The story of a shooting: recommendations for more effective crisis communication

A crisis narrative is used to tell the story of a shooting at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri, United States. The story provides a learning experience for institutions as they seek best practices in handling crises. Although it appears that the university followed procedures correctly in dealing with this situation, questions linger as to whether administrators truly communicated effectively with students. Technology was used to warn students of potential danger, but not enough information was provided so students could deal on a personal level with the crisis. Face-to-face communication is important especially in a crisis to “soften” the blows of the situation

Cultural Implications of a Study of Police Communication With Minorities

Recent protests and riots around the globe have renewed the call for police reform. While police reforms could benefit the police and the public, police training in cultural awareness, racial biases, and communications may result in better and faster changes in police attitudes and approaches for working with minorities. This study suggests that non-police public safety personnel perceive a greater need for police training than the police. The study examined the police relationship and their communication with minority populations as perceived by Kosovo police (N=20) and other public safety personnel (N=24). Respondents answered a quantitative survey. Although not statistically significant, it appears that most police respondents didn’t recognize that cultural barriers exist between minorities and police, and they didn’t feel a strong need for cultural training. On the other hand, other public safety personnel showed greater support for cultural training, recognizing that cultural barriers do exist between police and minorities. Both groups agreed that trust is more important than speaking the same language when working with minorities

Trends and Regional Variation in Hip, Knee and Shoulder Replacement

Analyzes patterns in underuse or overuse of joint replacements among Medicare beneficiaries by geographic regions and race/ethnicity. Explores underlying factors and highlights the need for physician and patient education and shared decision making

The Logarithmic Triviality of Compact QED Coupled to a Four Fermi Interaction

This is the completion of an exploratory study of Compact lattice Quantum Electrodynamics with a weak four-fermi interaction and four species of massless fermions. In this formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics massless fermions can be simulated directly and Finite Size Scaling analyses can be performed at the theory's chiral symmetry breaking critical point. High statistics simulations on lattices ranging from $8^4$ to $24^4$ yield the equation of state, critical indices, scaling functions and cumulants. The measurements are well fit with the orthodox hypothesis that the theory is logarithmically trivial and its continuum limit suffers from Landau's zero charge problem.Comment: 27 pages, 15 figues and 10 table

Dynamic Dependency Tests for Audio-Visual Speaker Association

We formulate the problem of audio-visual speaker association as a dynamic dependency test. That is, given an audio stream and multiple video streams, we wish to determine their dependancy structure as it evolves over time. To this end, we propose the use of a hidden factorization Markov model in which the hidden state encodes a finite number of possible dependency structures. Each dependency structure has an explicit semantic meaning, namely “who is speaking. ” This model takes advantage of both structural and parametric changes associated with changes in speaker. This is contrasted with standard sliding window based dependence analysis. Using this model we obtain state-of-the-art performance on an audio-visual association task without benefit of training data. Index Terms — Pattern clustering methods 1

Photoacoustic effect for multiply scattered light

We consider the photoacoustic effect for multiply scattered light in a random medium. Within the accuracy of the diffusion approximation to the radiative transport equation, we present a general analysis of the sensitivity of a photoacoustic wave to the presence of one or more small absorbing objects. Applications to tumor detection by photoacoustic imaging are suggested

Placental Structure in Preterm Birth Among HIV-Positive Versus HIV-Negative Women in Kenya.

BackgroundPreterm birth (PTB) is a major cause of infant morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Recent data suggest that in addition to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection, use of antiretroviral therapy (ART) increases the risk of PTB. As the mechanisms remain unexplored, we conducted this study to determine whether HIV and ART were associated with placental changes that could contribute to PTB.SettingWe collected and evaluated placentas from 38 HIV-positive women on ART and 43 HIV-negative women who had preterm deliveries in Nairobi, Kenya.MethodsAnatomical features of the placentas were examined at gross and microscopic levels. Cases were matched for gestational age and compared by the investigators who were blinded to maternal HIV serostatus.ResultsAmong preterm placentas, HIV infection was significantly associated with thrombosis (P = 0.001), infarction (P = 0.032), anomalies in cord insertion (P = 0.02), gross evidence of membrane infection (P = 0.043), and reduced placental thickness (P = 0.010). Overall, preterm placentas in both groups were associated with immature villi, syncytial knotting, villitis, and deciduitis. Features of HIV-positive versus HIV-negative placentas included significant fibrinoid deposition with villus degeneration, syncytiotrophoblast delamination, red blood cell adhesion, hypervascularity, and reduction in both surface area and perimeter of the terminal villi.ConclusionsThese results imply that HIV infection and/or ART are associated with morphological changes in preterm placentas that contribute to delivery before 37 weeks. Hypervascularity suggests that the observed pathologies may be attributable, in part, to hypoxia. Further research to explore potential mechanisms will help elucidate the pathways that are involved perhaps pointing to interventions for decreasing the risk of prematurity among HIV-positive women