Developing Primary Liaison Psychiatric Services for HIV/AIDS Patients in Community

In Indonesia, the number of HIV/AIDS patients has grown at significant level. HIV can be a source of major stress which can lead to changes in mental health, such as persistent sadness, feeling empty and anxiety. The ability of liaison officer could help patients reduce their psychiatric problems and at the same time it can greatly affect patients' risks for transmission of HIV to others. This study aimed to analyze the effect of developing primary liaison psychiatric services for HIV/AIDS patients on the abilities of health care workers to provide treatments. This study used a quasi experimental design with one group pretest-posttest which included 64 health care workers aged between 20 and 50 years from the Community-Integrated Health Care in East Java. The inclusion criteria were nurses and physician in Community-Integrated Health Care. The respondents were assessed using the Abilities of Health Care Workers Checklist pre-treatment and post-treatment. The outcomes were analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. There was a significant increased in the abilities of health care workers to provide psychiatric services after treatment (p<0.05). The liaison psychiatric services were considered to be effective in increasing the abilities of health care workers in improving the treatment of HIV/AIDS

Alignment of the Atlas Inner Detector

ATLAS is one of the two general purpose detectors at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC will be colliding proton beams at a center of mass energy {\surd}s= 14 TeV and is currently operating at {\surd}s = 7 TeV. During the commissioning phase since September 2008, the ATLAS recorded cosmic-rays data and proton-proton collisions at {\surd}s = 0.9 TeV. This data has extensively been used for the alignment and calibration of various sub-detectors. The ATLAS detector has a precision tracking system installed around the beam pipe for the measurements of the position and momentum of charged particles emerging from the collisions. The precise knowledge of misalignments of the tracking devices is crucial for the important physics measurements. At the time of writing the alignment corrections were obtained from the cosmic-rays and 0.9 TeV proton-proton collisions data, while the large statistics of proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV was used to check the performance of the alignment. This article gives an overview of the alignment strategy and the alignment performance using the data collected from proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV.Comment: 4 pages, Hadron Collider Physics Symposium 2010, conference proceeding

Jury Challenges, Capital Punishment, and Labat v. Bennett: A Reconciliation

Reasoning that one who opposes the death penalty may deny the state an impartial trial, most American jurisdictions sustain a challenge for cause to a prospective juror with such scruples. Recent decisions, attempting to ensure that the jury truly represents a cross-section of the community, have, however, suggested that due process may be denied when an identifiable class of the community is summarily excluded from the jury cross-section. The legitimacy of this theory may well be tested in the Supreme Court this term, as two cases raise the question whether capital punishment objectors are such a class. This comment seeks to assess the validity of the due process approach in the context of traditional justifications for the challenge to the capital punishment objector

Towards the Automatic Classification of Documents in User-generated Classifications

There is a huge amount of information scattered on the World Wide Web. As the information flow occurs at a high speed in the WWW, there is a need to organize it in the right manner so that a user can access it very easily. Previously the organization of information was generally done manually, by matching the document contents to some pre-defined categories. There are two approaches for this text-based categorization: manual and automatic. In the manual approach, a human expert performs the classification task, and in the second case supervised classifiers are used to automatically classify resources. In a supervised classification, manual interaction is required to create some training data before the automatic classification task takes place. In our new approach, we intend to propose automatic classification of documents through semantic keywords and building the formulas generation by these keywords. Thus we can reduce this human participation by combining the knowledge of a given classification and the knowledge extracted from the data. The main focus of this PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Fausto Giunchiglia, is the automatic classification of documents into user-generated classifications. The key benefits foreseen from this automatic document classification is not only related to search engines, but also to many other fields like, document organization, text filtering, semantic index managing

Micro-credit, risk coping and incidence of rural-to-urban migration

The focus of this paper is on the rural poor of south Asia and their struggle to cope with the seasonal risk of unemployment and the ensuing income risks. In the absence of formal credit or insurance markets the rural poor typically resort to, among other options, the following informal strategies to cope with seasonal income risks: (i) seasonal rural-to-urban migration, and (ii) mutual (ex-post) transfers between families of friends and relatives. Access to credit through a microfinance institution could also provide a competing source of insurance. The question raised in this paper is how the access to credit may affect the more traditional/time honoured means of risk coping, such as seasonal migration. Given that credit, i.e., a credit-financed activity, is potentially a substitute for seasonal migration, it is reasonable to argue that easy access to credit (or high return on credit) will lower the incidence of migration. However, there also exists a potential complementarity between the two activities (if implemented jointly) in terms of gains due to diversification of income risks. That is, given that income from migration is not typically subject to the same shocks as income generated by a credit-financed activity, a joint adoption of both activities creates opportunities for diversification of risk in the family incomes portfolio. If the diversification gains are large enough then the adoption of both activities jointly will be preferred to adopting either of the activities individually. In that event, introduction of microfinance in rural societies may result in raising the incidence of migration. The joint adoption case for rural households is modelled using a choice theoretic framework, and exact conditions are derived for when joint adoption is preferable to adoption of a single project. The model of joint adoption is estimated by applying a Bivariate Probit regression model on a single cross-section of household survey data from rural Bangladesh. Our preliminary results show that indeed the probability of participation in migration by household members is positively related to the probability of the household being a credit recipient.Development, South Asia, Poverty, Microfinance, Rural labour markets, Rural-to-urban migration, Risk-coping strategies