Editorial DEPP: drug experienced young people in contact with the criminal justice system. Understanding the challenges and working towards solutions

The focus of this collection of papers is on young people (age 14–25) who are drug experienced and are in contact with the Criminal Justice System (CJS). In general, research tends to focus on either young people’s drug use or offending; equally, we see a tendency within policy and service responses to focus on interventions aimed either at drug use or at offending but rarely addressing complex problems that may include drug use and offending (Herold et al., 2019). By drawing on young peoples’ own perspectives and experiences and focusing on multiple problem areas at the same time, this collection presents findings that complement and augment the existing literature, and are highly relevant to policy development and service provision by: providing an account of young people’s own perspectives and experiences of their drug use and offending trajectories and the experienced relationship between these trajectories; describing young people’s own perspectives and experiences of different kinds of drug and/or offending reducing initiatives they have participated in and what they appreciate and/or find difficult in these institutional arrangements; showing how professionals engage with this group of young people, and how young people themselves consider engagement in services offered to them; and finally, highlighting the unintended consequences for and experienced by young people of the application of prohibitive drug policies and of involvement in the criminal justice system

Unstable states in QED of strong magnetic fields

We question the use of stable asymptotic scattering states in QED of strong magnetic fields. To correctly describe excited Landau states and photons above the pair creation threshold the asymptotic fields are chosen as generalized Licht fields. In this way the off-shell behavior of unstable particles is automatically taken into account, and the resonant divergences that occur in scattering cross sections in the presence of a strong external magnetic field are avoided. While in a limiting case the conventional electron propagator with Breit-Wigner form is obtained, in this formalism it is also possible to calculate $S$-matrix elements with external unstable particles.Comment: Revtex, 7 pages. To appear in Phys. Rev. D53(2

Equation of state of a strongly magnetized hydrogen plasma

The influence of a constant uniform magnetic field on the thermodynamic properties of a partially ionized hydrogen plasma is studied. Using the method of Green' s function various interaction contributions to the thermodynamic functions are calculated. The equation of state of a quantum magnetized plasma is presented within the framework of a low density expansion up to the order e^4 n^2 and, additionally, including ladder type contributions via the bound states in the case of strong magnetic fields (2.35*10^{5} T << B << 2.35*10^{9} T). We show that for high densities (n=10^{27-30} m^{-3}) and temperatures T=10^5 - 10^6 K typical for the surface of neutron stars nonideality effects as, e.g., Debye screening must be taken into account.Comment: 12 pages, 2 Postscript figures. uses revtex, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Unintended consequences of drug policies experienced by young drug users in contact with the criminal justice systems

The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent prohibitive drug policies hamper the management of drug problems from the perspective of young people who have experience with the criminal justice systems (CJS). Qualitative, in-depth interviews were carried out in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the UK) following a common interview guide to obtain comparative data on the life trajectories of drug experienced youth. Altogether 198 interviews with people aged 14–25 years were collected and analysed by national teams following a common coding book. Unintended consequences of drug policies for the individual and society were identified. Individual consequences included health consequences and traumatic experiences with law enforcement. Social consequences included those affecting social relations such as stigmatisation and those impacting on institutions, for example, focusing on drug use and neglecting other problems. This paper confirmed earlier research indicating unintended consequences of prohibitive drug policies but also added to the literature its cross-national perspective and use of young people narratives as a source of analyses. There are, however, policy measures available that may reduce the volume and range of unintended effects. Their implementation is crucial to reduce the array of unintended consequences of prohibitive drug policies

