2,231 research outputs found
Increasing Skin Infections and Staphylococcus aureus Complications in Children, England, 1997-2006
During 1997-2006, general practitioner consultations for skin conditions for children <18 years of age in England increased 19%, from 128.5 to 152.9/1,000 child-years, and antistaphylococcal drug prescription rates increased 64%, from 17.8 to 29.1/1,000 child-years. During the same time period, hospital admissions for Staphylococcus aureus infections rose 49% from 53.4 to 79.3/100,000 child-years.link_to_subscribed_fulltex
Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health of Ilhas Selvagens, Portugal
In September 2015, National Geographic's Pristine Seas project, in conjunction with the Instituto Universitário-Portugal, The Waitt Institute, the University of Western Australia, and partners conducted a comprehensive assessment of the rarely surveyed Ilhas Selvagens to explore the marine environment, especially the poorly understood deep sea and open ocean areas, and quantify the biodiversity of the nearshore marine environment
The Utility of Cancer-Related Cultural Constructs to Understand Colorectal Cancer Screening Among African Americans
Data suggest that colorectal cancer could be cut by approximately 60% if all people aged 50 years or older received regular screening. Studies have identified socio-cultural attitudes that might inform cancer education and screening promotion campaigns. This article applies item response theory (IRT) to a set of survey items selected to assess sociocultural attitudes in order to determine how current measures may affect what we know about how these attitudes affect colorectal cancer screening (CRCS). Design and Methods. A survey of colorectal cancer screening, screening attitudes and cultural beliefs was administered to 1021 African Americans - 683 women and 338 men, ages 50 to 75. Eligibility criteria for participation included being born in the United States, selfidentified African American male or female, age 50 to 75 years. The IRT analysis was performed on 655 individuals with complete data for the 43 observed variables. Results. Twenty-nine items comprise the Multi-construct African American Cultural Survey (MAACS) that addresses seven cultural constructs: mistrust/distrust, privacy, ethnic identity, collectivism, empowerment, and male gender roles. The items provide adequate information about the attitudes of the population across most levels of the constructs assessed. Among the sociocultural variables considered, empowerment (OR=1.078; 95% CI: 1.008, 1.151) had the strongest association with CRCS adherence and privacy showed promise. Conclusions. The MAACS provides a fixed length questionnaire to assess African American CRCS attitudes, two new constructs that might assist in CRCS promotion, and a suggested focus for identification of additional constructs of interest
The utility of cancer-related cultural constructs to understand colorectal cancer screening among African Americans
Background. Data suggest that colorectal cancer could be cut by approximately 60% if all people aged 50 years or older received regular screening. Studies have identified socio-cultural attitudes that might inform cancer education and screening promotion campaigns. This article applies item response theory (IRT) to a set of survey items selected to assess sociocultural attitudes in order to determine how current measures may affect what we know about how these attitudes affect colorectal cancer screening (CRCS).Design and Methods. A survey of colorectal cancer screening, screening attitudes and cultural beliefs was administered to 1021 African Americans – 683 women and 338 men, ages 50 to 75. Eligibility crite ria for participation included being born in the United States, self-identified African American male or female, age 50 to 75 years. The IRT analysis was performed on 655 individuals with complete data for the 43 observed variables. Results. Twenty-nine items comprise the Multi-construct African American Cultural Survey (MAACS) that addresses seven cultural con- structs: mistrust/distrust, privacy, ethnic identity, collectivism, empowerment, and male gender roles. The items provide adequate information about the attitudes of the population across most levels of the constructs assessed. Among the sociocultural variables considered, empowerment (OR=1.078; 95% CI: 1.008, 1.151) had the strongest association with CRCS adherence and privacy showed promise. Conclusions. The MAACS provides a fixed length questionnaire to assess African American CRCS attitudes, two new constructs that might assist in CRCS promotion, and a suggested focus for identification of additional constructs of interest
Regular Expression Matching and Operational Semantics
Many programming languages and tools, ranging from grep to the Java String
library, contain regular expression matchers. Rather than first translating a
regular expression into a deterministic finite automaton, such implementations
typically match the regular expression on the fly. Thus they can be seen as
virtual machines interpreting the regular expression much as if it were a
program with some non-deterministic constructs such as the Kleene star. We
formalize this implementation technique for regular expression matching using
operational semantics. Specifically, we derive a series of abstract machines,
moving from the abstract definition of matching to increasingly realistic
machines. First a continuation is added to the operational semantics to
describe what remains to be matched after the current expression. Next, we
represent the expression as a data structure using pointers, which enables
redundant searches to be eliminated via testing for pointer equality. From
there, we arrive both at Thompson's lockstep construction and a machine that
performs some operations in parallel, suitable for implementation on a large
number of cores, such as a GPU. We formalize the parallel machine using process
algebra and report some preliminary experiments with an implementation on a
graphics processor using CUDA.Comment: In Proceedings SOS 2011, arXiv:1108.279
The Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search Program
We are undertaking an astrometric search for gas giant planets and brown
dwarfs orbiting nearby low mass dwarf stars with the 2.5-m du Pont telescope at
the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. We have built two specialized
astrometric cameras, the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search Cameras (CAPSCam-S
and CAPSCam-N), using two Teledyne Hawaii-2RG HyViSI arrays, with the cameras'
design having been optimized for high accuracy astrometry of M dwarf stars. We
describe two independent CAPSCam data reduction approaches and present a
detailed analysis of the observations to date of one of our target stars, NLTT
48256. Observations of NLTT 48256 taken since July 2007 with CAPSCam-S imply
that astrometric accuracies of around 0.3 milliarcsec per hour are achievable,
sufficient to detect a Jupiter-mass companion orbiting 1 AU from a late M dwarf
10 pc away with a signal-to-noise ratio of about 4. We plan to follow about 100
nearby (primarily within about 10 pc) low mass stars, principally late M, L,
and T dwarfs, for 10 years or more, in order to detect very low mass companions
with orbital periods long enough to permit the existence of habitable,
Earth-like planets on shorter-period orbits. These stars are generally too
faint and red to be included in ground-based Doppler planet surveys, which are
often optimized for FGK dwarfs. The smaller masses of late M dwarfs also yield
correspondingly larger astrometric signals for a given mass planet. Our search
will help to determine whether gas giant planets form primarily by core
accretion or by disk instability around late M dwarf stars.Comment: 48 pages, 9 figures. in press, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacifi
The Cervical Dystonia Impact Profile (CDIP-58): Can a Rasch developed patient reported outcome measure satisfy traditional psychometric criteria?
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are currently producing guidelines for the scientific adequacy of patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) in clinical trials, which will have implications for the selection of scales used in future clinical trials. In this study, we examine how the Cervical Dystonia Impact Profile (CDIP-58), a rigorous Rasch measurement developed neurologic PROM, stands up to traditional psychometric criteria for three reasons: 1) provide traditional psychometric evidence for the CDIP-58 in line with proposed FDA guidelines; 2) enable researchers and clinicians to compare it with existing dystonia PROMs; and 3) help researchers and clinicians bridge the knowledge gap between old and new methods of reliability and validity testing.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We evaluated traditional psychometric properties of data quality, scaling assumptions, targeting, reliability and validity in a group of 391 people with CD. The main outcome measures used were the CDIP-58, Medical Outcome Study Short Form-36, the 28-item General Health Questionnaire, and Hospital and Anxiety and Depression Scale.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 391 people returned completed questionnaires (corrected response rate 87%). Analyses showed: 1) data quality was high (low missing data ≤ 4%, subscale scores could be computed for > 96% of the sample); 2) item groupings passed tests for scaling assumptions; 3) good targeting (except for the Sleep subscale, ceiling effect = 27%); 4) good reliability (Cronbach's alpha ≥ 0.92, test-retest intraclass correlations ≥ 0.83); and 5) validity was supported.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study has shown that new psychometric methods can produce a PROM that stands up to traditional criteria and supports the clinical advantages of Rasch analysis.</p
Relativistic Meson Spectroscopy and In-Medium Effects
We extend our earlier model of mesons using relativistic
quasipotential (QP) wave equations to include open-flavor states and running
quark-gluon coupling effects. Global fits to meson spectra are achieved with
rms deviations from experiment of 43-50 MeV. We examine in-medium effects
through their influence on the confining interaction and predict the confining
strength at which the masses of certain mesons fall below the threshold of
their dominant decay channel.Comment: 12 Pages, 2 Postscript figures (appended at the end with
instructions, available also from [email protected]
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