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&gt

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

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