Adolescent Sexual Health and the Dynamics of Oppression: A Call for Cultural Competency

This paper encourages those who work with youth to understand the impact of prejudice and discrimination on vulnerable adolescents, to assess and address their needs, and to build on their assets. In prevention programming, it is essential to empower young participants by involving them in all aspects of designing and running programs for youth. It is equally essential to provide culturally appropriate interventions, with culturally competent adult and youth staff

Quality Improvement for Well Child Care

Presented to the Faculty of University of Alaska Anchorage in Partial Fulfillment of Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCEThe American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Bright Futures (BF) guidelines for well child care were designed to provide quality pediatric care. Adherence to AAP-BF guidelines improves: screenings, identification of developmental delay, immunization rates, and early identification of children with special healthcare needs. The current guideline set is comprehensive and includes thirty one well child exams, thirty three universal screening exams and one hundred seventeen selective screening exams. Many providers have difficulty meeting all guideline requirements and are at risk of committing Medicaid fraud if a well exam is coded and requirements are not met. The goal of this quality improvement project was to design open source and adaptable templates for each pediatric age group to improve provider adherence to the BF guidelines. A Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) quality improvement model was used to implement the project. Templates were created for ages twelve months to eighteen years and disseminated to a pilot clinic in Anchorage, Alaska. The providers were given pre-implementation and postimplementation surveys to determine the efficacy and usefulness of the templates. Templates were determined to be useful and efficient means in providing Bright Futures focused well child care. The templates are in the process of being disseminated on a large scale to assist other providers in meeting BF guideline requirements.Title Page / Table of Contents / List of Tables / List of Appendices / Abstract / Introduction / Background / Clinical Significance / Current Clinical Practice / Research Question / Literature Review / Framework: Evidence Based Practice Model/ Ethical Considerations and Institutional Review Board / Methods / Implementation Barriers / Findings / Discussion / Disseminatio

Race and Policing: An Agenda for Action

This paper is organized into two parts -- Strategic Voice and Tactical Agency. Strategic Voice argues that problems of race in policing cannot be resolved by the police alone. Other people must help by understanding and ameliorating the social conditions that cause race to be associated with crime and hence become a dilemma for American policing. Rather than accepting these conditions as givens, police leaders with their powerful collective voice should actively call attention to what needs to be changed. Tactical Agency outlines what the police can do on their own initiative to deal with the operational dilemmas of race -- in the communities they serve and in their own organizations

Fatigue failure load indicator

An indicator for recording the load at which a fatigue specimen breaks during the last cycle of a fatigue test is described. A load cell is attached to the specimen which is alternately subjected to tension and compression loads. The output of the load cell which is proportional to the load on the specimen is applied to the input of a peak detector. Each time the specimen is subjected to a compression load, means are provided for applying a positive voltage to the rest of the peak detector to reset it. During the last cycle of the tension load the peak detector measures the maximum load on the specimen. Means are provided for disconnecting the load cell from the peak detector when there is a failure in the specimen

The interplanetary magnetic field

Large-scale properties of the interplanetary magnetic field as determined by the solar wind velocity structure are examined. The various ways in which magnetic fields affect phenomena in the solar wind are summarized. The dominant role of high and low velocity solar wind streams that persist, with fluctuations and evolution, for weeks or months is emphasized. It is suggested that for most purposes the sector structure is better identified with the stream structure than with the magnetic polarity and that the polarity does not necessarily change from one velocity sector to the next. Several mechanisms that might produce the stream structure are considered. The interaction of the high and low velocity streams is analyzed in a model that is steady state when viewed in a frame that corotates with the sun