A stochastic spatial-temporal disaggreation model for rainfall

A stochastic model for disaggregating spatial-temporal rainfall data is presented. In the model, the starting times of rain cells occur in a Poisson process, where each cell has a random duration and a random intensity. In space, rain cells have centres that are distributed according to a two dimensional Poisson process and have radii that follow an exponential distribution. The model is fitted to seven years of five-minute data taken from six sites across Auckland City. The historical five-minute series are then aggregated to hourly depths and stochastically disaggregated to five-minute depths using the fitted model. The disaggregated series and the original five-minute historical series are then used as input to a network flow simulation model of Auckland City’s combined and wastewater system. Simulated overflow volumes predicted by the network model from the historical and disaggregated series are found to have equivalent statistical distributions, within sampling error. The results thus support the use of the stochastic disaggregation model in urban catchment studies

Overriding Mental Health Treatment Refusals: How Much Process is “Due”?

Getting mental health treatment to patients who need it is today a much belegaled enterprise. This is in part because lawmakers have a skewed view of the enterprise, in particular regarding the treatment of patients with antipsychotic medications. The properties and uses of these medications are misunderstood by many in the legal community, with the drugs’ undesirable side effects typically overstated and the remedial effects undersold when not outright ignored. One specific legal effect has been to accord to mental patients a substantively outsized right to refuse treatment that comes with a correspondingly action-stifling dose of procedural safeguards, this despite the patients’ frequent lack of capacity to exercise the right wisely and the bad personal and systemic consequences that flow from that. The purpose of this Article is to provide better balanced and accurate evidence of the properties of antipsychotic drugs so as to convince lawmakers and advocates for the mentally disabled that it is safe to roll back some of the more counterproductive legal strictures on the effort to provide mental health treatment. An analysis of selected cases and statutes is intended to illustrate that such a roll back can and should be applied to a variety of legal and institutional contexts

Interferon Alfa-2b Alone or in Combination with Ribavirin for the Treatment of Relapse of Chronic Hepatitis C

BACKGROUND Interferon alfa is the only effective treatment for patients with chronic hepatitis C. Forty percent of patients have an initial response to this therapy, but most subsequently relapse. We compared the effect of interferon alone with that of interferon plus oral ribavirin for relapses of chronic hepatitis C. METHODS We studied 345 patients with chronic hepatitis C who relapsed after interferon treatment. A total of 173 patients were randomly assigned to receive standard-dose recombinant interferon alfa-2b concurrently with ribavirin (1000 to 1200 mg orally per day, depending on body weight) for six months, and 172 patients were assigned to receive interferon and placebo. RESULTS At the completion of treatment, serum levels of hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA were undetectable in 141 of the 173 patients who were treated with interferon and ribavirin and in 80 of the 172 patients who were treated with interferon alone (82 percent vs. 47 percent, P\u3c0.001). Serum HCV RNA levels remained undetectable 24 weeks after the end of treatment in 84 patients (49 percent) in the combinationtherapy group, but in only 8 patients (5 percent) in the interferon group (P\u3c0.001). Sustained normalization of serum alanine aminotransferase concentrations and histologic improvement were highly correlated with virologic response. Base-line serum HCV RNA levels of 2¬106 copies per milliliter or less were associated with higher rates of response in both treatment groups. Viral genotypes other than type 1 were associated with sustained responses only in the combination-therapy group. Combined therapy caused a predictable fall in hemoglobin concentrations but otherwise had a safety profile similar to that of interferon alone. CONCLUSIONS In patients with chronic hepatitis C who relapse after treatment with interferon, therapy with interferon and oral ribavirin results in higher rates of sustained virologic, biochemical, and histologic response than treatment with interferon alone

Asians Applying for Postsecondary Success: Students, Schools, and Socioeconomic Status

