SELF-EFFICACY, CO-PARENTING RELATIONSHIP, AND PARENT SATISFACTION: VARIABLES THAT PREDICT PATERNAL INVOLVEMENT BY NON-CUSTODIAL FATHERS

Based on the traditions of role theory (Biddle and Thomas, 1979; Longres, 2000; Mead, 1934; Sarbin and Allen, 1954) and self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1997), this study examined non-custodial fathers and their involvement with their child. Using a convenience sample (n = 72) recruited from men enrolled in the Erie Family Center for Child Development Fatherhood Initiatives Programs, survey participants completed a questionnaire designed to assess their level of self-efficacy, the co-parenting relationship with the custodial mother of their child, and their parenting satisfaction, each posited to be determinants of their paternal involvement. Path analysis was used to assess the effects of these relationships on paternal involvement. Moreover, this study tested the hypothesis that paternal involvement would co-vary with child custody status and marital status. Study results suggest parent satisfaction had the largest direct effect on paternal involvement while co-parenting relationships had the smallest effect on paternal involvement. Controlling for the effects of child custody status and marital status were not statistically significant. The magnitude of parent satisfaction and the minor effect of co-parenting relationship on paternal involvement may have been moderated by the non-custodial fathers' participation in fatherhood programs. Implications for social work practice and social welfare policy are discussed

Achieving Green and Healthy Homes and Communities in America

In the Fall of 2010, the National Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisioning contracted with the National Academy to develop and execute an online dialogue that would examine ways to increase the health, safety, and energy efficiency of low- to moderate-income homes. Since 1999, the National Coalition had worked to improve low- to moderate-income housing through the support and execution of home interventions that addressed multiple issues within a home at one time; an approach that often did not align with other traditional, single-issue housing assistance programs. By 2010, the National Coalition had taken on the leadership of the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, a public-private partnership focused on integrating funding streams to improve low- to middle-income homes across the country.With plans to expand the GHHI's operations, the National Coalition partnered with the National Academy to conduct the National Dialogue on Green and Healthy Homes, a collaborative online dailogue in which participants were asked to identify challenges to, and innovative practices for, improving the health, safety and energy-efficiency of low- to moderate- income homes. The Dialogue was live from November 4-November 22, 2010, and collected 100 hundred ideas and 362 comments from 320 registered users. Over the course of its two and a half week duration, the Dialogue received more than 2,500 visits from over 1,100 people in 48 states and territories. Key FindingsBy reviewing the feedback received in the Dialogue, the Panel was able to make a number of recommendations on how the green and healthy homes community of practice could increase the health, safety and energy efficiency of homes across the country. These recommendations included: Conduct an evaluation of current housing standards to determine if they meet the Nation's health, safety, and energy efficiency needs; Develop a tiered performance standard for healthy, safe and energy efficient homes; Group government funding streams to better align programs with the comprehensive intervention approach; Develop a long-term funding strategy to support efforts after Recovery Act funding ends; and Educate government decisionmakers and the public on the importance of developing green and healthy homes and communities, and the work that supports that development

Cryptococcal meningitis : epidemiology and therapeutic options

Cryptococcal meningitis causes morbidity and mortality worldwide. The burden of disease is greatest in middle- and low-income countries with a high incidence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV infection. Patients taking immunosuppressive drugs and some immunocompetent hosts are also at risk. Treatment of cryptococcal meningitis consists of three phases: Induction, consolidation, and maintenance. Effective induction therapy requires potent fungicidal drugs (amphotericin B and flucytosine, which are often unavailable in low-resource, high-endemicity settings. As a consequence, mortality is unacceptably high. Wider access to effective treatment is urgently required to improve outcomes. For human immunodeficiency virus-infected patients, judicious management of asymptomatic cryptococcal antigenemia and appropriately timed introduction of antiretroviral therapy are important.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Effects of disorder in location and size of fence barriers on molecular motion in cell membranes

The effect of disorder in the energetic heights and in the physical locations of fence barriers encountered by transmembrane molecules such as proteins and lipids in their motion in cell membranes is studied theoretically. The investigation takes as its starting point a recent analysis of a periodic system with constant distances between barriers and constant values of barrier heights, and employs effective medium theory to treat the disorder. The calculations make possible, in principle, the extraction of confinement parameters such as mean compartment sizes and mean intercompartmental transition rates from experimentally reported published observations. The analysis should be helpful both as an unusual application of effective medium theory and as an investigation of observed molecular movements in cell membranes.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America, 2005

