Access to Care and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: A Cross-Sectional Study in 2 Latino Communities.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading killer of Americans. CVD is understudied among Latinos, who have high levels of CVD risk factors. This study aimed to determine whether access to health care (ie, insurance status and having a usual source of care) is associated with 4 CVD prevention factors (ie, health care utilization, CVD screening, information received from health care providers, and lifestyle factors) among Latino adults and to evaluate whether the associations depended on CVD clinical risk/disease.Data were collected as part of a community-engaged food environment intervention study in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, CA. Logistic regressions were fitted with insurance status and usual source of care as predictors of the 4 CVD prevention factors while controlling for demographics. Analyses were repeated with interactions between self-reported CVD clinical risk/disease and access to care measures.Access to health care significantly increased the odds of CVD prevention. Having a usual source of care was associated with all factors of prevention, whereas being insured was only associated with some factors of prevention. CVD clinical risk/disease did not moderate any associations.Although efforts to reduce CVD risk among Latinos through the Affordable Care Act could be impactful, they might have limited impact in curbing CVD among Latinos, via the law's expansion of insurance coverage. CVD prevention efforts must expand beyond the provision of insurance to effectively lower CVD rates

The Co-Creation Space: An online safe space for community opera creation

This work presents the Co-Creation Space, a multilingual platform for professional and community artists to 1) generate raw artistic ideas, and 2) discuss and reflect on the shared meaning of those ideas. The paper describes the architecture and the technology behind the platform, and how it was used to facilitate the communication process during several user trials. By supporting ideation sessions around media items guided by a facilitator and allowing users to express themselves and be part of the creation of an artistic product, participants were enabled to access new cultural spaces and be part of the creative process

The Co-Creation Space: An online safe space for community opera creation

This work presents the Co-Creation Space, a multilingual platform for professional and community artists to 1) generate raw artistic ideas, and 2) discuss and reflect on the shared meaning of those ideas. The paper describes the architecture and the technology behind the platform, and how it was used to facilitate the communication process during several user trials. By supporting ideation sessions around media items guided by a facilitator and allowing users to express themselves and be part of the creation of an artistic product, participants were enabled to access new cultural spaces and be part of the creative process

A new degree of freedom for memory allocation in clusters

Improvements in parallel computing hardware usually involve increments in the number of available resources for a given application such as the number of computing cores and the amount of memory. In the case of shared-memory computers, the increase in computing resources and available memory is usually constrained by the coherency protocol, whose overhead rises with system size, limiting the scalability of the final system. In this paper we propose an efficient and cost-effective way to increase the memory available for a given application by leveraging free memory in other computers in the cluster. Our proposal is based on the observation that many applications benefit from having more memory resources but do not require more computing cores, thus reducing the requirements for cache coherency and allowing a simpler implementation and better scalability. Simulation results show that, when additional mechanisms intended to hide remote memory latency are used, execution time of applications that use our proposal is similar to the time required to execute them in a computer populated with enough local memory, thus validating the feasibility of our proposal. We are currently building a prototype that implements our ideas. The first results from real executions in this prototype demonstrate not only that our proposal works but also that it can efficiently execute applications that make use of remote memory resources. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.This work has been supported by PROMETEO from Generalitat Valenciana (GVA) under Grant PROMETEO/2008/060.Montaner Mas, H.; Silla Jiménez, F.; Fröning, H.; Duato Marín, JF. (2012). A new degree of freedom for memory allocation in clusters. 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In: 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing, 2008. ICPP ’08, pp. 238–245 (2008). doi: 10.1109/ICPP.2008.85Magnusson, P., Christensson, M., Eskilson, J., et al.: Simics: a full system simulation platform. Computer 35(2), 50–58 (2002). doi: 10.1109/2.982916Martin, M., Sorin, D., Beckmann, B., et al.: Multifacet’s general execution-driven multiprocessor simulator (GEMS) toolset. ACM SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News 33(4), 92–99 (2005) doi: 10.1145/1105734.1105747MBA3 NC Series Catalog: http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/storage/hdd/ehdd/mba3073nc-mba3300nc.htmlMcCalpin, J.D.: Memory bandwidth and machine balance in current high performance computers. In: IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Newsletter, pp. 19–25 (1995)NUMAChip: http://www.numachip.com/Oguchi, M., Kitsuregawa, M.: Using available remote memory dynamically for parallel data mining application on ATM-connected PC cluster. In: IPDPS 2000. 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CAST constraints on the axion-electron coupling

In non-hadronic axion models, which have a tree-level axion-electron interaction, the Sun produces a strong axion flux by bremsstrahlung, Compton scattering, and axiorecombination, the "BCA processes." Based on a new calculation of this flux, including for the first time axio-recombination, we derive limits on the axion-electron Yukawa coupling gae and axion-photon interaction strength ga using the CAST phase-I data (vacuum phase). For ma <~ 10 meV/c2 we find ga gae < 8.1 × 10−23 GeV−1 at 95% CL. We stress that a next-generation axion helioscope such as the proposed IAXO could push this sensitivity into a range beyond stellar energy-loss limits and test the hypothesis that white-dwarf cooling is dominated by axion emission

