Interventions for Problem and Pathological Gambling: Status, Innovations, and Challenges

The purpose of this presentation is to address research on the effectiveness of problem gambling interventions and offer insights for new directions. Dr. Martens has led two clinical trials over the past five years that have integrated technology into problem gambling interventions for young adults. In the first trial (Martens et al., 2015), he found that a computerized personalized feedback intervention reduced gambling problems among at-risk young adult gamblers. In the second trial (Martens et al., in preparation), he found that an intervention delivered via cell phone and text-message had an indirect effect on gambling-related problems. Although effect sizes for these interventions were in the small to medium range, both interventions were relatively inexpensive and easy to implement. He will discuss these findings, how they fit into the context of prior brief intervention efforts in the field (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2009; Hodgins et al., 2009; Petry et al., 2008), how they may be able to scale up and be disseminated widely, and how they inform potential future directions for reducing problem gambling among young adults and other vulnerable populations. He will also address some of the unique challenges associated with integrating technology into brief intervention efforts

On the Correlation between Globalization and Vulnerability in Times of Economic Crisis — A Statistical Analysis for Europe

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that more globalized countries in Europe are equally vulnerable to the current crisis as less globalized European countries. To determine the level of globalization, we use the Maastricht Globalization Index (MGI). We measure the severity of the economic crisis with five key economic indicators. The results seem to suggest that the rising level of globalization increases vulnerability to economic crises on the one hand, while, on the other, higher levels of globalization increase the opportunities to deal with a crisi

Energy conversion in the coronal plasma

Solar and stellar X-ray emission are the observed waste products of the interplay between magnetic fields and the motion of stellar plasma. Theoretical understanding of the process of coronal heating is of utmost importance, since the high temperature is what defines the corona in the first place. Most of the research described deals with the aspects of the several rivalling theories for coronal heating. The rest of the papers deal with processes of energy conversion related to flares

Cosmological stabilization of moduli with steep potentials

A scenario which overcomes the well-known cosmological overshoot problem associated with stabilizing moduli with steep potentials in string theory is proposed. Our proposal relies on the fact that moduli potentials are very steep and that generically their kinetic energy quickly becomes dominant. However, moduli kinetic energy red-shifts faster than other sources when the universe expands. So, if any additional sources are present, even in very small amounts, they will inevitably become dominant. We show that in this case cosmic friction allows the dissipation of the large amount of moduli kinetic energy that is required for the field to be able to find an extremely shallow minimum. We present the idea using analytic methods and verify with some numerical examples.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

A coordinate free description of magnetohydrostatic equilibria

The question what geometrical restrictions are imposed on static magnetic fields by the magnetohydrostatic (MHS) equation is addressed. The general mathematical problem is therefore to determine the solutions of the MHS equations in the corona subject to an arbitrary normal component of the magnetic field at the boundary and arbitrary connectivity. What constraints the MHS equations impose on the geometry of the solutions, expressed in metric tensors, will be determined

Quantum tomography for collider physics: Illustrations with lepton pair production

Quantum tomography is a method to experimentally extract all that is observable about a quantum mechanical system. We introduce quantum tomography to collider physics with the illustration of the angular distribution of lepton pairs. The tomographic method bypasses much of the field-theoretic formalism to concentrate on what can be observed with experimental data, and how to characterize the data. We provide a practical, experimentally-driven guide to model-independent analysis using density matrices at every step. Comparison with traditional methods of analyzing angular correlations of inclusive reactions finds many advantages in the tomographic method, which include manifest Lorentz covariance, direct incorporation of positivity constraints, exhaustively complete polarization information, and new invariants free from frame conventions. For example, experimental data can determine the $entanglement$ $entropy$ of the production process, which is a model-independent invariant that measures the degree of coherence of the subprocess. We give reproducible numerical examples and provide a supplemental standalone computer code that implements the procedure. We also highlight a property of $complex$ $positivity$ that guarantees in a least-squares type fit that a local minimum of a $\chi^{2}$ statistic will be a global minimum: There are no isolated local minima. This property with an automated implementation of positivity promises to mitigate issues relating to multiple minima and convention-dependence that have been problematic in previous work on angular distributions.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure