The experiences and health care needs of Asian coronary patients and their partners. Methodological issues and preliminary findings

The incidence of heart disease in the Asian population in the UK is high and mortality from coronary heart disease for both Asian men and women is also higher than for non-Asians. The need to provide more information on cardiac rehabilitation programmes is highlighted. Cultural factors influence how Asian people perceive the heart, health and health care practices. A number of methodological issues are pertinent to conducting research involving ethnic groups, namely inter vs intra group differences, victim blaming, sampling, measurement, language issues and researcher effect. The aim of the study is to design, refine and validate a number of tools for use with Asian people in relation to cardiac rehabilitation. Preliminary and tentative conclusions suggest that cardiac rehabilitation services need a higher profile within the Asian community and that established approaches to data collection may need to be challenged if accurate and relevant feedback is to be achieved.     

Milk production, health, behavior, and endocrine responses of cows exposed to electrical current during milking

Six cows were exposed during milkings to electrical current to assess its effects on behavior, health, milking performance, and endocrine responses. Three treatments (0, 4, and 8 mA) were applied in a changeover design over three consecutive 1-wk periods. A cow received the same current treatment during 14 consecutive milkings, beginning with the evening milking (d 1) and ending with the morning milking (d 8). Treatments began 5 min before milking and continued until milking unit removal. Treatments consisted of 60 Hz square wave current of 5-s duration applied every 30 s from udder to hooves. Milk accumulation curves provided information about milk yields, milking times, peak milk flow rates, and times of peak milk flow. Residual milk yields also were measured. Milk was analyzed for protein, fat, and somatic cells. Blood samples from 60 min before to 60 min after treatment were collected, and oxytocin, prolactin, and cortisol concentrations were measured. Behavioral responses to current decreased with time. Changes of milking performance and milk composition were not significant. Changes of milking related cortisol responses during 8-mA current stimulation were significant. Oxytocin release was delayed during 8-mA treatments. Current treatments did not affect prolactin.     

Life table study of Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae) in Puerto Rico fed only human blood versus blood plus sugar

Life table studies were performed in 1996 with Aedes aegypti (L.) during the low (cool/dry) and high (hot/rainy) dengue virus transmission seasons in Puerto Rico. Mated adult females from field-collected pupae were placed individually in cages and divided into 2 treatment groups: one was fed only human blood and the other human blood plus a 10% sucrose solution. Survival and number of eggs laid were recorded daily for each female. During both seasons, age specific survivorship was higher for the blood plus sugar group, groups fed only human blood had higher reproductive outputs (mx), and net replacement rates (Ro) for blood only groups were higher than for those fed blood plus sugar. Intrinsic rates of growth (r) were the same for both treatments during the low (cool/dry) transmission season, but higher for the blood-only treatment during the high (hot/rainy) transmission season. Our results indicate that feeding on only human blood provides an evolutionary advantage to Ae. aegypti females in Puerto Rico. These results are similar to those from an earlier study carried out with Ae. aegypti in Thailand; the advantage of feeding on human blood does not seem to be restricted to a particular geographic region. We also found that the benefits associated with human feeding persist through epidemiologically different times of the year. We conclude that feeding on human blood is reproductively beneficial for Ae. aegypti, which may increase their contact with human hosts, and therefore may influence their vectorial capacity for dengue viruses through frequent feeding on blood.     

Cokriging with airborne MSS imagery

The coregionalization of radiation sensed by an airborne multispectral scanner (MSS) and both the green leaf area index (GLAI) of barley and the biomass of pasture has been investigated and modeled. In both crops there was fairly strong spatial interdependence with the radiation, even though the simple correlation was weak. The auto and cross variograms showed dependence extending to some 15 m. These functions were used with the data to estimate GLAI and biomass by cokriging, and to calculate the estimation variances. The results showed that whereas simple regression would have provided worthless estimates, cokriging with the MSS data both increased the precision of the estimates above that attainable by auto kriging, and allowed the planning of a new survey with substantially less sampling effort. The study also revealed considerable redundancy in the MSS data.     

