Intrinsic Motivations and Perceived Benefits of U.S. Males for Taking Dimethyltryptamine

Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a psychedelic drug which has a rapidly increasing user rate, giving rise to concern amongst law enforcement and public health officials around the world. While previous researchers have primarily focused their examinations of motivations for DMT use internationally with diverse populations, this study was an investigation of DMT use in the United States among its most prevalent user demographic, adult men. The purpose of this study was to bridge the gap between knowledge of motivations for DMT use internationally and lack of knowledge domestically. The theoretical foundation for this study was comprised of the self-efficacy theory and the self-determination theory. The research questions for this study were designed to examine the intrinsic motivations for both first-time and continued experimentation with DMT, and how expectations of use align with perceived benefits of use. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, face to face semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 participants who were U.S. males between the ages of 18-50. Transcripts from the interviews were analyzed using a 6-step coding process which developed codes into 8 categories and 3 main themes. Study results indicated that (a) curiosity and convenience were the main contributors to motivations for initial use of DMT, (b) motivations for continued use became far more diverse, and (c) user’s expectations of use did not typically align with perceived benefits of use. Implications for social change include informing legislators, law enforcement officials, and mental health professionals of the motivations for DMT use in the U.S. adult male population to better formulate policies and practices related to this rapidly growing drug use phenomenon

Environmental Law

Environmental law as a separate discipline has continued to grow in stature during the last few years and the rising influence of environmental factors in all areas of law and business shows no signs of abating. With President Clinton\u27s appointment of Carol Browner, former Florida Department of Environmental Regulation Secretary, as Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ), the new administration signaled its intent to place greater emphasis on environmental issues. Even Vice President Gore\u27s popular book, Earth In The Balance, advocates wide ranging and fundamental changes in American society and revolves around a particular environmental vision. Like its predecessor, this survey provides a single compilation of the significant case law on environmental issues in the Eleventh Circuit. During the survey period, courts in the Eleventh Circuit focused most of their attention on the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the chief federal statute addressing contaminated land. However, for the sake of consistency and usefulness, this Article will follow the format of the previous survey addressing the issues in the order of environmental procedure, water protection, land related cases, and, finally, criminal enforcement

O consumo de energia elétrica e o desenvolvimento : estudo do período de 2001 a 2010 do Paraná e do Brasil

Orientador: Mariano de Matos MacedoMonografia(Graduação) - Universidade Federal do Paraná,Setor de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas, Curso de Ciências EconômicasResumo: O trabalho visa apresentar os elementos referentes ao consumo de energia elétrica e a sua correlação com desenvolvimento socioeconômico local. É apresentado um histórico do período de 2001 a 2010 do consumo de energia elétrica residencial dos Estados brasileiros e de forma específica dos Municípios do estado do Paraná, acompanhado de sua relação com índices que mensuram o desenvolvimento de cada localidade. Ao final é realizado uma análise sobre os locais que apresentaram um cenário com maior elevação de seu nível de desenvolvimento e do consumo per capita de energia elétrica nas residências

Environmental Law

Environmental law matured during the last decade to occupy a leading role in American jurisprudence. News of the dominance of environmental issues will come as no surprise to anyone practicing law today. At least one attorney in almost every private law firm specializes in environmental law, and most larger law firms devote entire departments to the field. As environmental law grows more and more complex, staying abreast of its sometimes shocking developments becomes increasingly difficult

Row–Column Beamformer for Fast Volumetric Imaging

This work presents a beamforming procedure that significantly reduces the number of operations when performing volumetric synthetic aperture imaging with row–column addressed arrays (RCAs). The proposed beamformer uses that the image values along the elevation direction of the low-resolution volume (LRV) are approximately constant. It is thus hypothesized that the entire LRV could be reconstructed from a single 2-D cross section of the LRV. The presented method contains two stages. The first stage beamforms, for each emission, a cross section using the conventional RCA beamformer. The second stage extrapolates the rest of the image points in the volume from the 2-D cross sections. Assuming the image volume is covered by 3-D grid coordinates with a size of ${N}_{w}\times {N}_{w} \times {N}_{z}$ , i.e., ${N}_{w}$ samples along the ${x}$ - and ${y}$ -axis and ${N}_{z}$ samples along the ${z}$ -axis, the proposed beamformer reduces the number of mathematical operations by a factor of approximately $\textit {NN}_{w}/{(}\textit {NS}+{N}_{w}{)}$ . Here, ${S}$ is the ratio between the first- and second-stage axial sampling rates, and ${N}$ is the receiving aperture’s number of channels. Beamforming a $128\times 128\times1024$ volume from data acquired with ${N}$ = 128 receiving channel can thus be achieved with 25.6 times fewer operations, when ${S}$ = 4. A 9.23 times increase in the beamforming rate for a $100\times 100\times200$ volume was demonstrated on complex data from a 128 + 128 Vermon RCA probe. Real-time volumetric beamformation can, with this increase, be performed with a pulse repetition frequency of up to 1804.80 Hz. The proposed and conventional beamformer’s output was visually indistinguishable, and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) and full width at tenth maximum (FWTM) were at most 1.19% larger with the proposed approach. The proposed beamformer can thus perform volumetric imaging significantly faster than the current approach, with a negligible difference in image quality

Row-Column Beamformer for Fast Volumetric Imaging

A row-column beamformation algorithm is presented, which yields the output from the conventional delay-and-sum algorithm while reducing the number of operations by order of magnitude. The proposed method uses that in a row-column synthetic aperture sequence, the low-resolution volumes (LRV) have approximately constant image values along the elevation axis. It is, thus, possible to reconstruct the entire LRV from a single cross-section by modeling the positions with constant image values. As such, the proposed method consists of two stages. The first stage beamforms a low-resolution image per emission using the conventional approach. The second stage reconstructs the LRVs with one interpolation per voxel. Lastly, a high-resolution volume (HRV) is obtained by summing the LRVs across all emissions. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on measured data acquired using a 6 MHz 128+128 Vermon row-column probe and a Verasonics Vantage system. The proposed method beamformed a $100 \times 100 \times 200$ HRV consisting of 48 LRVs at a volume rate of 38 Hz. This was 9.23 times faster than a published GPU implementation of the conventional approach and real-time volumetric beamformation was achieved with a pulse repetition frequency of up to 1805 Hz. The output from the conventional and proposed beamformer was visually indistinguishable, and their point spread function's width heccurate interpolation requiright at -6 dB and -20 dB deviated less than 0.5%. This demonstrates that the number of operations of the conventional row-column beamformer can be significantly reduced with a negligible impact on image quality.</p

Study in the issues of illegal logging and related trade of timber and other forest product issues in Europe

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