HIPAA's Effect on Web Site Privacy Policies

Healthcare institutions typically post their privacy practices online as privacy policy documents. We conducted a longitudinal study that examines the effects of HIPAA's enactment on a collection of privacy policy documents for a fixed set of organizations over a four-year period. We present our analysis of 24 healthcare privacy policy documents from nine healthcare Web sites, analyzed using goal mining, a content-analysis method that supports extraction of useful information about institutions' privacy practices from documents. We compare our results to our pre-HIPAA study of these same institutions' online privacy practices and evaluate their evolution in the presence of privacy laws     

Calories,fat and cancer

The experiments reported are part of our effort to dissociate the tumor-enhancing effects of dietary fat and high caloric intake. Rats either were fed ad libitum diets containing 4% corn oil or their calories were restricted by 40% and their diets contained 13.1% corn oil. Incidence of 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene (DMBA)-induced mammary tumors was 80% in rats fed ad libitum and 20% in those fed the calorie-restricted diets. Incidence of 1,2-dimethylhydrazine (DMH)-induced colon tumors was 100% in rats fed ad libitum and 53% in those whose caloric intake was restricted by 40%. The tumor yield (tumors per tumor-bearing rat) was significantly lower in rats on caloric restriction. In another series, rats were fed diets containing 5, 15 or 20% corn oil ad libitum or were fed calorie-restricted (by 25%) diets which provided 20 or 26.6% corn oil (therefore, the same absolute amount of fat was consumed in each of the pair-fed groups). Tumor incidence and tumor yield in the two calorie-restricted groups were similar to those seen in the rats fed 5% fat ad lititum; tumor burden (total g of tumor) was 45–65% lower in the calorie-restricted rats. The data suggest that caloric intake is a more stringent determinant of tumor growth than fat intake.     

Thermal comfort and sensation in men wearing a cooling system controlled by skin temperature

OBJECTIVE: The study was done to determine whether thermal comfort (TC), thermal sensation (TS), and subjective factors gauging environmental stress were negatively affected with different cooling methods in men exercising in chemical protective clothing. BACKGROUND: Previous studies have reported that intermittent regional cooling improved the efficacy of cooling as compared with constant cooling (CC), but no studies have addressed whether there is any improvement in thermal comfort. METHODS: Eight male volunteers exercised at moderate work intensity (425 W) in three microclimate cooling tests. The circulating fluid in the cooling garment was provided during exercise to the head (6% body surface area [BSA]), torso (22% BSA), and thighs (44% BSA) and manipulated under three methods: (a) CC, (b) pulsed cooling (PC), and (c) PC activated by mean skin temperature (T(sk)) control (PC(skin)). TC and TS ratings were recorded every 20 min during the 80-min test. RESULTS: TC and TS ratings were not different for PC(skin) and CC; thus the participants perceived PC(skin) as being similar to CC. TS was significantly warmer with PC than with PC(skin) and CC (p < .001). In PC(skin), T(sk) was significantly higher than in PC and CC (p < .001), and PC(skin) was rated as being not as warm as PC according to TS. CONCLUSION: This indicates that the PC(skin) method was perceived as being as cool as CC and cooler than PC. APPLICATION: These findings indicate that the PC(skin) cooling method is an acceptable alternative to CC and PC based on human perceptions.     

Genetic Correlational Analyses of Ethanol Reward and Aversion Phenotypes in Short-Term Selected Mouse Lines Bred for Ethanol Drinking or Ethanol-Induced Conditioned Taste Aversion.

Short-term selective breeding created mouse lines divergent for ethanol drinking (high drinking short-term selected line [STDRHI], low drinking [STDRLO]) or ethanol-induced conditioned taste aversion (CTA; high [HTA], low [LTA]). Compared with STDRLO, STDRHI mice consumed more saccharin and less quinine, exhibited greater ethanol-induced conditioned place preference (CPP), and showed reduced ethanol stimulation and sensitization under some conditions; a line difference in ethanol-induced CTA was not consistently found. Compared with LTA, HTA mice consumed less ethanol but were similar in saccharin consumption, sensitivity to ethanol-induced CPP, and ethanol-induced locomotor stimulation and sensitization. These data suggest that ethanol drinking is genetically associated with several reward-and aversion-related traits. The interpretation of ethanol-induced CTA as more genetically distinct must be tempered by the inability to test the CTA lines beyond Selection Generation 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Demands on Attention and the Role of Response Priming in Visual Discrimination of Feature Conjunctions.

This study examined how response mapping of features within single- and multiple-feature targets affects decision-based processing and attentional capacity demands. Observers judged the presence or absence of 1 or 2 target features within an object either presented alone or with distractors. Judging the presence of 2 features relative to the less discriminable of these features alone was faster (conjunction benefits) when the task-relevant features differed in discriminability and were consistently mapped to responses. Conjunction benefits were attributed to asynchronous decision priming across attended, task-relevant dimensions. A failure to find conjunction benefits for disjunctive conjunctions was attributed to increased memory demands and variable feature-response mapping for 2- versus single-feature targets. Further, attentional demands were similar between single- and 2-feature targets when response mapping, memory demands, and discriminability of the task-relevant features were equated between targets. Implications of the findings for recent attention models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

“Growing Smarter Over Time”: An Emergence Model for Administrating a New Media Writing Studio

This article reports on efforts to create an administrative structure for learning and teaching multimodal composing that depends not on the leadership of a new media writing expert but on the collaboration of relative novices organized according to principles of emergent learning. Based on four years’ experience in a grant-funded program that supports new media composing in multiple disciplines, I report on the benefits of a bottom-up, emergent approach while raising questions about the long-term sustainability of such an approach. I conclude by describing efforts to create more top-down support for new media composing, while remaining committed to serving the teachers and students who are the real agents of change.     

Mechanical properties and microstructure changes of proton exchange membrane under immersed conditions

In this study, mechanical tensile stress–strain response and microstructure changes of proton exchange membranes (PEM) in immersed conditions are studied. The effects of water pretreatment and immersion time on stress–strain responses of Nafion^®?212 membranes are discussed. It is found that in the water immersion it took 24 h for the membrane to reach saturation equilibrium. Compared with dry membrane, immersed Nafion membrane shows a lower stress level at 30°C, but a higher stress level at 70°C. In situ small angle neutron scattering (SANS) experiments show that with the increase of temperature and water uptake, domains of the membrane become ordered and stay stable at around 60°C. Based on the observation, the relationship between the microstructure and mechanical properties is explained. POLYM. ENG. SCI. 54:2215–2221, 2014. © 2013 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Effects of osteoporosis on AIS 3+ injury risk in motor-vehicle crashes

Older occupants in motor-vehicle crashes are more likely to experience injury than younger occupants. One possible reason for this is that increasing age is associated with increased prevalence of osteoporosis, which decreases bone strength.Crash-injury data were used with Bayes’ Theorem to estimate the conditional probability of AIS 3+ skeletal injury given that an occupant is osteoporotic for the injury to the head, spine, thorax, lower extremities, and upper extremities. This requires the conditional probabilities of osteoporosis given AIS 3+ injury for each of the body regions, which were determined from analysis of the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network database. It also requires information on probability of osteoporosis in the crash-involved population and the probabilities of AIS 3+ skeletal injury to different body regions in crashes. The latter probabilities were obtained from the National Automotive Sampling System-Crashworthiness Data System (NASS-CDS) database. The former was obtained by modeling the probability of osteoporosis in the US populations using data from the 2006 National Health Examination Nutrition Survey and applying this model to the estimate of the crash-involved population in NASS-CDS. To attempt to account for the effects of age on injury outcome that are independent of osteoporosis, only data from occupants who were 60 years of age or older were used in all analyses.Results indicate that the only body region that experiences a statistically significant change in fracture injury risk with osteoporosis is the spine, for which osteoporosis increases the risk of AIS 3+ fracture by 3.28 times, or from 0.41% to 1.34% (p < 0.0001). This finding suggests that the increase in AIS 3+ injury risk with age for non-spine injuries is likely influenced by factors other than osteoporosis.