429 research outputs found
Petition for a Writ of Certiorari. Opp v. Office of the State\u27s Attorney of Cook County, 565 U.S. 815 (2011) (No. 10-1163), 2011 U.S. LEXIS 6893
QUESTION PRESENTED Five major federal employment statutes, including in this case the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, exclude certain government workers at the policymaking level from the definition of employees protected by those laws. The question presented is: who is a worker on the policymaking level
Effect of home telemonitoring on glycemic and blood pressure control in primary care clinic patients with diabetes
Objective: Patient self-management support may be augmented by using home-based technologies that generate data points that providers can potentially use to make more timely changes in the patients' care. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of short-term targeted use of remote data transmission on treatment outcomes in patients with diabetes who had either out-of-range hemoglobin A1c (A1c) and/or blood pressure (BP) measurements. Materials and Methods: A single-center randomized controlled clinical trial design compared in-home monitoring (n=55) and usual care (n=53) in patients with type 2 diabetes and hypertension being treated in primary care clinics. Primary outcomes were A1c and systolic BP after a 12-week intervention. Results: There were no significant differences between the intervention and control groups on either A1c or systolic BP following the intervention. Conclusions: The addition of technology alone is unlikely to lead to improvements in outcomes. Practices need to be selective in their use of telemonitoring with patients, limiting it to patients who have motivation or a significant change in care, such as starting insulin. Attention to the need for effective and responsive clinic processes to optimize the use of the additional data is also important when implementing these types of technology
Treaty Compliance and Violation
International law has enjoyed a recent renaissance as an important subfield of study within international relations. Two trends are evident in the recent literature. First, the obsession with theoretical labels is on the decline. Second, empirical, especially quantitative, work is burgeoning. This article reviews the literature in four issues areas — security, war, and peace; international trade; protection of the environment; and human rights — and concludes we have a much stronger basis for assessing claims about compliance and violation now than was the case only a few years ago. Still, the literature suffers from a few weaknesses, including problems of selection and endogeneity of treaties themselves and an enduring state-centric focus, despite the fact that researchers recognize that nonstate and substate actors influence treaty behavior. Nonetheless, the quality and quantity of new work demonstrates that international law has regained an important place in the study of international politics
Focus, Vol. 1 No. 1
A literary magazine of student writing published by the Department of English of Stephen F. Austin State College.https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/focus/1000/thumbnail.jp
Occupational Risks during a Monkeypox Outbreak, Wisconsin, 2003
Veterinary staff were at high risk; standard veterinary infection-control guidelines should be followed
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measuring structure growth using passive galaxies
We explore the benefits of using a passively evolving population of galaxies
to measure the evolution of the rate of structure growth between z=0.25 and
z=0.65 by combining data from the SDSS-I/II and SDSS-III surveys. The
large-scale linear bias of a population of dynamically passive galaxies, which
we select from both surveys, is easily modeled. Knowing the bias evolution
breaks degeneracies inherent to other methodologies, and decreases the
uncertainty in measurements of the rate of structure growth and the
normalization of the galaxy power-spectrum by up to a factor of two. If we
translate our measurements into a constraint on sigma_8(z=0) assuming a
concordance cosmological model and General Relativity (GR), we find that using
a bias model improves our uncertainty by a factor of nearly 1.5. Our results
are consistent with a flat Lambda Cold Dark Matter model and with GR.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS (clarifications added, results and
conclusions unchanged
NACCHO Exchange: Health Equity
Essential Elements of Health Equity Practice: Partnering to Support Power-Building; Revitalizing Communities: Partnerships to Create Active, Safe Places in Merced County, California; Advancing Health Equity through Regional Collaboration; and Governing for Racial Equity: A Local Health Department's Journe
The Chandra Source Catalog
The Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) is a general purpose virtual X-ray
astrophysics facility that provides access to a carefully selected set of
generally useful quantities for individual X-ray sources, and is designed to
