The Association of Independent Living/Transitional Living Program Services to Educational Attainment among Older Foster Youth.

Among a sample of 312 older youth transitioning from foster care in the state of Missouri, this study examined whether participating in independent living (IL) classes and living in an IL or transitional living program (TLP) is associated with completing high school with a diploma or GED and entering college. Most of the youth reported participating in IL classes (80%), with 25% having lived in an IL/TLP between ages 17-19. Results of multinomial logistic regression analysis indicated that having lived in any type of IL/TLP was associated with greater odds of completing high school with a diploma or GED as well as entering college. Participating in IL classes was not associated with high school completion. but completion of IL classes was associated with greater odds of high school graduation with a diploma or GED. These findings lend support for the positive role that living in an IL/TL setting, or the completion of IL classes can play in the academic achievement of older youth transitioning from foster care. Future evaluation research is needed that elucidates specific components of IL services and transitional living programs that successfully address the academic needs of older foster youth and contribute to greater educational attainment.

Energy recovery in a commercial building using pico-hydropower turbines: An Australian case study.

Optimising energy use in systems and buildings is crucial to reduce climate change. This paper aims to address the gap in knowledge for pico-hydropower (<5 kW) that has been identified as an area of untapped potential in the water industries. A literature review and multivariate analysis are used to find a suitable pico-hydro turbine to install into a coral reef aquarium system in a government owned facility. Key findings from the literature review are untapped potential, gaps in knowledge and global quantification of small hydropower for energy recovery, and lack of enabling data contributing to slow uptake of small hydropower. The study showed a propeller pico-hydropower turbine could be used to recover approximately 10% of the energy used for pumping water through a filtration system. At 2.3 m available head, and 90 L/s water flow, power output up to 1.124 kW was achieved. The project was economically viable with financial and non-financial benefits for the life cycle of the product. There remain sparse case studies for energy recovery using small hydropower in the scientific literature. A growing number of authors see the potential of this renewable energy technology to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals to provide affordable clean energy and address climate change. This study helps to shine a light on opportunities to find value from waste using a novel application of hydropower in a water industry.

Evaluation of fetal exposure to external loud noise using a sheep model: quantification of in utero acoustic transmission across the human audio range.

BACKGROUND: There is mounting evidence that neural memory traces are formed by auditory learning in utero and that premature newborns are particularly sensitive to the intense, sustained noises or impulses sounds associated with the use of intensive care equipment. One area of critical importance is the determination of sound level exposure in utero associated with maternal occupation. The attenuation factors provided by the abdomen and tissue as well as the routes by which the inner ear receives stimulation need careful consideration and investigation to provide prenatal protection from external sound levels and frequencies that may cause harm. OBJECTIVE: To measure how sound from external sound sources is transmitted to the fetus inside the uterus of a pregnant sheep in 6 Hz frequency steps between 100 Hz and 20 kHz (ie, across most of the human audio range). STUDY DESIGN: We measured acoustic transfer characteristics in vivo in 6 time-mated singleton pregnant Romney ewes (gestational age, 103-130 days, weight, 54-74 kg). Under general anesthesia and at hysterotomy, a calibrated hydrophone was attached to the occiput of the fetal head within the amniotic sac. Two calibrated microphones were positioned in the operating theater, close to the head and to the body of each ewe. Initial experiments were carried out on 3 pregnant ewes 3 days after transport recovery to inform the data acquisition protocol. This was followed by detailed data acquisition of 3 pregnant ewes under general anesthesia, using external white noise signals. Voltage signals were acquired with 2 calibrated microphones, located near the head and the body of each ewe and with a calibrated hydrophone located in the amniotic fluid. RESULTS: Measurement of acoustic transmission through the maternal abdominal and uterine walls indicates that frequency contents above 10 kHz are transmitted into the amniotic sac and that some frequencies are attenuated by as little as 3 dB. CONCLUSION: This study provides new data about in utero sound transmission of external noise sources beyond physiological noise (cardiovascular, respiratory, and intestinal sounds), which help quantity the potential for fetal physiological damage resulting from exposure to high levels of noise during pregnancy. Fine-frequency acoustic attenuation characteristics are essential to inform standards and clinical recommendations on exposure of pregnant women to noise. Such transfer functions may also inform the design of filters to produce an optimal acoustic setting for maternal occupational noise exposure, use of magnetic resonance imaging during pregnancy, and for neonatal incubators.

Towards distribution-based control of social networks.

BACKGROUND: Complex networks are found in many domains and the control of these networks is a research topic that continues to draw increasing attention. This paper proposes a method of network control that attempts to maintain a specified target distribution of the network state. In contrast to many existing network control research works, which focus exclusively on structural analysis of the network, this paper also accounts for user actions/behaviours within the network control problem. METHODS: This paper proposes and makes use of a novel distribution-based control method. The control approach is applied within a simulation of the real-valued voter model, which could have applications in problems such as the avoidance of consensus or extremism. The network control problem under consideration is investigated using various theoretical network types, including scale free, random, and small world. RESULTS: It is argued that a distribution-based control approach may be more appropriate for several types of social control problems, in which the exact state of the system is of less interest than the overall system behaviour. The preliminary results presented in this paper demonstrate that a standard reinforcement learning approach is capable of learning a control signal selection policy to prevent the network state distribution from straying far from a specified target distribution. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, the results presented in this paper demonstrate the feasibility of a distribution-based control solution within the simulated problem. Additionally, several interesting questions arise from these results and are discussed as potential future work.

