Mental health patients\u27 experiences of being misunderstood

Mental health patients describe “being understood” as an experience that evokes feelings of importance, worthiness, and empowerment. However, the experience of “being misunderstood” is more prevalent in patients’ relationships with health care providers. Negative consequences such as vulnerability, dehumanization, and frustration reveal that being misunderstood has the potential to damage or destroy therapeutic relationships

Effects of Lepton Flavour Violation on Chargino Production at the Linear Collider

We study the effects of lepton flavour violation (LFV) on the production processes e+e- --> \chi+_i \chi-_j at a linear collider with longitudinal e+ and e- beam polarizations. In the case of LFV the sneutrino mass eigenstates have no definite flavour, therefore, in the t-channel more than one sneutrino mass eigenstate can contribute to the chargino production cross sections. Our framework is the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) including LFV terms. We show that in spite of the restrictions on the LFV parameters due to the current limits on rare lepton decays, the cross section \sigma(e+e- --> \chi+_1 \chi-_1) can change by a factor of 2 or more when varying the LFV mixing angles. We point out that even if the present bound on BR(tau- --> e- gamma) improves by a factor of thousand the influence of LFV on the chargino production cross section can be significant. These results could have an important impact on the strategies for determining the underlying model parameters at the linear collider.Comment: 11pp; final version for JHE

Lookup tables to compute high energy cosmic ray induced atmospheric ionization and changes in atmospheric chemistry

A variety of events such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae may expose the Earth to an increased flux of high-energy cosmic rays, with potentially important effects on the biosphere. Existing atmospheric chemistry software does not have the capability of incorporating the effects of substantial cosmic ray flux above 10 GeV . An atmospheric code, the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center two-dimensional (latitude, altitude) time-dependent atmospheric model (NGSFC), is used to study atmospheric chemistry changes. Using CORSIKA, we have created tables that can be used to compute high energy cosmic ray (10 GeV - 1 PeV) induced atmospheric ionization and also, with the use of the NGSFC code, can be used to simulate the resulting atmospheric chemistry changes. We discuss the tables, their uses, weaknesses, and strengths.Comment: In press: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. 6 figures, 3 tables, two associated data files. Major revisions, including results of a greatly expanded computation, clarification and updated references. In the future we will expand the table to at least EeV levels

Alberta field survey of herbicide-resistant weeds

Non-Peer ReviewedIn 2001, 236 fields were randomly selected throughout the ecoregions of Alberta and surveyed for grass and broadleaf weeds resistant to Group 1 (ACCase inhibitor) or Group 2 (ALS inhibitor) herbicides. Nearly 20% of surveyed fields had a herbicide-resistant weed biotype. Only 5% of producers with resistant biotypes were aware of their occurrence. This survey serves as a baseline for determining future trends in weed resistance in Alberta

Generating Dynamic Democratic Discussions: An Analysis of Teaching with US Presidential Debates

Researchers have found that when young people participate in discussions of controversial political issues, they often become more politically engaged and informed (Hess 2009). Nonetheless, some educators avoid fostering such discussions because they can become heated and thus distract from academic learning (Hess 2002). Presidential elections, including the highly publicized debates, provide substantial material for discussions of major national and international issues, but no published research has examined how educators can leverage these events to generate productive civic learning experiences. In this paper, we analyze data collected in seven high school classrooms during the 2012 presidential election to examine the challenges and opportunities associated with generating substantive, dynamic discussions of presidential debates. Our findings indicate that students enjoyed learning about candidates’ different perspectives and that certain strategies were especially helpful for fostering substantive discussions: (a) scaffolding students’ preparation for discussion, (b) providing opportunities for students to address open-ended questions, (c) redirecting students’ engagement in competitive, interpersonal dynamics to learning about the issues, and (d) countering students’ partisan tendencies. We discuss implications for practice and research and present a conceptual framework for generating dynamic, substantive democratic discussions

Developing an empirical study of how qualified subjects might be selected for IT system security penetration testing