Higher education recruitment rates are rapidly declining as schools are stymied by dynamic demographic shifts and a competitive ecosystem. Despite the constant realities of this challenge for tertiary institutions, the complexities of the interplay for demographics, student motivation, parental influences, and school environments during the postsecondary education application process is often overlooked. This thesis analyses how these four domains impact Asian American students within the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) in terms of the number of postsecondary schools to which they apply? This study examines a sample (N = 662) of the ELS by employing multivariate regression analysis on the number of postsecondary schools to which these students apply to during the first round of applications. The analysis suggests that parental implications are not significant influencers for these students as previous literature suggests. The paramount predictors in this process are socioeconomic status and students’ belief in their own potential. Although every system involved in this progression impacts this critical process, special effort should be made by scholars, educators, administrators, and policymakers to continue to develop policies and practices that support these primary postsecondary education application influencers of socioeconomic status and self-aspirations

Momentum flux density, kinetic energy density and their fluctuations for one-dimensional confined gases of non-interacting fermions

We present a Green's function method for the evaluation of the particle density profile and of the higher moments of the one-body density matrix in a mesoscopic system of N Fermi particles moving independently in a linear potential. The usefulness of the method is illustrated by applications to a Fermi gas confined in a harmonic potential well, for which we evaluate the momentum flux and kinetic energy densities as well as their quantal mean-square fluctuations. We also study some properties of the kinetic energy functional E_{kin}[n(x)] in the same system. Whereas a local approximation to the kinetic energy density yields a multi-valued function, an exact single-valued relationship between the density derivative of E_{kin}[n(x)] and the particle density n(x) is demonstrated and evaluated for various values of the number of particles in the system.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Violation of self-similarity in the expansion of a 1D Bose gas

The expansion of a 1D Bose gas is investigated employing the Lieb-Liniger equation of state within the local density approximation. We show that during the expansion the density profile of the gas does not follow a self-similar solution, as one would expect from a simple scaling Ansatz. We carry out a variational calculation, which recovers the numerical results for the expansion, the equilibrium properties of the density profile, and the frequency of the lowest compressional mode. The variational approach allows for the analysis of the expansion in all interaction regimes between the mean field and the Tonks-Girardeau limits, and in particular shows the range of parameters for which the expansion violates self-similarity.Comment: 6 pages, 5 eps figure

The Bogoliubov Theory of a BEC in Particle Representation

In the number-conserving Bogoliubov theory of BEC the Bogoliubov transformation between quasiparticles and particles is nonlinear. We invert this nonlinear transformation and give general expression for eigenstates of the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian in particle representation. The particle representation unveils structure of a condensate multiparticle wavefunction. We give several examples to illustrate the general formalism.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Superfluid toroidal currents in atomic condensates

The dynamics of toroidal condensates in the presence of condensate flow and dipole perturbation have been investigated. The Bogoliubov spectrum of condensate is calculated for an oblate torus using a discrete-variable representation and a spectral method to high accuracy. The transition from spheroidal to toroidal geometry of the trap displaces the energy levels into narrow bands. The lowest-order acoustic modes are quantized with the dispersion relation $\omega \sim |m| \omega_s$ with $m=0,\pm 1,\pm 2, ...$. A condensate with toroidal current $\kappa$ splits the $|m|$ co-rotating and counter-rotating pair by the amount: $\Delta E \approx 2 |m|\hbar^2 \kappa < r^{-2}>$. Radial dipole excitations are the lowest energy dissipation modes. For highly occupied condensates the nonlinearity creates an asymmetric mix of dipole circulation and nonlinear shifts in the spectrum of excitations so that the center of mass circulates around the axis of symmetry of the trap. We outline an experimental method to study these excitations.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Radiation content of Conformally flat initial data

We study the radiation of energy and linear momentum emitted to infinity by the headon collision of binary black holes, starting from rest at a finite initial separation, in the extreme mass ratio limit. For these configurations we identify the radiation produced by the initially conformally flat choice of the three geometry. This identification suggests that the radiated energy and momentum of headon collisions will not be dominated by the details of the initial data for evolution of holes from initial proper separations $L_0\geq7M$. For non-headon orbits, where the amount of radiation is orders of magnitude larger, the conformally flat initial data may provide a relative even better approximation.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure