Cultural competency: professional action and South Asian carers

Inequality and exclusion are characteristic of the experience of UK South Asian communities. In health care, community needs are often not addressed by health and social welfare services. An increase in cultural competency is now part of identified policy. The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which there is evidence of cultural competency amongst professionals concerning South Asian parents caring for a person with cerebral palsy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with respondents from 19 service organisations. Results are presented on perceptions of service delivery and on the dynamics of service development: evidence is found that inadequate service delivery continues despite professional knowledge that it exists. Conditions necessary for the achievement of cultural competence are discussed. We suggest that service development to meet the needs of South Asian carers must form part of an overall strategy geared to change at different levels within and outside service organisations

Evaluating complementary medicine: methodological challenges of randomised controlled trials

Complementary medicine has a different philosophy from conventional medicine, presenting challenges to research methodology. Rigorous evaluation of complementary medicine could provide much needed evidence of its effectiveness. Good design of randomised controlled trials will avoid invalid results and misrepresentation of the holistic essence of complementary medicine. Practitioners need to be recognised as a component in or contributor to complementary treatment. Both specific and non-specific outcome measures with long follow up are needed to adequately encompass the essence of complementary medicine

A New Model-Independent Method for Extracting Spin-Dependent Cross Section Limits from Dark Matter Searches

A new method is proposed for extracting limits on spin-dependent WIMP-nucleon interaction cross sections from direct detection dark matter experiments. The new method has the advantage that the limits on individual WIMP-proton and WIMP-neutron cross sections for a given WIMP mass can be combined in a simple way to give a model-independent limit on the properties of WIMPs scattering from both protons and neutrons in the target nucleus. Extension of the technique to the case of a target material consisting of several different species of nuclei is discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 6 Encapsulated Postscript figure

Directed Random Markets: Connectivity determines Money

Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution arises as the statistical equilibrium probability distribution of money among the agents of a closed economic system where random and undirected exchanges are allowed. When considering a model with uniform savings in the exchanges, the final distribution is close to the gamma family. In this work, we implement these exchange rules on networks and we find that these stationary probability distributions are robust and they are not affected by the topology of the underlying network. We introduce a new family of interactions: random but directed ones. In this case, it is found the topology to be determinant and the mean money per economic agent is related to the degree of the node representing the agent in the network. The relation between the mean money per economic agent and its degree is shown to be linear.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Supersymmetric particle mass measurement with invariant mass correlations

The kinematic end-point technique for measuring the masses of supersymmetric particles in R-Parity conserving models at hadron colliders is re-examined with a focus on exploiting additional constraints arising from correlations in invariant mass observables. The use of such correlations is shown to potentially resolve the ambiguity in the interpretation of quark+lepton end-points and enable discrimination between sequential two-body and three-body lepton-producing decays. The use of these techniques is shown to improve the SUSY particle mass measurement precision for the SPS1a benchmark model by at least 20-30% compared to the conventional end-point technique.Comment: 29 pages, 23 .eps figures, JHEP3 style; v2 adds some references and small clarifications to text; v3 adds some more clarifications to the tex

Scheduling Bidirectional Traffic on a Path

We study the fundamental problem of scheduling bidirectional traffic along a path composed of multiple segments. The main feature of the problem is that jobs traveling in the same direction can be scheduled in quick succession on a segment, while jobs in opposing directions cannot cross a segment at the same time. We show that this tradeoff makes the problem significantly harder than the related flow shop problem, by proving that it is NP-hard even for identical jobs. We complement this result with a PTAS for a single segment and non-identical jobs. If we allow some pairs of jobs traveling in different directions to cross a segment concurrently, the problem becomes APX-hard even on a single segment and with identical jobs. We give polynomial algorithms for the setting with restricted compatibilities between jobs on a single and any constant number of segments, respectively

Sqrt{shat}_{min} resurrected

We discuss the use of the variable sqrt{shat}_{min}, which has been proposed in order to measure the hard scale of a multi parton final state event using inclusive quantities only, on a SUSY data sample for a 14 TeV LHC. In its original version, where this variable was proposed on calorimeter level, the direct correlation to the hard scattering scale does not survive when effects from soft physics are taken into account. We here show that when using reconstructed objects instead of calorimeter energy and momenta as input, we manage to actually recover this correlation for the parameter point considered here. We furthermore discuss the effect of including W + jets and t tbar+jets background in our analysis and the use of sqrt{shat}_{min} for the suppression of SM induced background in new physics searches.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures; v2: 1 figure, several subsections and references as well as new author affiliation added. Corresponds to published versio

Practical Aspects of Automatic Orientation Analysis of Micrographs

Techniques to analyse the orientation of particulate materials as observed in the scanning electron microscope are reviewed in this paper. Emphasis is placed on digital imaging, processing, and analysis methods, but many secondary electron images are not amenable to traditional image processing as adequate thresholding is often difficult to achieve. Evaluation of the intensity gradient at each pixel offers an alternative approach, and this method is described in detail including the latest developments to generalize the technique. Practical points in the acquisition, processing and analysis of the images are considered and several images, including both synthetically generated and actual back-scattered images of soil particle arrangements are presented. A discussion of methods to display the results is included as are possible future developments

Constraining SUSY Dark Matter with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC

In the event that R-Parity conserving supersymmetry (SUSY) is discovered at the LHC, a key issue which will need to be addressed will be the consistency of that signal with astrophysical and non-accelerator constraints on SUSY Dark Matter. This issue is studied for the SPS1a mSUGRA benchmark model by using measurements of end-points and thresholds in the invariant mass spectra of various combinations of leptons and jets in ATLAS to constrain the model parameters. These constraints are then used to assess the statistical accuracy with which quantities such as the Dark Matter relic density and direct detection cross-section can be measured. Systematic effects arising from the use of different mSUGRA RGE codes are also estimated. Results indicate that for SPS1a a statistical(systematic) precision on the relic abundance ~ 2.8% (3 %) can be obtained given 300 fb-1 of data.Comment: 11 pages, 10 encapsulated postscript figures. Minor modification to ref

The stransverse mass, MT2, in special cases

This document describes some special cases in which the stransverse mass, MT2, may be calculated by non-iterative algorithms. The most notable special case is that in which the visible particles and the hypothesised invisible particles are massless -- a situation relevant to its current usage in the Large Hadron Collider as a discovery variable, and a situation for which no analytic answer was previously known. We also derive an expression for MT2 in another set of new (though arguably less interesting) special cases in which the missing transverse momentum must point parallel or anti parallel to the visible momentum sum. In addition, we find new derivations for already known MT2 solutions in a manner that maintains manifest contralinear boost invariance throughout, providing new insights into old results. Along the way, we stumble across some unexpected results and make conjectures relating to geometric forms of M_eff and H_T and their relationship to MT2.Comment: 11 pages, no figures. v2 corrects minor typos. v3 corrects an incorrect statement in footnote 8 and inserts a missing term in eq (3.9). v4 and v5 correct minor typos spotted by reader