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General Situation (general + situation)
Selected AbstractsThe individual and "the general situation": The tension barometer and the race problem at the University of Chicago, 1947,1954JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 1 2010Leah N. Gordon This article explains how social theories that posited white attitudes as the root of racial injustice gained traction in postwar social thought. Examining the production of a "tension barometer," an attitude survey that scholars from the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations created to predict interracial violence, I chart vigorous debate over the nature and causes of racial oppression in the critical postwar decades. Available,and unavailable,social scientific frameworks, activists" interests, and emerging anticommunism, the Committee's history shows, created an environment where individualistic conceptions of the race problem won out, despite critique. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Mechanism of the formation of singularities for quasilinear hyperbolic systems with linearly degenerate characteristic fieldsMATHEMATICAL METHODS IN THE APPLIED SCIENCES, Issue 2 2008Ta-Tsien Li Abstract One often believes that there is no shock formation for the Cauchy problem of quasilinear hyperbolic systems (of conservation laws) with linearly degenerate characteristic fields. It has been a conjecture for a long time (see Arch. Rational Mech. Anal. 2004; 172:65,91; Compressible Fluid Flow and Systems of Conservation Laws in Several Space Variables. Springer: New York, 1984) and it is still an open problem in the general situation up to now. In this paper, a framework to justify this conjecture is proposed, and, by means of the concept such as the strict block hyperbolicity, the part richness and the successively block-closed system, some general kinds of quasilinear hyperbolic systems, which verify the conjecture, are given. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Unsaturated incompressible flows in adsorbing porous mediaMATHEMATICAL METHODS IN THE APPLIED SCIENCES, Issue 16 2003A. Fasano We study a free boundary problem modelling the penetration of a liquid through a porous material in the presence of absorbing granules. The geometry is one dimensional. The early stage of penetration is considered, when the flow is unsaturated. Since the hydraulic conductivity depends both on saturation and on porosity and the latter change due to the absorption, the main coefficient in the flow equation depends on the free boundary and on the history of the process. Some results have been obtained in Fasano (Math. Meth. Appl. Sci. 1999; 22:605) for a simplified version of the model. Here existence and uniqueness are proved in a class of weighted Hölder spaces in a more general situation. A basic tool are the estimates on a non-standard linear boundary value problem for the heat equation in an initially degenerate domain (Rend. Mat. Acc. Lincei 2002; 13:23). Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Special needs of children with type 1 diabetes at primary school: perceptions from parents, children, and teachersPEDIATRIC DIABETES, Issue 1 2009Blanca Amillategui Objective:, To identify the special needs of children with type 1 diabetes at primary school taking into account the perceptions reported by parents, children, and teachers. Methods:, This was a cross-sectional survey carried out at nine public hospitals with a cohort of 6- to 13-yr-old children. Parents were personally informed about the objectives of the survey and the necessity to involve their children and the teachers. The self-reporting questionnaire included demographic information as well as some questions that helped to evaluate the general situation of children with type 1 diabetes at primary school, main worries about the disease, and possible improvement measures. Results:, A total of 430 questionnaires were completed and validated of which 39% were filled in by parents, 35% by children, and 26% by teachers. The majority of children were 10,13 yr old and came from public schools. At school, most children required glucose monitoring, but few of them (9,12%) needed insulin administration. Some parents (7%) experienced problems at their schools when they informed them about their children's disease, 2% were finally not accepted, and 1% were forced to change school. Major children's concerns included the ability to recognize hypoglycemia or to self-administer insulin. Parents, teachers, and children demanded better information at school about diabetes and about emergency management. Conclusions:, The three population groups agreed about the necessity of having more available information on diabetes at schools. Although some discriminatory behavior was still occurring, it seemed it has been diminishing in recent years. [source] Video tracking system optimization using evolution strategiesINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF IMAGING SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 2 2007Jesús García Abstract A video-based tracking system for airport surveillance, composed by modules performing vision