The Health Crisis for CHA Families

Outlines a study of long-term trends in the health status of Chicago's distressed public housing residents, including chronic illness, disability, mortality rates, and anxiety. Examines limited effects of moving to better housing and their implications

Escaping the Hidden War: Safety Is the Biggest Gain for CHA Families

Examines changes in residents' sense of safety and exposure to drugs, gangs, and violence after moving from distressed public housing to mixed-income or rehabilitated developments or the private market. Makes recommendations for sustaining gains

A fresh look at paralytics in the critically ill: real promise and real concern.

Neuromuscular blocking agents (NMBAs), or "paralytics," often are deployed in the sickest patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) when usual care fails. Despite the publication of guidelines on the use of NMBAs in the ICU in 2002, clinicians have needed more direction to determine which patients would benefit from NMBAs and which patients would be harmed. Recently, new evidence has shown that paralytics hold more promise when used in carefully selected lung injury patients for brief periods of time. When used in early acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), NMBAs assist to establish a lung protective strategy, which leads to improved oxygenation, decreased pulmonary and systemic inflammation, and potentially improved mortality. It also is increasingly recognized that NMBAs can cause harm, particularly critical illness polyneuromyopathy (CIPM), when used for prolonged periods or in septic shock. In this review, we address several practical considerations for clinicians who use NMBAs in their practice. Ultimately, we conclude that NMBAs should be considered a lung protective adjuvant in early ARDS and that clinicians should consider using an alternative NMBA to the aminosteroids in septic shock with less severe lung injury pending further studies

Oxygen in the Earth's core: a first principles study

First principles electronic structure calculations based on density functional theory have been used to study the thermodynamic, structural and transport properties of solid solutions and liquid alloys of iron and oxygen at Earth's core conditions. Aims of the work are to determine the oxygen concentration needed to account for the inferred density in the outer core, to probe the stability of the liquid against phase separation, to interpret the bonding in the liquid, and to find out whether the viscosity differs significantly from that of pure liquid iron at the same conditions. It is shown that the required concentration of oxygen is in the region 25-30 mol percent, and evidence is presented for phase stability at these conditions. The Fe-O bonding is partly ionic, but with a strong covalent component. The viscosity is lower than that of pure liquid iron at Earth's core conditions. It is shown that earlier first-principles calculations indicating very large enthalpies of formation of solid solutions may need reinterpretation, since the assumed crystal structures are not the most stable at the oxygen concentration of interest.Comment: 21 pages, 12 figure

Atlantic Exchange: Case Studies of Housing and Community Redevelopment in the United States and the United Kingdom

Examines lessons learned from community redevelopment initiatives in Birmingham, England, and Chicago. Explores physical, managerial, and demographic changes and issues of place identity, community cohesion, and the communities' place in city initiatives

An Induced Natural Selection Heuristic for Finding Optimal Bayesian Experimental Designs

Bayesian optimal experimental design has immense potential to inform the collection of data so as to subsequently enhance our understanding of a variety of processes. However, a major impediment is the difficulty in evaluating optimal designs for problems with large, or high-dimensional, design spaces. We propose an efficient search heuristic suitable for general optimisation problems, with a particular focus on optimal Bayesian experimental design problems. The heuristic evaluates the objective (utility) function at an initial, randomly generated set of input values. At each generation of the algorithm, input values are "accepted" if their corresponding objective (utility) function satisfies some acceptance criteria, and new inputs are sampled about these accepted points. We demonstrate the new algorithm by evaluating the optimal Bayesian experimental designs for the previously considered death, pharmacokinetic and logistic regression models. Comparisons to the current "gold-standard" method are given to demonstrate the proposed algorithm as a computationally-efficient alternative for moderately-large design problems (i.e., up to approximately 40-dimensions)

The CHA's Plan for Transformation: How Have Residents Fared?

Summarizes findings from studies on how relocation from distressed public housing changed former residents' quality of life, including living conditions, safety, poverty, employment, health, well-being of children, and satisfaction. Outlines implications

Historical cohort study examining comparative effectiveness of albuterol inhalers with and without integrated dose counter for patients with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

This study was supported financially by an unrestricted grant from Teva Pharmaceuticals, Frazer, PA, USA. The authors thank Jenny Fanstone of Fanstone Medical Communications Ltd., UK, and Elizabeth V Hillyer for medical writing support, funded by Research in Real-Life. We acknowledge with gratitude Dr Ruchir Parikh for his review of and contributions to the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Modelling circumstellar discs with 3D radiation hydrodynamics

We present results from combining a grid-based radiative transfer code with a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics code to produce a flexible system for modelling radiation hydrodynamics. We use a benchmark model of a circumstellar disc to determine a robust method for constructing a gridded density distribution from SPH particles. The benchmark disc is then used to determine the accuracy of the radiative transfer results. We find that the SED and the temperature distribution within the disc are sensitive to the representation of the disc inner edge, which depends critically on both the grid and SPH resolution. The code is then used to model a circumstellar disc around a T-Tauri star. As the disc adjusts towards equilibrium vertical motions in the disc are induced resulting in scale height enhancements which intercept radiation from the central star. Vertical transport of radiation enables these perturbations to influence the mid-plane temperature of the disc. The vertical motions decay over time and the disc ultimately reaches a state of simultaneous hydrostatic and radiative equilibrium.Comment: MNRAS accepted; 15 pages; 17 figures, 4 in colou