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Introduction: Lung cancer screening (LCS) combined with smoking cessation intervention is currently recommended for older individuals with a history of heavy smoking. Tailoring tobacco treatment for this patient population of older, people who smoke (PWS) may improve cessation rates while efficiently using limited smoking cessation resources. Although some older people who smoke will need more intensive treatment to achieve sustained abstinence, others may be successful with less intensive treatment. A framework to identify them a priori would be helpful to distribute smoking cessation resources accordingly. Methods: Baseline demographic, smoking, and health data are reported from a randomized clinical trial of longitudinal smoking cessation interventions delivered in the setting of LCS. Candidate variables were factor analyzed to identify latent factors, or constructs, to identify subgroups of older participants among the heterogenous population of older people who smoke. Results: We identified three factor-derived constructs: self-reported health status, heaviness of smoking, and nicotine dependence. Nicotine dependence was moderately correlated with both of the other two factors. Conclusions: This factor analysis of baseline participant characteristics identified a set of latent constructs – based on a few practical clinical variables -- that can be used to classify the heterogenous population of older people who smoke to identify. We propose this framework to identify subgroups of people who smoke who might successfully quit with less intense treatment at the time of lung cancer screening.

Flooded rice soils are unique in terms of maintaining soil fertility and long-term productivity, allowing continuous rice systems to contribute greatly to global food supply. Yet increasing herbicide resistant weed pressure, water scarcity, and other sustainability challenges suggest a need to explore options for cropping system diversification. However, little research has evaluated the current obstacles limiting diversification of rice systems in different contexts. During summer and fall of 2020 we interviewed 42 rice growers to (i) assess the perceived benefits and challenges of crop rotation in the context of California rice systems and (ii) identify the factors influencing decision-making and barriers to adoption. Rice-based cropping systems ranged from high to low diversity across three different categories of growers (conventional rotations > organic > continuous rice). Key factors influencing the feasibility of rotations were soil limitations, production costs and productivity level of alternative crops, water and equipment requirements, market access, and regional differences. Generally, growers agreed that weed control and reduced reliance on herbicides were benefits of rotation. Similarly, growers who rotated described soil health as a primary benefit that decreases the need for fertilizer and pesticide inputs. However, there were many challenges to implementing rotations including heavy clay soils with poor drainage, lack of available contracts and markets for other crops, financial barriers such as land ownership and farm infrastructure (size of operation and available labor and equipment), and limited experience and knowledge of other viable crops. In terms of economic feasibility, those who only grow rice believed that other crops are less profitable, while those who rotate said that rotations increased profitability. Our research indicates that soil conditions are an important limitation, but other economic, social, and cultural barriers also strongly influence the potential for the diversification of rice systems.

Abstract Background With high rates of HIV and multiple vulnerable subgroups across diverse settings, there is a need for culturally based, HIV stigma reduction interventions. Pregnant women who are living with HIV are especially in need of services to protect not only their own but also their children’s lives. Uptake of HIV services worldwide is hindered by stigma towards persons living with HIV/AIDS. While cultural context plays a key role in shaping HIV stigma, these insights have not yet been fully integrated into stigma reduction strategies. By utilizing the “What Matters Most” stigma framework, we propose that an intervention to counter culturally salient aspects of HIV stigma will improve treatment adherence and other relevant outcomes. A pragmatic clinical trial in Botswana will evaluate the “Mothers Moving towards Empowerment” (MME) intervention, which seeks to address HIV stigma in Botswana and to specifically engage pregnant mothers so as to promote antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence in the postpartum period. Methods This study will test MME against treatment as usual (TAU) among pregnant mothers diagnosed with HIV and their infants. Outcomes will be assessed during pregnancy and 16 weeks postpartum. Women who meet eligibility criteria are assigned to MME or TAU. Women assigned to MME are grouped with others with similar estimated delivery dates, completing up to eight intervention group sessions scheduled before week 36 of their pregnancies. Primary outcomes among mothers include (i) reducing self-stigma, which is hypothesized to mediate improvements in (ii) psychological outcomes (quality of life, depression and social functioning), and (iii) adherence to antenatal care and ART. We will also examine a set of follow-up infant birth outcomes (APGAR score, preterm delivery, mortality (at