The drug-free world.

In 1998, the United Nations and every one of its then member states committed themselves to a foolish pledge to which, in the face of all reason and evidence-based information, it has since remained committed, like lemmings clinging to the belief that if they all together jump off a cliff, the raging waters below will somehow dematerialize and reality will thereby be brought into line with wishful thinking.

Satisfaction with Counseling among Black Males in Transition from the Foster Care System.

Using the Multidimensional Adolescent Satisfaction Scale (Garland, Saltzman, & Aarons, 2000), satisfaction with counseling and associated variables were examined among Black males (n = 47) transitioning from the foster care system. Potential associated variables assessed were foster care custody status, counseling status, diagnosis of major depression and disruptive behavior disorder based DSM-IV criteria, history of placement in congregate care settings, attitudes toward mental health services, stigma beliefs, and masculine norms. Results from simultaneous multiple regression analysis showed that attitudes toward mental health services contributed significantly to satisfaction with counseling. Specifically, Black males who expressed more positive attitudes toward mental health services in terms of confidence in mental health professionals and the therapeutic process reported greater satisfaction. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

UML as a cell and biochemistry modeling language.

The systems biology community is building increasingly complex models and simulations of cells and other biological entities, and are beginning to look at alternatives to traditional representations such as those provided by ordinary differential equations (ODE). The lessons learned over the years by the software development community in designing and building increasingly complex telecommunication and other commercial real-time reactive systems, can be advantageously applied to the problems of modeling in the biology domain. Making use of the object-oriented (OO) paradigm, the unified modeling language (UML) and Real-Time Object-Oriented Modeling (ROOM) visual formalisms, and the Rational Rose RealTime (RRT) visual modeling tool, we describe a multi-step process we have used to construct top-down models of cells and cell aggregates. The simple example model described in this paper includes membranes with lipid bilayers, multiple compartments including a variable number of mitochondria, substrate molecules, enzymes with reaction rules, and metabolic pathways. We demonstrate the relevance of abstraction, reuse, objects, classes, component and inheritance hierarchies, multiplicity, visual modeling, and other current software development best practices. We show how it is possible to start with a direct diagrammatic representation of a biological structure such as a cell, using terminology familiar to biologists, and by following a process of gradually adding more and more detail, arrive at a system with structure and behavior of arbitrary complexity that can run and be observed on a computer. We discuss our CellAK (Cell Assembly Kit) approach in terms of features found in SBML, CellML, E-CELL, Gepasi, Jarnac, StochSim, Virtual Cell, and membrane computing systems.

Drug testing at work: issues and perspectives.

Over the past two decades there has been a significant rise in the number of employers requiring their staff or prospective staff members to undergo testing to determine whether they have been taking illicit drugs. Such testing usually takes place within the framework of broad employee-assistance programs and is underpinned by the wish to ensure public safety and corporate security, as well as achieving a "drug-free workplace" by helping staff who have drug-use-related problems. By whatever means these tests are conducted, though, issues of privacy raise a question mark against whether this is truly an area in which the interests of collective security should always override individual civil liberties.

International drug control issues and dilemmas: but, how are we doing right now?

Selected international drug control plans, projects, and programs will be reviewed in terms of the individual and systemic "actors" (initiators, facilitators-promoters, barriers, recipients), places, underlying assumptions, critical conditions and "demands," and outcomes (short and long term). Unresolved issues will be noted.

Educational experiences and aspirations of older youth in foster care.

This study documents the school experiences of 262 youth referred for independent-living preparation from the foster care system of one midwestern U.S. county. Of the youth, 73% had been suspended at least once since the seventh grade, and 16% had been expelled. In the past year, 58% had failed a class, and 29% had physical fights with students. Yet the group reported high educational aspirations: 70% wanted to attend college. Those in congregate care and family settings often had school behavior problems. The results support the need for a system of education advocates who work to maintain proper education placements for youth in foster care and help them receive the academic resources they need to graduate from high school and proceed to college.

Controlling and policing substance use(rs).

Controlling drug use--a dynamic, global, politicalized process--is reviewed in terms of selected types of drugs, "natural levels" of drug demand and use, drug markets and the drug market environment, types of traffickers, illicit drug trade profits, approaches to drug control ("War on Drugs", "Zero Tolerance" programs and policies, "normalizing" and legalizing selected drugs), including UN's then relatively recent "Balanced Approach" and facets of drug law enforcement (drug prices and purity levels and values of drug seizures), including various rarely noted benefits to intervention programs and control agents. Unresolved issues and needed "tools" are noted while considering the implications of the first UN's World Drug Report data.