9,201 research outputs found
Perspective: tobacco manufacturers are now compensating states for smoking-related costs: how will this affect the economy?
Smoking out the social and economic benefits of the 1998 tobacco settlement for Massachusetts.Tobacco industry ; Medical care, Cost of
Cognitive Information Processing
Contains reports on three research projects split into two sections.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 36-039-AMC-03200(E)National Science Foundation (Grant GP-2495)National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-05)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NsG-496
Impact of intermittent preventive treatment with dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine on malaria in Ugandan schoolchildren: a randomized, placebo-controlled trial.
BACKGROUND: Intermittent preventive treatment (IPT) in schoolchildren offers a promising option for malaria control. However, the optimal drug and dosing regimens for IPT remain to be determined. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in 740 schoolchildren aged 6-14 years living in a setting of high malaria transmission in Uganda. Enrolled children were randomized to dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP) given once a month (IPTm), DP given once a school term (4 treatments over 12 months, IPTst), or placebo and followed for 12 months. The primary outcome was the incidence of malaria over 12 months. Secondary outcomes included parasite prevalence and anemia over 12 months. Analyses were conducted on an intention-to-treat basis. RESULTS: In the placebo arm, the incidence of malaria was 0.34 episodes per person-year and the prevalence of parasitemia and anemia was 38% and 20%, respectively. IPTm reduced the incidence of malaria by 96% (95% confidence interval [CI], 88%-99%, P < .0001), the prevalence of asymptomatic parasitemia by 94% (95% CI, 92%-96%, P < .0001), and the prevalence of anemia by 40% (95% CI, 19%-56%, P < .0001). IPTst had no significant effect on the incidence of symptomatic malaria or the prevalence of anemia, but reduced the prevalence of asymptomatic parasitemia by 54% (95% CI, 47%-60%, P < .0001). CONCLUSIONS: Monthly IPT with DP offered remarkable protection against clinical malaria, parasitemia, and anemia in schoolchildren living in a high-malaria-transmission setting. CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRATION: NCT01231880
Input-state-output representations and constructions of finite-support 2D convolutional codes
Two-dimensional convolutional codes are considered, with codewords having compact support indexed in N^2 and taking values in F^n, where F is a finite field. Input-state-output representations of these codes are introduced and several aspects of such representations are discussed. Constructive procedures of such codes with a designed distance are also presented. © 2010 AIMS-SDU
The Real Combination Problem : Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence
Panpsychism harbors an unresolved tension, the seriousness of which has yet to be fully appreciated. I capture this tension as a dilemma, and offer panpsychists advice on how to resolve it. The dilemma, briefly, is as follows. Panpsychists are committed to the perspicuous explanation of macro-mentality in terms of micro-mentality. But panpsychists take the micro-material realm to feature not just mental properties, but also micro-subjects to whom these properties belong. Yet it is impossible to explain the constitution of a macro-subject (like one of us) in terms of the assembly of micro-subjects, for, I show, subjects cannot combine. Therefore the panpsychist explanatory project is derailed by the insistence that the world’s ultimate material constituents (ultimates) are subjects of experience. The panpsychist faces a choice of abandoning her explanatory project, or recanting the claim that the ultimates are subjects. This is the dilemma. I argue that the latter option is to be preferred. This needn’t constitute a wholesale abandonment of panpsychism, however, since panpsychists can maintain that the ultimates possess phenomenal qualities, despite not being subjects of those qualities. This proposal requires us to make sense of phenomenal qualities existing independently of experiencing subjects, a challenge I tackle in the penultimate section. The position eventually reached is a form of neutral monism, so another way to express the overall argument is to say that, keeping true to their philosophical motivations, panpsychists should really be neutral monists.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Space and Ground Based Pulsation Data of Eta Bootis Explained with Stellar Models Including Turbulence
The space telescope MOST is now providing us with extremely accurate low
frequency p-mode oscillation data for the star Eta Boo. We demonstrate in this
paper that these data, when combined with ground based measurements of the high
frequency p-mode spectrum, can be reproduced with stellar models that include
the effects of turbulence in their outer layers. Without turbulence, the l=0
modes of our models deviate from either the ground based or the space data by
about 1.5-4.0 micro Hz. This discrepancy can be completely removed by including
turbulence in the models and we can exactly match 12 out of 13 MOST frequencies
that we identified as l=0 modes in addition to 13 out of 21 ground based
frequencies within their observational 2 sigma tolerances. The better agreement
between model frequencies and observed ones depends for the most part on the
turbulent kinetic energy which was taken from a 3D convection simulation for
the Sun.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, ApJ in pres
How Good a Deal Was the Tobacco Settlement?: Assessing Payments to Massachusetts
We estimate the increment in Massachusetts Medicaid program costs attributable to smoking from December 20, 1991, to 1998. We describe how our methods improve upon earlier estimates of analogous costs at the national level. Current costs to the Massachusetts Medicaid program approximate the payments to Massachusetts under the tobacco settlement of November 1998. Whether these payments are viewed as appropriate compensation for Medicaid costs over time depends upon the rate of increase in future health care costs, the rate of decline in smoking, the proportion of smoking that should be attributed to the actions of the tobacco companies and the liklihood that state would have prevailed at trial. The costs to the Medicaid program are dwarfed by the internal costs to smokers themselves.
Aspects of Fractional Superstrings
We investigate some issues relating to recently proposed fractional
superstring theories with . Using the factorization
approach of Gepner and Qiu, we systematically rederive the partition functions
of the and theories and examine their spacetime supersymmetry.
Generalized GSO projection operators for the model are found. Uniqueness
of the twist field, , as source of spacetime fermions is
demonstrated. Last, we derive a linear (rather than quadratic) relationship
between the required conformal anomaly and the conformal dimension of the
supercurrent ghost.Comment: 36 pages, CALT-68-1756 Revisions to match form to appear in Comm.
Math. Phys. Use standard TeX. Derivation of affine partition functions
related to models is now shown. References Update
Inclusion of turbulence in solar modeling
The general consensus is that in order to reproduce the observed solar p-mode
oscillation frequencies, turbulence should be included in solar models.
However, until now there has not been any well-tested efficient method to
incorporate turbulence into solar modeling. We present here two methods to
include turbulence in solar modeling within the framework of the mixing length
theory, using the turbulent velocity obtained from numerical simulations of the
highly superadiabatic layer of the sun at three stages of its evolution. The
first approach is to include the turbulent pressure alone, and the second is to
include both the turbulent pressure and the turbulent kinetic energy. The
latter is achieved by introducing two variables: the turbulent kinetic energy
per unit mass, and the effective ratio of specific heats due to the turbulent
perturbation. These are treated as additions to the standard thermodynamic
coordinates (e.g. pressure and temperature). We investigate the effects of both
treatments of turbulence on the structure variables, the adiabatic sound speed,
the structure of the highly superadiabatic layer, and the p-mode frequencies.
We find that the second method reproduces the SAL structure obtained in 3D
simulations, and produces a p-mode frequency correction an order of magnitude
better than the first method.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure
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