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Variety Of Purposes (variety + of_purpose)
Selected AbstractsThe European Service Mapping Schedule (ESMS): development of an instrumentfor the description and classificationof mental health servicesACTA PSYCHIATRICA SCANDINAVICA, Issue 2000S. Johnson Objective: This paper describes the development of an instrument for description and classification of mental health services and for measurement of service use. Purposes to be served by the instrument include: (i) identification of gaps in the spectrum of services in a catchment area; (ii) obtaining background information which may be important to understanding why apparently similar interventions lead to different outcomes in different areas; (iii) investigating how introduction of a particular type of service influences use of other local services; and (iv) understanding the relationship between sociodemographic factors and service use. Method: The instrument was developed through meetings of an international expert panel and pilot stages in several European countries. Results: Use of the European Mapping Service Mapping Schedule (ESMS) appears feasible in several countries and allowed description and classification of the full range of services identified within each of the study catchment areas. Conclusion: The ESMS promises to fill a gap in the technology available for mental health services research. Further practical experiences of its use for a variety of purposes in a variety of settings are now needed to indicate how far the ESMS does successfully generate data which are useful to researchers and planners. [source] An Empirical Analysis of the FBI's Ten Most WantedJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2008Thomas J. Miles Police agencies regularly publish lists of wanted fugitives. These lists may serve a variety of purposes, including (1) announcement of the police agency's enforcement priorities and (2) the facilitation of fugitive apprehension. When a police agency's enforcement priorities encompass fugitives whose apprehension risks vary in their sensitivity to publicity, a tradeoff may exist between these two purposes. This article conducts the first statistical analysis of fugitives who have appeared on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Ten Most Wanted List. It reports results consistent with this tradeoff. Estimates from hazard models show that changes in the characteristics of fugitives on the list were contemporaneous with declines in the speed of apprehension and in the likelihood that information or "tips" from the public caused a fugitive's apprehension. The results suggest that as the FBI acquired responsibility to enforce a wider range of criminal activity and as other avenues for publicizing fugitives developed, it increasingly used the list to communicate its priorities rather than to locate fugitives. [source] Multiple imputation for national public-use datasets and its possible application for gestational age in United States Natality filesPAEDIATRIC & PERINATAL EPIDEMIOLOGY, Issue 2007Jennifer D. Parker Summary Multiple imputation (MI) is a technique that can be used for handling missing data in a public-use dataset. With MI, two or more completed versions of the dataset are created, containing possibly different but reasonable replacements for the missing data. Users analyse the completed datasets separately with standard techniques and then combine the results using simple formulae in a way that allows the extra uncertainty due to missing data to be assessed. An advantage of this approach is that the resulting public-use data can be analysed by a variety of users for a variety of purposes, without each user needing to devise a method to deal with the missing data. A recent example for a large public-use dataset is the MI of the family income and personal earnings variables in the National Health Interview Survey. We propose an approach to utilise MI to handle the problems of missing gestational ages and implausible birthweight,gestational age combinations in national vital statistics datasets. This paper describes MI and gives examples of MI for public-use datasets, summarises methods that have been used for identifying implausible gestational age values on birth records, and combines these ideas by setting forth scenarios for identifying and then imputing missing and implausible gestational age values multiple times. Because missing and implausible gestational age values are not missing completely at random, using multiple imputations and, thus, incorporating both the existing relationships among the variables and the uncertainty added from the imputation, may lead to more valid inferences in some analytical studies than simply excluding birth records with inadequate data. [source] The enhanced tool-kit of two groups of wild bearded capuchin monkeys in the Caatinga: tool making, associative use, and secondary toolsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF PRIMATOLOGY, Issue 3 2009Massimo Mannu Abstract The use of stones to crack open encapsulated fruit is widespread among wild bearded capuchin monkeys (Cebus libidinosus) inhabiting savanna-like environments. Some populations in Serra da Capivara National Park (Piauí, Brazil), though, exhibit a seemingly broader toolkit, using wooden sticks as probes, and employing stone tools for a variety of