SMART, the acronym of scalable media adaptation and robust transport, is a suite of compression and transmission technologies for efficient, scalable, adaptive, and robust video streaming over the best-effort Internet. It consists of two indispensable parts: SMART video coding and SMART video streaming. The SMART video coding part is an efficient DCT-based universal fine granularity scalable coding scheme. Since the SMART video coding scheme adopts multiple-loop prediction anddrifting reduction techniques at the macroblock level, it can achieve high coding efficiency at a wide range of bit rates. More importantly, it provides all sorts of scalabilities, that is,quality, temporal, spatial, and complexity scalabilities, in order to accommodate heterogeneous time-variant networks and different devices. The SMART video streaming part is a transport scheme that fully takes advantages of the special features of thescalable bit streams. An accurate bandwidth estimation method is first discussed as the prerequisite of network adaptation. Then, flexible error resilience technique and unequal error protection strategy are investigated to enhance the robustness of streamingSMART bit stream. The SMART system shows excellent performances with regard to high coding efficiency, flexible channel bandwidth adaptation, smooth playback, and superior error robustness in static and dynamic experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The rising price of cigarettes has prompted many smokers to quit. Those who continue to smoke are now concentrated in lower income populations and an increasing amount of their income is dedicated to tobacco. This analysis looks at the percentage of annual income spent on tobacco by smokers in a multi-site research study. Methods Subjects (n=605) screened for a study involving switching smokers to alternative nicotine products were asked demographics, annual income, purchase price per pack of cigarettes, and cigarettes smoked per day to estimate annual tobacco costs. Wilcoxon rank sum test compared the percent of income spent on cigarettes across several demographic variables. Results Subjects were an average of 43.4 years old (SD=13.1), smoking 15.6 (7.4) cigarettes per day for 10 years; 56.3% were white, 35.2% black and 8.6% other; and mostly male (58%). Nearly a third of the subjects were unemployed (31.6%) and an additional 5.5% were disabled; 46.6% reported either full/part time or casual work. The average amount spent on tobacco was US$1,743 across all 3 sites or 10% of annual income. Percent of income spent across sites was 11.4 in Minnesota, 9.4 in Ohio, and 8.2 in New York. As expected, unemployed and disabled spent a significantly higher percent of their income compared to employed subjects (13.1 vs 8.0; p< 0.001). Gender or age were not related to cigarette spending. Over a quarter of the subjects reported an annual income of less than $10,000 (28.6%). Those reporting annual incomes of < $10,000, well below the poverty line compared to those above this line, spent a significantly higher percent on cigarettes (17.2 and 7.2 respectively; p< 0.001). Conclusions Nicotine addiction is an economic burden for those smokers already living in poverty. Cessation treatment must be provided to this population especially when increased taxes are used for tobacco control.

INTRODUCTION: Cancer contributes to significant illness burden in South Africa, with delayed diagnosis resulting from limited knowledge of cancer, lack of biomedical treatment and stigma. This study examines ways in which people are identified as having cancer through perspectives of traditional healing or the biomedical model. Additionally, we sought to understand the stigma associated with cancer, including stereotypes, anticipated discrimination and coping styles. METHODS: Livestrong foundation conducted 11 semi-structured focus groups with key community stakeholders in three South African townships. Interviews examined the negative consequences of being labeled with a cancer diagnosis as well as causes of, possible prevention of and barriers and methods to improve access to cancer treatment. Analyses were completed using directed content analysis. RESULTS: interviews revealed three main labeling mechanisms: physical appearance of perceived signs/symptoms of cancer, diagnosis by a traditional healer, or a biomedical diagnosis by a Western physician. Being labeled led to anticipated discrimination in response to prevalent cancer stereotypes. This contributed to delayed treatment, use of traditional healers instead of biomedical treatment and secrecy of symptoms and/or diagnosis. Further, perceptions of cancer were commonly conflated with HIV/TB owing to prior educational campaigns. CONCLUSION: our study deepens the understanding of the cancer labeling process in South Africa and the resulting negative effects of stigma. Future anti-stigma interventions should partner with traditional healers due to their respected community status and consider how previous health interventions may significantly impact current understandings of illness.