tasks at different levels, is adapted for operational conditions by means of Evolution Strategies (ES). An optimization procedure has been carried out considering different scenes composed of representative trajectories, supported by a global evaluation metric proposed to quantify the system performance. The generalization problem (the search of appropriate solutions for general situations, avoiding over-adaptation to particular conditions) is approached considering evaluation of ES-individuals over combinations of trajectories to build the fitness function. In this way, the optimization procedure covers sets of trajectories representing different types of problems. Besides, alternative operators for aggregating partial evaluations have been analysed. Results show how the optimization strategy provides a sensitive tuning of performance related to input parameters at different levels, and how the combination of different situations improves the generalization capability of the trained system. The global performance final system after optimization is also compared with representative algorithms in the state of the art of visual tracking. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 17, 75,90, 2007 [source] Getting Real Performance Out of Pay-for-PerformanceTHE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2008SEAN NICHOLSON Context: Most private and public health insurers are implementing pay-for-performance (P4P) programs in an effort to improve the quality of medical care. This article offers a paradigm for evaluating how P4P programs should be structured and how effective they are likely to be. Methods: This article assesses the current comprehensiveness of evidence-based medicine by estimating the percentage of outpatient medical spending for eighteen medical processes recommended by the Institute of Medicine. Findings: Three conditions must be in place for outcomes-based P4P programs to improve the quality of care: (1) health insurers must not fully understand what medical processes improve health (i.e., the health production function); (2) providers must know more about the health production function than insurers do; and (3) health insurers must be able to measure a patient's risk-adjusted health. Only two of these conditions currently exist. Payers appear to have incomplete knowledge of the health production function, and providers appear to know more about the health production function than payers do, but accurate methods of adjusting the risk of a patient's health status are still being developed. Conclusions: This article concludes that in three general situations, P4P will have a different impact on quality and costs and so should be structured differently. When information about patients' health and the health production function is incomplete, as is currently the case, P4P payments should be kept small, should be based on outcomes rather than processes, and should target physicians' practices and health systems. As information improves, P4P incentive payments could be increased, and P4P may become more powerful. Ironically, once information becomes complete, P4P can be replaced entirely by "optimal fee-for-service." [source] Estimating HIV Incidence Based on Combined Prevalence TestingBIOMETRICS, Issue 1 2010Raji Balasubramanian Summary Knowledge of incidence rates of HIV and other infectious diseases is important in evaluating the state of an epidemic as well as for designing interventional studies. Estimation of disease incidence from longitudinal studies can be expensive and time consuming. Alternatively, Janssen et al. (1998,,Journal of the American Medical Association,280, 42,48) proposed the estimation of HIV incidence at a single point in time based on the combined use of a standard and "detuned" antibody assay. This article frames the problem from a longitudinal perspective, from which the maximum likelihood estimator of incidence is determined and compared with the Janssen estimator. The formulation also allows estimation for general situations, including different batteries of tests among subjects, inclusion of covariates, and a comparative evaluation of different test batteries to help guide study design. The methods are illustrated with data from an HIV interventional trial and a seroprevalence survey recently conducted in Botswana. [source] Evaluation of DNA Mixtures from Database SearchBIOMETRICS, Issue 1 2010Yuk-Ka Chung Summary With the aim of bridging the gap between DNA mixture analysis and DNA database search, a novel approach is proposed to evaluate the forensic evidence of DNA mixtures when the suspect is identified by the search of a database of DNA profiles. General formulae are developed for the calculation of the likelihood ratio for a two-person mixture under general situations including multiple matches and imperfect evidence. The influence of the prior probabilities on the weight of evidence under the scenario of multiple matches is demonstrated by a numerical example based on Hong Kong data. Our approach is shown to be capable of presenting the forensic evidence of DNA mixtures in a comprehensive way when the suspect is identified through database search. [source] | |||||||||||||