Innovations that Address Socioeconomic, Cultural, and Geographic Barriers to Preventive Oral Health Care

This report focuses on nine oral health innovations that integrate service delivery and workforce models in order to reduce or eliminate socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural barriers to care. Two additional reports in this series describe the remaining programs that provide care in non-dental settings and care to young children. Although the programs are diverse in their approaches as well as in the specific characteristics of the communities they serve, a common factor among them is the implementation of multiple strategies to increase the number of children from low-income families who access preventive care, and also to engage families and communities in investing in and prioritizing oral health. For low-income children and their families, the barriers that must be addressed to increase access to preventive oral health care are numerous. For example, even children covered by public insurance programs face a shortage of dentists that accept Medicaid and who specialize in pediatric dentistry.(Guay, 2004).The effects of poverty intersect with other barriers such as living in remote geographic areas and community-wide history of poor access to dental care in populations such as recent immigrants . Overcoming these barriers requires creative strategies that address transportation barriers; establish welcoming environments for oral health care; and are linguistically and culturally relevant. Each of these nine programs is based on such strategies, including:-Expanding the dental workforce through training new types of providers or adding new providers to their workforce to increase reach and community presence;-Implementing new strategies to increase the cost-effectiveness of care so that more oral health care services are available and accessible;-Providing training and technical assistance that increase opportunities for and competence in delivering oral health education and care to children;-Developing creative service delivery models that address transportation and cultural barriers as well as the fear and stigma associated with dental care that may arise in communities with historically poor access.The findings from the EAs of these programs are synthesized to highlight diverse and innovative strategies for overcoming barriers to access that have potential for rigorous evaluation that could emerge as best practices. If proven effective, these innovative program elements could then be disseminated and replicated to increase access for populations in need of preventive oral health care

Dental Professionals in Non-Dental Settings

This report focuses on nine oral health innovations seeking to increase access to preventive oral health care in nondental settings. Two additional reports in this series describe the remaining programs that provide care in dental settings and care to young children. The nine innovations described here integrate service delivery and workforce models in order to reduce or eliminate socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural barriers to care. Although the programs are diverse in their approaches as well as in the specific characteristics of the communities they serve, a common factor among them is the implementation of multiple strategies to increase the number of children from low-income families who access preventive care, and also to engage families and communities in investing in and prioritizing oral health. For low-income children and their families, the barriers that must be addressed to increase access to preventive oral health care are numerous. For example, even children covered by public insurance programs face a shortage of dentists that accept Medicaid and who specialize in pediatric dentistry. The effects of poverty intersect with other barriers such as living in remote geographic areas and having a community-wide history of poor access to dental care in populations such as recent immigrants. Overcoming these barriers requires creative strategies that address transportation barriers, establish welcoming environments for oral health care, and are linguistically and culturally relevant. Each of these nine programs is based on such strategies, including:-Expanding the dental workforce through training new types of providers or adding new providers to the workforce toincrease reach and community presence;-Implementing new strategies to increase the cost-effectiveness of care so that more oral health care services are available and accessible;-Providing training and technical assistance that increase opportunities for and competence in delivering oral health education and care to children;-Offering oral health care services in existing, familiar community venues such as schools, Head Start programs and senior centers;-Developing creative service delivery models that address transportation and cultural barriers as well as the fear and stigma associated with dental care that may arise in communities with historically poor access.The findings from the EAs of these programs are synthesized to highlight diverse and innovative strategies for overcoming barriers to access. These strategies have potential for rigorous evaluation and could emerge as best practices. If proven effective, these innovative program elements could then be disseminated and replicated to increase access for populations in need of preventive oral health care

NLO-QCD corrections to e+ e- --> hadrons in models of TeV-scale gravity

We present results on NLO-QCD corrections to the process e+ e- --> hadrons via photon-, Z- and graviton-exchange in the context of TeV-scale gravity models. The quantitative impact of these QCD corrections for searches of extra dimensions at a Linear Collider is briefly discussed.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, using axodraw.st

Higgs Bosons: Intermediate Mass Range at e+e- Colliders

We elaborate on the production of the Standard Model Higgs particle at high-energy $e^+e^-$ colliders through the reaction $e^+e^- \rightarrow ZH$. Particular emphasis is put on the intermediate mass range. In addition to the signal we discuss in detail the background processes. Angular distributions which are sensitive to the spin and parity of the Higgs particle are analyzed.Comment: Standard Latex. 15 pages. 11 figures available by fax or regular mail. MAD/PH/749, DESY 93-064, UdeM-LPN-TH-93-143, NUHEP-TH-93-1

Perturbative QCD Fragmentation Functions for Production of P-wave Mesons with Charm and Beauty

