‘When I get better I will do the test’: Facilitators and barriers to HIV testing in Northwest Region of Cameroon with implications for TB and HIV/AIDS control programmes

The World Health Organization has recommended collaborative activities between TB and HIV programmes with routine counselling and testing for HIV among TB patients in order to improve the uptake of HIV services. We carried out qualitative research interviews with 21 TB patients in four selected TB and HIV/AIDS treatment centres in the Northwest Region of Cameroon to explore the facilitators and barriers to HIV testing. The desire to be healthy and live longer from knowing one’s status inspired by the anticipated support from loved ones, faith in a supreme being, influence and trust in the medical authority, encouraged HIV testing. Men also demonstrated their masculinity by testing, thus portraying themselves as positive role models for other men. Meanwhile, the overwhelming burden of facing both TB and HIV  simultaneously, influenced by the fear of disclosure of results, harmful gender norms and practices, fear of stigma and discrimination, and misconceptions surrounding HIV/AIDS deterred HIV testing. However, as a result of conflicting emotional experiences regarding to test or not to test, the decision-making process was not straightforward and this complex process needs to be acknowledged by health care providers when advocating for routine HIV testing among TB patients

Diffractive Higgs boson production at the Tevatron and LHC

Improved possibilities to find the Higgs boson in diffractive events, having less hadronic activity, depend on whether the cross section is large enough. Based on the soft color interaction models that successfully describe diffractive hard scattering at HERA and the Tevatron, we find that only a few diffractive Higgs events may be produced at the Tevatron, but we predict a substantial rate at the LHC.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, uses Revtex

Second language user support

Computer users rarely experience entirely trouble-free interaction. The natural variety ofindividuals ensures that no software systems yield constantly fluent interaction for allusers. In consequence, software designers often strive to ameliorate this situation bybuilding 'user support' into their systems. User support can take different forms but,conventionally, each aims to assist the needy end-user by means of facilities directly supporting the performance of certain operations, or through supply of information thatadvises the user on available system functionality.The present paper briefly characterises a range of user support facilities before describingone requirement in greater detail. This aspect considers the needs of users whose mother-tongue is not English, but who are obliged to use English-based information systems. Inthis context, 'helping the user' must reasonably extend beyond mere advice on systemoperation to selective elucidation of information content. We regard this move as alogical extension of the user support concept, by seeking to address specific interactionneeds in a target user population. An example of this approach is described through aninformation system, in the domain of civil engineering, for native Chinese speakers ofEnglish

Rapidity gaps at HERA and the Tevatron from soft colour exchanges

Models based on soft colour exchanges to rearrange colour strings in the final state provide a general framework for both diffractive and non-diffractive events in ep and hadron-hadron collisions. We study two such models and find that they can reproduce rapidity gap data from both HERA and the Tevatron. We also discuss the influence of parton cascades and multiple interactions on the results.Comment: 4 pages, 4 EPS figures, presented at UK Phenomenology Workshop on Collider Physics, Durham. Uses iopart.cl

Soft Color Interactions and Diffractive Hard Scattering at the Fermilab Tevatron

An improved understanding of nonperturbative QCD can be obtained by the recently developed soft color interaction models. Their essence is the variation of color string-field topologies, giving a unified description of final states in high energy interactions, e.g., diffractive and nondiffractive events in ep and ppbar. Here we present a detailed study of such models (the soft color interaction model and the generalized area law model) applied to ppbar, considering also the general problem of the underlying event including beam particle remnants. With models tuned to HERA ep data, we find a good description also of Tevatron data on production of W, beauty and jets in diffractive events defined either by leading antiprotons or by one or two rapidity gaps in the forward or backward regions. We also give predictions for diffractive J/psi production where the soft exchange mechanism produces both a gap and a color singlet ccbar state in the same event. This soft color interaction approach is also compared with Pomeron-based models for diffraction, and some possibilities to experimentally discriminate between these different approaches are discussed.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figures, uses REVTeX. Minor changes, version to appear in Phys. Rev.

The narratives of Hardship: : The new and the old poor in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Hulya Dagdeviren, Matthew Donoghue, and Lars Meier, ‘The narratives of hardship: the new and the old poor in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Europe’, The Sociological Review, vol. 65 (2): 369-385, May 2017. The final, definitive version of record is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12403. Published by SAGE.This paper examines poverty and hardship in Europe after the 2008 crisis, using household interviews in nine European countries. A number of findings deserve highlighting. First, making a distinction between ‘the old poor’ (those who lived in poverty before as well as after the crisis) and ‘the new poor’ (thosewho fell into hardship after the crisis), we show that hardship is experienced quite differently by these groups. Second, the household narratives showed that while material deprivations constitute an important aspect of hardship, the themes of insecurity and dependency also emerged as fundamental dimensions. In contrast to popular political discourse in countries such as the UK, dependency on welfare or family was experienced as a source of distress and manifested as a form of hardship by participants in all countries covered in this study.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Gluon distributions in nucleons and pions at a low resolution scale

In this paper we study the gluon distribution functions in nucleons and pions at a low resolution $Q^2$ scale. This is an important issue since parton densities at low $Q^2$ have always been taken as an external input which is adjusted through DGLAP evolution to fit the experimental data at higher scales. Here, in the framework of a model recently developed, it is shown that the hypothetical cloud of {\it neutral} pions surrounding nucleons and pions appears to be responsible for the characteristic valence-like gluon distributions needed at the inital low scale. As an additional result, we get the remarkable prediction that neutral and charged pions have different intrinsic sea flavor contents.Comment: final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Discussion on several points enlarge

Diffractive Dissociation In The Interacting Gluon Model

We have extended the Interacting Gluon Model (IGM) to calculate diffractive mass spectra generated in hadronic collisions. We show that it is possible to treat both diffractive and non-diffractive events on the same footing, in terms of gluon-gluon collisions. A systematic analysis of available data is performed. The energy dependence of diffractive mass spectra is addressed. They show a moderate narrowing at increasing energies. Predictions for LHC energies are presented.Comment: 12 pages, latex, 14 figures (PostScript Files included); accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D (Feb.97

Testing Color Evaporation in Photon-Photon Production of J/Psi at CERN LEP II

The DELPHI Collaboration has recently reported the measurement of J/Psi production in photon-photon collisions at LEP II. These newly available data provide an additional proof of the importance of colored c bar{c} pairs for the production of charmonium because these data can only be explained by considering resolved photon processes. We show here that the inclusion of color octet contributions to the J/Psi production in the framework of the color evaporation model is able to reproduce this data. In particular, the transverse-momentum distribution of the J/Psi mesons is well described by this model.Comment: 10 pages, 5 Figures, Revtex