A Narrative Approach to the Evaluation of Supportive Housing: Stories of Homeless People Who Have Experienced Serious Mental Illness

We present the findings of a narrative approach to the evaluation of supportive housing for formerly homeless people who have experienced serious mental illness. According to the accounts of 11 men and 9 women, their youth and adult years were piled with personal problems, troubled relationships, and a lack of adequate social resources. Since entering supportive housing, participants noted more stability in their lives and the beginning of journeys to recover positive personal identities, restore or develop new supportive relationships, and reclaim resources vital to leading lives with dignity and meaning. The findings add to the literature on housing interventions for this population in suggesting many positive gains beyond reductions in hometessness and hospitatization

Calibration and signal reconstruction in the ATLAS Tile Hadronic calorimeter

International audienceTileCal is the barrel hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment at LHC/CERN, made of steel and scintillating tiles and read out by optical fibers and photomultiplier tubes. It provides measurements for hadrons, jets and missing transverse energy. The TileCal calibration procedures rely on the performance of dedicated calibration systems: - calibration of the full signal read-out path with movable radioactive 137Cs gamma source; - monitoring of the Photomultiplier tube gains with the laser system; - calibration of the front-end electronic gains with the charge injection system. In this talk we will describe the energy and time calibration procedures used in TileCal to establish the reference detector response and synchronization. We will also discuss the calibration systems performance and the corresponding uncertainties to the energy and timing measurements

Transportation Systems with Autonomous Vehicles: Models and algorithms for equilibrium assignment

Abstract Technologies for connected, automated or autonomous vehicles (AVs) are fast developing, so that they seem ready for substituting in the near future privately owned non-autonomous traditional vehicles (TVs) and further supporting the spread of shared vehicles both for person and good transportation. On the other hand, it may easily be anticipated that the time needed to turn the existing stock of TVs into AVs will last several years during which mixed traffic is expected. A change so great may be not technology-driven only, but also requires a carefully analysis of its several impact through well designed enhancements of tools already available to the transportation systems modelers and planners. Such enhanced tools may be casted in the general framework of multi-user class assignment to transportation networks, concerning: (i) transportation network analysis, through level-of-service models distinguishing between non-autonomous vs. autonomous vehicles, presumably sharing same infrastructure; (ii) travel demand analysis, through behavioral choice modeling paradigms, including choice between AVs vs. TVs, owned vs. shared, as well as route choice behavior; (iii) steady-state equilibrium assignment. This paper describes models and algorithms to deal with steady-state equilibrium assignment; they are used to show to which extent existing methods can still be applied as well as which issues remain still open and worth of further research efforts

Suspected vaping associated lung injury in a 16-year old female

Background: In the summer of 2019, there were multiple reports of young people falling ill, diagnosed with a severe lung disease without any apparent infectious cause after extensive radiographic imaging studies and laboratory tests. The common link being history of recent electronic cigarette (e-cigarette or vaping) use. This new illness is defined as Vaping Associated Lung Injury (VALI) and is affecting young people in the United States. Multiple early studies involving vaping and lung injury show a pattern of diffuse lung injury on imaging and severe respiratory symptoms leading to respiratory failure and even death in some cases.Case Presentation: A 16-year old female with worsening bilateral pneumonia failing outpatient treatment presented to the pediatric emergency center. The patient was hypoxic on presentation requiring supplemental oxygenation. History was significant for regular and recent e-cigarette use—including recent use of illicit tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in her e- cigarette. She was initially treated on the general pediatric floor with pulmonary toileting and broad-spectrum antibiotics. She rapidly declined requiring intensive care admission for BiPAP and eventually intubation with mechanical ventilation and escalation to high frequency oscillatory ventilation. Infectious disease and pulmonology specialist were consulted for a comprehensive infectious work up which ultimately was negative. Imaging, including chest x-ray and chest CT consistently showed diffuse bilateral interstitial and ground glass infiltrates. With extensive supportive care, patient eventually improved and infectious work up did not yield any positive results.Conclusions: Every single day, the number of reported cases of VALI increases with more questions arising about the cause and how to get a handle on the situation. Since this study, new information has emerged as to the cause including excess levels of vitamin E and illicit THC vaping cartridge operation originating in the mid-west. Quick action needs to be taken by scientist, investigators, law makers, public health officials, and the tobacco industry to better understand the long-term and short-term consequences of the increased popularity of vaping in the United States

High Diversity among Feather-Degrading Bacteria from a Dry Meadow Soil

The aim of this study was to determine the diversity of cultivable bacteria able to degrade feathers and present in soil under temperate climate. We obtained 33 isolates from soil samples, which clustered in 13 ARDRA groups. These isolates were able to grow on solid medium with pigeon feathers as sole carbon and nitrogen source. One representative isolate of each ARDRA group was selected for identification and feather degradation tests. The phylogenetic analysis of 16S rDNA gene fragments revealed that only 4 isolates were gram positives. Two other isolates belonged to the Cytophaga-Flavobacterium group, and the remaining to Proteobacteria. High keratinolysis activity was found for strains related to Bacillus, Cytophagales, Actinomycetales, and Proteobacteria. The 13 selected strains showed variable efficiency in degrading whole feathers and 5 strains were able to degrade maximum 40% to 98% of the whole feathers. After 4 weeks incubation, five strains grown on milled feathers produced more than 0.5 U keratinase per mL. Keratinase activities across the 13 strains were positively correlated with the percentage of feather fragmentation and protein concentratio

Unit Testing in ASPIDE

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative logic programming formalism, which is employed nowadays in both academic and industrial real-world applications. Although some tools for supporting the development of ASP programs have been proposed in the last few years, the crucial task of testing ASP programs received less attention, and is an Achilles' heel of the available programming environments. In this paper we present a language for specifying and running unit tests on ASP programs. The testing language has been implemented in ASPIDE, a comprehensive IDE for ASP, which supports the entire life-cycle of ASP development with a collection of user-friendly graphical tools for program composition, testing, debugging, profiling, solver execution configuration, and output-handling.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Logic Programming (WLP 2011

Painting maps with bats: Species distribution modelling in bat research and conservation

Species distribution models (SDMs) offer an effective tool for identifying species conservation requirements and forecasting how global environmental changes will affect species diversity and distribution. This approach is particularly relevant for bats because their nocturnal behaviour hinders detectability and identification in flight. Despite their important contribution to global biodiversity and wide geographical ranges, bats have been under-represented in early SDM studies, and only in the last few years has this approach become more widely used in bat research. We carried out a meta-analysis of the published literature to review the history of the use of SDMs in bat research and their application in conservation, climate change assessments and genetic studies. We focus on the geographical coverage, theme and modelling algorithm of published studies, and compare studies that are uniquely dedicated to bats to multi-taxa studies that include bats. We provide recommendations for good modelling practices through considering spatial scale and spatial biases, selecting ecologically relevant variables, following rigorous modelling protocols, and recognising the limitations of extrapolation across temporal scales. We suggest future developments that will further favour the use of SDMs to study bat ecology and biogeography, as well as inform conservation management. We conclude that despite an increase in bat SDM studies, their scope and application can be further enhanced through incorporating dispersal, landscape connectivity and biotic interactions between bats, their prey and their pathogens

Compartmentalized control of Cdk1 drives mitotic spindle assembly

During cell division, dramatic microtubular rearrangements driven by cyclin B-cdk1 (Cdk1) kinase activity mark the onset of mitosis leading to dismantling of the interphase microtubular cytoskeleton and assembly of the mitotic spindle. During interphase, Cdk1 accumulates in an inactive state, phosphorylated at inhibitory sites by Wee1/Myt1 kinases. At mitosis onset, Cdc25 phosphatase dephosphorylates and activates Cdk1. Once activated, Cdk1 clears cytoplasmic microtubules by inhibiting microtubule-stabilizing and growth-promoting microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs). Nevertheless, some of these MAPs are required for spindle microtubule growth and spindle assembly, creating quite a conundrum. We show here that a Cdk1 fraction bound to spindle structures escapes Cdc25 action and remains inhibited by phosphorylation (i-Cdk1) in mitotic human cells. Loss or restoration of i-Cdk1 inhibits or promotes spindle assembly, respectively. Furthermore, polymerizing spindle microtubules foster i-Cdk1 aggregating with Wee1 and excluding Cdc25. Our data reveal that spindle assembly relies on compartmentalized control of Cdk1 activity

Traffic management system for smart road networks reserved for self-driving cars

A model of a smart road network consisting of unsignalised intersections and smart roads connecting them is considered in this work with the aim of presenting a traffic management system for self-driving cars (or, more generally, autonomous vehicles) which travel the network. The proposed system repeatedly solves a set of mathematical programming problems (each of them relative to a single intersection or to a single road stretch of the network) within a decentralised control scheme in which each local intersection controller and each local road controller communicates with the fully autonomous vehicles in order to receive travel data from vehicles and to provide speed profiles to them once determined the optimal solution of the problem. In order to reduce the computational effort required to provide the optimal solution, a discrete-time approach is adopted so that, in each time interval, a limited number of vehicles are taken into consideration; in this way, solutions can be determined in a very short time thus making the proposed model compatible with a practical application to real traffic systems. The proposed model is general enough, and can be adapted to different scenarios of smart road networks reserved for self-driving cars