Cell walls of the dimorphic fungal pathogens Sporothrix schenckii and Sporothrix brasiliensis exhibit bilaminate structures and sloughing of extensive and intact layers

This work was supported by the Fundação Carlos Chagas de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), grants E-26/202.974/2015 and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), grants 229755/2013-5, Brazil. LMLB is a senior research fellow of CNPq and Faperj. NG acknowledged support from the Wellcome Trust (Trust (097377, 101873, 200208) and MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (MR/N006364/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

ROAD: Domestic Assistant and Rehabilitation Robot

This study introduces the concept design and analysis of a robotic system for the assistance and rehabilitation of disabled people. Based on the statistical data of the most common types of disabilities in Spain and other industrialized countries, the different tasks that the device must be able to perform have been determined. In this study, different robots for rehabilitation and assistance previously introduced have been reviewed. This survey is focused on those robots that assist with gait, balance and standing up. The structure of the ROAD robot presents various advantages over these robots, we discuss some of them. The performance of the proposed architecture is analyzed when it performs the sit to stand activity

Association between the plasma/whole blood lead ratio and history of spontaneous abortion: a nested cross-sectional study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Blood lead has been associated with an elevated risk of miscarriage. The plasmatic fraction of lead represents the toxicologically active fraction of lead. Women with a tendency to have a higher plasma/whole blood Pb ratio could tend towards an elevated risk of miscarriage due to a higher plasma Pb for a given whole blood Pb and would consequently have a history of spontaneous abortion.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We studied 207 pregnant Mexico City residents during the 1^sttrimester of pregnancy, originally recruited for two cohorts between 1997 and 2004. Criteria for inclusion in this study were having had at least one previous pregnancy, and having valid plasma and blood Pb measurements. Pb was measured in whole blood and plasma by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry using ultra-clean techniques. History of miscarriage in previous pregnancies was obtained by interview. The incidence rate of spontaneous abortion was defined as the proportion of previous pregnancies that resulted in miscarriage. Data were analyzed by means of Poisson regression models featuring the incidence rate of spontaneous abortion as the outcome and continuous or categorized plasma/blood Pb ratios as predictor variables. All models were adjusted for age and schooling. Additionally, logistic regression models featuring inclusion in the study sample as the outcome were fitted to assess potential selection bias.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mean number of miscarriages was 0.42 (range 0 to 4); mean Pb concentrations were 62.4 and 0.14 μg/L in whole blood and plasma respectively. Mean plasma/blood Pb ratio was 0.22%. We estimated that a 0.1% increment in the plasma/blood Pb ratio lead was associated to a 12% greater incidence of spontaneous abortion (p = 0.02). Women in the upper tertile of the plasma/blood Pb ratio had twice the incidence rate of those in the lower tertile (p = 0.02). Conditional on recruitment cohort, inclusion in the study sample was unrelated to observable characteristics such as number of abortions, number of pregnancies, blood Pb levels, age schooling, weight and height.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Women with a large plasma/whole blood Pb ratio may be at higher risk of miscarriage, which could be due to a greater availability of placental barrier-crossing Pb.</p

UBVRI Light Curves of 44 Type Ia Supernovae

We present UBVRI photometry of 44 type-Ia supernovae (SN Ia) observed from 1997 to 2001 as part of a continuing monitoring campaign at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The data set comprises 2190 observations and is the largest homogeneously observed and reduced sample of SN Ia to date, nearly doubling the number of well-observed, nearby SN Ia with published multicolor CCD light curves. The large sample of U-band photometry is a unique addition, with important connections to SN Ia observed at high redshift. The decline rate of SN Ia U-band light curves correlates well with the decline rate in other bands, as does the U-B color at maximum light. However, the U-band peak magnitudes show an increased dispersion relative to other bands even after accounting for extinction and decline rate, amounting to an additional ~40% intrinsic scatter compared to B-band.Comment: 84 authors, 71 pages, 51 tables, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Version with high-res figures and electronic data at http://astron.berkeley.edu/~saurabh/cfa2snIa

Co-creation stage: A web-based tool for collaborative and participatory co-located art performances

In recent years, artists and communities have expressed the desire to work with tools that facilitate co-creation and allow distributed community performances. These performances can be spread over several physical stages, connecting them on real-time towards a single experience with the audience distributed along them. This enables a wider remote audience consuming the performance through their own devices, and even grants the participation of remote users in the show. In this paper we introduce the Co-creation Stage, a web-based tool that allows managing heterogeneous content sources, with a particular focus on live and on-demand media, across several distributed devices. The Co-creation Stage is part of the toolset developed in the Traction H2020 project which enables community performing art shows, where professional artists and non-professional participants perform together from different stages and locations. Here we present the design process, the architecture and the main functionaliti