XVIII. The amount of radium present in typical rocks in the immediate neighbourhood of Montreal

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What about lay counselors' experiences of task-shifting mental health interventions? Example from a family-based intervention in Kenya.

Background:A key focus of health systems strengthening in low- and middle-income countries is increasing reach and access through task-shifting. As such models become more common, it is critical to understand the experiences of lay providers because they are on the forefront for delivering care services. A greater understanding would improve lay provider support and help them provide high-quality care. This is especially the case for those providing mental health services, as providing psychological care may pose unique stressors. We sought to understand experiences of lay counselors, focusing on identity, motivation, self-efficacy, stress, and burnout. The goal was to understand how taking on a new provider role influences their lives beyond simply assuming a new task, which would in turn help identify actionable steps to improve interventions with task-shifting components. Methods:Semi-structured interviews (n = 20) and focus group discussions (n = 3) were conducted with three lay counselor groups with varying levels of experience delivering a community-based family therapy intervention in Eldoret, Kenya. Thematic analysis was conducted, including intercoder reliability checks. A Stress Map was created to visualize stress profiles using free-listing and pile-sorting data collected during interviews and focus group discussions. Results:Counselors described high intrinsic motivation to become counselors and high self-efficacy after training. They reported positive experiences in the counselor role, with new skills improving their counseling and personal lives. As challenges arose, including client engagement difficulties and balancing many responsibilities, stress and burnout increased, dampening motivation and self-efficacy. In response, counselors described coping strategies, including seeking peer and supervisor support, that restored their motivation to persevere. At case completion, they again experienced high self-efficacy and a desire to continue. Conclusions:Findings informed suggestions for ways to incorporate support for lay providers into task-shifting interventions at initiation, during training, and throughout implementation. These include acknowledging and preparing counselors for challenges during training, increasing explicit attention to counselor stress in supervision, fostering peer support among lay providers, and ensuring a fair balance between workload and compensation. Improving and building an evidence base around practices for supporting lay providers will improve the effectiveness and sustainability of lay provider-delivered interventions

Cervial cancer screening among HIV-positive women in rural Cambodia: a pilot programme

Mexico AIDS Conference 200

Hearing the Past

Recent developments in computer technology are providing historians with new ways to see—and seek to hear, touch, or smell—traces of the past. Place-based augmented reality applications are an increasingly common feature at heritage sites and museums, allowing historians to create immersive, multifaceted learning experiences. Now that computer vision can be directed at the past, research involving thousands of images can recreate lost or destroyed objects or environments, and discern patterns in vast datasets that could not be perceived by the naked eye. Seeing the Past with Computers is a collection of twelve thought-pieces on the current and potential uses of augmented reality and computer vision in historical research, teaching, and presentation. The experts gathered here reflect upon their experiences working with new technologies, share their ideas for best practices, and assess the implications of—and imagine future possibilities for—new methods of historical study. Among the experimental topics they explore are the use of augmented reality that empowers students to challenge the presentation of historical material in their textbooks; the application of seeing computers to unlock unusual cultural knowledge, such as the secrets of vaudevillian stage magic; hacking facial recognition technology to reveal victims of racism in a century-old Australian archive; and rebuilding the soundscape of an Iron Age village with aural augmented reality. This volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of history and the digital humanities more broadly. It will inspire them to apply innovative methods to open new paths for conducting and sharing their own research

Lord Rutherford of Nelson, His 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Why He Didn't Get a Second Prize

"I have dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but the quickest that I have met was my own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist." Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Banquet, 1908) This article is about how Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) got the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and why he did not get a second Prize for his subsequent outstanding discoveries in physics, specially the discovery of the atomic nucleus and the proton. Who were those who nominated him and who did he nominate for the Nobel Prizes. In order to put the Prize issue into its proper context, I will briefly describe Rutherford's whereabouts. Rutherford, an exceptionally gifted scientist who revolutionized chemistry and physics, was moulded in the finest classical tradition. What were his opinions on some scientific issues such as Einstein's photon, uncertainty relations and the future prospects for atomic energy? What would he have said about the "Theory of Everything"?Comment: Extended version of an invited talk presented at the neutrino conference "Neutrino 2008", Christchurch, New Zealand, 25-31 May 200

The effect of the Coriolis force on Kelvin-Helmholtz-driven mixing in protoplanetary disks

