Barriers to HIV couples testing: The African American woman\u27s perspective

African American Women continue to contract HIV/AIDS at an alarming rate. Of all the women living with Aids in the United States, 64% were African American and two out of three African American women got HIV from having unprotected sex with a man. The purposes of the study are to identify perceived barriers to HIV testing of the intimate partners of African American Women and subsequently identify an effective couples of HIV testing strategy. The research study investigated the primary causes for low HIV testing rates of African American couples. This study uttilized a quantitatve method using self-administered questionaires. The primary data source will be fifty-four African American Women who reside in a region of southern California referred to as the Inland Empire

Continuity in the Absence of Declarative Memory in Patients with Moderate Dementia of the Alzheimer\u27s Type

Objective: The standard paradigm of research into dementia of the Alzheimer\u27s type (DAT) has yielded little in the way of effective patient treatment. Recent neuroscientific advances into the understanding of implicit memory have opened up new possibilities of patient care. The ontology developed within the existentialphenomenological (EP) tradition provided the best foundation for further research in this direction, toward restoring moderately impaired DAT patients to Erikson\u27s last normative stage of development, gerotranscendence. Drawing from the EP tradition, the idea of continuity was developed for this research. Continuity is composed of four domains: postural modality, discourse, and the patient\u27s focal relationships to the environment and others within it. It was hypothesized that there would be a partial restoration of functioning through these four domains when the patient engaged with a cherished object. Method: Five subjects were recruited from a pool of previously diagnosed patients with moderate DAT living in a nursing home. Some neuropsychological testing was conducted to provide a baseline of cognitive functioning. Each participant was interviewed at least twice about some cherished object in his or her room, yielding at least three episodes of continuity, which were then analyzed within and across participants. Results: It was found that an alignment between the object and the patient\u27s postural modality, as well as other domain alignments, supported various insights, including those that encouraged gerotranscendence. The power of the object to effect this alignment depended on its confluence with the rest of the immediate environment. Each subject was shown to have a spatial signature, an alignment of domains that best facilitated gerotranscendence. A therapeutic object was designed for each participant based on this signature, and a working vocabulary for a therapy based on continuity was developed that melded the standard paradigm with the EP tradition. Conclusion: It was concluded that gerotranscendence was possible for moderately impaired DAT patients, and that the idea of continuity could be used to elaborate a therapy to achieve that end, primarily by means of therapeutic objects

Exploration of Neural Structures for Dynamic System Control

Biological neural systems are powerful mechanisms for controlling biological sys- tems. While the complexity of biological neural networks makes exact simulation intractable, several key aspects lend themselves to implementation on computational systems. This thesis constructs a discrete event neural network simulation that implements aspects of biological neural networks. A combined genetic programming/simulated annealing approach is utilized to design network structures that function as regulators for continuous time dynamic systems in the presence of process noise when simulated using a discrete event neural simulation. Methods of constructing such networks are analyzed including examination of the final network structure and the algorithm used to construct the networks. The parameters of the network simulation are also analyzed, as well as the interface between the network and the dynamic system. This analysis provides insight to the construction of networks for more complicated control applications

(Knight)\u3csup\u3e3\u3c/sup\u3e: A Graphical Perspective of the Knight\u27s Tour on a Multi-Layered Chess Board

The Knight’s Tour is an interesting question related to the game of chess. In chess, the Knight must move two squares in one direction (forward, backward, left, right) followed by one square in a perpendicular direction. The question of the Knight’s Tour follows: Does there exist a tour for the Knight that encompasses every single square on the chess board without revisiting any squares? The existence of Knight’s Tours has been proven for the standard 8x8 chess board. Furthermore, the Knight’s Tour can also exist on boards with different sizes and shapes. There has been a lot of research into tours on two-dimensional boards. In this project, we explore the question of the Knight’s Tour on multi-layered chess boards. In other words, would it still be possible for a Knight’s Tour to exist on a chess board if there was a third dimension of movement that the Knight could take? This thesis will look at the Knight’s Tour on a two-dimensional board, both standard and rectangular, and will then examine the existence of Knight’s Tours on a multi-layered chess board. Finally, the Knight’s Tour will also be explored on a three dimensional cube on which the Knight can only move on the face of the cube. Throughout the thesis, we will use concepts of Graph Theory to explore tours on the different types of boards

Trombone Synthesis by Model and Measurement

A physics-based synthesis model of a trombone is developed using filter elements that are both theoretically-based and estimatedfrom measurement. The model consists of two trombone instrument transfer functions: one at the position of the mouthpieceenabling coupling to a lip-valve model and one at the outside of the bell for sound production. The focus of this work is onextending a previously presented measurement technique used to obtain acoustic characterizations of waveguide elements forcylindrical and conical elements, with further development allowing for the estimation of the flared trombone bell reflection andtransmission functions for which no one-parameter traveling wave solution exists. A one-dimensional bell model is developedproviding an approximate theoretical expectation to which estimation results may be compared. Dynamic trombone modelelements, such as those dependent on the bore length, are theoretically and parametrically modeled. As a result, the trombonemodel focuses on accuracy, interactivity, and efficiency, making it suitable for a number of real-time computer music applications