alumnos con Necesidades Educativas Especiales (NEE)

La introducción paulatina de las (TIC) en todos lo ámbitos de la actividad humana está transformando la sociedad y, en consecuencia, emergen directamente dentro del escenario educativo.; por ello, en los diferentes tipos de centros de las diversas etapas educativas se están desarrollando experiencias muy interesantes, pero paulatinas y analíticas, que reflejan el aprovechamiento en las diversas áreas de la enseñanza-aprendizaje.Y desde aquí ya adelantamos que este trabajo ha pretendido abrir un foro de debate y reflexión sobre la articulación de las TIC en las aulas dando a conocer opiniones docentes con la finalidad de enriquecer formación para profesionales del diferente alumnado, contemplando, plenamente, sus nee de éste cuando las presenta

Online Algorithms with Advice for the -search Problem

In the online search problem, a seller seeks to find the maximum price from a sequence of prices p1, p2,…, pn that is revealed in a piece-wise manner. The bound for all prices is well known in advance with m ≤ pί ≤ M. In the online k-search problem, the seller seeks to find the k maximum out of the n prices. In this paper, we present a tight bound of [Formula Presented] on the advice complexity of optimal online algorithms for online k-search. We also provide online algorithms with advice that use less than the required number of bits and compute the performance guarantee. Although it is natural to expect improvement due to the additional power of advice, we are interested to identify the relationship of additional information with respect to the improvement. We show that with 1 bit of advice, we can already surpass the quality of the best possible deterministic algorithm for online 2-search. We also provide a set of online algorithms, ALGί, that utilizes [Formula Presented] advice bits with a competitive ratio of (formula presented). We show that increasing the amount of advice improves the solution quality of the algorithm. Moreover, we compare the power of advice and randomization. We show that for some identified minimum number of advice bits, the lower bound on the competitive ratio of online algorithms with advice is better than any deterministic and randomized algorithm for online k-search