Clinical assessment of hand oedema: A systematic review

Introduction: Assessment of oedema after trauma or surgery is important to determine whether treatment is effective and to detect change over time. Volumetry is referred to as the ‘gold standard’ method of measuring volume. However, this has practical limitations and other methods are available. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the psychometric properties of alternative methods used to assess hand oedema. Methods: A search of electronic bibliographic databases was undertaken for any studies published in English reporting the psychometric evaluation of a method for measuring hand oedema, in an adult population with hand swelling from surgery, trauma or stroke. The Consensus‐based Standards for the Selection of health Measurement Instruments (COSMIN) checklist was used to evaluate the methodological quality. Results: Six studies met the inclusion criteria. Three methods were identified assessing hand oedema: perometry, visual inspection and the figure-of-eight tape measure, all were compared to volumetry. Four different psychometric properties were assessed. Studies scored fair or poor on COSMIN criteria. There is low-quality evidence supporting the use of the figure-of-eight tape measure to assess hand volume. The perometer systematically overestimated volume and visual estimation had poor sensitivity and specificity. Discussion: The figure-of-eight tape measure is the best alternative to volumetry for hand oedema. Benefits include reduced cost and time while having comparable reliability to the ‘gold standard’. Further research is needed to compare methods in patients with greater variability of conditions and with isolated digit oedema. Visual estimation of hand oedema is not recommended

Propuesta de modelo de negocio de un food truck de venta de desayunos en una universidad privada de Chiclayo, 2016

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo establecer un modelo de negocio para un food truck de desayunos en una universidad privada de Chiclayo. La metodología aplicada para la investigación es cualitativa – exploratoria, se fundamenta en un proceso inductivo (explorar, describir y luego generar perspectivas teóricas), es decir va de lo particular a lo general; esta metodología permite obtener información en base a entrevistas realizadas a la comunidad universitaria. La investigación busca conocer la aceptación del modelo de food truck de venta de desayuno, se basó en el modelo Lean Canvas, desarrollado en el libro Running Lean de Ash Maurya, nos da un enfoque de nueve (9) dimensiones para tener en cuenta y poder lograr un modelo de negocio de éxito. La propuesta de valor obtenida, consiste en vender productos saludables que les ayude a promover la calidad y bienestar de la salud de nuestros clientes, por ello se ofrecerán desayunos elaborados a base de frutas, cereales andinos y sándwich preparados al instante, ofrecidos en unos envases biodegradables, cumpliendo con los estándares de salubridad. Asimismo se tendrá variedad en los productos a ofrecer, para que el cliente pueda escoger y se brindará una atención rápida y personalizada con la finalidad de cumplir con uno de los aspectos que los clientes valoran.Tesi

Adiabatic compression and indirect detection of supersymmetric dark matter

Recent developments in the modelling of the dark matter distribution in our Galaxy point out the necessity to consider some physical processes to satisfy observational data. In particular, models with adiabatic compression, which include the effect of the baryonic gas in the halo, increase significantly the dark matter density in the central region of the Milky Way. On the other hand, the non-universality in scalar and gaugino sectors of supergravity models can also increase significantly the neutralino annihilation cross section. We show that the combination of both effects gives rise to a gamma-ray flux arising from the Galactic Center largely reachable by future experiments like GLAST. We also analyse in this framework the EGRET excess data above 1 GeV, as well as the recent data from CANGAROO and HESS. The analysis has been carried out imposing the most recent experimental constraints, such as the lower bound on the Higgs mass, the \bsg branching ratio, and the muon $g-2$. In addition, the recently improved upper bound on $B(B_s \to \mu^+ \mu^-)$ has also been taken into account. The astrophysical (WMAP) bounds on the dark matter density have also been imposed on the theoretical computation of the relic neutralino density through thermal production.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures, final version to appear in JCA

Cellular automaton decoders of topological quantum memories in the fault tolerant setting

Active error decoding and correction of topological quantum codes—in particular the toric code—remains one of the most viable routes to large scale quantum information processing. In contrast, passive error correction relies on the natural physical dynamics of a system to protect encoded quantum information. However, the search is ongoing for a completely satisfactory passive scheme applicable to locally interacting two-dimensional systems. Here, we investigate dynamical decoders that provide passive error correction by embedding the decoding process into local dynamics. We propose a specific discrete time cellular-automaton decoder in the fault tolerant setting and provide numerical evidence showing that the logical qubit has a survival time extended by several orders of magnitude over that of a bare unencoded qubit. We stress that (asynchronous) dynamical decoding gives rise to a Markovian dissipative process. We hence equate cellular-automaton decoding to a fully dissipative topological quantum memory, which removes errors continuously. In this sense, uncontrolled and unwanted local noise can be corrected for by a controlled local dissipative process. We analyze the required resources, commenting on additional polylogarithmic factors beyond those incurred by an ideal constant resource dynamical decoder