Cancer Surveillance and Outreach in Carlisle, Massachusetts: An Analysis of MDPH Cancer and Environmental Health Data in a Small Town Context

Introduction: The Carlisle Board of Health (BOH) sought to understand how cancer affects its town (population under 5,000), using data on expected and observed cancer incidence provided by the Massachusetts Cancer Registry (MCR). This project examined cancer incidence data summarized by city/town in five-year intervals, evaluated demographic and environmental factors that could contribute to cancer, and provided recommendations for cancer outreach. Methods: MCR city/town reports from 1995-2009 were examined to identify community cancer trends. A literature review focused on cancers of concern to guide outreach efforts. Data on contributing environmental exposures and health behaviors were explored to identify potential risk factors in Carlisle. Individual- and community-level recommendations were issued based on the data and literature. Results: Observed cases of breast cancer and melanoma in women and colorectal cancer and prostate cancer in men exceeded the number of expected cases. Bladder cancer in men and lung cancer in men and women were somewhat lower than expected. There was insufficient evidence of causation by local environmental exposure. Discussion: Excess cancer cases in Carlisle cannot be interpreted as a cancer cluster. Individuals should be aware of important risk factors and control lifestyle-related factors for common types of cancer. The BOH can monitor data on potential environmental exposures and provide ongoing communication with Carlisle residents about cancer in the community through social media, the local newspaper, and town events. Broad educational outreach on specific risk factors, including sun exposure, arsenic in drinking water, and youth tobacco use should be considered to foster healthy behaviors

Evaluation Report of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality

This report presents some of the core findings from a project designed to track the process of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, with particular focus on the quality of the deliberative process and the attitudes of the members towards the process. The evaluation team observed all public sessions of the assembly, surveyed members each weekend and interviewed members as well as the organisation team. Overall we found a very well run process, with high deliberative quality and good levels of knowledge gain and understanding by members. The transition to online was well thought through and carried out efficiently. Throughout this report we examine the emerging Irish practice for deliberation, widely recognised as a global leader, and make a number of suggestions that may be worth considering as the Irish practice continues to develop and evolve

Utilizing Activity-Based Costing To Manage The Maintenance Function In A Manufacturing Company

Maintenance is the term used by many industries and businesses to describe the broad functions associated with preserving assets.  Of course, preserving assets requires the expenditure of funds.  In many industries, the amount of monetary funds dedicated to maintenance functions can exceed 40% of a typical operating budget.  However, even at this level of spending, management decision-making in the maintenance area is generally accomplished without the necessary information or strategy other business areas demand

A General Security Approach for Soft-information Decoding against Smart Bursty Jammers

Malicious attacks such as jamming can cause significant disruption or complete denial of service (DoS) to wireless communication protocols. Moreover, jamming devices are getting smarter, making them difficult to detect. Forward error correction, which adds redundancy to data, is commonly deployed to protect communications against the deleterious effects of channel noise. Soft-information error correction decoders obtain reliability information from the receiver to inform their decoding, but in the presence of a jammer such information is misleading and results in degraded error correction performance. As decoders assume noise occurs independently to each bit, a bursty jammer will lead to greater degradation in performance than a non-bursty one. Here we establish, however, that such temporal dependencies can aid inferences on which bits have been subjected to jamming, thus enabling counter-measures. In particular, we introduce a pre-decoding processing step that updates log-likelihood ratio (LLR) reliability information to reflect inferences in the presence of a jammer, enabling improved decoding performance for any soft detection decoder. The proposed method requires no alteration to the decoding algorithm. Simulation results show that the method correctly infers a significant proportion of jamming in any received frame. Results with one particular decoding algorithm, the recently introduced ORBGRAND, show that the proposed method reduces the block-error rate (BLER) by an order of magnitude for a selection of codes, and prevents complete DoS at the receiver.Comment: Accepted for GLOBECOM 2022 Workshops. Contains 7 pages and 7 figure

Assessing U.S. Food Wastage and Opportunities for Reduction

Reducing food wastage is one of the key strategies to combat hunger and sustainably feed the world. We present a comprehensive analysis of available data, despite uncertainties due to data limitation, indicating that the U.S. loses at least 150 million metric tonnes (MMT) of food between farm and fork annually, of which about 70 MMT is edible food loss. Currently, \u3c2% of the edible food loss is recovered for human consumption. A reasonably-attainable goal of food waste reduction at the source by 20% would save more food than the annual increase in total food production and would feed millions of people. This is an opportunity of significant magnitude, offering food security and resource and environmental benefits with few negatives. Seizing this opportunity requires technological innovation, policy intervention, and public outreach. This U.S.-based analysis is pertinent to other mid- to high-income countries