1,052 research outputs found

    Household decision-making about delivery in health facilities: evidence from Tanzania.

    Get PDF
    This study investigated how partners' perceptions of the healthcare system influence decisions about delivery-location in low-resource settings. A multistage population-representative sample was used in Kasulu district, Tanzania, to identify women who had given birth in the last five years and their partners. Of 826 couples in analysis, 506 (61.3%) of the women delivered in the home. In multivariate analysis, factors associated with delivery in a health facility were agreement of partners on the importance of delivering in a health facility and agreement that skills of doctors are better than those of traditional birth attendants. When partners disagreed, the opinion of the woman was more influential in determining delivery-location. Agreement of partners regarding perceptions about the healthcare system appeared to be an important driver of decisions about delivery-location. These findings suggest that both partners should be included in the decision-making process regarding delivery to raise rates of delivery at facility

    Studying the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium in Emission

    Get PDF
    We assess the possibility to detect the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) in emission and to characterize its physical conditions and spatial distribution through spatially resolved X-ray spectroscopy, in the framework of the recently proposed DIOS, EDGE, Xenia, and ORIGIN missions, all of which are equipped with microcalorimeter-based detectors. For this purpose we analyze a large set of mock emission spectra, extracted from a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. These mock X-ray spectra are searched for emission features showing both the OVII K alpha triplet and OVIII Ly alpha line, which constitute a typical signature of the warm hot gas. Our analysis shows that 1 Ms long exposures and energy resolution of 2.5 eV will allow us to detect about 400 such features per deg^2 with a significance >5 sigma and reveals that these emission systems are typically associated with density ~100 above the mean. The temperature can be estimated from the line ratio with a precision of ~20%. The combined effect of contamination from other lines, variation in the level of the continuum, and degradation of the energy resolution reduces these estimates. Yet, with an energy resolution of 7 eV and all these effects taken into account, one still expects about 160 detections per deg^2. These line systems are sufficient to trace the spatial distribution of the line-emitting gas, which constitute an additional information, independent from line statistics, to constrain the poorly known cosmic chemical enrichment history and the stellar feedback processes.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures, ApJ in press; revised version according to revie

    Chandra View of the Warm-hot Intergalactic Medium toward 1ES 1553+113: Absorption-line Detections and Identifications. I.

    Get PDF
    We present the first results from our pilot 500 ks Chandra Low Energy Transmission Grating Large Program observation of the soft X-ray brightest source in the z gsim 0.4 sky, the blazar 1ES 1553+113, aimed to secure the first uncontroversial detections of the missing baryons in the X-rays. We identify a total of 11 possible absorption lines, with single-line statistical significances between 2.2σ and 4.1σ. Six of these lines are detected at high single-line statistical significance (3.6 ≤ σ ≤ 4.1), while the remaining five are regarded as marginal detections in association with either other X-ray lines detected at higher significance and/or far-ultraviolet (FUV) signposts. Three of these lines are consistent with metal absorption at z sime 0, and we identify them with Galactic O I and C II. The remaining eight lines may be imprinted by intervening absorbers and are all consistent with being high-ionization counterparts of FUV H I and/or O VI intergalactic medium signposts. In particular, five of these eight possible intervening absorption lines (single-line statistical significances of 4.1σ, 4.1σ, 3.9σ, 3.8σ, and 2.7σ), are identified as C V and C VI Kα absorbers belonging to three WHIM systems at zX = 0.312, zX = 0.237, and langzX rang = 0.133, which also produce broad H I (and O VI for the zX = 0.312 system) absorption in the FUV. For two of these systems (zX = 0.312 and 0.237), the Chandra X-ray data led the a posteriori discovery of physically consistent broad H I associations in the FUV (for the third system the opposite applies), so confirming the power of the X-ray-FUV synergy for WHIM studies. The true statistical significances of these three X-ray absorption systems, after properly accounting for the number of redshift trials, are 5.8σ (zX = 0.312; 6.3σ if the low-significance O V and C V Kβ associations are considered), 3.9σ (zX = 0.237), and 3.8σ (langzX rang = 0.133), respectively

    Shocks, Seyferts and the SNR connection: a Chandra observation of the Circinus galaxy

    Get PDF
    We analyse new Chandra observations of the nearest (D=4 Mpc) Seyfert 2 active galaxy, Circinus, and match them to pre-existing radio, infrared and optical data to study the kpc-scale emission. The proximity of Circinus allows us to observe in striking detail the structure of the radio lobes, revealing for the first time edge-brightened emission both in X-rays and radio. After considering various other possible scenarios, we show that this extended emission in Circinus is most likely caused by a jet-driven outflow, which is driving shells of strongly shocked gas into the halo of the host galaxy. In this context, we estimate Mach numbers M=2.7-3.6 and M=2.8-5.3 for the W and E shells respectively. We derive temperatures of 0.74 (+0.06, -0.05) keV and 0.8-1.8 keV for the W and E shells, and an expansion velocity of ~900-950 km/s. We estimate that the total energy (thermal and kinetic) involved in creating both shells is ~2x10^55 erg, and their age is ~10^6 years. Comparing these results with those we previously obtained for Centaurus A, NGC 3801 and Mrk 6, we show that these parameters scale approximately with the radio power of the parent AGN. The spatial coincidence between the X-ray and edge-brightened radio emission in Circinus resembles the morphology of some SNR shocks. This parallel has been expected for AGN, but has never been observed before. We investigate what underlying mechanisms both types of systems may have in common, arguing that, in Circinus, the edge-brightening in the shells may be accounted for by a B field enhancement caused by shock compression, but do not preclude some local particle acceleration. These results can be extrapolated to other low-power systems, particularly those with late type hosts.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, and 5 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap

    The lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media

    Get PDF
    We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the caloric content of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of caloric input , caloric output , and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities; is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates; has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a population\u27s health; and has the potential to be used alongside traditional survey data in the development of public policy and collective self-awareness. Because our Lexicocalorimeter is a linear superposition of principled phrase scores, we also show we can move beyond correlations to explore what people talk about in collective detail, and assist in the understanding and explanation of how population-scale conditions vary, a capacity unavailable to black-box type methods
    • …
    corecore