Race and Income Disparities in Disaster Preparedness in Old Age

Objective: Older adults are one of the most vulnerable populations impacted by disasters and communities continue to struggle addressing preparedness. This study investigated to what extent income status and race/ethnicity in old age interplayed with disaster preparedness. Methods: Data came from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative panel survey of older Americans over 51 years old. Our sample was restricted to respondents who participated in a special survey about disaster preparedness (N=1,705). Disaster preparedness was measured as a score, which includes 13 variables related to personal, household, program, and medical preparedness. Race/ethnicity was categorized by White, Black, and Hispanic. Low income was defined as below 300% of the federal poverty line. OLS regression was used to examine the main and interaction effects of race/ethnicity and lower income status on disaster preparedness scores. Results: We found that older adults in lower income status had lower preparedness level than those in higher income (Coef.=-0.318, p\u3c.01). Hispanics tend to be less prepared compared to White and African Americans (Coef.=--0.548, p\u3c.001). Preparedness of Black elders was not significantly different from that of Whites. However, interestingly, Black elders in lower income status were significantly less prepared for disaster than other groups (Coef.=-0.520, p\u3c.05). We did not find significant interaction effects between Hispanic and lower income status on disaster preparedness. Discussion. This study identified vulnerable subgroups of older adults for disaster preparedness and suggests that preparedness programs should target minority and low income elders, particularly Hispanics and low income Black elders

Serological survey of anti-group A rotavirus IgM in UK adults

Rotaviral associated disease of infants in the UK is seasonal and infection in adults not uncommon but the relationship between these has been little explored. Adult sera collected monthly for one year from routine hospital samples were screened for the presence of anti-group A rotavirus immunoglobulin M class antibodies as a marker of recent infection. Anti-rotavirus IgM was seen in all age groups throughout the year with little obvious seasonal variation in the distribution of antibody levels. IgM concentrations and the proportion seropositive above a threshold both increased with age with high concentrations consistently observed in the elderly. Results suggest either high infection rates of rotavirus in adults, irrespective of seasonal disease incidence in infants, IgM persistence or IgM cross-reactivity. These results support recent evidence of differences between infant and adult rotavirus epidemiology and highlight the need for more extensive surveys to investigate age and time related infection and transmission of rotavirus

Classes of Skorokhod Embeddings for the Simple Symmetric Random Walk

The Skorokhod Embedding problem is well understood when the underlying process is a Brownian motion. We examine the problem when the underlying is the simple symmetric random walk and when no external randomisation is allowed. We prove that any measure on Z can be embedded by means of a minimal stopping time. However, in sharp contrast to the Brownian setting, we show that the set of measures which can be embedded in a uniformly integrable way is strictly smaller then the set of centered probability measures: specifically it is a fractal set which we characterise as an iterated function system. Finally, we define the natural extension of several known constructions from the Brownian setting and show that these constructions require us to further restrict the sets of target laws

Embedding laws in diffusions by functions of time

We present a constructive probabilistic proof of the fact that if $B=(B_t)_{t\ge0}$ is standard Brownian motion started at $0$, and $\mu$ is a given probability measure on $\mathbb{R}$ such that $\mu(\{0\})=0$, then there exists a unique left-continuous increasing function $b:(0,\infty)\rightarrow\mathbb{R}\cup\{+\infty\}$ and a unique left-continuous decreasing function $c:(0,\infty)\rightarrow\mathbb{R}\cup\{-\infty\}$ such that $B$ stopped at $\tau_{b,c}=\inf\{t>0\vert B_t\ge b(t)$ or $B_t\le c(t)\}$ has the law $\mu$. The method of proof relies upon weak convergence arguments arising from Helly's selection theorem and makes use of the L\'{e}vy metric which appears to be novel in the context of embedding theorems. We show that $\tau_{b,c}$ is minimal in the sense of Monroe so that the stopped process $B^{\tau_{b,c}}=(B_{t\wedge\tau_{b,c}})_{t\ge0}$ satisfies natural uniform integrability conditions expressed in terms of $\mu$. We also show that $\tau_{b,c}$ has the smallest truncated expectation among all stopping times that embed $\mu$ into $B$. The main results extend from standard Brownian motion to all recurrent diffusion processes on the real line.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOP941 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Proof-of-concept engineering workflow demonstrator

When Microsoft needed a proof-of-concept implementation of bespoke engineering workflow software for their customer, BAE Systems, it called on the software engineering skills and experience of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing. BAE Systems was looking into converting their in-house SOLAR software suite to run on the MS Compute Cluster Server product with 64-bit MPI support in conjunction with an extended Windows Workflow environment for use by their engineer