Program evaluation: resource for decision making

Formal program evaluation is an important resource for health care decision making. It is necessary in situations where traditional organizational evaluative capabilities an no longer meet the requirements of the job at hand.     

Characterization of benzodiazepine receptors in primary cultures of fetal mouse brain and spinal cord neurons

Primary cultures of fetal mouse brain and spinal cord were examined for the presence of binding sites for [3H]diazepam. Both brain and spinal cord cultures contain high affinity binding sites which resemble benzodiazepine receptors found in mammalian CNS with respect to both pharmacologic profile and response to exogenously applied GABA. These observations, coupled with the electrophysiologic properties of these cells suggest that primary cultures of fetal mouse brain and spinal cord may be valid models for studying the role and regulation of the benzodiazepine receptor.     

Spatial and Temporal Resolution of Conjugate Conduction-Convection Thermal Resistance

A transient, 3-D solution to the heat conduction equation with a small square heat source on an adiabatic surface and Newtonian convection on the opposite side was obtained using Green's functions. The geometry conservatively models conduction spreading resistance encountered by small, concentrated heat sources such as light-emitting diodes and integrated circuits in general, mounted to larger substrates such as the base of a heat sink experiencing Newtonian convection. The solution is presented for a range of nondimensional parameters. Superposition techniques can also be used to extend the applicability of the current solution to the temperature prediction of arbitrary heat flux patterns in certain cases. This technique only holds for applications where the heat transfer coefficient is not a function of temperature, such as thermal management strategies designed to rely on forced convection with air.     

What kind of #conversation is Twitter? Mining #psycholinguistic cues for emergency coordination

The information overload created by social media messages in emergency situations challenges response organizations to find targeted content and users. We aim to select useful messages by detecting the presence of conversation as an indicator of coordinated citizen action. Using simple linguistic indicators drawn from conversation analysis in social science, we model the presence of coordination in the communication landscape of Twitter¹ using a corpus of 1.5 million tweets for various disaster and non-disaster events spanning different periods, lengths of time, and varied social significance. Within replies, retweets and tweets that mention other Twitter users, we found that domain-independent, linguistic cues distinguish likely conversation from non-conversation in this online form of mediated communication. We demonstrate that these likely conversation subsets potentially contain more information than non-conversation subsets, whether or not the tweets are replies, retweets, or mention other Twitter users, as long as they reflect conversational properties. From a practical perspective, we have developed a model for trimming the candidate tweet corpus to identify a much smaller subset of data for submission to deeper, domain-dependent semantic analyses for the identification of actionable information nuggets for coordinated emergency response.     

An automated approach to beat-by-beat QT-interval analysis

The present work attempts to resolve some of the problems encountered in QT interval analysis and to describe a new algorithm that uses wavelets to analyze the QT interval on a beat-by-beat basis. The QT interval is further segmented into its contributing factors to find the variability in the repolarization phase. The technique and the algorithm have been tested on control and disease data from the standard MIT ECG library to prove the reproducibility and accuracy of the system. The technique has been implemented on a PC DSP add-on card to do the analysis on a beat-by-beat basis