3,082 research outputs found
Effect of a Novel Brief Motivational Intervention for Alcohol-Intoxicated Young Adults in the Emergency Department: A Randomized Clinical Trial.
Heavy drinking among young adults is a major public health concern. Brief motivational interventions in the emergency department have shown promising but inconsistent results.
To test whether young adults receiving a newly developed brief motivational intervention reduce their number of heavy drinking days and alcohol-related problems over 1 year compared with participants receiving brief advice.
This randomized clinical trial was conducted at an emergency department of a tertiary care university hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland. Recruitment ran from December 2016 to August 2019. Follow-up was conducted after 1, 3, 6, and 12 months. All adults aged 18 to 35 years presenting for any cause and presenting with alcohol intoxication were eligible (N = 2108); 1764 were excluded or refused participation. Follow-up rate was 79% at 12 months and 89% of participants provided follow-up data at least once and were included in the primary analyses. Statistical analysis was performed from September 2020 to January 2021.
The novel intervention was based on motivational interviewing and comprised in-person discussion in the emergency department and up to 3 booster telephone calls. The control group received brief advice.
Primary outcomes were the number of heavy drinking days (at least 60 g of ethanol) over the previous month and the total score on the Short Inventory of Problems (0-45, higher scores indicating more problems) over the previous 3 months. Hypotheses tested were formulated before data collection.
There were 344 young adults included (median [IQR] age: 23 [20-28] years; 84 women [24.4%]). Among the 306 participants providing at least 1 follow-up point, a statistically significant time × group interaction was observed (β = -0.03; 95% CI, -0.05 to 0.00; P = .02), and simple slopes indicated an increase of heavy drinking days over time in the control (β = 0.04; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.05; P < .001) but not in the intervention group (β = 0.01; 95% CI, -0.01 to 0.03; P = .24). There was no effect on the Short Inventory of Problems score (β = -0.01; 95% CI, -0.03 to 0.02; P = .71).
This randomized clinical trial found that a brief motivational intervention implemented in the emergency department provided beneficial effects on heavy drinking, which accounts for a substantial portion of mortality and disease burden among young adults.
ISRCTN registry: 13832949
SOME ABSTRACT PROPERTIES OF SEMIGROUPS APPEARING IN SUPERCONFORMAL THEORIES
A new type of semigroups which appears while dealing with
superconformal symmetry in superstring theories is considered. The ideal series
having unusual abstract properties is constructed. Various idealisers are
introduced and studied. The ideal quasicharacter is defined. Green's relations
are found and their connection with the ideal quasicharacter is established.Comment: 11 page
The association between mentoring and training outcomes in junior doctors in medicine: an observational study.
OBJECTIVE: To determine quantitatively if a positive association exists between the mentoring of junior doctors and better training outcomes in postgraduate medical training within the UK. DESIGN: Observational study. PARTICIPANTS: 117 trainees from the East of England Deanery (non-mentored group) and the recently established Royal College of Physicians (RCP) Mentoring scheme (mentored group) who were core medical trainees (CMTs) between 2015 and 2017 completed an online survey. Trainees who received mentoring at the start of higher specialty training, incomplete responses and trainees who were a part of both the East of England deanery and RCP Mentoring scheme were excluded leaving 85 trainees in the non-mentored arm and 25 trainees in the mentored arm. Responses from a total of 110 trainees were analysed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Pass rates of the various components of the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) (UK) examination (MRCP Part 1, MRCP Part 2 Written and MRCP Part 2 PACES), pass rates at the Annual Review of Competency Progression (ARCP), trainee involvement in significant events, clinical incidents or complaints and trainee feedback on career progression and confidence. RESULTS: Mentored trainees reported higher pass rates of the MRCP Part 1 exam versus non-mentored trainees (84.0% vs 42.4%, p<0.01). Mentored international medical graduates (IMGs) reported higher pass rates than non-mentored IMGs in the MRCP Part 2 Written exam (71.4% vs 24.0%, p<0.05). ARCP pass rates in mentored trainees were observed to be higher than non-mentored trainees (95.8% vs 69.9%, p<0.05). Rates of involvement in significant events, clinical incidents and complaints in both groups did not show any statistical difference. Mentored trainees reported higher confidence and career progression. CONCLUSIONS: A positive association is observed between the mentoring of CMTs and better training outcomes. Further studies are needed to investigate the causative effects of mentoring in postgraduate medical training within the UK
Snowmass 2001: Jet Energy Flow Project
Conventional cone jet algorithms arose from heuristic considerations of LO
hard scattering coupled to independent showering. These algorithms implicitly
assume that the final states of individual events can be mapped onto a unique
set of jets that are in turn associated with a unique set of underlying hard
scattering partons. Thus each final state hadron is assigned to a unique
underlying parton. The Jet Energy Flow (JEF) analysis described here does not
make such assumptions. The final states of individual events are instead
described in terms of flow distributions of hadronic energy. Quantities of
physical interest are constructed from the energy flow distribution summed over
all events. The resulting analysis is less sensitive to higher order
perturbative corrections and the impact of showering and hadronization than the
standard cone algorithms.Comment: REVTeX4, 13 pages, 6 figures; Contribution to the P5 Working Group on
QCD and Strong Interactions at Snowmass 200
Molecular and epidemiologic analysis of dengue virus isolates from Somalia.
