Equity, Evidence & Ethics: Assessing the Implications of Outdoor Smoke-free Policies for Vulnerable Populations

Smoke-free policies in outdoor settings are becoming increasingly common. Economic and social conditions tend to influence tobacco use patterns as well as exposure to secondhand smoke. Thus, active and passive smoking are both health equity and social justice concerns. Smoking on the Margins is a multi-component,mixed-methods project that applies an ethical framework to outdoor smoke-free policies in order to identify both concerns and opportunities to promote health and health equity. Justification for smoke-free policies Smoke-free spaces are primarily justified on the basis of three goals: 1) Reducing exposure to secondhand smoke; 2) Encouraging people to quit smoking; and 3) Preventing youth smoking initiation. Smoke-free policies in parks and beaches may have a small positive population health impact. Such policies reduce secondhand smoke exposure by eliminating a combination of circumstances that create sufficient concentration of tobacco smoke to pose serious health risk; such bans may also facilitate smoking cessation or reduction for some people. There is little evidence to date,however, that smoke-free policies in parks and on beaches have an impact on the prevention of smoking initiation among youth. As well, the documented positive benefits may be offset by other, unintended and/or inequitable burdens, such as when the stigmatization of smoking makes it harder for some smokers to quit or contributes to greater health inequalities

Equitable Consequences? Issues of Evidence, Equity and Ethics Arising from Outdoor Smoke-free Policies

From introduction: Kass argues that an ethical approach in public health is one that places the fewest burdens on individuals’ health without significantly reducing the potential benefits of intervening. Yet many population health regulations are highly intrusive, compromising individual liberty and imposing penalties for non-compliance. Moreover, the benefits of these regulations and the burdens they impose may not be shared equally. When developing interventions, the state has, therefore, an obligation to consider the benefits and burdens, particularly on those vulnerable to health inequities and other disparities

Equitable Consequences? Issues of Evidence, Equity and Ethics Arising from Outdoor Smoke-free Policies

From Introduction: Kass argues that an ethical approach in public health is one that places the fewest burdens on individuals’ health without significantly reducing the potential benefits of intervening. Yet many population health regulations are highly intrusive, compromising individual liberty and imposing penalties for non-compliance. Moreover, the benefits of these regulations and the burdens they impose may not be shared equally. When developing interventions, the state has, therefore, an obligation to consider the benefits and burdens, particularly on those vulnerable to health inequities and other disparities

Smoking on the Margins? Assessing the Health Equity Effects of a Smoke-free Law in Parks and Beaches

Policies which aim to limit secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure by restricting spaces where people can smoke have been shown to improve population health and garner a high level of support from the public, health professionals and policy makers. Following local, national and international examples, Vancouver’s Board of Parks and Recreation approved a smoke-free by-law for the city’s parks, beaches, and facilities effective September 1, 2010. Research suggests that such smoke-free by-laws, when enacted indoors, may affect men and women in different ways, but little research has examined the effects of such outdoor smoking bans on women and men and other segments of the population. Such by-laws may have different effects because some people may not have the means to seek out alternative places to smoke, have access to resources to quit smoking, or have other sites for recreation. Hence the aim of this study is to apply a health and health equity lens to examine Vancouver’s smoke free la

Chromomagnetic Dipole Moment of the Top Quark Revisited

We study the complete one-loop contributions to the chromagnetic dipole moment $\Delta\kappa$ of the top quark in the Standard Model, two Higgs doublet models, topcolor assited technicolor models (TC2), 331 models and extended models with a single extra dimension. We find that the SM predicts $\Delta\kappa = - 0.056$ and that the predictions of the other models are also consitent with the constraints imposed on $\Delta\kappa$ by low-energy precision measurements.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Updat

Relativistic Calculation of the Meson Spectrum: a Fully Covariant Treatment Versus Standard Treatments

A large number of treatments of the meson spectrum have been tried that consider mesons as quark - anti quark bound states. Recently, we used relativistic quantum "constraint" mechanics to introduce a fully covariant treatment defined by two coupled Dirac equations. For field-theoretic interactions, this procedure functions as a "quantum mechanical transform of Bethe-Salpeter equation". Here, we test its spectral fits against those provided by an assortment of models: Wisconsin model, Iowa State model, Brayshaw model, and the popular semi-relativistic treatment of Godfrey and Isgur. We find that the fit provided by the two-body Dirac model for the entire meson spectrum competes with the best fits to partial spectra provided by the others and does so with the smallest number of interaction functions without additional cutoff parameters necessary to make other approaches numerically tractable. We discuss the distinguishing features of our model that may account for the relative overall success of its fits. Note especially that in our approach for QCD, the resulting pion mass and associated Goldstone behavior depend sensitively on the preservation of relativistic couplings that are crucial for its success when solved nonperturbatively for the analogous two-body bound-states of QED.Comment: 75 pages, 6 figures, revised content

Impacts of large herbivores on terrestrial ecosystems

Environmental Biolog

D* Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering at HERA

This paper presents measurements of D^{*\pm} production in deep inelastic scattering from collisions between 27.5 GeV positrons and 820 GeV protons. The data have been taken with the ZEUS detector at HERA. The decay channel $D^{*+}\to (D^0 \to K^- \pi^+) \pi^+$ (+ c.c.) has been used in the study. The $e^+p$ cross section for inclusive D^{*\pm} production with $5<Q^2<100 GeV^2$ and $y<0.7$ is 5.3 \pms 1.0 \pms 0.8 nb in the kinematic region {$1.3<p_T(D^{*\pm})<9.0$ GeV and $| \eta(D^{*\pm}) |<1.5$}. Differential cross sections as functions of p_T(D^{*\pm}), $\eta(D^{*\pm}), W$ and $Q^2$ are compared with next-to-leading order QCD calculations based on the photon-gluon fusion production mechanism. After an extrapolation of the cross section to the full kinematic region in p_T(D^{*\pm}) and $\eta$(D^{*\pm}), the charm contribution $F_2^{c\bar{c}}(x,Q^2)$ to the proton structure function is determined for Bjorken $x$ between 2 $\cdot$ 10$^{-4}$ and 5 $\cdot$ 10$^{-3}$.Comment: 17 pages including 4 figure