Alcohol outlets near schools in a midsize Romanian city : prevalence and characteristics

Objective: alcohol availability is one of the strongest predictors of adolescent alcohol use, and subsequent harm. Alcohol outlets near schools are an important indicator of three types of availability related to adolescent alcohol use; physical (number), economic (price), and legal (compliance with age limits).\ud \ud Method: two teams with trained students (16 and 17 years old) visited all 37 schools in a 200,000 inhabitant Romanian city (Pitesti). On the spot all alcohol outlets were visited and data was collected on outlet characteristics and visitors. Also, by conducting mystery shopping purchase attempts by the researchers, compliance on the age limits for alcohol sales was tested.\ud \ud Results: a total of 40 outlets were found within a 250 meter distance around 23 schools. Alcohol turns out to be cheap, and commercial alcohol brand signs are dominantly visible. With respect to compliance with the 18-year-old Romanian age limit for alcohol sales, only eight (20%) outlets refused to sell alcohol to under aged decoy customers.\ud \ud Conclusion: adolescent alcohol availability is high on the physical, economic and legal aspect. Pitesti is the first city in\ud Romania where an international alcohol prevention project has started to reduce alcohol related consequences. This project\ud involves all relevant stakeholders, and the first new legislation on this subject had been implemented

P.E. Strzelecki, Australian explorer, 1797-1873.

Item does not contain fulltex

An Unknown Essential Function of Trna Splicing Endonuclease Is Linked to the Integrated Stress Response and Intron Debranching

tRNA splicing endonuclease (TSEN) has a well-characterized role in transfer RNA (tRNA) splicing but also other functions. For yeast TSEN, these other functions include degradation of a subset of mRNAs that encode mitochondrial proteins and an unknown essential function. In this study, we use yeast genetics to characterize the unknown tRNA-independent function(s) of TSEN. Using a high-copy suppressor screen, we found that sen2 mutants can be suppressed by overexpression of SEN54. This effect was seen both for tRNA-dependent and tRNA-independent functions indicating that SEN54 is a general suppressor of sen2, likely through structural stabilization. A spontaneous suppressor screen identified mutations in the intron-debranching enzyme, Dbr1, as tRNA splicing-independent suppressors. Transcriptome analysis showed that sen2 mutation activates the Gcn4 stress response. These Gcn4 target transcripts decreased considerably in the sen2 dbr1 double mutant. We propose that Dbr1 and TSEN may compete for a shared substrate, which TSEN normally processes into an essential RNA, while Dbr1 initiates its degradation. These data provide further insight into the essential function(s) of TSEN. Importantly, single amino acid mutations in TSEN cause the generally fatal neuronal disease pontocerebellar hypoplasia (PCH). The mechanism by which defects in TSEN cause this disease is unknown, and our results reveal new possible mechanisms

The Use of the Internet in the U.S Lodging Industry

The internet has been heralded as the communications and marketing tool of the future for the hospitality industry. Both corporate executives and information technology experts feel the hotel of the future cannot do without a presence on the Web. Yet, do the actions of hospitality operators in the field reflect this optimism? This article reports on a study done among property managers in the U.S. lodging industry to determine the actual use of the internet in hotel properties of various types and sizes. Additionally, it addresses development and maintenance issues related to internet use

Compliance with age limits for the sales of alcoholic beverages in Romania. Designing and evaluating a three year campaign

The availability of alcohol in general is the most important predictor of alcohol consumption and alcohol abuse in adolescents. Alcohol availability can divided into economic (alcohol prices and discounts), physical (number of alcohol outlets, opening hours), legal (age limits on drinking and purchasing alcohol) and social availability (at home availability, parental behavior and parenting style). When protecting youth from alcohol use, the legal availability is the strongest instrument.Of course, when legislation states that alcohol is not allowed to be sold to people under a certain age, both on-premise (e.g., bars) and off-premise (e.g.,supermarkets) alcohol outlet personnel should be trained and enforced in complying with legal age limits. In order to explore baseline compliance to this legislation a mystery shopping study was conducted in a Romanian city. Under ages and trained students tried to buy alcohol in to explore to what extent alcohol sellers comply with this legal age limits. This compliance level turned out to be 0%. Within the alcohol project, therefore, it was decided to develop a campaign in which the importance of this age limit was communicated. After this campaign, again compliance was measured. Compliance was improved in the on-premise (bars) outlets only. Despite that the results on compliance with the age limit in practice were not strong directly after the campaign, both elements from that intervention and the research method can be used in other Romanian cities to improve and measure compliance with age limits on the sales of alcohol

Technology Vendors: Lodging Managers View Support They Receive

The authors report on a comparative study of regional differences in the perceptions of lodging managers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom on the support they receive from their technology vendors, and the technology systems they are using. Besides a comparison based on regions, the study also looks at differences of opinions based on property size

MDP Homomorphic Networks: Group Symmetries in Reinforcement Learning

This paper introduces MDP homomorphic networks for deep reinforcement learning. MDP homomorphic networks are neural networks that are equivariant under symmetries in the joint state-action space of an MDP. Current approaches to deep reinforcement learning do not usually exploit knowledge about such structure. By building this prior knowledge into policy and value networks using an equivariance constraint, we can reduce the size of the solution space. We specifically focus on group-structured symmetries (invertible transformations). Additionally, we introduce an easy method for constructing equivariant network layers numerically, so the system designer need not solve the constraints by hand, as is typically done. We construct MDP homomorphic MLPs and CNNs that are equivariant under either a group of reflections or rotations. We show that such networks converge faster than unstructured baselines on CartPole, a grid world and Pong