2,074 research outputs found
Naval Reserve support to information Operations Warfighting
Since the mid-1990s, the Fleet Information Warfare Center (FIWC) has led the Navy's Information Operations (IO) support to the Fleet. Within the FIWC manning structure, there are in total 36 officer and 84 enlisted Naval Reserve billets that are manned to approximately 75 percent and located in Norfolk and San Diego Naval Reserve Centers. These Naval Reserve Force personnel could provide support to FIWC far and above what they are now contributing specifically in the areas of Computer Network Operations, Psychological Operations, Military Deception and Civil Affairs. Historically personnel conducting IO were primarily reservists and civilians in uniform with regular military officers being by far the minority. The Naval Reserve Force has the personnel to provide skilled IO operators but the lack of an effective manning document and training plans is hindering their opportunity to enhance FIWC's capabilities in lull spectrum IO. This research investigates the skill requirements of personnel in IO to verify that the Naval Reserve Force has the talent base for IO support and the feasibility of their expanded use in IO.http://archive.org/details/navalreservesupp109451098
Conceptualizing and Measuring Risk Perceptions of Skin Cancer: A Review
Background: Perceived risk is commonly conceived as a joint function of the perceived evaluations about the probability estimate of a negative outcome, and the perceived seriousness of the consequences of that negative outcome. Theories typically posit that once people perceive their vulnerability to health risks or outcomes, they form intentions to take preventive actions to reduce their risk. This theoretical proposition is not supported in skin cancer preventative behavior studies, which could be due to improper measurement of perceived risk. Purpose and Methods: The purpose of this manuscript was to assess how risk perception of skin cancer has been conceptualized and measured in the literature to date. Literature retrieval was facilitated through EBSCO, PubMed, PsycInfo, MEDLINE, and ERIC databases. Twenty potentially relevant articles were identified for this review. Results: In the literature, skin cancer risk has been operationalized in two ways: absolute risk and comparative risk. However, these measures have some serious limitations. For example, there is great uncertainty regarding the quality of risk perception measurements (i.e., whether the items used to measure perceived risk are reliable and valid). Future studies are warranted to better understand the significance of using conditional risk measures
Quantum Inequalities and Singular Energy Densities
There has been much recent work on quantum inequalities to constrain negative
energy. These are uncertainty principle-type restrictions on the magnitude and
duration of negative energy densities or fluxes. We consider several examples
of apparent failures of the quantum inequalities, which involve passage of an
observer through regions where the negative energy density becomes singular. We
argue that this type of situation requires one to formulate quantum
inequalities using sampling functions with compact support. We discuss such
inequalities, and argue that they remain valid even in the presence of singular
energy densities.Comment: 18 pages, LaTex, 2 figures, uses eps
Budget impact of adding ivabradine to standard of care in patients with chronic systolic heart failure in the United States
BACKGROUND: Heart failure (HF) costs 37,507; non-HF CV = 17,904. The annualized wholesale acquisition cost of ivabradine was 0.01 and 991,256 and 13,849,262 and 0.01 for the commercial population and $0.24 for the Medicare Advantage population.
CONCLUSIONS: Adding ivabradine to SoC led to lower average annual treatment costs. The negative PMPM budget impact indicates that ivabradine is an affordable option for U.S. payers
Object Substitution Masking in Schizophrenia: An Event-Related Potential Analysis
Schizophrenia patients exhibit deficits on visual processing tasks, including visual backward masking, and these impairments are related to deficits in higher-level processes. In the current study we used electroencephalography techniques to examine successive stages and pathways of visual processing in a specialized masking paradigm, four-dot masking, which involves masking by object substitution. Seventy-six schizophrenia patients and 66 healthy controls had event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during four-dot masking. Target visibility was manipulated by changing stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the target and mask, such that performance decreased with increasing SOA. Three SOAs were used: 0, 50, and 100 ms. The P100 and N100 perceptual ERPs were examined. Additionally, the visual awareness negativity (VAN) to correct vs. incorrect responses, an index of reentrant processing, was examined for SOAs 50 and 100 ms. Results showed that patients performed worse than controls on the behavioral task across all SOAs. The ERP results revealed that patients had significantly smaller P100 and N100 amplitudes, though there was no effect of SOA on either component in either group. In healthy controls, but not patients, N100 amplitude correlated significantly with behavioral performance at SOAs where masking occurred, such that higher accuracy correlated with a larger N100. Healthy controls, but not patients, exhibited a larger VAN to correct vs. incorrect responses. The results indicate that the N100 appears to be related to attentional effort in the task in controls, but not patients. Considering that the VAN is thought to reflect reentrant processing, one interpretation of the findings is that patients’ lack of VAN response and poorer performance may be related to dysfunctional reentrant processing
Recommended from our members
Biobehavioral effects of Tai Chi Qigong in men with prostate cancer: Study design of a three-arm randomized clinical trial.
