Being Bromo in a Heterosexual Dominated Culture: A Qualitative Approach

Homosexual males want to be a part of a social fraternity for the same reasons heterosexual males want to join a social fraternity, however, homosexual males going through recruitment could soon be welcomed into an environment that is not supportive of homosexual males. Studies have proven that unwelcoming and unsupportive environments can hinder identity development of males who are either homosexual, questioning their sexual identity, or bisexual (Long, 2011). This study was designed to focus on the support fraternities have for homosexual members joining fraternities and the level of support as a fraternity community. Using a qualitative approach, the researcher interviewed four men who varied in sexual orientation, experiences within a social fraternity, and analyzed the data for common themes and trends. The participants represented two homosexual males and two heterosexual males who are members of a social fraternity and held leadership roles within their social fraternity and the wider campus community. Results varied in the support for homosexual males in a social fraternity at a mid-sized, Mid-Western university. Participants expressed that homophobic terminology is frequently used within the social fraternity setting, expressed their concerns concerning chapter reputation and being labeled the gay fraternity, and a social adjustment function (Aber, 2010; Hall & France, 2007) impacted a majority of social fraternity members and their support of homosexual members. However, three of the four participants expressed that their social fraternity would be open to homosexual diversity programming

A Shape Theorem for Riemannian First-Passage Percolation

Riemannian first-passage percolation (FPP) is a continuum model, with a distance function arising from a random Riemannian metric in $\R^d$. Our main result is a shape theorem for this model, which says that large balls under this metric converge to a deterministic shape under rescaling. As a consequence, we show that smooth random Riemannian metrics are geodesically complete with probability one

Medicaid Managed Care Contracting for Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Services

This study reports on provisions relating to childhood lead poisoning prevention services in Medicaid managed care contract documents (service agreements and requests for proposals, RFPS). The provisions were extracted from the managed care contracts data base of the Center for Health Policy Research of the George Washington University Medical Center. The data base was constructed and is updated as part of the Center\u27s ongoing analytic studies.\u27 As with other Center studies of the contract documents, this is a descriptive study of how state Medicaid agencies addressed a series of contracting issues at a specific point in time.* In brief, we found that a substantial number of the 42 contract documents in the data base addressed screening enrolled children for elevated blood lead levels (EBLLS) as a duty of managed care organizations (MCOs) serving Medicaid beneficiaries. However, very few documents addressed either medical followup for children for whom screening showed EBLL or integration of medical followup with public health agency activities to identify and reduce lead hazards in the homes of enrollees with EBLL. This last finding is consistent with a major finding of our larger studies, that at the time the contract documents we analyzed were drafted, state Medicaid agencies were just beginning to consider interactions between MCOs enrolling Medicaid beneficiaries and other public agencies with health-related duties toward enrollees. We also found that the contract documents rarely identified lead-related services in either quality assurance or as a specific MCO reporting duty. Thus, while managed care is viewed as a means of providing medical homes for Medicaid children and creating administrative systems for tracking and assuring provision of care, the contract documents suggest that many states have yet to really grasp the potential of managed care to provide a tool for improving the quality of leadrelated treatment services. After setting out our methods, findings and discussion of findings, we provide the contract language excerpts on which the analysis is based

An Evaluation of Contracts Between Managed Care Organizations and Community Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment and Prevention Agencies

This study represents a descriptive, point-in-time examination of the structure and content of provider network agreements between managed care organizations (MCOs) and community mental health and substance abuse (MH/SA) treatment and prevention agencies. This is not a study of the quality of managed care systems. Instead, this analysis is designed to assess provider contracts (one of the basic legal instruments on which the managed care system rests) and to identify the meaning of these instruments for MH/SA service providers, group purchasers, MCOs, individual consumers and their families, and public policy

Influence of Noise on Force Measurements

We demonstrate how the ineluctable presence of thermal noise alters the measurement of forces acting on microscopic and nanoscopic objects. We quantify this effect exemplarily for a Brownian particle near a wall subjected to gravitational and electrostatic forces. Our results demonstrate that the force measurement process is prone to artifacts if the noise is not correctly taken into account.Comment: 4 Pages, 4 Figures, Accepte

Disorder-Induced Order in Quantum XY Chains

We observe signatures of disorder-induced order in 1D XY spin chains with an external, site-dependent uni-axial random field within the XY plane. We numerically investigate signatures of a quantum phase transition at T=0, in particular an upsurge of the magnetization in the direction orthogonal to the external magnetic field, and the scaling of the block-entropy with the amplitude of this field. Also, we discuss possible realizations of this effect in ultra-cold atom experiments

Stratonovich-to-Ito transition in noisy systems with multiplicative feedback

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Intrinsically noisy mechanisms drive most physical, biological and economic phenomena. Frequently, the system's state influences the driving noise intensity (multiplicative feedback). These phenomena are often modelled using stochastic differential equations, which can be interpreted according to various conventions (for example, Ito calculus and Stratonovich calculus), leading to qualitatively different solutions. Thus, a stochastic differential equation-convention pair must be determined from the available experimental data before being able to predict the system's behaviour under new conditions. Here we experimentally demonstrate that the convention for a given system may vary with the operational conditions: we show that a noisy electric circuit shifts from obeying Stratonovich calculus to obeying Ito calculus. We track such a transition to the underlying dynamics of the system and, in particular, to the ratio between the driving noise correlation time and the feedback delay time. We discuss possible implications of our conclusions, supported by numerics, for biology and economics

Effective drifts in dynamical systems with multiplicative noise: A review of recent progress

Noisy dynamical models are employed to describe a wide range of phenomena. Since exact modeling of these phenomena requires access to their microscopic dynamics, whose time scales are typically much shorter than the observable time scales, there is often need to resort to effective mathematical models such as stochastic differential equations (SDEs). In particular, here we consider effective SDEs describing the behavior of systems in the limits when natural time scales become very small. In the presence of multiplicative noise (i.e. noise whose intensity depends upon the system's state), an additional drift term, called noise-induced drift or effective drift, appears. The nature of this noise-induced drift has been recently the subject of a growing number of theoretical and experimental studies. Here, we provide an extensive review of the state of the art in this field. After an introduction, we discuss a minimal model of how multiplicative noise affects the evolution of a system. Next, we consider several case studies with a focus on recent experiments: the Brownian motion of a microscopic particle in thermal equilibrium with a heat bath in the presence of a diffusion gradient; the limiting behavior of a system driven by a colored noise modulated by a multiplicative feedback; and the behavior of an autonomous agent subject to sensorial delay in a noisy environment. This allows us to present the experimental results, as well as mathematical methods and numerical techniques, that can be employed to study a wide range of systems. At the end we give an application-oriented overview of future projects involving noise-induced drifts, including both theory and experiment. © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd

Description of Discordance Between LDL Cholesterol, Non-HDL Cholesterol, and LDL Particle Number Among Patients of a Lipid Clinic

Background: While LDL cholesterol measures the cholesterol content within an LDL particle (LDL-P), it may not reflect LDL-P concentrations. If discordance exists, LDL-P may better predict cardiovascular events compared to LDL-C and non-HDL cholesterol (non-HDL-C). In primary prevention patients, discordance has been associated with diabetes, ethnicity, gender, metabolic syndrome, and smoking history. Objective: To describe discordance in patients of a lipid clinic by exploring associations between patient characteristics and discordance among LDL-C, non-HDL-C, or LDL-P. Secondarily to compare proportion of patients with baseline concordance versus discordance who have ASCVD events, diagnoses of new onset diabetes or death. Methods: A retrospective, single-center cohort study at a large academic medical center was conducted. Patients establishing care from January 2009 through December 2012 with complete initial labs were included. Logistic regression models were used to explore associations between discordance and patient characteristics. Results: Of 603 patients screened, the final cohort included 166 patients with 104 (62.7%) discordant. LDL-P was the most common discordant value. Discordance was associated with gender, smoking status, use of lipid lowering medications, and achieving patient specific LDL-C goals. In terms of any event observed after initial measurements, no significant differences were detected between discordant and concordant groups. Conclusion: Within a lipid clinic population, discordance was associated with male gender, smoking status, lipid-lowering therapy, and being at patient specific LDL-C goal. While associations were found in our population, clinicians should consider measuring LDL-P to fully assess presence or extent of discordance. Conflict of Interest We declare no conflicts of interest or financial interests that the authors or members of their immediate families have in any product or service discussed in the manuscript, including grants (pending or received), employment, gifts, stock holdings or options, honoraria, consultancies, expert testimony, patents and royalties.    Type: Original Researc