Poetry I: Teaching verse with CAI

The teaching of literature through CAI raises problems of both a linguistic and instructional nature; student involvement and creativity in studying literature, and especially poetry, is difficult to build into a computer-based lesson. We have confronted these difficulties in the lessonPoetry I, which introduces undergraduates to basic concepts of poetic verse in a design using screen display, speech synthesis, and verse processing to maximize interactivity and student involvement.The lesson contains instructional modules which include the student's composition of a limerick. Computational processing of the limerick's text enables the program to offer guidance as the student composes and revises the verse and gains first-hand experience with metrical language. The significant problems inherent in processing verse are addressed by adapting Digital Equipment Corporation's DECTalk speech synthesizer as an engine converting natural language verse text into accessible strings of phonemic symbols. Although the verse processor cannot scan verse, it can interpret DECTalk's symbols reliably enough to successfully stimulate students' thinking about their verse compositions.Preliminary responses to the program have been favorable and demonstrate its effectiveness in involving students more deeply in learning about poetic verse. This suggests that the techniques of verse processing prototyped inPoetry I might be usefully extended to other types of verse and levels of study.W. Webster Newbold is an Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, USA, who has recently served as English Department Computer Coordinator. His research interests include computer-assisted instruction and computer-based composition.Herbert F. W Stahlke is a Professor of English, specializing in linguistics, and currently serves as Associate Director for Academic Computing, Ball State University Computing Services. His research interests include computer-assisted instruction, natural language processing, and lexical databases.     

Connecting the dots: Understanding the interrelated impacts of type,quality and children's awareness of design features and the mathematics content learning goals in digital math games and related learning outcomes

This study focused on an examination of how type, quality and children's awareness of design features in digital math games, along with an awareness of the mathematics goals of the game, were related to learning outcomes. We conducted a parallel conversion mixed methods study with 45 students in Grades 3 and 4 (ages 9–10). Students participated in clinical interviews using three digital math games. The results suggest a moderated mediation relationship in which the quality of the design features moderated the mediating impact of children's awareness of the game's design features, specifically when the child was aware of the mathematics content learning goal (MCLG) of the game. These findings show how important it is that design features are of high quality in a digital math game, and how this is intertwined with children's awareness of the features and the MCLG. When these variables intertwined in just the right way, the interactions between the children and the digital math game afforded mathematical learning growth.     

Real-time evaluation and visualization of learner performance in a mixed-reality environment for clinical breast examination

We investigate the efficacy of incorporating real-time feedback of user performance within mixed-reality environments (MREs) for training real-world tasks with tightly coupled cognitive and psychomotor components. This paper presents an approach to providing real-time evaluation and visual feedback of learner performance in an MRE for training clinical breast examination (CBE). In a user study of experienced and novice CBE practitioners (n = 69), novices receiving real-time feedback performed equivalently or better than more experienced practitioners in the completeness and correctness of the exam. A second user study (n = 8) followed novices through repeated practice of CBE in the MRE. Results indicate that skills improvement in the MRE transfers to the real-world task of CBE of human patients. This initial case study demonstrates the efficacy of MREs incorporating real-time feedback for training real-world cognitive-psychomotor tasks.     

Conservation of mechanical energy and circulation in the theory of inviscid fluid sheets

In the theory of thin fluid sheets, governing equations are derived with specific reference to an assumed simple kinematic structure of the flow. There is a separate set of governing equations associated with each degree of complexity of the kinematic structure, forming a hierarchy of models (Green and Naghdi [3] and Shields and Webster [8]). If one is interested in the velocity profile across the sheet, the kinematic structure can be used again to interpret the variables in the governing equations as an approximate flow. This paper is concerned with the properties of this approximate flow.Two important consequences of the field equations (Euler's equations) in the classical, three-dimensional theory of ideal fluids are: conservation of mechanical energy, and conservation of circulation (Kelvin's theorem). The research reported herein provides a proof that mechanical energy is exactly conserved for the approximate flow in each level in this hierarchy. Two types of circulation are considered in the approximate flow: in-sheet circulation which is computed about circuits lying a fixed fractional distance between the top and bottom surfaces of the sheet, and cross-sheet circulation which is computed about circuits lying in a vertical cylindrical surface. It was found that K moments of the in-sheet circulation and K – 1 weighted moments of the cross-sheet circulation are conserved in the Kth level approximate flow.