5,973 research outputs found
Who is failing abused and neglected children?
This is a response to an article by Nigel Speight and
Jane Wynne, ‘Is the Children Act failing severely
abused and neglected children?’, published in this
journal in March 2000.1 Overall, we consider the
article to be polemical and inadequately argued.
Many of the points made are unsubstantiated and
there are errors of fact. Where does evidence based
practice go if senior practitioners prefer anecdotes
and personal belief to research findings?
Restrictions on space preclude an exhaustive
reply to all the points Speight and Wynne raise, so
we have confined ourselves to addressing those considered
most significant
Attitudes towards mental illness in Malawi: a cross-sectional survey
<p><b>Background:</b> Stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness are strongly linked to suffering, disability and poverty. In order to protect the rights of those with mental disorders and to sensitively develop services, it is vital to gain a more accurate understanding of the frequency and nature of stigma against people with mental illness. Little research about this issue has been conducted in sub Saharan Africa. Our study aimed to describe levels of stigma in Malawi.</p>
<p><b>Method:</b> A cross-sectional survey of patients and relatives attending mental health and non-mental health related clinics in a general hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. Subjects were interviewed using an adapted version of the questionnaire developed for the World Psychiatric Association Program to Reduce Stigma and Discrimination Because of Schizophrenia.</p>
<p><b>Results:</b> 210 subjects participated in our study. Most attributed mental disorder to alcohol and illicit drug abuse (95%). This was closely followed by brain disease (92.8%), spirit possession (82.8%) and then psychological trauma (76.1%). There were some associations found between demographic variables and single question responses, however no consistent trends were observed in stigmatising beliefs. These results should be interpreted with caution and in the context of existing research. Contrary to the international literature, having direct personal experience of mental illness seemed to have no positive effect on stigmatising beliefs in our sample.</p>
<p><b>Conclusions:</b> Our study contributes to an emerging picture that individuals in sub Saharan Africa most commonly attribute mental illness to alcohol/ illicit drug use and spiritual causes. Our work adds weight to the argument that stigma towards mental illness is an important global health and human rights issue.</p>
Formation of a rotating jet during the filament eruption on 10-11 April 2013
We analyze multi-wavelength and multi-viewpoint observations of a helically
twisted plasma jet formed during a confined filament eruption on 10-11 April
2013. Given a rather large scale event with its high spatial and temporal
resolution observations, it allows us to clearly understand some new physical
details about the formation and triggering mechanism of twisting jet. We
identify a pre-existing flux rope associated with a sinistral filament, which
was observed several days before the event. The confined eruption of the
filament within a null point topology, also known as an Eiffel tower (or
inverted-Y) magnetic field configuration results in the formation of a twisted
jet after the magnetic reconnection near a null point. The sign of helicity in
the jet is found to be the same as that of the sign of helicity in the
filament. Untwisting motion of the reconnected magnetic field lines gives rise
to the accelerating plasma along the jet axis. The event clearly shows the
twist injection from the pre-eruptive magnetic field to the jet.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, to appear in MNRA
Flux rope, hyperbolic flux tube, and late EUV phases in a non-eruptive circular-ribbon flare
We present a detailed study of a confined circular flare dynamics associated
with 3 UV late phases in order to understand more precisely which topological
elements are present and how they constrain the dynamics of the flare. We
perform a non-linear force free field extrapolation of the confined flare
observed with the HMI and AIA instruments onboard SDO. From the 3D magnetic
field we compute the squashing factor and we analyse its distribution.