This paper describes a planned program of investigation designed to determine what characteristics are signficant in predicting performance of students used as subjects in IT system penetration testing testbeds. In large part the experimental design replicates an earlier study by Jonsson et al., and extends that study to include factors describing the attacking subjects. In this way the proposed study is expected to be able to verify and further their work by collecting data on a larger population of subjects. Among others we expect to verify their hypothesis that to the stationary nature of the breaking-in process and the intrusion process during the standard attack phase is characterized by exponential distribution. Finally, the proposed study will be also usable for the purpose of evaluation of intrusion detection systems

Numeric and symbolic evaluation of the pfaffian of general skew-symmetric matrices

Evaluation of pfaffians arises in a number of physics applications, and for some of them a direct method is preferable to using the determinantal formula. We discuss two methods for the numerical evaluation of pfaffians. The first is tridiagonalization based on Householder transformations. The main advantage of this method is its numerical stability that makes unnecessary the implementation of a pivoting strategy. The second method considered is based on Aitken's block diagonalization formula. It yields to a kind of LU (similar to Cholesky's factorization) decomposition (under congruence) of arbitrary skew-symmetric matrices that is well suited both for the numeric and symbolic evaluations of the pfaffian. Fortran subroutines (FORTRAN 77 and 90) implementing both methods are given. We also provide simple implementations in Python and Mathematica for purpose of testing, or for exploratory studies of methods that make use of pfaffians.Comment: 13 pages, Download links: http://gamma.ft.uam.es/robledo/Downloads.html and http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/bertsch/computer.htm

British Labour government policy to reduce inequalities in health: Responses in an inner London borough, 1997-2003.

The stimulus for this research was the publication of the Green and White papers: Our Healthier Nation (OHN) - Saving Lives (DoH, 1998/9). The aim was to ascertain factors affecting the pattern and speed of local reactions to the new policy. These factors were predicted to be similar to those found in analysis of pre-1997. Conservative government, public health policy. However, the particular hypothesis of the thesis was that tensions in the Labour Party and government concerning aspects of the wider determinants of health would also play a role in affecting local implementation. Of specific importance was the equivocal determinant of 'income inequalities'. A case study of one inner-London borough was undertaken. Data collection was by way of in-depth interviews, participant observation and a review of local and national policy documents. Findings based on fieldwork are: 1. The implementation process was protracted. Delays need to be distinguished from policy failure. 2. Staff views did influence the pattern of implementation. However, some widely-held beliefs did not affect local work developed in response to the policy. This was primarily because no permission had been granted by central government for local staff to act on these opinions. 3. Local NHS staff needed clear guidance on how to prioritise work, this was not provided until 2003. 4. Unresolved anomalies exist in NHS and local authority public involvement work relating to health inequalities reduction. This is because the policy highlights the wider determinants of health, including income distribution. The latter is a politically partisan subject. The 'neutral' state bureaucracy is less adept at facilitating 'citizen' influence over the issue than political parties have been. However, sections of the Labour Party itself appear to have some interest in directing involvement away from party organisation

Porcine CD18 mediates Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae ApxIII species-specific toxicity

Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae, the causative agent of porcine pleuropneumonia, produces Apx toxins that are recognized as major virulence factors. Recently, we showed that ApxIIIA-cytotoxic activity specifically targets Sus scrofa leukocytes. Since both LtxA from Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans (aggressive periodontitis in humans) and LktA from Mannheimia haemolytica (pneumonia in ruminants) share this characteristic, respectively towards human and ruminant leukocytes, and because both use the CD18 subunit to interact with their respective LFA-1, we hypothesized that ApxIIIA was likely to bind porcine CD18 to exercise its deleterious effects on pig leukocytes. A β 2−integrin-deficient ApxIIIA-resistant human erythroleukemic cell line was transfected either with homologous or heterologous CD11a/CD18 heterodimers using a set of plasmids coding for human (ApxIIIA-resistant), bovine (-resistant) and porcine (-susceptible) CD11a and CD18 subunits. Cell preparations that switched from ApxIIIA-resistance to -susceptibility were then sought to identify the LFA-1 subunit involved. The results showed that the ApxIIIA-resistant recipient cell line was rendered susceptible only if the CD18 partner within the LFA-1 heterodimer was that of the pig. It is concluded that porcine CD18 is necessary to mediate A. pleuropneumoniae ApxIIIA toxin-induced leukolysis