Review

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142199/1/naaq0094.pd

The Effects Of Problem Drinking On The Utilization Of Physicians In Canadian Family Practice

This study was concerned with the extent to which the abuse of alcoholic beverages is associated with the frequency of use of physicians in Canadian family practice and the type of morbidity presented to the doctor. The study group was composed of 108 problem drinkers identified in two family medical practices in London, Ontario. The utilization of their family physician was compared to a matched control group over a two-year period. Utilization by the spouses and children living with the problem drinkers was also examined. Data were obtained retrospectively from a problem oriented, patient classification system and other aspects of the medical records. The main dependent variables were the average number of patient-physician contacts per year and the type of diagnoses made during each contact.;The results showed that problem drinkers were in contact with their family physician twice as often as matched control patients. They were also more likely to be diagnosed as having neoplastic disease, endocrine/nutrition disorders, mental health problems, drug or tobacco abuse, respiratory, digestive and skin disease, vague signs, symptoms and ill-defined conditions, traumatic injuries and social/marital/family problems. The higher rate of utilization was due primarily to the higher prevalence of psychosocial problems and traumatic injuries.;Spouses of the problem drinkers did not differ significantly from their matched controls on the frequency of utilization, although visits were more common for mental health problems and problems associated with social/marital/family relationships. No differences in utilization emerged when the overall sample of children of problem drinkers was compared to their control group. However, index children between the ages of six and eleven were more frequent attenders and had more psychosocial problems.;The findings of this investigation are discussed in terms of the development of case finding procedures to detect familial alcohol abuse and the planning of future studies into the efficacy of therapeutic interventions with these families

Origin and Dispersal of the Alewife, Alosa Pseudoharengus, and the Gizzard Shad, Dorosoma Cepedianum, in the Great Lakes

It is possible that the alewife is native to Lake Ontario and the gizzard shad to Lake Erie, although conclusive evidence for this is lacking. There appear to be no records of the alewife from Lake Ontario prior to 1873, after the lake had been stocked with American shad. That species may still occur in Lake Ontario occasionally. A tabular comparison of these species is given to facilitate identification. The alewife is referred to the genus Alosa (rather than Pomolobus) because no reliable characteristics are available to distinguish the species of these two groups.Wilmot recorded a herring‐like fish (not the American shad) from Lake Ontario about 1837 which probably was the gizzard shad, though it may have been the alewife. The first record of gizzard shad in Lake Ontario is for 1913, but the species was reported from Lake Erie in 1848, 18 years after the completion of the first canal to connect Lake Erie and the Ohio River. It is hypothesized that the gizzard shad entered Lake Erie in pre‐Columbian times during a warm‐dry period.A chronological record of the appearance of alewives in the upper Great Lakes shows the first specimen reported from Lake Erie was taken in 1931, Lake Huron 1933, Lake Michigan 1949, and Lake Superior 1954; actual dates of first appearance in each lake are unknown, but the species obviously moved from Lake Erie to the other lakes via Detroit River and Lake St. Clair. The alewife did not become abundant in Lake Erie or Lake Huron until around 1950 or in Lake Michigan until about 1956; it is widely distributed but not yet abundant in Lake Superior. The phenomenal increase in abundance and spreading of the alewife may be correlated with the upset in population balance by the sea lamprey; catch statistics for the alewife and shallow water cisco (Coregonus artedii) from South Bay, Lake Huron, suggest a direct or indirect causal relationship during 1954–1956.The gizzard shad does not occur north of lower New York Harbor (and there only rarely) on the Atlantic slope, although it has been reported from New Brunswick, where it was probably misidentified for the alewife. Its inland range has been extended by canal connections and perhaps it reached Lake Erie in this way; it definitely entered Lake Michigan through the Chicago River canal. A reference in 1874 to the “saw‐belly” from the Great Lakes undoubtedly represents the gizzard shad, also known by that name. The species has evidently spread to Lake Ontario and the vicinity of Quebec by moving through the Welland Canal, and to Lake Huron via the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair. The first specimen known to be taken in Lake Michigan was caught on October 13, 1953, west of Muskegon, Michigan; another was taken near Gary, Indiana, on November 2, 1953. The gizzard shad has not been reported from Lake Superior where cold, deep water may prohibit its establishment. It has on occasion gained some commercial importance in Lakes Erie and Huron, where 31,600 pounds valued at $930 were taken in 1949. The gizzard shad may have been aided in expanding northward by the warming climatic trend of the past half century.The two species, particularly the alewife, are steadily increasing in abundance and methods of utilizing this new resource should be devised.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141231/1/tafs0097.pd

City of Los Angeles: Animal Care and Control

I have found my department\u27s work statistics to be more useful in determining the changes in the pet population and in the success of our programs. The shelters are mirrors of our society, they tell us what dog breeds are popular and what health conditions prevail for pets in our cities. We can gauge the success of our programs by looking at the numbers and types of dogs and cats impounded, the number of animal bites, cruelty cases and stray dogs

Threatened Freshwater Fishes of the United States

Threatened, native freshwater fishes are listed for 49 of the 50 U.S. States, the first such compilation. Over 300 kinds are included in a formal classification, cross‐indexed to states (Table 1), followed by state lists and the status of each fish, whether rare, endangered, depleted, or undetermined. The concern for native fishes and the important factors responsible for threats to their existence are briefly outlined. Although the lists vary from those based on extensive recent state surveys to others in which current information is sparse, publication is expected to enhance the chances for survival through protective legislation (already enacted by a number of states) and stronger concern for such natural resources.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142313/1/tafs0239.pd

Speciation In Fishes Of The Genera Cyprinodon And Empetrichthys, Inhabiting The Death Valley Region

