Radiation Tolerance of CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors with Self-Biased Pixels

CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) are proposed as a technology for various vertex detectors in nuclear and particle physics. We discuss the mechanisms of ionizing radiation damage on MAPS hosting the the dead time free, so-called self bias pixel. Moreover, we discuss radiation hardened sensor designs which allow operating detectors after exposing them to irradiation doses above 1 Mra

Empowering minority women: Autonomy versus participation

Feminist attempts to empower women within their own cultural traditions have employed two broad strategies: authentic choice and participation. This paper argues that the methodological problems that beset the authentic choice strategy tell in favour of the participation approach. However, proponents of the participation strategy have failed to pay sufficient attention to the background conditions that need to be met if women are to make effective use of the institutional mechanisms their models advocate. If women are to be effective political agents at least some of the most serious structural inequalities that women face must be addressed. A nuanced statement of the participation strategy must therefore take account of long-standing feminist concerns regarding economic equality and access to resources. While this approach falls short of the demanding conditions for democratic citizenship implicit in the authentic choice strategy, it none the less places significant limits on the scope of participatory strategies and links the goal of empowering women within their own cultural traditions to wider feminist struggles to secure greater economic equality for women in general

Condom-use Skills Checklist: A Proxy for Assessing Condom-use Knowledge and Skills When Direct Observation Is Not Possible

Because of the continued importance of correct condom-use in controlling the HIV epidemic and the limited availability of tools for assessing correct condom-use, methods for assessing condom-application skills, especially when direct observation is not feasible, are needed. Accordingly, in the context of a high-risk population (The Bahamas) for HIV, a 17-item scale—the Condom-use Skills Checklist (CUSC)—was developed for use among young adolescents and adults. The rationale and approach to developing the scale and some measures of internal consistency, construct validity, and criterion-related validity have been described. It is concluded that the scale offers a reasonable alternative to direct observation among older subjects and that further development may make it more useful among pre-adolescents

Partially ordered models

We provide a formal definition and study the basic properties of partially ordered chains (POC). These systems were proposed to model textures in image processing and to represent independence relations between random variables in statistics (in the later case they are known as Bayesian networks). Our chains are a generalization of probabilistic cellular automata (PCA) and their theory has features intermediate between that of discrete-time processes and the theory of statistical mechanical lattice fields. Its proper definition is based on the notion of partially ordered specification (POS), in close analogy to the theory of Gibbs measure. This paper contains two types of results. First, we present the basic elements of the general theory of POCs: basic geometrical issues, definition in terms of conditional probability kernels, extremal decomposition, extremality and triviality, reconstruction starting from single-site kernels, relations between POM and Gibbs fields. Second, we prove three uniqueness criteria that correspond to the criteria known as bounded uniformity, Dobrushin and disagreement percolation in the theory of Gibbs measures.Comment: 54 pages, 11 figures, 6 simulations. Submited to Journal of Stat. Phy