Qualitative study of pilot payment aimed at increasing general practitioners' antismoking advice to smokers

OBJECTIVES: To elicit general practitioners' and practice nurses' accounts of changes in their clinical practice or practice organisation made to claim a pilot health promotion payment. To describe attitudes towards the piloted and previous health promotion payments. DESIGN: Qualitative, semistructured interview study. SETTING: 13 general practices in Leicester. PARTICIPANTS: 18 general practitioners and 13 practice nurses. RESULTS: Health professionals did not report substantially changing their clinical practice to claim the new payments and made only minimal changes in practice organisation. The new health promotion payment did not overcome general practitioners' resistance towards raising the issue of smoking when they felt that doing so could cause confrontation with patients. General practitioners who made the largest number of claims altered the way in which they recorded patients' smoking status rather than raising the topic of smoking more frequently with patients. Participants had strong negative views on die new payment, feeling it would also be viewed negatively by patients. They were, however, more positive about health promotion payments that rewarded "extra" effort-for example, setting up practice based smoking cessation clinics. CONCLUSIONS: General practitioners and practice nurses were negative about a new health promotion payment, despite agreeing to pilot it. Health promotion payments do not automatically generate effective health promotion activity, and policymakers should consider careful piloting and evaluation of future changes in health promotion payments

A Three-Dimensional Solution of Flows over Wings with Leading-Edge Vortex Separation. Part 2: Program Description Document

For abstract, see N75-32026

Minimal Potentials with Very Many Minima

We demonstrate, by construction, that simple renormalizable matrix potentials with S_N, as opposed to O(N), symmetry can exhibit an exponentially large number of inequivalent deep local minima.Comment: LaTeX, 9 pages, 2 figures. Additional applications and references adde

Survey of the schools of Hinds County, Mississippi

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/ms_school_surveys/1106/thumbnail.jp

Embedded Vortices

We present a discussion of embedded vortices in general Yang-Mills theories. The origin of a family structure of solutions is shown to be group theoretic in nature and a procedure for its determination is developed. Vortex stability can be quantified into three types: Abelian topological stability, non-Abelian topological stability, and dynamical stability; we relate these to the family structure of vortices, in particular discussing how Abelian topological and dynamical stability are related. The formalism generally encompasses embedded domain walls and embedded monopoles also.Comment: final corrections. latex fil

Majorana Zero Modes in 1D Quantum Wires Without Long-Ranged Superconducting Order

We show that long-ranged superconducting order is not necessary to guarantee the existence of Majorana fermion zero modes at the ends of a quantum wire. We formulate a concrete model which applies, for instance, to a semiconducting quantum wire with strong spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting coupled to a wire with algebraically-decaying superconducting fluctuations. We solve this model by bosonization and show that it supports Majorana fermion zero modes. We argue that a large class of models will also show the same phenomenon. We discuss the implications for experiments on spin-orbit coupled nanowires coated with superconducting film and for LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interfaces.Comment: 14 pages. Figures added and a discussion of the effects of quantum phase slips. References Added. Fourth author adde

General Solutions for Tunneling of Scalar Fields with Quartic Potentials in de Sitter Space

The tunneling rates for scalar fields with quartic potentials in de Sitter space in the limit of no gravitational back reaction are calculated numerically and the results are fitted by analytic formulae.Comment: (Contours in Figure 1 corrected, two-dimensional fitting coefficient corrected, references added.), 16 pages, KUNS 124

Local Moments in an Interacting Environment

We discuss how local moment physics is modified by the presence of interactions in the conduction sea. Interactions in the conduction sea are shown to open up new symmetry channels for the exchange of spin with the localized moment. We illustrate this conclusion in the strong-coupling limit by carrying out a Schrieffer Wolff transformation for a local moment in an interacting electron sea, and show that these corrections become very severe in the approach to a Mott transition. As an example, we show how the Zhang Rice reduction of a two-band model is modified by these new effects.Comment: Latex file with two postscript figures. Revised version, with more fully detailed calculation