Conjointly, we analyse the AIA EUV light curves and images in order to identify
the post-flare loops, their temporal and thermal evolution. By combining both
analysis we are able to propose a detailed scenario that explains the dynamics
of the flare. Our topological analysis shows that in addition to a null-point
topology with the fan separatrix, the spine lines and its surrounding
Quasi-Separatix Layers halo (typical for a circular flare), a flux rope and its
hyperbolic flux tube (HFT) are enclosed below the null. By comparing the
magnetic field topology and the EUV post-flare loops we obtain an almost
perfect match 1) between the footpoints of the separatrices and the EUV
1600~\AA{} ribbons and 2) between the HFT's field line footpoints and bright
spots observed inside the circular ribbons. We showed, for the first time in a
confined flare, that magnetic reconnection occured initially at the HFT, below
the flux rope. Reconnection at the null point between the flux rope and the
overlying field is only initiated in a second phase. In addition, we showed
that the EUV late phase observed after the main flare episode are caused by the
cooling loops of different length which have all reconnected at the null point
during the impulsive phase.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, in pres
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Orientation and distribution of recent gullies in the southern hemisphere of Mars: observations from HRSC/MEX and MOC/MGS data
Abstract not available
Multigroup radiation hydrodynamics with flux-limited diffusion and adaptive mesh refinement
International audienceContext. Radiative transfer plays a crucial role in the star formation process. Because of the high computational cost, radiation-hydrodynamics simulations performed up to now have mainly been carried out in the grey approximation. In recent years, multifrequency radiation-hydrodynamics models have started to be developed in an attempt to better account for the large variations in opacities as a function of frequency.Aims. We wish to develop an efficient multigroup algorithm for the adaptive mesh refinement code RAMSES which is suited to heavy proto-stellar collapse calculations.Methods. Because of the prohibitive timestep constraints of an explicit radiative transfer method, we constructed a time-implicit solver based on a stabilized bi-conjugate gradient algorithm, and implemented it in RAMSES under the flux-limited diffusion approximation.Results. We present a series of tests that demonstrate the high performance of our scheme in dealing with frequency-dependent radiation-hydrodynamic flows. We also present a preliminary simulation of a 3D proto-stellar collapse using 20 frequency groups. Differences between grey and multigroup results are briefly discussed, and the large amount of information this new method brings us is also illustrated.Conclusions. We have implemented a multigroup flux-limited diffusion algorithm in the RAMSES code. The method performed well against standard radiation-hydrodynamics tests, and was also shown to be ripe for exploitation in the computational star formation context
On the first order operators in bimodules
We analyse the structure of the first order operators in bimodules introduced
by A. Connes. We apply this analysis to the theory of connections on bimodules
generalizing thereby several proposals.Comment: 13 pages, AMSLaTe
Dynamic Evocation of Hand Action Representations During Sentence Comprehension
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. When listening to a sentence describing an interaction with a manipulable object, understanding the actor’s intentions is shown to have a striking influence on action representations evoked during comprehension. Subjects performed a cued reach and grasp response while listening to a context sentence. Responses were primed when they were consistent with the proximal intention of an actor (“John lifted the cell phone...”), but this effect was evanescent and appeared only when sentences mentioned the proximal intention first. When the sentence structure was changed to mention the distal intention first (“To clear the shelf...”), priming effects were no longer context specific and actions pertaining to the function of an object were clearly favored. These results are not compatible with a straightforward mental-simulation account of sentence comprehension but instead reflect a hierarchy of intentions distinguishing how and why actions are performed
Synchronous Behavior of Two Coupled Electronic Neurons
We report on experimental studies of synchronization phenomena in a pair of
analog electronic neurons (ENs). The ENs were designed to reproduce the
observed membrane voltage oscillations of isolated biological neurons from the
stomatogastric ganglion of the California spiny lobster Panulirus interruptus.
The ENs are simple analog circuits which integrate four dimensional
differential equations representing fast and slow subcellular mechanisms that
produce the characteristic regular/chaotic spiking-bursting behavior of these
cells. In this paper we study their dynamical behavior as we couple them in the
same configurations as we have done for their counterpart biological neurons.
The interconnections we use for these neural oscillators are both direct
electrical connections and excitatory and inhibitory chemical connections: each
realized by analog circuitry and suggested by biological examples. We provide
here quantitative evidence that the ENs and the biological neurons behave
similarly when coupled in the same manner. They each display well defined
bifurcations in their mutual synchronization and regularization. We report
briefly on an experiment on coupled biological neurons and four dimensional ENs
which provides further ground for testing the validity of our numerical and
electronic models of individual neural behavior. Our experiments as a whole
present interesting new examples of regularization and synchronization in
coupled nonlinear oscillators.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure
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