BackgroundAtrial fibrillation (AF) has been objectively associated with exercise intolerance in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction; however, its impact in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction has not been fully scrutinized. Methods and ResultsWe identified 1744 patients with heart failure and ejection fraction ≥50% referred for cardiopulmonary stress testing at the Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, OH), 239 of whom had AF. We used inverse probability of treatment weighting to balance clinical characteristics between patients with and without AF. A weighted linear regression model, adjusted for unbalanced variables (age, sex, diagnosis, hypertension, and β‐blocker use), was used to compare metabolic stress parameters and 8‐year total mortality (social security index) between both groups. Weighted mean ejection fraction was 58±5.9% in the entire population. After adjusting for unbalanced weighted variables, patients with AF versus those without AF had lower mean peak oxygen consumption (18.5±6.2 versus 20.3±7.1 mL/kg per minute), oxygen pulse (12.4±4.3 versus 12.9±4.7 mL/beat), and circulatory power (2877±1402 versus 3351±1788 mm Hg·mL/kg per minute) (P

Different cultural contexts contribute to substantial variation in the stigma faced by people with psychosis globally. We propose a new formulation of how culture affects stigma to create psychometrically-validated tools to assess stigma's culture-specific effects. We propose to construct culture-specific stigma measures for the Chilean context via: 1) open-ended administration of 'universal' stigma scales to a sample of individuals with psychosis, relatives, and community respondents; 2) qualitative analyses to identify how culture shapes stigma and to derive initial 'culture-specific' stigma items; 3) construction and pilot-testing of final 'culture-specific' stigma measures; 4) initial psychometric validation among a sample of individuals with psychosis. We identify initial hypotheses for how stigma might threaten the capacities to participate in fundamental activities that 'matter most' in the Chilean context. These include mental illness stigma threatening the man's ability to protect the honor of the family, and the woman's ability to be a 'holy and pure' mother. Mental illness stigma may further endanger the ability of the family to uphold reciprocal obligations within their social network. Developing such measures promises to aid efforts to address culture-specific forms of stigma, and to facilitate implementation of community mental health services, in Chile and other Latin American contexts.

For two decades Havana, Cuba, has served as a living laboratory for practitioners and scholars of urban agriculture, particularly in its well-docu­mented role in helping stave off food insecurity during a period of severe resource constraints. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the austere economic conditions that followed, the Cuban government enacted a series of radical agrarian reforms aimed at seeding the growth of private urban gardens—a new phenomenon in this country once dependent on trade subsidies and food rations. As a result of the reforms, close to 300 private urban agricultural cooperatives and thousands of small home gardens sprouted up across Havana. Yet in the ensuing decade and a half, Cuba’s increasing desire to integrate with the global economy, and its adoption of free-market principles, has forced the urban agriculture sector to make dramatic adjustments. Using secondary data, reports by other observers, and our own structured interviews with 11 of Havana’s urban gardeners, this study examines the challenges and opportunities that urban agriculture has experienced, and will continue to experience, in Cuba’s post-communist society. We hope to stimulate continuing inquiry into Havana’s evolving urban agriculture scene, as it continues to provide valuable lessons for other cities in the Global North and South that are increasingly likely to experience their own future resource constraints and food insecurity.

A large-scale, long-term study is being conducted to describe the bird assemblages inhabiting a 6500 ha area at Booderee National Park, south-eastern Australia. In this paper, we provide a list of birds recorded within rainforest, forest, woodland, shrubland, heathland and sedgeland during surveys conducted each spring between 2003 and 2007. Of particular interest was the contrast between the birds of sites burned in a wildfire in 2003 and sites that remained unburned. We recorded a total of 103 species from 35 families. We found that after the major fire, the vast majority of individual species and the bird assemblage per se in most vegetation types recovered within two years. Exceptions occurred in structurally simple vegetation types such as sedgeland and wet heathland in which reduced levels of species had not returned to pre-fire (2003) levels by 2007.

Field research and grower interviews were used to evaluate the potential of minimum tillage for California rice systems. We found that by tilling only in the fall (instead of both the fall and spring), rice farmers can control herbicide-resistant weeds when combined with a stale rice seedbed, which entails spring flooding to germinate weeds followed by a gly-phosate application to kill them. Our results indicated that yield potentials are comparable between water-seeded minimum- and conventional-till systems. We also found that rice growers can reduce fuel costs and plant early. However, minimum tillage may require more nitrogen fertilizer to achieve these yields.

A large-scale, long-term study of the impacts on vertebrates of landscape change and habitat fragmentation is taking place at Tumut in southern New South Wales, south-eastern Australia. Field surveys focus on counting birds within three broad kinds of sites in the study region. These are: (1) A randomized and replicated set of 85 sites in remnants or fragments of native Eucalyptus forest located within the boundaries of the Radiata Pine plantation. (2) Sites dominated by Radiata Pine plantation trees (N = 40 sites). (3) Sites in the large areas of continuous Eucalyptus forest adjacent to the plantation that act as “controls” (N = 40 sites). We list of birds recorded during 1996 and 1997. A total of 92 species from 34 families was recorded. The list will be useful for workers examining bird responses to fragmented landscapes as well as those interested in the biodiversity values of plantation landscapes.

Far from being authorless texts, eternal truths, and the authentic voice of the Volk (as Romantic theories have it), myths are narratives that disguise both their authorship and their tendentious nature. The two variants of “the” Scythian origin myth preserved in Herodotus 4.5–6 and 4.8–10 provide a convenient example of how close reading permits one to identify the interests advanced by each variant through the ways they rework details of the structure they have in common.

On-farm experiments were conducted throughout California to study the effect of early- and late-season nitrogen fertilizer applications on grain protein in winter wheat. Results indicate that early-season nitrogen application is inefficient. However, late-season nitrogen (N) applications coupled with irrigation can lead to efficient fertilizer N uptake and partitioning to grain, and increased grain protein. Late-season application was not efficiently recovered in the grain when there was midseason nitrogen application or high native soil nitrogen supply.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, much has been written about religious groups commonly called ‘terrorist’, building on an older literature whose equally tendentious buzzwords were ‘cult’ and ‘fundamentalism’. In general, the conclusions advanced within such works tilt sometimes in the direction of alarm, and sometimes in that of reassurance. The amount of academic attention devoted to a given threat ought reflect its seriousness, based on calculations of the likelihood that threat will be realized and the destruction it can unleash. Among the most dangerous of situations is that in which an extremely powerful state bent on conquest finds and deploys religious arguments that encourage its aggressive tendencies and imperial ambitions. Believing that it may be useful to consider data sufficiently removed from the present to afford some critical distance, I have devoted much of my research in recent years to the role played by religion in Achaemenid Persia (550–330 bce), the largest, wealthiest, most powerful empire of antiquity before the emergence of Rome. As a convenient summary of that research, I propose to discuss two Achaemenian data, each of which can assume emblematic status. Only after that exercise will I return to contemporary materials and issues.

In this study, the Df (dissipation factor or loss tangent) and Dk (dielectric constant or permittivity) of the low-loss dielectric material from three different vendors are measured by the Fabry–Perot open resonator (FPOR) technique. Emphasis is placed on the sample preparation, data collection, and the comparison with the data sheet values provided from vendors. A coplanar waveguide with ground (CPWG) test vehicle with one of these raw dielectric materials (vendor 1) is designed (through Polar and simulation) and fabricated. The impedance of the test vehicle is measured by TDR (time-domain reflectometer), and the effective Dk of the test vehicle is calculated by the real cross-section of the metal line width, spacing, and thickness of the test vehicle and a closed-form equation. In parallel, the insertion loss and return loss are measured with the VNA (vector network analyzer) of the test vehicle. Finally, the measurement and simulation results are correlated. Some recommendations on the low-loss dielectric materials of the Dk and Df are also provided.