Connecting the Dots: A Healthy Community Leader's Guide to Understanding the Nonprofit Hospital Community Benefit Requirements

Imagine a healthy community as a connect-the-dots landscape painting. Each "dot" has its place and purpose: affordable housing, a vibrant economy, safe streets and public transportation, a high quality public education system, easy access to fresh food and safe recreation, and a healthcare system that provides both preventative and responsive services.The revised nonprofit hospital community benefit requirements in the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) are an opportunity for us to help connect the dots, which are often referred to as "determinants of health." They are an impetus for healthy community design leaders and nonprofit hospitals to form partnerships that define, design and implement plans for healthy communities. "Connecting the Dots: A Healthy Community Leader's Guide to Understanding Nonprofit Hospital Community Benefit Requirements" is a brand new Policy Primer from St. Luke's Health Initiatives that's been developed to increase understanding and create opportunities to connect Community Development with Community Benefit. It provides a guide for how Community Development leaders can begin to connect with nonprofit hospitals, building on a brief tracing of community benefit history and examination of current Community Health Needs Assessment work and hospital funding priorities

Dropped? Latino Education and Arizona's Economic Future

Describes persistent barriers to educational opportunities and the achievement gap Latinos face; implications for incomes, health insurance coverage, and the economy; and strategies for improving the educational system and Latino educational attainment

Efficient inference for genetic association studies with multiple outcomes

Combined inference for heterogeneous high-dimensional data is critical in modern biology, where clinical and various kinds of molecular data may be available from a single study. Classical genetic association studies regress a single clinical outcome on many genetic variants one by one, but there is an increasing demand for joint analysis of many molecular outcomes and genetic variants in order to unravel functional interactions. Unfortunately, most existing approaches to joint modelling are either too simplistic to be powerful or are impracticable for computational reasons. Inspired by Richardson et al. (2010, Bayesian Statistics 9), we consider a sparse multivariate regression model that allows simultaneous selection of predictors and associated responses. As Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference on such models can be prohibitively slow when the number of genetic variants exceeds a few thousand, we propose a variational inference approach which produces posterior information very close to that of MCMC inference, at a much reduced computational cost. Extensive numerical experiments show that our approach outperforms popular variable selection methods and tailored Bayesian procedures, dealing within hours with problems involving hundreds of thousands of genetic variants and tens to hundreds of clinical or molecular outcomes

Geoid, topography, and convection-driven crustal deformation on Venus

High-resolution Magellan images and altimetry of Venus reveal a wide range of styles and scales of surface deformation that cannot readily be explained within the classical terrestrial plate tectonic paradigm. The high correlation of long-wavelength topography and gravity and the large apparent depths of compensation suggest that Venus lacks an upper-mantle low-viscosity zone. A key difference between Earth and Venus may be the degree of coupling between the convecting mantle and the overlying lithosphere. Mantle flow should then have recognizable signatures in the relationships between surface topography, crustal deformation, and the observed gravity field

Performance of a 1380-foot-per-second-tip-speed axial-flow compressor rotor with a blade tip solidity of 1.3

Aerodynamic design parameters are presented along the overall and blade element performance, of an axial flow compressor rotor designed to study the effects of blade solidity on efficiency and stall margin. At design speed the peak efficiency was 0.844 and occurred at an equivalent weight flow of 63.5 lb/sec with a total pressure ratio of 1.801. Design efficiency, pressure ratio, and weight flow 0.814, 1.65, and 65.3(41.1 lb/sec/sq ft of annulus area), respectively. Stall margin for design speed was 6.4 percent based on the weight flow and pressure ratio values at peak efficiency and just prior to stall

Problem-Based Learning and Competency Development.

Problem-based learning is an approach to professional education which has been used by a number of educational institutions involved in professional education both here and overseas. The most famous example in Australia is probably the medical course at the University of Newcastle. This paper argues that this initiative in professional education has within it characteristics which are sympathetic to many of the current moves in Australia to describe, and in some cases redefine, professional work. This process is part of a wider move in Australia to upgrade and improve the skills and abilities of the Australian workforce in the context of economic refor

Localization of gravity and topography: constraints on the tectonics and mantle dynamics of Venus

We develop a method for spatio-spectral localization of harmonic data on a sphere and use it to interpret recent high-resolution global estimates of the gravity and topography of Venus in the context of geodynamical models. Our approach applies equally to the simple spatial windowing of harmonic data and to variable-length-scale analyses, which are analogous to a wavelet transform in the Cartesian domain. Using the variable-length-scale approach, we calculate the localized RMS amplitudes of gravity and topography, as well as the spectral admittance between the two fields, as functions of position and wavelength. The observed admittances over 10 per cent of the surface of Venus (highland plateaus and tessera regions) are consistent with isostatic compensation of topography by variations in crustal thickness, while admittances over the remaining 90 per cent of the surface (rises, plains and lowlands) indicate that long-wavelength topography is dominantly the result of vertical convective tractions at the base of the lithosphere. The global average crustal thickness is less than 30 km, but can reach values as large as 40 km beneath tesserae and highland plateaus. We also note that an Earth-like radial viscosity structure cannot be rejected by the gravity and topography data and that, without a mechanical model of the lithosphere, admittance values cannot constrain the thickness of the thermal boundary layer of Venus. Modelling the lithosphere as a thin elastic plate indicates that at the time of formation of relief in highland plateaus and tesserae, the effective elastic plate thickness, T_e, was less than 20 km. Estimates of T_e at highland rises are consistently less than 30 km. Our inability to find regions with T_e > 30 km is inconsistent with predictions made by a class of catastrophic resurfacing models