Effect of Socio-Demographics, Health-Related Problems, and Family Structure on Chronic Absenteeism Among Children

Purpose/Background: From 5 to 7.5 million school children are chronically absent, defined as missing ≥15 days of school within a year. Students miss schools due to various reasons such as health, socioeconomic status, and environmental factors. We examined child’s health and behavior, family structure, and socio-demographics to understand chronic absenteeism. Materials & Methods: The population included children ages 6 to 17 years from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) years 2008-2013. Multivariable logistic regressions were used to identify the risk factors of chronic absenteeism, adjusting for the complex sampling design. Results: Among socio-demographic variables, age ≥14 years, race/ethnicity, lower-income family, public health insurance, US-born, and speaking English at home were associated with chronic absenteeism. Asians, Mexican Hispanics, and blacks have lower chronic absenteeism than whites. Among health-related variables, children using an inhaler for asthma, having behavioral problems, and less healthy than other children were more likely to be chronically absent. Among family variables, a smaller family size was a risk factor for chronic absenteeism. Discussion/Conclusion: Asthma and behavioral problems were highly associated with chronic absenteeism. The identification of children at risk for chronic absenteeism will help the educational professionals identify the barriers to academic achievements and develop integrated educational interventions and policies to support disadvantaged children

2007 August 15 Magnitude 7.9 Earthquake near the Coast of Central Peru

A field reconnaissance mission was led to the areas affected by the disaster caused by the Magnitude 7.9 earthquake event of 15/08/2007 near the city of Pisco in Peru. The main objectives of the mission were to collect data and make observations leading to improvements in design methods and techniques for strengthening and retrofit, and to assist the phase of reconstruction. The mission focused on the behaviour of non-engineered structures, in particular those of adobe constructions. The findings of the mission confirmed that most of the damage was observed on adobe houses constructed with traditional non anti-seismic techniques which either collapsed or nearly collapsed, causing 519 deaths, 1,366 injuries and more than 58,000 houses destroyed. The mission also confirmed that buildings constructed according to modern earthquake resistant design standards performed with no evident damage. All the parties contacted during the mission, especially the EC Delegation, showed particular interest in the results of the present mission report, which will be taken into consideration when planning the reconstruction phase, especially of the most distant rural areas, where close collaboration between the Governmental Institutions, International Organizations, Universities and NGO¿s, will be needed to assist the population for the adoption of earthquake resistant designs in the reconstruction of the destroyed houses.JRC.G.5-European laboratory for structural assessmen

Does the Living Wage ensure an adequate standard of living for families?

New Zealand was once held up as a model of egalitarianism to other countries. Today New Zealand is far from being that leader, with high income and wealth inequality and an unacceptable level of family poverty and homelessness. Children are particularly affected, suffering the highest levels of material deprivation in New Zealand (Perry, 2016). Living Wage Movement Aotearoa New Zealand (LWMA) has argued that raising wages is the best way to address this problem

Fully-Coupled Simulation of Cosmic Reionization. I: Numerical Methods and Tests

We describe an extension of the Enzo code to enable fully-coupled radiation hydrodynamical simulation of inhomogeneous reionization in large $\sim (100 Mpc)^3$ cosmological volumes with thousands to millions of point sources. We solve all dynamical, radiative transfer, thermal, and ionization processes self-consistently on the same mesh, as opposed to a postprocessing approach which coarse-grains the radiative transfer. We do, however, employ a simple subgrid model for star formation which we calibrate to observations. Radiation transport is done in the grey flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation, which is solved by implicit time integration split off from the gas energy and ionization equations, which are solved separately. This results in a faster and more robust scheme for cosmological applications compared to the earlier method. The FLD equation is solved using the hypre optimally scalable geometric multigrid solver from LLNL. By treating the ionizing radiation as a grid field as opposed to rays, our method is scalable with respect to the number of ionizing sources, limited only by the parallel scaling properties of the radiation solver. We test the speed and accuracy of our approach on a number of standard verification and validation tests. We show by direct comparison with Enzo's adaptive ray tracing method Moray that the well-known inability of FLD to cast a shadow behind opaque clouds has a minor effect on the evolution of ionized volume and mass fractions in a reionization simulation validation test. We illustrate an application of our method to the problem of inhomogeneous reionization in a 80 Mpc comoving box resolved with $3200^3$ Eulerian grid cells and dark matter particles.Comment: 32 pages, 23 figures. ApJ Supp accepted. New title and substantial revisions re. v

Cut points in abcohesive, aposyndetic, and semi-locally connected spaces

In 1941, F. B. Jones introduced aposyndesis, which generalizes the concept of semi-local connectedness defined earlier by G. T. Whyburn (1942), in the study of continuum theory. Using Jones's idea, D. A. John (1993) defined abcohesiveness as a generalization of aposyndesis and studied the A-sets in abcohesive spaces. In this paper, some properties of abcohesive spaces are studied and a number of results by B. Lehman (1976) and Whyburn (1942, 1968) are generalized; sufficient conditions for the existence of two nodal sets are established as well

Mutational analysis of the P1 phosphorylation domain in E. coli CheA, the signaling kinase for chemotaxis

pre-printThe histidine autokinase CheA functions as the central processing unit in the Escherichia coli chemotaxis signaling machinery. CheA receives autophosphorylation control inputs from chemoreceptors and in turn regulates the flux of signaling phosphates to the CheY and CheB response regulator proteins. Phospho-CheY changes the direction of flagellar rotation; phospho-CheB covalently modifies receptor molecules during sensory adaptation. The CheA phosphorylation site, His-48, lies in the N-terminal P1 domain, which must engage the CheA ATP-binding domain, P4, to initiate an autophosphorylation reaction cycle. The docking determinants for the P1-P4 interaction have not been experimentally identified. We devised mutant screens to isolate P1 domains with impaired autophosphorylation or phosphotransfer activities. One set of P1 mutants identified amino acid replacements at surface-exposed residues, distal to His-48. These lesions reduced the rate of P1 transphosphorylation by P4. However, once phosphorylated, the mutant P1 domains transferred phosphate to CheY at the wild-type rate. Thus, these P1 mutants appear to define interaction determinants for P1-P4 docking during the CheA autophosphorylation reaction

Describing Gambling Affinity: The Role of Personality Traits

This study was undertaken to determine the degree to which personality dimensions provide insights into who is likely to gamble a significant dollar amount at a casino. Using measures of the Big Five, respondents were grouped into one of the following four personality clusters: (a) Moderate Trait Scores, in which no trait dimension was dominant; (b) Elevated Trait Scores, where a respondent scored highly across trait dimensions; (c) Agreeably Conscientious, in which a respondent scored highly on the agreeableness and conscientious trait domains; and (d) Highly Extraverted, where a respondent’s dominant trait dimension was extraversion. Respondents who were classified as Highly Extraverted were the most likely to gamble a day’s wages at a casino. Those classified into the Moderate Trait Scores cluster also exhibited a gambling affinity. Other factors associated with gambling affinity included subjective financial knowledge, financial satisfaction, and risk tolerance. Results from this study show that personality traits are important descriptors of gambling affinity; however, rather than there being a direct relationship with individual trait factors, the willingness to gamble appears to be based on unique combinations of personality. Findings from this study provide direct insights into who is more likely to require financial advice regarding gambling expenditures at the household level

Frequent use of paracetamol and risk of allergic disease among women in an Ethiopian population

Introduction The hypothesis that paracetamol might increase the risk of asthma and other allergic diseases have gained support from a range of independent studies. However, in studies based in developed countries, the possibility that paracetamol and asthma are associated through aspirin avoidance is difficult to exclude. Objectives To explore this hypothesis among women in a developing country, where we have previously reported aspirin avoidance to be rare. Methods In 2005/6 a population based cohort of 1065 pregnant women was established in Butajira, Ethiopia and baseline demographic data collected. At 3 years post birth, an interview-based questionnaire administered to 945 (94%) of these women collected data on asthma, eczema, and hay fever in the past 12 month, frequency of paracetamol use and potential confounders. Allergen skin tests to Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus and cockroach were also performed. The independent effects of paracetamol use on allergic outcomes were determined using multiple logistic regression analysis. Findings The prevalence of asthma, eczema and hay fever was 1.7%, 0.9% and 3.8% respectively; of any one of these conditions 5.5%, and of allergen sensitization 7.8%. Paracetamol use in the past month was reported by 29%, and associations of borderline significance were seen for eczema (adjusted OR (95% CI) = 8.51 (1.68 to 43.19) for 1–3 tablets and 2.19 (0.36 to 13.38) for ≥4 tablets, compared to no tablets in the past month; overall p = 0.055) and for ‘any allergic condition’ (adjusted OR (95% CI) = 2.73 (1.22 to 6.11) for 1–3 tablets and 1.35 (0.67 to 2.70) for ≥4 tablets compared to 0 in the past month; overall p = 0.071). Conclusions This study provides further cross-sectional evidence that paracetamol use increases the risk of allergic disease

SpawnNet: Learning Generalizable Visuomotor Skills from Pre-trained Networks

The existing internet-scale image and video datasets cover a wide range of everyday objects and tasks, bringing the potential of learning policies that have broad generalization. Prior works have explored visual pre-training with different self-supervised objectives, but the generalization capabilities of the learned policies remain relatively unknown. In this work, we take the first step towards this challenge, focusing on how pre-trained representations can help the generalization of the learned policies. We first identify the key bottleneck in using a frozen pre-trained visual backbone for policy learning. We then propose SpawnNet, a novel two-stream architecture that learns to fuse pre-trained multi-layer representations into a separate network to learn a robust policy. Through extensive simulated and real experiments, we demonstrate significantly better categorical generalization compared to prior approaches in imitation learning settings

Design and assembly sequence analysis of option 3 for CETF reference space station

A design and assembly sequence was conducted on one option of the Dual Keel Space Station examined by a NASA Critical Evaluation Task Force to establish viability of several variations of that option. A goal of the study was to produce and analyze technical data to support Task Force decisions to either examine particular Option 3 variations in more depth or eliminate them from further consideration. An analysis of the phasing assembly showed that use of an Expendable Launch Vehicle in conjunction with the Space Transportation System (STS) can accelerate the buildup of the Station and ease the STS launch rate constraints. The study also showed that use of an Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle on the first flight can significantly benefit Station assembly and, by performing Station subsystem functions, can alleviate the need for operational control and reboost systems during the early flights. In addition to launch and assembly sequencing, the study assessed stability and control, and analyzed node-packaging options and the effects of keel removal on the structural dynamics of the Station. Results of these analyses are presented and discussed