Fatigue is often one of the most commonly reported symptoms in prostate cancer survivors, but it is also one of the least understood cancer-related symptoms. Fatigue is associated with psychological distress, disruptions in sleep quality, and impairments in health-related quality of life. Moreover, inflammatory processes and changes related to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and/or autonomic nervous system may also play a role in cancer-related fatigue. Thus, effective treatments for fatigue in prostate cancer survivors represent a current unmet need. Prior research has shown that Tai Chi Qigong, a mind-body exercise intervention, can improve physical and emotional health. Herein, we describe the protocol of the ongoing 3-arm randomized controlled Health Empowerment & Recovery Outcomes (HERO) clincal trial. One hundred sixty-six prostate cancer survivors with fatigue are randomized to a modified Tai Chi Qigong intervention (TCQ), intensity-matched body training intervention (BT), or usual care (UC) condition. Guided by biopsychosocial and psychoneuroimmunology models, we propose that TCQ, as compared to BT or UC will: i) reduce fatigue (primary outcome) in prostate cancer survivors; ii) reduce inflammation; and iii) regulate the expression of genes from two major functional clusters: a) inflammation, vasodilation and metabolite sensing and b) energy and adrenergic activation. Assessments are conducted at baseline, the 6-week midpoint of the intervention, and 1 week, 3 months, and 12 months post-intervention. If our findings show that TCQ promotes recovery from prostate cancer and its treatment, this type of intervention can be integrated into survivorship care plans as the standard of care. The study's findings will also provide novel information about underlying biobehavioral mechanisms of cancer-related fatigue. Trial registration number:NCT03326713; clinicaltrials.gov
Evaluation of Eu:LiCAF for Neutron Detection Utilizing SiPMs and Portable Electronics
With the increasing cost and decreasing availability of 3He, there have been many efforts to find alternative neutron detection materials. Lithium calcium aluminum fluoride (LiCAF) enriched to 95% 6Li doped with europium was evaluated here as a replacement material for 3He. Wafers 0.5 cm thick, consisting of LiCAF crystals in a rubberized matrix, were embedded with wavelength shifting fibers (WSF) and mated to silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs) to measure the photon response in a flux of neutrons from a DD neutron generator. Excellent discrimination was realized between neutrons and gammas, and both pulse-height discrimination and pulse-shape analysis were explored. A Figure of Merit (FoM) of 1.03 was achieved. By applying pulse-shape analysis, a simple neutron count output was generated by utilizing a low-pass filter to suppress fast pulses from the SiPM output and subsequently applying a threshold to the remaining signal. Custom electronics were built to bias the SiPMs, then amplify, filter, discriminate, and digitize the LiCAF/WSF scintillation photons, resulting in a digital pulse that can easily be counted with any microcontroller or field programmable gate array. A significant advantage of LiCAF is that it can be fabricated into any shape/size (when embedded in a rubberized matrix), and the light output and transparency is sufficient to allow for thicker scintillators which enable detection of both thermal and epithermal neutrons. This work demonstrated that Eu:LiCAF is capable of discriminating gammas from neutrons and is a potential replacement material for 3He, especially for nuclear security applications and neutron spectroscopy
A Search for Exozodiacal Clouds with Kepler
Planets embedded within dust disks may drive the formation of large scale
clumpy dust structures by trapping dust into resonant orbits. Detection and
subsequent modeling of the dust structures would help constrain the mass and
orbit of the planet and the disk architecture, give clues to the history of the
planetary system, and provide a statistical estimate of disk asymmetry for
future exoEarth-imaging missions. Here we present the first search for these
resonant structures in the inner regions of planetary systems by analyzing the
light curves of hot Jupiter planetary candidates identified by the Kepler
mission. We detect only one candidate disk structure associated with KOI 838.01
at the 3-sigma confidence level, but subsequent radial velocity measurements
reveal that KOI 838.01 is a grazing eclipsing binary and the candidate disk
structure is a false positive. Using our null result, we place an upper limit
on the frequency of dense exozodi structures created by hot Jupiters. We find
that at the 90% confidence level, less than 21% of Kepler hot Jupiters create
resonant dust clumps that lead and trail the planet by ~90 degrees with optical
depths >~5*10^-6, which corresponds to the resonant structure expected for a
lone hot Jupiter perturbing a dynamically cold dust disk 50 times as dense as
the zodiacal cloud.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for publication in Ap
- …