The Lived Experience of Ovarian Cancer

It was estimated that in 2009,21,550 women would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer and 14.600 women would die from it. There are approximately 176,007 women living with ovarian cancer in the US. While there is extant quantitative - literature surrounding quality of life of women with ovarian cancer, there are significantly less qualitative studies. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of how women with ovarian cancer perceived their quality of life. I Five women were interviewed. Interviews were tape recorded and transcribed, then I read for overall impression and general themes. Three major themes were identified in the data: feelings of loss, impact on family, and life has changed. The findings were consistent with that of other qualitative studies and provide insight for health care providers caring for these women. Women who are battling ovarian cancer need emotional as well as physical support from their health care providers. Providers need to be aware of the implications that a diagnosis of ovarian cancer has on a patient and her family

Universally Typical Sets for Ergodic Sources of Multidimensional Data

We lift important results about universally typical sets, typically sampled sets, and empirical entropy estimation in the theory of samplings of discrete ergodic information sources from the usual one-dimensional discrete-time setting to a multidimensional lattice setting. We use techniques of packings and coverings with multidimensional windows to construct sequences of multidimensional array sets which in the limit build the generated samples of any ergodic source of entropy rate below an $h_0$ with probability one and whose cardinality grows at most at exponential rate $h_0$.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure. To appear in Kybernetika. This replacement corrects typos and slightly strengthens the main theore

Citizenship Education and the Free Exercise of Religion

Part One of this article provides a broad-brush overview of constitutional doctrine as it bears on citizenship education in the public schools. The remaining parts of the article focus on a Free Exercise challenge to the introduction of a Callaneseque program of citizenship education in a public school. Part Two thus explicates Callan’s theory. Part Three outlines my approach to the Free Exercise Clause. Part Four applies that approach to a challenge brought against a Callanesque program of citizenship education. Part Five takes up other possible rights-based limits on the education power and offers a suggestion regarding how citizenship education might proceed without violating the Free Exercise Clause

Do extremists impose the structure of social networks?

The structure and the properties of complex networks essentially depend on the way how nodes get connected to each other. We assume here that each node has a feature which attracts the others. We model the situation by assigning two numbers to each node, \omega and \alpha, where \omega indicates some property of the node and \alpha the affinity towards that property. A node A is more likely to establish a connection with a node B if B has a high value of \omega and A has a high value of \alpha. Simple computer simulations show that networks built according to this principle have a degree distribution with a power law tail, whose exponent is determined only by the nodes with the largest value of the affinity \alpha (the "extremists"). This means that the extremists lead the formation process of the network and manage to shape the final topology of the system. The latter phenomenon may have implications in the study of social networks and in epidemiology.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Passive Supporters of Terrorism and Phase Transitions

We discuss some social contagion processes to describe the formation and spread of radical opinions. The dynamics of opinion spread involves local threshold processes as well as mean field effects. We calculate and observe phase transitions in the dynamical variables resulting in a rapidly increasing number of passive supporters. This strongly indicates that military solutions are inappropriate.Comment: references added concerning previous work of S. Gala