purposes. Over the course of 701.5,hr of visual contact of two wild capuchin groups we recorded 677 tool use episodes. Five hundred and seventeen of these involved the use of stones, and 160 involved the use of sticks (or other plant parts) as probes to access water, arthropods, or the contents of insects' nests. Stones were mostly used as "hammers",not only to open fruit or seeds, or smash other food items, but also to break dead wood, conglomerate rock, or cement in search of arthropods, to dislodge bigger stones, and to pulverize embedded quartz pebbles (licking, sniffing, or rubbing the body with the powder produced). Stones also were used in a "hammer-like" fashion to loosen the soil for digging out roots and arthropods, and sometimes as "hoes" to pull the loosened soil. In a few cases, we observed the re-utilization of stone tools for different purposes (N=3), or the combined use of two tools,stones and sticks (N=4) or two stones (N=5), as sequential or associative tools. On three occasions, the monkeys used smaller stones to loosen bigger quartz pebbles embedded in conglomerate rock, which were subsequently used as tools. These could be considered the first reports of secondary tool use by wild capuchin monkeys. Am. J. Primatol. 71:242,251, 2009. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Disulfide Bond Substitution by Directed Evolution in an Engineered Binding ProteinCHEMBIOCHEM, Issue 8 2009Antoine Drevelle Dr. Abstract Breaking ties: The antitumour protein, neocarzinostatin (NCS), is one of the few drug-carrying proteins used in human therapeutics. However, the presence of disulfide bonds limits this protein's potential development for many applications. This study describes a generic directed-evolution approach starting from NCS-3.24 (shown in the figure complexed with two testosterone molecules) to engineer stable disulfide-free NCS variants suitable for a variety of purposes, including intracellular applications. The chromoprotein neocarzinostatin (NCS) has been intensively studied for its antitumour properties. It has recently been redesigned as a potential drug-carrying scaffold. A potential limit of this protein scaffold, especially for intracellular applications, is the presence of disulfide bonds. The objective of this work was to create a disulfide-free NCS-derived scaffold. A generic targeted approach was developed by using directed evolution methods. As a starting point we used a previously engineered NCS variant in which a hapten binding site had been created. A library was then generated in which cysteine Cys88 and Cys93 and neighbouring residues were randomly substituted. Variants that preserved the hapten binding function were selected by phage display and further screened by colony filtration methods. Several sequences with common features emerged from this process. The corresponding proteins were expressed, purified and their biophysical properties characterised. How these selected sequences rescued folding ability and stability of the disulfide-free protein was carefully examined by using calorimetry and the results were interpreted with molecular simulation techniques. [source] Nerve supply of the brachioradialis muscle: Surgically relevant variations of the extramuscular branches of the radial nerveCLINICAL ANATOMY, Issue 7 2005Maria D. Latev Abstract The brachioradialis muscle is utilized in tendon-transfer operations, carried out for a variety of purposes. The extramuscular branches of the radial nerve to the brachioradialis were dissected and studied in 43 embalmed cadaveric specimens. The number of primary and secondary branches and the spatial locations of their origins and muscle-entry points was determined for each specimen. All distances were measured relative to the lateral epicondyle. A wide anatomic variation was observed in both the nerve branching pattern as well as the number and locations of muscle-entry points. A single primary nerve branch was found in 20 specimens, or 46.5% of the cases. On an average, single primary nerve branches arose from the radial nerve 30 mm proximal to the lateral epicondyle. In 16 of these cases, the primary branch splits into two to four secondary branches, and in four cases there was only one branch entering the muscle. Seventeen specimens had two primary branches whose origin points were separated by 5 to 40 mm with an average of 15 mm. In seven of these seventeen cases one or both of the primary branches split into secondary branches. Six specimens had three primary branches; the origin points of the most proximal and the most distal branch were separated by up to 30 mm with an average of 13 mm. Excluding the four cases with extensive fanning into multiple thin branches, the number of muscle-entry points ranged from 1 to 4 (mean 2.7). The locations of the muscle-entry points for all specimens were widespread ranging from 50 mm proximal and 40 mm distal to the lateral epicondyle with an average at 6 mm proximal to the lateral epicondyle. The greatest distance between muscle-entry points was 50 mm in a single specimen. In surgical procedures involving dissection of the brachioradialis muscle more proximal than 50 mm distal to the elbow, the extramuscular branch(es) of the radial nerve branches to the brachioradialis may be at risk. Clin. Anat. 18:488,492, 2005. © 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] | |||||||||||||