Nucleotide sequence analysis was performed on 14 dengue virus isolates (13 dengue-2 viruses and 1 dengue-3 virus) recovered from febrile soldiers in Somalia in 1993. The dengue-2 viruses were most closely related to dengue-2 virus recovered in Somalia in 1984. However, differences in nucleotide sequence (0.35% to 1.35%) were evident among the 1993 isolates. These differences were closely associated with the geographic location of the infection as well as with different times of infection at the same location. Genetic difference between strains was not associated with differences in clinical features. Molecular analysis of dengue viruses is a useful adjunct to epidemiologic investigation of their distribution over distance and time
Propositional Reasoning about Safety and Termination of Heap-Manipulating Programs
This paper shows that it is possible to reason about the safety and
termination of programs handling potentially cyclic, singly-linked lists using
propositional reasoning even when the safety invariants and termination
arguments depend on constraints over the lengths of lists. For this purpose, we
propose the theory SLH of singly-linked lists with length, which is able to
capture non-trivial interactions between shape and arithmetic. When using the
theory of bit-vector arithmetic as a background, SLH is efficiently decidable
via a reduction to SAT. We show the utility of SLH for software verification by
using it to express safety invariants and termination arguments for programs
manipulating potentially cyclic, singly-linked lists with unrestricted,
unspecified sharing. We also provide an implementation of the decision
procedure and use it to check safety and termination proofs for several
heap-manipulating programs
Predicate Abstraction for Linked Data Structures
We present Alias Refinement Types (ART), a new approach to the verification
of correctness properties of linked data structures. While there are many
techniques for checking that a heap-manipulating program adheres to its
specification, they often require that the programmer annotate the behavior of
each procedure, for example, in the form of loop invariants and pre- and
post-conditions. Predicate abstraction would be an attractive abstract domain
for performing invariant inference, existing techniques are not able to reason
about the heap with enough precision to verify functional properties of data
structure manipulating programs. In this paper, we propose a technique that
lifts predicate abstraction to the heap by factoring the analysis of data
structures into two orthogonal components: (1) Alias Types, which reason about
the physical shape of heap structures, and (2) Refinement Types, which use
simple predicates from an SMT decidable theory to capture the logical or
semantic properties of the structures. We prove ART sound by translating types
into separation logic assertions, thus translating typing derivations in ART
into separation logic proofs. We evaluate ART by implementing a tool that
performs type inference for an imperative language, and empirically show, using
a suite of data-structure benchmarks, that ART requires only 21% of the
annotations needed by other state-of-the-art verification techniques
Optical and near-infrared observations of SN 2011dh - The first 100 days
We present optical and near-infrared (NIR) photometry and spectroscopy of the
Type IIb supernova (SN) 2011dh for the first 100 days. We complement our
extensive dataset with SWIFT ultra-violet (UV) and Spitzer mid-infrared (MIR)
data to build a UV to MIR bolometric lightcurve using both photometric and
spectroscopic data. Hydrodynamical modelling of the SN based on this bolometric
lightcurve have been presented in Bersten (2012). We find that the absorption
minimum for the hydrogen lines is never seen below ~11000 km/s but approaches
this value as the lines get weaker. This suggests that the interface between
the helium core and hydrogen rich envelope is located near this velocity in
agreement with the Bersten et al. (2012) He4R270 ejecta model. Spectral
modelling of the hydrogen lines using this ejecta model supports the conclusion
and we find a hydrogen mass of 0.01-0.04 solar masses to be consistent with the
observed spectral evolution. We estimate that the photosphere reaches the
helium core at 5-7 days whereas the helium lines appear between ~10 and ~15
days, close to the photosphere and then move outward in velocity until ~40
days. This suggests that increasing non-thermal excitation due to decreasing
optical depth for the gamma-rays is driving the early evolution of these lines.
We also provide and discuss pre- and post-explosion observations of the SN site
which shows a reduction by 75 percent in flux at the position of the yellow
supergiant coincident with SN 2011dh. The B, V and r band decline rates of
0.0073, 0.0090 and 0.0053 mag/day respectively are consistent with the
remaining flux being emitted by the SN. Hence we find that the star was indeed
the progenitor of SN 2011dh as previously suggested by Maund et al. (2011) and
which is also consistent with the results from the hydrodynamical modelling.Comment: 38 pages, 27 figures, 18 tables, accepted for publication by A&
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