Determinants of Pediatric Care Utilization

The purpose of this paper is to understand the determinants of utilization of pediatric care -- care rendered to children by all physicians. Multivariate techniques are employed to examine four measures of pediatric care utilization in a national sample of children between the ages of 1 and 5. These measures are the probability of contacting a physician within the past year, the probability of obtaining a preventive physical examination within the past year, the number of office visits to physicians in private practice by children with positive visits, and the average quality of these visits.

A computer simulation of processor scheduling in UNIX 4.2BSD

This project is a study of the processor scheduling system in UNIX 4.2BSD. This study involved a computer simulation of the processor scheduling system. The preliminary work for the simulation included choosing a system, choosing and running a set of test processes on that system, gathering statistics from these runs, and constructing a model of the scheduling system. The model was then tuned to perform like the real system by introducing overhead into the model. The overhead was added using several variables in the model. Tuning consisted of adjusting the values of these variables until the performance of the model was as close as possible to that of the real system. Experiments were performed on the model consisting of a rescheduling experiment that examined the handling of compute-bound processes by the scheduler and several experiments that study the effects of modifications to the scheduler

The role of emergency medicine physicians in trauma care in North America: evolution of a specialty

The role of Emergency Medicine Physicians (EMP) in the care of trauma patients in North America has evolved since the advent of the specialty in the late 1980's. The evolution of this role in the context of the overall demands of the specialty and accreditation requirements of North American trauma centers will be discussed. Limited available data published in the literature examining the role of EMP's in trauma care will be reviewed with respect to its implications for an expanded role for EMPs in trauma care. Two training models currently in the early stages of development have been proposed to address needs for increased manpower in trauma and the critical care of trauma patients. The available information regarding these models will be reviewed along with the implications for improving the care of trauma patients in both Europe and North America

Ulceroglandular Tularemia: A Typical Case of Relapse

Tularemia is an infectious disease that continues to occur sporadically and in epidemics in the United States. It is characterized as an acute febrile illness with constitutional symptoms associated with skin, glandular, respiratory, or gastrointestinal involvement. Tularemia usually can be treated effectively with streptomycin. Relapse most often occurs when patients are treated with bacteriostatic agents such as chloramphenicol or tetracycline. We present a case of ulceroglandular tularemia distinguished by its relapse after initial streptomycin/doxycycline therapy and subsequent slow response to additional streptomycin

Fitness of interspecific hybrids in the genus Cyprinella: An evaluation of swimming performance in stream fishes

As the result of anthropogenic disturbance, freshwater ecosystems are rapidly being destroyed worldwide. Accordingly, such impacts are also resulting in the loss of aquatic biodiversity. Specifically, the introduction of non-native aquatic species is becoming an increasing concern. Historically, many non-native freshwater fish introductions have been the result of commercial baitfish aquaculture and private aquarium release. Cyprinella lutrensis (the red shiner) is endemic to much of the central U.S., and its natural range does not extent east of the Mississippi River. Since the 1950’s, red shiner have been cultivated and transported across the globe as both bait and aquarium fish. During the early 1990’s, invasive red shiner populations were first observed in the Coosa River Basin, located in northwest Georgia, USA. Originating from bait bucket releases, invasive red shiner have quickly established in this area, and readily compete and hybridize with at least one native species of Cyprinella (Cyprinella venusta), the blacktail shiner. Over the past thirty years, red x blacktail shiner hybrids are becoming more abundant and demonstrate an uncertain level of viability. To date, little is known about the relative fitness of red x blacktail shiner hybrids compared to parental species. If hybrids exhibit a higher level of fitness compared to parental species, then this could result in regional extinctions of native stream fishes. To better understand the relative fitness of native blacktail shiner vs. hybrid shiner, we examined swimming performance as a widely accepted proxy. Blacktail, red, and hybrid shiner were collected in Northwest Georgia during the time frame of August 2020- March 2021. Individual swimming performance trials were then conducted in a recirculating flow chamber. During these trials, a suite of physiological and morphometric measurements were recorded. Here, we present an analysis of our preliminary data, investigating differences in fitness among native and hybrid shiner

Measuring the Photon Helicity in Radiative B Decays

We propose a way of measuring the photon polarization in radiative B decays into K resonance states decaying to K\pi\pi, which can test the Standard Model and probe new physics. The photon polarization is shown to be measured by the up-down asymmetry of the photon direction relative to the K\pi\pi decay plane in the K resonance rest frame. The integrated asymmetry in K_1(1400)\to K\pi\pi, calculated to be 0.34\pm 0.05 in the Standard Model, is measurable at currently operating B factories.Comment: 4 pages, final version to appear in Physical Review Letter

Toward a Dependability Case Language and Workflow for a Radiation Therapy System

We present a near-future research agenda for bringing a suite of modern programming-languages verification tools - specifically interactive theorem proving, solver-aided languages, and formally defined domain-specific languages - to the development of a specific safety-critical system, a radiotherapy medical device. We sketch how we believe recent programming-languages research advances can merge with existing best practices for safety-critical systems to increase system assurance and developer productivity. We motivate hypotheses central to our agenda: That we should start with a single specific system and that we need to integrate a variety of complementary verification and synthesis tools into system development

An open-source platform for pediatric cancer data exploration: a report from Data for the Common Good

Objective: The Pediatric Cancer Data Commons (PCDC)-a project of Data for the Common Good-houses clinical pediatric oncology data and utilizes the open-source Gen3 platform. To meet the needs of end users, the PCDC development team expanded the out-of-box functionality and developed additional custom features that should be useful to any group developing similar data commons. Materials and methods: Modifications of the PCDC data portal software were implemented to facilitate desired functionality. Results: Newly developed functionality includes updates to authorization methods, expansion of filtering capabilities, and addition of data analysis functions. Discussion: We describe the process by which custom functionalities were developed. Features are open source and available to be implemented and adapted to suit needs of data portals that utilize the Gen3 platform. Conclusion: Data portals are indispensable tools for facilitating data sharing. Open-source infrastructure facilitates a modular and collaborative approach for meeting needs of end users and stakeholders.</p