Effect of Socio-Demographics, Health-Related Problems, and Family Structure on Chronic Absenteeism Among Children

Purpose/Background: From 5 to 7.5 million school children are chronically absent, defined as missing ≥15 days of school within a year. Students miss schools due to various reasons such as health, socioeconomic status, and environmental factors. We examined child’s health and behavior, family structure, and socio-demographics to understand chronic absenteeism. Materials & Methods: The population included children ages 6 to 17 years from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) years 2008-2013. Multivariable logistic regressions were used to identify the risk factors of chronic absenteeism, adjusting for the complex sampling design. Results: Among socio-demographic variables, age ≥14 years, race/ethnicity, lower-income family, public health insurance, US-born, and speaking English at home were associated with chronic absenteeism. Asians, Mexican Hispanics, and blacks have lower chronic absenteeism than whites. Among health-related variables, children using an inhaler for asthma, having behavioral problems, and less healthy than other children were more likely to be chronically absent. Among family variables, a smaller family size was a risk factor for chronic absenteeism. Discussion/Conclusion: Asthma and behavioral problems were highly associated with chronic absenteeism. The identification of children at risk for chronic absenteeism will help the educational professionals identify the barriers to academic achievements and develop integrated educational interventions and policies to support disadvantaged children

Kinetic conversion of CO to CH4 in the Solar System

Some of the most interesting chemistry in the Solar System involves changes in the oxidation state of the simple carbon species. The chemical pathways for the conversion of CH4 to CO and CO2 are for the most part known. The reverse process, the reduction of CO to CH4, is, however, poorly understood. This is surprising in view of the importance of the reduction process in the chemistry of the Solar System. Recently we investigated the chemical kinetics of a hitherto unsuspected reaction. It is argued that the formation of the methoxy radical (CH3O) from H+H2CO may play an essential role in the reduction of CO to CH4. The rate coefficient for this reaction has been estimated using the approximate theory of J. Troe and transition state theory. We will discuss the implications of this reaction for the chemistry of CO on Jupiter, in the solar nebula, for interpreting the laboratory experiments of A. Bar-Nun and A. Shaviv and A. Bar-Nun and S. Chang, and for organic synthesis in the prebiotic terrestrial atmosphere. The possible relation of CO reduction in the solar nebula and polyoxymethylene observed in comet Halley will be discussed

Implementation of control point form of algebraic grid-generation technique

The control point form (CPF) provides explicit control of physical grid shape and grid spacing through the movement of the control points. The control point array, called a control net, is a space grid type arrangement of locations in physical space with an index for each direction. As an algebraic method CPF is efficient and works well with interactive computer graphics. A family of menu-driven, interactive grid-generation computer codes (TURBO) is being developed by using CPF. Key features of TurboI (a TURBO member) are discussed and typical results are presented. TurboI runs on any IRIS 4D series workstation

Influence of Doubled CO2 on Ozone via Changes in the Brewer–Dobson Circulation

In this short note, the effect of enhanced circulation due to doubling CO2 on ozone is investigated. The difference of Brewer–Dobson circulation (BDC) between the doubled CO2 and control run from an idealized atmospheric general circulation model is added to the BDC climatology derived from National Centers for Environmental Prediction—Department of Energy Reanalysis 2 (NCEP2) from 1979 to 2002. Then it is used to drive the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech/JPL) two-dimensional chemistry and transport model. The results reveal that the total ozone increases by 7 and 3.5 Dobson units (DU) in the high latitudes of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, respectively, and decreases by 4 DU in the Tropics as a result of the increase in BDC associated with doubled CO2. If the change of eddy mixing coefficients after doubling CO2 is also considered, the total ozone will increase by 6.5 and 3 DU in the high latitudes of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres after combining both effects from the change in BDC and eddy mixing coefficients

Large-N Solution of the Heterotic CP(N-1) Model with Twisted Masses

We address a number of unanswered questions in the N=(0,2)-deformed CP(N-1) model with twisted masses. In particular, we complete the program of solving CP(N-1) model with twisted masses in the large-N limit. In hep-th/0512153 nonsupersymmetric version of the model with the Z_N symmetric twisted masses was analyzed in the framework of Witten's method. In arXiv:0803.0698 this analysis was extended: the large-N solution of the heterotic N=(0,2) CP(N-1) model with no twisted masses was found. Here we solve this model with the twisted masses switched on. Dynamical scenarios at large and small m are studied (m is the twisted mass scale). We found three distinct phases and two phase transitions on the m plane. Two phases with the spontaneously broken Z_N-symmetry are separated by a phase with unbroken Z_N. This latter phase is characterized by a unique vacuum and confinement of all U(1) charged fields ("quarks"). In the broken phases (one of them is at strong coupling) there are N degenerate vacua and no confinement, similarly to the situation in the N=(2,2) model. Supersymmetry is spontaneously broken everywhere except a circle |m|=\Lambda in the Z_N-unbroken phase. Related issues are considered. In particular, we discuss the mirror representation for the heterotic model in a certain limiting case.Comment: 69 pages, 14 figures; typos corrected, final version to appear in PRD; v Jan. 2014 Erratum added on p. 50, two references added and two references update

Perfect State Transfer, Effective Gates and Entanglement Generation in Engineered Bosonic and Fermionic Networks

We show how to achieve perfect quantum state transfer and construct effective two-qubit gates between distant sites in engineered bosonic and fermionic networks. The Hamiltonian for the system can be determined by choosing an eigenvalue spectrum satisfying a certain condition, which is shown to be both sufficient and necessary in mirror-symmetrical networks. The natures of the effective two-qubit gates depend on the exchange symmetry for fermions and bosons. For fermionic networks, the gates are entangling (and thus universal for quantum computation). For bosonic networks, though the gates are not entangling, they allow two-way simultaneous communications. Protocols of entanglement generation in both bosonic and fermionic engineered networks are discussed.Comment: RevTeX4, 6 pages, 1 figure; replaced with a more general example and clarified the sufficient and necessary condition for perfect state transfe

Feature fusion at the local region using localized maximum-margin learning for scene categorization

In the field of visual recognition such as scene categorization, representing an image based on the local feature (e.g., the bag-of-visual-word (BOVW) model and the bag-of-contextual-visual-word (BOCVW) model) has become popular and one of the most successful methods. In this paper, we propose a method that uses localized maximum-margin learning to fuse different types of features during the BOCVW modeling for eventual scene classification. The proposed method fuses multiple features at the stage when the best contextual visual word is selected to represent a local region (hard assignment) or the probabilities of the candidate contextual visual words used to represent the unknown region are estimated (soft assignment). The merits of the proposed method are that (1) errors caused by the ambiguity of single feature when assigning local regions to the contextual visual words can be corrected or the probabilities of the candidate contextual visual words used to represent the region can be estimated more accurately; and that (2) it offers a more flexible way in fusing these features through determining the similarity-metric locally by localized maximum-margin learning. The proposed method has been evaluated experimentally and the results indicate its effectiveness. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.postprin