Examines national and state obesity rates and government policies. Challenges the research community to focus on major research questions to inform policy decisions, and policymakers to pursue actions to combat the obesity crisis

Carrier localization mechanisms in InGaN/GaN quantum wells

Localization lengths of the electrons and holes in InGaN/GaN quantum wells have been calculated using numerical solutions of the effective mass Schr\"odinger equation. We have treated the distribution of indium atoms as random and found that the resultant fluctuations in alloy concentration can localize the carriers. By using a locally varying indium concentration function we have calculated the contribution to the potential energy of the carriers from band gap fluctuations, the deformation potential and the spontaneous and piezoelectric fields. We have considered the effect of well width fluctuations and found that these contribute to electron localization, but not to hole localization. We also simulate low temperature photoluminescence spectra and find good agreement with experiment.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Low Temperature Tunneling Dynamics in Condensed Media

There has been considerable interest recently in the low temperature dynamics of condensed phase tunneling phenomena. In this paper we consider the interplay between quasiparticle transport and vibrational relaxation; the former taking place via tunneling in a double well potential, and the latter occurring due to interactions of the tunneling system with a harmonic bath. Taking the system-bath interactions to be linear in the bath coordinates, and explicitly allowing for a vibrationally excited well, we present a unified treatment of the weak and strong coupling regimes and obtain reduced equations of motion for the tunneling particle position operator. Solutions are obtained for several important limiting cases. In particular, we find that at sufficiently low temperatures, the dynamical behavior strongly resembles that of multisite spin jump model

Variational Treatment of a Harmonic Oscillator Coupled to a Dissipative Heat Bath

We consider the problem of a single quantum oscillator coupled linearly to a heat bath of independent harmonic modes. An exact solution is presented for the system-oscillator observables of interest. The exact results are then used to evaluate the utility of a variational approach to the problem that has proven useful recently in elucidating the dynamics of dissipatively coupled systems. We find that the variational approach does provide a good description for most, but not all, observables of interest. Both the exact and the variational treatment demonstrate the important role played by the low-frequency bath modes in determining qualitative features of the dynamical behavior

The role of the lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate in stimulus–response association reversals

Many complex tasks require us to flexibly switch between behavioral rules, associations, and strategies. The prefrontal cerebral cortex is thought to be critical to the performance of such behaviors, although the relative contribution of different components of this structure and associated subcortical regions are not fully understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity during a simple task which required repeated reversals of a rule linking a colored cue and a left/right motor response. Each trial comprised three discrete events separated by variable delay periods. A colored cue instructed which response was to be executed, followed by a go signal which told the subject to execute the response and a feedback instruction which indicated whether to ‘‘hold’’ or ‘‘f lip’’ the rule linking the colored cue and response. The design allowed us to determine which brain regions were recruited by the specific demands of preparing a rule contingent motor response, executing such a response, evaluating the significance of the feedback, and reconfiguring stimulus–response (SR) associations. The results indicate that an increase in neural activity occurs within the anterior cingulate gyrus under conditions in which SR associations are labile. In contrast, lateral frontal regions are activated by unlikely/unexpected perceptual events regardless of their significance for behavior. A network of subcortical structures, including the mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus and striatum were the only regions showing activity that was exclusively correlated with the neurocognitive demands of reversing SR associations. We conclude that lateral frontal regions act to evaluate the behavioral significance of perceptual events, whereas medial frontal–thalamic circuits are involved in monitoring and reconfiguring SR associations when necessary

Traversal Times for Random Walks on Small-World Networks

We study the mean traversal time for a class of random walks on Newman-Watts small-world networks, in which steps around the edge of the network occur with a transition rate F that is different from the rate f for steps across small-world connections. When f >> F, the mean time to traverse the network exhibits a transition associated with percolation of the random graph (i.e., small-world) part of the network, and a collapse of the data onto a universal curve. This transition was not observed in earlier studies in which equal transition rates were assumed for all allowed steps. We develop a simple self-consistent effective medium theory and show that it gives a quantitatively correct description of the traversal time in all parameter regimes except the immediate neighborhood of the transition, as is characteristic of most effective medium theories.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure