'She's like a daughter to me': insights into care, work and kinship from rural Russia

This article draws on ethnographic research into a state-funded homecare service in rural Russia. The article discusses intersections between care, work and kinship in the relationships between homecare workers and their elderly wards and explores the ways in which references to kinship, as a means of authenticating paid care and explaining its emotional content, reinforce public and private oppositions while doing little to relieve the tensions and conflicts of care work. The discussion brings together detailed empirical insights into local ideologies and practices as a way of generating new theoretical perspectives, which will be of relevance beyond the particular context of study

Training product unit neural networks with genetic algorithms

The training of product neural networks using genetic algorithms is discussed. Two unusual neural network techniques are combined; product units are employed instead of the traditional summing units and genetic algorithms train the network rather than backpropagation. As an example, a neural netork is trained to calculate the optimum width of transistors in a CMOS switch. It is shown how local minima affect the performance of a genetic algorithm, and one method of overcoming this is presented

Excited States in Warm and Hot Dense Matter

Accurate modeling of warm and hot dense matter is challenging in part due to the multitude of excited states that must be considered. In thermal density functional theory, these excited states are averaged over to produce a single, averaged, thermal ground state. Here we present a variational framework and model that includes explicit excited states. In this framework an excited state is defined by a set of effective one-electron occupation factors and the corresponding energy is defined by the effective one-body energy with an exchange and correlation term. The variational framework is applied to an atom-in-plasma model (a generalization of the so-called average atom model). Comparisons with a density functional theory based average atom model generally reveal good agreement in the calculated pressure, but the new model also gives access to the excitation energies and charge state distributions

Abundance Measurements of Titan's Stratospheric HCN, HC3_3N, C3_3H4_4, and CH3_3CN from ALMA Observations

Previous investigations have employed more than 100 close observations of Titan by the Cassini orbiter to elucidate connections between the production and distribution of Titan's vast, organic-rich chemical inventory and its atmospheric dynamics. However, as Titan transitions into northern summer, the lack of incoming data from the Cassini orbiter presents a potential barrier to the continued study of seasonal changes in Titan's atmosphere. In our previous work (Thelen et al., 2018), we demonstrated that the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is well suited for measurements of Titan's atmosphere in the stratosphere and lower mesosphere (~100-500 km) through the use of spatially resolved (beam sizes <1'') flux calibration observations of Titan. Here, we derive vertical abundance profiles of four of Titan's trace atmospheric species from the same 3 independent spatial regions across Titan's disk during the same epoch (2012 to 2015): HCN, HC$_3$N, C$_3$H$_4$, and CH$_3$CN. We find that Titan's minor constituents exhibit large latitudinal variations, with enhanced abundances at high latitudes compared to equatorial measurements; this includes CH$_3$CN, which eluded previous detection by Cassini in the stratosphere, and thus spatially resolved abundance measurements were unattainable. Even over the short 3-year period, vertical profiles and integrated emission maps of these molecules allow us to observe temporal changes in Titan's atmospheric circulation during northern spring. Our derived abundance profiles are comparable to contemporary measurements from Cassini infrared observations, and we find additional evidence for subsidence of enriched air onto Titan's south pole during this time period. Continued observations of Titan with ALMA beyond the summer solstice will enable further study of how Titan's atmospheric composition and dynamics respond to seasonal changes.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Icarus, September 201

Deep Depth From Focus

Depth from focus (DFF) is one of the classical ill-posed inverse problems in computer vision. Most approaches recover the depth at each pixel based on the focal setting which exhibits maximal sharpness. Yet, it is not obvious how to reliably estimate the sharpness level, particularly in low-textured areas. In this paper, we propose `Deep Depth From Focus (DDFF)' as the first end-to-end learning approach to this problem. One of the main challenges we face is the hunger for data of deep neural networks. In order to obtain a significant amount of focal stacks with corresponding groundtruth depth, we propose to leverage a light-field camera with a co-calibrated RGB-D sensor. This allows us to digitally create focal stacks of varying sizes. Compared to existing benchmarks our dataset is 25 times larger, enabling the use of machine learning for this inverse problem. We compare our results with state-of-the-art DFF methods and we also analyze the effect of several key deep architectural components. These experiments show that our proposed method `DDFFNet' achieves state-of-the-art performance in all scenes, reducing depth error by more than 75% compared to the classical DFF methods.Comment: accepted to Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 201

A comparative framework: how broadly applicable is a 'rigorous' critical junctures framework?

The paper tests Hogan and Doyle's (2007, 2008) framework for examining critical junctures. This framework sought to incorporate the concept of ideational change in understanding critical junctures. Until its development, frameworks utilized in identifying critical junctures were subjective, seeking only to identify crisis, and subsequent policy changes, arguing that one invariably led to the other, as both occurred around the same time. Hogan and Doyle (2007, 2008) hypothesized ideational change as an intermediating variable in their framework, determining if, and when, a crisis leads to radical policy change. Here we test this framework on cases similar to, but different from, those employed in developing the exemplar. This will enable us determine whether the framework's relegation of ideational change to a condition of crisis holds, or, if ideational change has more importance than is ascribed to it by this framework. This will also enable us determined if the framework itself is robust, and fit for the purposes it was designed to perform — identifying the nature of policy change

Health Literacy and Medication Adherence Among Patients Treated in a Free Health Clinic: A Pilot Study

Background: A patient’s health literacy is not routinely assessed during visits with a health care provider. Since low health literacy is a risk factor for poor health outcomes, assessing health literacy should be considered as part of the standard medical workup. Objectives: To evaluate the health literacy levels and medication adherence of patients treated by pharmacists in both the general medicine and the chronic care clinics at an urban free health clinic. Methods: Eligible patients from the free health clinic completed the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM), a health literacy measurement tool, during their clinic visit in 2011. Medication adherence was self-reported by the patients. Results: A total of 100 patients participated (mean age = 48). The majority of participants were female (56%) and white (55%). Most (64%) of the patients scored at a high school reading level according to REALM. Only 21% of participants read at a seventh- to eighth-grade level. Overall medication adherence rate was 73%. Forgetting to take medication was the most popular reason given for nonadherence. Conclusion: Disease state and adherence were significantly related in patients with HIV/AIDS and hypertension. Patient’s ethnicity was significantly associated with literacy levels (P < .05). Although patients’ literacy levels were not significantly associated with self-reported adherence in this population, availability of a patient’s baseline health literacy level as a part of the medical record may help clinicians to individualize their interaction based on the patient’s health literacy level in order to achieve better health outcomes, including improved medication adherence, especially for underserved populations

The Mid-Infrared Instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, VIII: The MIRI Focal Plane System

We describe the layout and unique features of the focal plane system for MIRI. We begin with the detector array and its readout integrated circuit (combining the amplifier unit cells and the multiplexer), the electronics, and the steps by which the data collection is controlled and the output signals are digitized and delivered to the JWST spacecraft electronics system. We then discuss the operation of this MIRI data system, including detector readout patterns, operation of subarrays, and data formats. Finally, we summarize the performance of the system, including remaining anomalies that need to be corrected in the data pipeline