satisfy the needs of a broad-based group of scientists, including those who may
be less familiar with astronomical data analysis in the X-ray regime. The first
release of the CSC includes information about 94,676 distinct X-ray sources
detected in a subset of public ACIS imaging observations from roughly the first
eight years of the Chandra mission. This release of the catalog includes point
and compact sources with observed spatial extents <~ 30''. The catalog (1)
provides access to the best estimates of the X-ray source properties for
detected sources, with good scientific fidelity, and directly supports
scientific analysis using the individual source data; (2) facilitates analysis
of a wide range of statistical properties for classes of X-ray sources; and (3)
provides efficient access to calibrated observational data and ancillary data
products for individual X-ray sources, so that users can perform detailed
further analysis using existing tools. The catalog includes real X-ray sources
detected with flux estimates that are at least 3 times their estimated 1 sigma
uncertainties in at least one energy band, while maintaining the number of
spurious sources at a level of <~ 1 false source per field for a 100 ks
observation. For each detected source, the CSC provides commonly tabulated
quantities, including source position, extent, multi-band fluxes, hardness
ratios, and variability statistics, derived from the observations in which the
source is detected. In addition to these traditional catalog elements, for each
X-ray source the CSC includes an extensive set of file-based data products that
can be manipulated interactively.Comment: To appear in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 53 pages,
27 figure
Cosmological Constraints from the Clustering of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 Luminous Red Galaxies
We present the power spectrum of the reconstructed halo density field derived
from a sample of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Seventh Data Release (DR7). The halo power spectrum has a direct connection to
the underlying dark matter power for k <= 0.2 h/Mpc, well into the quasi-linear
regime. This enables us to use a factor of ~8 more modes in the cosmological
analysis than an analysis with kmax = 0.1 h/Mpc, as was adopted in the SDSS
team analysis of the DR4 LRG sample (Tegmark et al. 2006). The observed halo
power spectrum for 0.02 < k < 0.2 h/Mpc is well-fit by our model: chi^2 = 39.6
for 40 degrees of freedom for the best fit LCDM model. We find \Omega_m h^2 *
(n_s/0.96)^0.13 = 0.141^{+0.009}_{-0.012} for a power law primordial power
spectrum with spectral index n_s and \Omega_b h^2 = 0.02265 fixed, consistent
with CMB measurements. The halo power spectrum also constrains the ratio of the
comoving sound horizon at the baryon-drag epoch to an effective distance to
z=0.35: r_s/D_V(0.35) = 0.1097^{+0.0039}_{-0.0042}. Combining the halo power
spectrum measurement with the WMAP 5 year results, for the flat LCDM model we
find \Omega_m = 0.289 +/- 0.019 and H_0 = 69.4 +/- 1.6 km/s/Mpc. Allowing for
massive neutrinos in LCDM, we find \sum m_{\nu} < 0.62 eV at the 95% confidence
level. If we instead consider the effective number of relativistic species Neff
as a free parameter, we find Neff = 4.8^{+1.8}_{-1.7}. Combining also with the
Kowalski et al. (2008) supernova sample, we find \Omega_{tot} = 1.011 +/- 0.009
and w = -0.99 +/- 0.11 for an open cosmology with constant dark energy equation
of state w.Comment: 26 pages, 19 figures, submitted to MNRAS. The power spectrum and a
module to calculate the likelihoods is publicly available at
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/toolbox/lrgdr/ . v2 fixes abstract formatting
issu
Statistical Characterization of the Chandra Source Catalog
The first release of the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) contains ~95,000 X-ray
sources in a total area of ~0.75% of the entire sky, using data from ~3,900
separate ACIS observations of a multitude of different types of X-ray sources.
In order to maximize the scientific benefit of such a large, heterogeneous
data-set, careful characterization of the statistical properties of the
catalog, i.e., completeness, sensitivity, false source rate, and accuracy of
source properties, is required. Characterization efforts of other, large
Chandra catalogs, such as the ChaMP Point Source Catalog (Kim et al. 2007) or
the 2 Mega-second Deep Field Surveys (Alexander et al. 2003), while
informative, cannot serve this purpose, since the CSC analysis procedures are
significantly different and the range of allowable data is much less
restrictive. We describe here the characterization process for the CSC. This
process includes both a comparison of real CSC results with those of other,
deeper Chandra catalogs of the same targets and extensive simulations of
blank-sky and point source populations.Comment: To be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (Fig.
52 replaced with a version which astro-ph can convert to PDF without issues.
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