Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Preferences among American Indian People of the Northern Midwest

This study examines factors that influence preferences between traditional cultural and western mental health and substance use associated care among American Indians from the northern Midwest. Personal interviews were conducted with 865 parents/caretakers of tribally enrolled youth concerning their preferences for traditional/cultural and formal healthcare for mental health or substance abuse problems. Adults strongly preferred traditional informal services to formal medical services. In addition, formal services on reservation were preferred to off reservation services. To better serve the mental health and substance abuse treatment needs of American Indians, traditional informal services should be incorporated into the current medical model

Measuring emotional and social wellbeing in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations: an analysis of a Negative Life Events Scale

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians experience widespread socioeconomic disadvantage and health inequality. In an attempt to make Indigenous health research more culturally-appropriate, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have called for more attention to the concept of emotional and social wellbeing (ESWB). Although it has been widely recognised that ESWB is of crucial importance to the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, there is little consensus on how to measure in Indigenous populations, hampering efforts to better understand and improve the psychosocial determinants of health. This paper explores the policy and political context to this situation, and suggests ways to move forward. The second part of the paper explores how scales can be evaluated in a health research setting, including assessments of endorsement, discrimination, internal and external reliability

On benchmarking optical flow

Evaluating the performance of optical flow algorithms has been difficult because of the lack of ground truth data sets for complex scenes. We present a new method for generating motion fields from real sequences containing polyhedral objects and present a test suite for benchmarking optical flow algorithms consisting of complex synthetic sequences and real scenes with ground truth. We provide a preliminary quantitative evaluation of seven optical flow algorithms using these synthetic and real sequences. Ultimately, we feel that researchers should benchmark their own algorithms using a standard suite. To that end, we offer our Web site as a repository for standard sequences and results

Correlates of Motivational Interviewing Use Among Substance Use Treatment Programs Serving American Indians/Alaska Natives

Motivational interviewing (MI) offers a treatment modality that can help meet the treatment needs of American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) with substance use disorders. This report presents results from a national survey of 192 AI/AN substance abuse treatment programs with regard to their use of MI and factors related to its implementation, including program characteristics, workforce issues, clinician perceptions of MI, and how clinicians learned about MI. Sixty-six percent of programs reported having implemented the use of MI in their programs. In the final logistic regression model, the odds of implementing MI were significantly higher when programs were tribally owned (OR = 2.946; CI95 1.014, 8.564), where more than 50% of staff were Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselors (CADCs) (OR = 5.469; CI951.330, 22.487), and in programs in which the survey respondent perceived that MI fit well with their staff\u27s expertise and training (OR = 3.321; CI95 1.287, 8.569)

Augmenting Experience Reports with Lightweight Postmortem Reviews

Abstract. Many small and medium-sized companies that develop software experience the same problems repeatedly, and have few systems in place to learn from their own mistakes as well as their own successes. Here, we propose a lightweight method to collect experience from completed software projects, and compare the results of this method to more widely applied experience reports. We find that the new method captures more information about core processes related to software development in contrast to experience reports that focus more on management processes.

Recovering Motion Fields: An Evaluation of Eight Optical Flow Algorithms

Evaluating the performance of optical flow algorithms has been difficult because of the lack of ground-truth data sets for complex scenes. We describe a simple modification to a ray tracer that allows us to generate ground-truth motion fields for scenes of arbitrary complexity. The resulting flow maps are used to assist in the comparison of eight optical flow algorithms using three complex, synthetic scenes. Our study found that a modified version of Lucas and Kanade's algorithm has superior performance but produces sparse flow maps. Proesmans et al.'s algorithm performs slightly worse, on average, but produces a very dense depth map. 1 Introduction Seventeen years have passed since Horn and Schunck published their influential paper on the calculation of optical flow [4]. Since then, a substantial amount of research has been devoted to finding ways to calculate optical flow more efficiently and more accurately. Optical flow extraction has been proposed as a preprocessing step..