We calculate the leading order QCD fragmentation functions for the production of $P$-wave charmed beauty mesons. Long-distance effects are factored into two nonperturbative parameters: the derivative of the radial wavefunction at the origin and a second parameter related to the probability for a $(\bar b c)$ heavy quark pair that is produced in a color-octet $S$-wave state to form a color-singlet $P$-wave bound state. The four $2P$ states and those $3P$ states which lie below the $BD$ flavor threshold eventually all decay into the $1S$ ground state $B_c$ through hadronic cascades or by emitting photons. The total fragmentation probabilities for production of the $1S$ ground state $B_c$ from the cascades of the $2P$ and $3P$ states are about $1.7 \times 10^{-4}$ and $2.3 \times 10^{-4}$ respectively. Thus the direct production of the $P$-wave states via fragmentation may account for a significant fraction of the inclusive production rate of the $B_c$ at large transverse momentum in high energy colliders. Our analytic results for the $P$-wave fragmentation functions disagree with those obtained earlier in the literature.Comment: 31 pages, Latex file, 1 figure (postscript file appended at the end

Ultra Wideband Channel Characterization and Ranging in Data Centers

This paper presents a detailed measurement based characterization of the Ultra Wideband (UWB) channels in a data center environment and examines the accuracy of direct ranging using Time of Arrival (ToA) measurements. Modern data centers present a unique indoor environment that to our knowledge has not yet been characterized. Our ranging experiments indicate that it is possible to achieve an accuracy of fraction of a meter via direct ranging and point to the feasibility of locating individual servers using more sophisticated cooperative ranging

Re-parameterization Invariance in Fractional Flux Periodicity

We analyze a common feature of a nontrivial fractional flux periodicity in two-dimensional systems. We demonstrate that an addition of fractional flux can be absorbed into re-parameterization of quantum numbers. For an exact fractional periodicity, all the electronic states undergo the re-parameterization, whereas for an approximate periodicity valid in a large system, only the states near the Fermi level are involved in the re-parameterization.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, minor changes, final version to appear in J. Phys. Soc. Jp

Serendipitous discovery of an extended X-ray jet without a radio counterpart in a high-redshift quasar

A recent Chandra observation of the nearby galaxy cluster Abell 585 has led to the discovery of an extended X-ray jet associated with the high-redshift background quasar B3 0727+409, a luminous radio source at redshift z=2.5. This is one of only few examples of high-redshift X-ray jets known to date. It has a clear extension of about 12", corresponding to a projected length of ~100 kpc, with a possible hot spot located 35" from the quasar. The archival high resolution VLA maps surprisingly reveal no extended jet emission, except for one knot about 1.4" from the quasar. The high X-ray to radio luminosity ratio for this source appears consistent with the $\propto (1+z)^{4}$ amplification expected from the inverse Compton radiative model. This serendipitous discovery may signal the existence of an entire population of similar systems with bright X-ray and faint radio jets at high redshift, a selection bias which must be accounted for when drawing any conclusions about the redshift evolution of jet properties and indeed about the cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes and active galactic nuclei in general

Chaotic to ordered state transition of cathode-sheath instabilities in DC glow discharge plasmas

Transition from chaotic to ordered state has been observed during the initial stage of a discharge in a cylindrical dc glow discharge plasma. Initially it shows a chaotic behavior but increasing the discharge voltage changes the characteristics of the discharge glow and shows a period substraction of order 7 period $\to$ 5 period $\to$3 period $\to$1 period i.e. the system goes to single mode through odd cycle subtraction. On further increasing the discharge voltage, the system goes through period doubling, like 1 period $\to$ 2 period $\to$ 4 period. On further increasing the voltage, the system goes to stable state without having any oscillations.Comment: chathode-sheath, instabilities, chaos, period-subtraction, bifurcation, dc-discharg

Supersymmetry and R-symmetry breaking in models with non-canonical Kahler potential

We analyze several aspects of R-symmetry and supersymmetry breaking in generalized O'Raifeartaigh models with non-canonical Kahler potential. Some conditions on the Kahler potential are derived in order for the non-supersymmetric vacua to be degenerate. We calculate the Coleman-Weinberg (CW) effective potential for general quiral non-linear sigma models and then study the 1-loop quantum corrections to the pseudo-moduli space. For R-symmetric models, the quadratic dependence of the CW potential with the ultraviolet cutoff scale disappears. We also show that the conditions for R-symmetry breaking are independent of this scale and remain unchanged with respect to those of canonical models. This is, R-symmetry can be broken when generic R-charge assignments to the fields are made, while it remains unbroken when only fields with R-charge 0 and 2 are present. We further show that these models can keep the runaway behavior of their canonical counterparts and also new runaway directions can be induced. Due to the runaway directions, the non-supersymmetric vacua is metastable.Comment: 19 pages, revised version with minor changes, references added, published in JHE