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137191/1/evo00050.pd

Investigating the role of language in children's early educational outcomes

Most children develop speech and language skills effortlessly, but some are slow to develop these skills and then go on to struggle with literacy and academic skills throughout their schooling. It is the first few years of life that are critical to their subsequent performance.\ud This project looks at what we know about the early communication environment in a child’s first two years of life, and the role this plays in preparing children for school using data from a large longitudinal survey of young people (ALSPAC - the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children).\ud It examines the characteristics of the environment in which children learn to communicate (such as activities undertaken with children, the mother’s attitude towards her baby, and the wider support available to the family) and the extent to which this affects a child’s readiness for school entry (defined as their early language, reading, writing, and maths skills that they need in school).\ud \ud Key Findings:\ud •\ud There is a strong association between a child’s social background and their readiness for school as measured by their scores on school entry assessments covering language, reading, maths and writing.\ud •\ud Language development at the age of 2 years predicts children’s performance on entry to primary school. Children’s understanding and use of vocabulary and their use of two or three word sentences at 2 years is very strongly associated with their performance on entering primary school.\ud •\ud The children’s communication environment influences language development. The number of books available to the child, the frequency of visits to the library, parents teaching a range of activities, the number of toys available, and attendance at pre-school, are all important predictors of the child’s expressive vocabulary at 2 years. The amount of television on in the home is also a predictor; as this time increased, so the child’s score at school entry decreased.\ud •\ud The communication environment is a more dominant predictor of early language than social background. In the early stages of language development, it is the particular aspects of a child’s communication environment that are associated with language acquisition rather than the broader socio-economic context of the family.\ud •\ud The child’s language and their communication environment influence the child’s performance at school entry in addition to their social background. Children’s success at school is governed not only by their social background; the child’s communication environment\ud before their second birthday and their language at the age of two years also have a strong influence

Weightless: Lossy Weight Encoding For Deep Neural Network Compression

The large memory requirements of deep neural networks limit their deployment and adoption on many devices. Model compression methods effectively reduce the memory requirements of these models, usually through applying transformations such as weight pruning or quantization. In this paper, we present a novel scheme for lossy weight encoding which complements conventional compression techniques. The encoding is based on the Bloomier filter, a probabilistic data structure that can save space at the cost of introducing random errors. Leveraging the ability of neural networks to tolerate these imperfections and by re-training around the errors, the proposed technique, Weightless, can compress DNN weights by up to 496x with the same model accuracy. This results in up to a 1.51x improvement over the state-of-the-art

QUANTILE REGRESSION AS A METHODOLOGY FOR UNDERPINNING PROPORTIONATE UNIVERSALISM

In the social sciences, and beyond, we are often interested in the impact of factors on some outcome. These research questions of interest are traditionally addressed with linear regression, which informs on those factors impacting on the average. Frequently though the interest is not in the ‘average’ but with those in the tails of the outcome distribution, where for example the low performing or high scoring are contained. This is particularly the case when these analyses are to inform policies to improve on those low performing and the identification and targeting of possible interventions for this. Focusing solely on the average and applying interventions across the board can only widen the gap between those low scoring and better performing. These traditional modelling methods will not provide information on differential impact of a factor across the distribution and indeed can fail to identify important factors. In addition to the analysis suitable to the research question there are inherent linear regression model assumptions which must be met. To try and address this using traditional techniques by segmenting the data to assess factor impact is inefficient and can have power implications. Also a logistic regression approach provides a cut-point with those on either side, regardless of their proximity to that cut-point being in one group or the other. Therefore to understand the effect of factors across the outcome distribution we must use different techniques and a quantile regression approach offers an assessment across the outcome distribution and can identify those factors which are influential at different locations on that distribution and is also robust to the assumptions which dog those other traditional methods. Thus with a principled method such as quantile regression analysis, there exists an enormous potential to inform not just basic policy questions, as to relationships amongst factors and outcome, but with the resulting more nuanced answers provide those key policymakers with a more complete evidence base with robust informative estimates on those mediating factors and on who to target

Psychometric evaluation of the ACHIEVE assessment

AM deposited 2020-04-22. Kept embargoed till publication at author's request.Miriam Crowe - ORCID 0000-0002-8941-5442 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8941-5442Donald Maciver - ORCID 0000-0002-6173-429X https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6173-429XReplaced AM with VoR 2020-06-12Objective: There has been a significant change within clinical practice in childhood disability from ‘treating’ at the level of body function to ecological approaches that address the child’s involvement in everyday life. Clinical assessment, and robust tools to support this, are of key importance. The aim of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the ACHIEVE Assessment in a clinical dataset. The ACHIEVE assessment is a parent and teacher report of participation in home, school and community settings, important contributory factors for participation, and environmental factors.Design: ACHIEVE scores of children were collected from parents and teachers. The Rasch Rating Scale Model produced model estimates with WINSTEPS software.Setting: Clinical rehabilitation settings in Scotland (United Kingdom).Subjects: 401 parents and 335 teachers of 402 children participated resulting in a final sample of 736 responses. Children (78% male) were 4-17 years old (mean 7.91 years SD 2.61). Children had a range of disabilities including Developmental Coordination Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.Results: The study includes a large clinical sample of children with disabilities. The results demonstrate that the ACHIEVE Assessment can provide unidimensional measurements of children’s participation and important contributory factors for participation. Differential item functioning analysis indicated majority of items were comparable between parent and teacher report.Conclusions: The results confirm evidence of appropriate psychometric properties of the ACHIEVE Assessment. ACHIEVE is a comprehensive tool that enables identification of patterns and issues around participation for clinical and research purposes.https://doi.org/10.3389/fped.2020.002458pubpu