An Assessment of Health Disparities among a Community Sample of LGBQ College Students

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) individuals are a marginalized population in the United States, and this status places them at a greater risk for adverse health outcomes, such as tobacco and substance use, obesity, cancer, sexually-transmitted infections, violence, mental health issues, and suicide. The present study used individual- and microsystem-level data from the American College Health Association (ACHA)-National College Health Assessment (NCHA) to compose a risk assessment for LGBQ students at a mid-Atlantic university. The study incorporated various levels of the ecological social model in an analysis of potentially influential factors on the development of LGBQ health disparities. 856 participants completed a self-administered anonymous survey that included questions assessing a broad variety of health indicators, such as alcohol, tobacco, and other substance use, sexual health, mental health, nutrition, and personal safety and violence. A significant minority of the sample identified with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual (n=184, 21.6%). Sexual minority students reported significantly higher rates of various types of substance use [e.g., sedatives x2 (1,N=856)=3.543,

Fusion method choice driven by user constraints in a human gesture recognition context

International audienceRecognition of human gesture leads to a dynamic field that produces many various methods. The main way to improve the recognition process is to perform data fusion based on a qualification of each recognition method. The advance in data fusion gives also several solutions and the choice of a fusion method is a crucial point. The goal of this paper is to present an approach were the choice of the fusion method is driven by the constraints of the final user of data. Such constraints are expressed as bounds on indicators like confidence or accuracy. A practical experimentation illustrating this approach is presented in this paper. From a depth camera sensor, human gesture is interpreted and, fusion method is selected in accordance with the constraints of the final information consumer. This approach is illustrated in a robotic control by human gesture: outputs perform the action to be done by a NAO robot

Temporal Information Modelling in the Context of Intelligent Instruments

International audienceThis paper presents the information modelling process in the context of intelligent instruments. The goal is to make the manipulation of measurement information possible with time response considerations. The presented approach focuses on the modelling of information entities and information dating. First, the context of the intelligent instruments is described. Then, information entity modelling is presented. Finally, interests and perspectives are presented in the context of intelligent instrument networking

Integrate information consumer need based on information and accuracy modeling with time consideration

International audienceThis paper presents a temporal information modeling and describes its use in the context of intelligent instruments. First, we propose an information modeling for the use of measurement information that takes into account the response time. This model offers the advantage of computing the uncertainty associated with the information. Information can be obtained from several sources. From the proposed model, the uncertainty associated with information comming from each source is computable at any time. We present a structure that makes it possible to use the knowledge of a consumer needs in order to obtain the best quality of required information

Automatic code generation based on generic description of intelligent instrument

International audienceThis paper presents an automatic outputs generation based on XML description of intelligent instruments. This description uses the service based approach called INOMs. The XML representation of intelligent instruments enables three different outputs: user informations output in html format, supervisor information output, and source code output for selected field bus network target. The intelligent instrument model is briefly described and the area of interest consists in the automatic code generation. A basic example is presented in order to illustrate the different steps and to show the simplicity of the operational implementation

Rape and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Examining the Mediating Role of Explicit Sex-Power Beliefs for Men Versus Women

Many rape survivors exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and recent literature suggests survivors\u27 beliefs about sex and control may affect PTSD symptoms. The present study examined beliefs about sex and power as potential mediators of the relationship between rape and PTSD symptoms for men versus women. Participants (N = 782) reported lifetime history of rape, current PTSD symptoms, and beliefs about sex and power. Women reported higher levels of lifetime history of rape than men (19.7% for women; 9.7% for men). While rape history predicted PTSD symptoms for both genders, beliefs about sex and power were shown to be a significant partial mediator of this relationship for men, but not for women. Results extend the literature on rape and PTSD by suggesting that survivors\u27 beliefs about sex and power are connected and can affect their PTSD symptoms. Additionally, results illustrate how sexual violence against men may reaffirm male gender roles that entail power and aggression, and ultimately affect trauma recovery

Agile low phase noise radio-frequency sine wave generator applied to experiments on ultracold atoms

We report on the frequency performance of a low cost (~500$) radio-frequency sine wave generator, using direct digital synthesis (DDS) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The output frequency of the device may be changed dynamically to any arbitrary value ranging from DC to 10 MHz without any phase slip. Sampling effects are substantially reduced by a high sample rate, up to 1 MHz, and by a large memory length, more than 2.10^5 samples. By using a low noise external oscillator to clock the DDS, we demonstrate a phase noise as low as that of the master clock, that is at the level of -113 dB.rad^2/Hz at 1 Hz from the carrier for an output frequency of 3.75 MHz. The device is successfully used to confine an ultracold atomic cloud of rubidium 87 in a RF-based trap, and there is no extra heating from the RF source.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Back-propagation of constraints from consumer to producer

International audienceIn the context of intelligent instrument network, i.e. intelligent sensors and actuators, Producer-Consumer pattern facilitates design and intelligent instrument networking. The connection between producer and consumer can be checked (i.e. type of data) and filtered (condition of exchange). We propose to extend the producer-consumer approach to allow the consumer to define and change constraint parameters: frequency of refreshment and maximum of tolerance. We consider especially interval confidence model of data and refreshment capability. A prototype is presented to illustrate and validate the approach on the OSGI platfor

A Constraint-based Approach to Web Services Provisioning

In this paper we consider the provisioning problem of Web services. Our framework is based on the existence of an abstract composition, i.e., the way some services of different types can be combined together in order to achieve a given task. Our approach consists in instantiating this abstract representation of a composite Web service by selecting the most appropriate concrete Web services. This instantiation is based on constraint programming techniques which allows us to match the Web services according to a given request. Our proposal performs this instantiation in a distributed manner, i.e., the solvers for each service type are solving some constraints at one level, and they are forwarding the rest of the request (modified by the local solution) to the next services. When a service cannot provision part of the composition, a distributed backtrack mechanism enables to change previous solutions (i.e., provisions). A major interest of our approach is to preserve privacy: solutions are not sent to the whole composition, services know only the services to which they are connected, and parts of the request that are already solved are removed from the next requests. We introduce a specific data structure, namely Message Treatment Structure, for modeling the problem. We show the interest of this data structure to express the general principles of our framework and the related algorithms