How Are HOPE VI Families Faring? Health

While the primary goal of the HOPE VI program is to improve the living environment of public housing residents, it also aims to help residents move toward self-sufficiency by helping them find new or better jobs (see page 6). The program's Community Support Services (CSS) component can help identify what residents need, such as job training or placement, to make them more likely to find employment. Relocation itself might help residents find employment if they move to less poor neighborhoods with more job opportunities and better job information networks. Residents who move back to new mixed-income developments on the HOPE VI sites could experience similar improved job networks. However, whether these expectations of increased employment and self-sufficiency are realistic for HOPE VI residents is unclear. For both employed and nonemployed residents, the gap between household income and the income needed for housing and other costs of living is wide. The HOPE VI Panel Study is tracking the well-being of residents from five HOPE VI sites (see page 7). These respondents, mostly African American women, were extremely poor at baseline.[1] The vast majority reported household incomes below the poverty level, and over a third (35 percent) reported annual incomes of less than $5,000. Less than half (45 percent) of respondents were employed, and those who were working earned low wages (Popkin et al. 2002). This brief discusses income and employment findings for working-age adults under 62 years old two years after relocation started at the five HOPE VI Panel Study sites.[2] It examines various barriers to employment for respondents, and considers both expectations for future employment and the services and support systems that might best mitigate those barriers. Future research will examine how residents' employment experiences are affected as relocation is completed and some residents return to the revitalized developments. Brief #4 from the series "Metropolitan Housing and Communities: A Roof Over Their Heads".Notes from this section1. Because many health problems vary significantly by gender and race, and because over 90 percent of the adults in the HOPE VI Panel Study are women and 89 percent are African American, a sample of black women nationally is used as the comparison group. The national data cited in this brief are published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, calculated from the National Health Interview Survey in 2001.National Health Interview Survey data are broken down by sex and race, but not further by poverty status. Nationally, approximately one-third of all black women live in households with incomes below the poverty level. Therefore, the comparison data are biased slightly upward in terms of better health because of the relatively better economic well-being of the national population of black women compared to the HOPE VI sample. Even limiting the comparisons to similar gender, race, and age groups, adults in the HOPE VI study experience health problems more often than other demographically similar groups

Listening from a distance: A survey of University of Illinois distance learners and its implications for meaningful instruction.

In Spring 2009, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library conducted a significant new survey of distance learners enrolled in off-campus or online graduate programs. Exploring distance learners’ perceptions about and use of library services, the survey of 146 students reveals opportunities to better meet the research needs of distance learners whose graduate work may demand extensive use of library resources. The survey affords insights into distance learners’ communication preferences, and their particular research needs. Findings from this survey have informed one academic library’s strategy to begin addressing important questions in library instruction for distance learners.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

A neural network based spatial light scattering instrument for hazardous airborne fiber detection

This paper was published in Applied Optics and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic or multiple reproduction, distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited. Copyright OSA (www.osa.org/pubs/osajournals.org)A laser light scattering instrument has been designed to facilitate the real-time detection of potentially hazardous respirable fibers, such as asbestos, within an ambient environment. The instrument captures data relating to the spatial distribution of light scattered by individual particles in flow using a dedicated multi-element photodiode detector array. These data are subsequently processed using an artificial neural network which has previously been trained to recognise those features or patterns within the light scattering distribution which may be characteristic of the specific particle types being sought, such as for example, crocidolite or chrysotile asbestos fibers. Each particle is thus classified into one of a limited set of classes based upon its light scattering properties, and from the accumulated data a particle concentration figure for each class may be produced and updated at regular intervals. Particle analysis rates in excess of 103 per second within a sample volume flow-rate of 1 litre per minute are achievable, offering the possibility of detecting fiber concentrations at the recommended maximum exposure limit of 0.1 fibers/ml within a sampling period of a few seconds.Peer reviewe

A light scattering instrument for investigating cloud ice microcrystal morphology

We describe an optical scattering instrument designed to assess the shapes and sizes of microscopic atmospheric cloud particles, especially the smallest ice crystals that can profoundly affect cloud processes and radiative properties yet cannot be seen clearly using in situ cloud particle imaging probes. The new instrument captures high-resolution spatial light scattering patterns from individual particles down to ~1 μm in size passing through a laser beam. Its significance lies in the ability of these patterns to provide morphological data for particle sizes well below the optical resolution limits of current probes

Scattering of non-uniform incident fields by long cylinders

Copyright University of BremenWe investigate experimentally far-field scattering from cylinders with illumination non-uniform along the axis of the cylinder. Scattered intensity as a function of angle in two orthogonal directions is examined. Variation along the scattering angle is found to be little affected by the illumination profile. However, variation in the transverse direction follows closely the Fourier transform of the illumination pattern and reproduces the angular distribution of the incident wave. These finding apply to circular as well as hexagonal cross-section cylinders

Risk of Tooth Loss After Cigarette Smoking Cessation

INTRODUCTION. Little is known about the effect of cigarette smoking cessation on risk of tooth loss. We examined how risk of tooth loss changed with longer periods of smoking abstinence in a prospective study of oral health in men. METHODS. Research subjects were 789 men who participated in the Veterans Administration Dental Longitudinal Study from 1968 to 2004. Tooth status and smoking status were determined at examinations performed every 3 years, for a maximum follow-up time of 35 years. Risk of tooth loss subsequent to smoking cessation was assessed sequentially at 1-year intervals with multivariate proportional hazards regression models. Men who never smoked cigarettes, cigars, or pipes formed the reference group. Hazard ratios were adjusted for age, education, total pack-years of cigarette exposure, frequency of brushing, and use of floss. RESULTS. The hazard ratio for tooth loss was 2.1 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.5-3.1) among men who smoked cigarettes during all or part of follow-up. Risk of tooth loss among men who quit smoking declined as time after smoking cessation increased, from 2.0 (95% CI, 1.4-2.9) after 1 year of abstinence to 1.0 (95% CI, 0.5-2.2) after 15 years of abstinence. The risk remained significantly elevated for the first 9 years of abstinence but eventually dropped to the level of men who never smoked after 13 or more years. CONCLUSION. These results indicate that smoking cessation is beneficial for tooth retention, but long-term abstinence is required to reduce the risk to the level of people who have never smoked.U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Epidemiology (Merit Review grant); Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center; National Institutes of Health (R01 DA10073, R03 DE016357, R15 DE12644, K24 DE00419

Alien Physicians and Their Admission into the United States - An Update

This Article provides an update to a previous article, Alien Physicians and Their Admission into the United States, which surveyed the new requirements on alien physicians to pass medical and English competency examinations and discussed various means by which these requirements may be circumvented. The author discusses the interim implementation of these requirements, and concludes that, while recent pieces of legislation were developed to clarify these requirements, considerable confusion still exists as to the application of these requirements

Fast prediction and evaluation of gravitational waveforms using surrogate models

[Abridged] We propose a solution to the problem of quickly and accurately predicting gravitational waveforms within any given physical model. The method is relevant for both real-time applications and in more traditional scenarios where the generation of waveforms using standard methods can be prohibitively expensive. Our approach is based on three offline steps resulting in an accurate reduced-order model that can be used as a surrogate for the true/fiducial waveform family. First, a set of m parameter values is determined using a greedy algorithm from which a reduced basis representation is constructed. Second, these m parameters induce the selection of m time values for interpolating a waveform time series using an empirical interpolant. Third, a fit in the parameter dimension is performed for the waveform's value at each of these m times. The cost of predicting L waveform time samples for a generic parameter choice is of order m L + m c_f online operations where c_f denotes the fitting function operation count and, typically, m << L. We generate accurate surrogate models for Effective One Body (EOB) waveforms of non-spinning binary black hole coalescences with durations as long as 10^5 M, mass ratios from 1 to 10, and for multiple harmonic modes. We find that these surrogates are three orders of magnitude faster to evaluate as compared to the cost of generating EOB waveforms in standard ways. Surrogate model building for other waveform models follow the same steps and have the same low online scaling cost. For expensive numerical simulations of binary black hole coalescences we thus anticipate large speedups in generating new waveforms with a surrogate. As waveform generation is one of the dominant costs in parameter estimation algorithms and parameter space exploration, surrogate models offer a new and practical way to dramatically accelerate such studies without impacting accuracy.Comment: 20 pages, 17 figures, uses revtex 4.1. Version 2 includes new numerical experiments for longer waveform durations, larger regions of parameter space and multi-mode model