We study the stability of proto-planetary disks with vertical velocity gradients in their equilibrium rotation rates; such gradients are expected to develop when dust settles into the midplane. Using a linear stability analysis of a simple three-layer model, we show that the onset of instability occurs at a larger value of the Richardson number, and therefore for a thicker layer, when the effects of Coriolis forces are included. This analysis also shows that even-symmetry (midplane-crossing) modes develop faster than odd-symmetry ones. These conclusions are corroborated by a large number of nonlinear numerical simulations with two different parameterized prescriptions for the initial (continuous) dust distributions. Based on these numerical experiments, the Richardson number required for marginal stability is more than an order of magnitude larger than the traditional 1/4 value. The dominant modes that grow have horizontal wavelengths of several initial dust scale heights, and in nonlinear stages mix solids fairly homogeneously over a comparable vertical range. We conclude that gravitational instability may be more difficult to achieve than previously thought, and that the vertical distribution of matter within the dust layer is likely globally, rather than locally, determined.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Spectral Properties of Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence from Numerical Simulations

We analyze the spectral properties of driven, supersonic compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence obtained via high-resolution numerical experiments, for application to understanding the dynamics of giant molecular clouds. Via angle-averaged power spectra, we characterize the transfer of energy from the intermediate, driving scales down to smaller dissipative scales, and also present evidence for inverse cascades that achieve modal-equipartition levels on larger spatial scales. Investigating compressive versus shear modes separately, we evaluate their relative total power, and find that as the magnetic field strength decreases, (1) the shear fraction of the total kinetic power decreases, and (2) slopes of power-law fits over the inertial range steepen. To relate to previous work on incompressible MHD turbulence, we present qualitative and quantitative measures of the scale-dependent spectral anisotropy arising from the shear-Alfv\'{e}n cascade, and show how these vary with changing mean magnetic field strength. Finally, we propose a method for using anisotropy in velocity centroid maps as a diagnostic of the mean magnetic field strength in observed cloud cores.Comment: 22 pages, 11 figures; Ap.J., accepte

Introduction

What are the strategies, modalities and aspirations of island-based, stateless nationalist and regionalist parties in the twenty-first century? Political independence is now easier to achieve, even by the smallest of territories; yet, it is not so likely to be pursued with any vigour by the world's various persisting sub-national (and mainly island) jurisdictions. Theirs is a pursuit of different expressions of sub-national autonomy, stopping short of independence. And yet, a number of independence referenda are scheduled, including one looming in Scotland in autumn 2014

An HST Archival Survey of Feathers in Spiral Galaxies

We present a survey of spiral arm extinction substructure referred to as feathers in 223 spiral galaxies using HST WFPC2 images. The sample includes all galaxies in the RC3 catalog with cz < 5000 km/s, B_T < 15, i < 60 degrees, and types Sa--Sd with well-exposed broadband WFPC2 images. The detection frequency of delineated, periodic feathers in this sample is 20% (45 of 223). This work is consistent with Lynds (1970), who concluded that feathers are common in prototypical Sc galaxies; we find that feathers are equally common in Sb galaxies. Sb--Sc galaxies without clear evidence for feathers either had poorer quality images, or flocculent or complex structure. We did not find clearly defined feathers in any Scd--Sd galaxy. The probability of detecting feathers was highest (83%) for spirals with well-defined primary dust lanes (PDLs; the lanes which line the inner edge of an arm); well-defined PDLs were only noted in Sab--Sc galaxies. Consistent with earlier work, we find that neighboring feathers tend to have similar shapes and pitch angles. OB associations are often found lining feathers, and many feathers transition to the stellar substructures known as spurs (Elmegreen 1980). We find that feathers are coincident with interarm filaments strikingly revealed in Spitzer 8 micron images. Comparison with CO 1-0 maps of NGC 0628 and NGC 5194 from BIMA SONG shows that feathers originate at the PDL coincident with gas surface density peaks. Contrary to the appearance at 8 microns, the CO maps show that gas surface density in feathers decreases rapidly with distance from the PDL. Also, we find that the spacing between feathers decreases with increasing gas surface density, consistent with formation via a gravitational instability.Comment: 47 pages, 22 figures (Figures 1-16,18 are in JPEG format, figures 17,19-22 are embedded postscript files; full resolution images at http://www.astro.umd.edu/~mlavigne/research/hst-survey-06-2006/). Accepted for publication in the Ap