Continuing care groups: long term treatment of substance use disorders

Master's Project (M.Ed.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2014Substance use disorders are chronic diseases that affect individuals, families, and communities. These illnesses frequently require several courses of treatment to achieve abstinence. Inpatient chemical dependency treatment, followed by continuing care, increases abstinence rates regardless of the interventions used within the continuing care program. The largest barrier to successful continuing care programs appears to be patients' attendance and participation. This project aims to create a continuing care program that focuses on increasing patients' attendance adherence in order to support them through their first year of recovery

Brightest Cluster Galaxy Alignments in Merging Clusters

The orientations of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) and their host clusters tend to be aligned, but the mechanism driving this is not clear. To probe the role of cluster mergers in this process, we quantify alignments of 38 BCGs in 22 clusters undergoing major mergers (up to $\sim 1$ Gyr after first pericenter). We find alignments entirely consistent with those of clusters in general. This suggests that alignments are robust against major cluster mergers. If, conversely, major cluster mergers actually help orient the BCG, such a process is acting quickly because the orientation is in place within $\sim 1$ Gyr after first pericenter.Comment: accepted to Ap

Influence of Strip-Mining on the Mortality of a Wetland Caddisfly, \u3ci\u3eLimnephilus Indivisus\u3c/i\u3e (Trichoptera: Limnephilidae).

A coal mine about 2.2 km upstream from Stillfork Swamp Nature Preserve, Carroll Co., Ohio was suspected of causing a reduction in Limnephilus indivisus caddisflies in the south half of the preserve. Second instar L. indivisus larvae collected from the south half of the preserve and from two control areas were reared in cages at the site of collection and at the other two sites in a replicated experiment. Elevated total dissolved solids in water samples from within rearing enclosures displayed strong correlation (r2 = 0.864) with increased mortality when compared to larvae reared in unaffected areas. This investigation suggests that larvae of L. indivisus are useful in biomonitoring of wetlands impacted by acid-mine drainage, and potentially other perturbations

Annotated List of Stoneflies (Plecoptera) from Stebbins Gulch in Northeastern Ohio

(excerpt) Stebbins Gulch is situated within property owned by The Holden Arboretum in northwestern Geauga County, Ohio, approximately 8.0 km east of the village of Kirtland (Fig. 1). Physiographically, the Arboretum is included within the Southern New York Section of the Appalachian Plateau Province (Feldman et al., 1977). This Section was overridden by several advances of Pleistocene glaciation, the latest of which receded some 13,000 years ago. It is characterized by poorly drained surfaces containing many bogs, ponds, and lakes, except near the Portage Escarpment where small rivers have excavated relatively deep valleys

Contract-theoretic approaches to wages and displacement, commentary

Wages

Subprime outcomes: turmoil in the mortgage market

Until 2007, few Americans had probably heard the word “subprime” - including many homeowners who would come to learn that their own mortgage was a subprime mortgage. Today, subprime mortgages are much discussed because they lie at the center of the turmoil that roiled credit markets in 2007 and 2008.Subprime mortgage

Comparison of alternatives to amplitude thresholding for onset detection of acoustic emission signals

Acoustic Emission (AE) monitoring can be used to detect the presence of damage as well as determine its location in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications. Information on the time difference of the signal generated by the damage event arriving at different sensors in an array is essential in performing localisation. Currently, this is determined using a fixed threshold which is particularly prone to errors when not set to optimal values. This paper presents three new methods for determining the onset of AE signals without the need for a predetermined threshold. The performance of the techniques is evaluated using AE signals generated during fatigue crack growth and compared to the established Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and fixed threshold methods. It was found that the 1D location accuracy of the new methods was within the range of <1–7.1%<1–7.1% of the monitored region compared to 2.7% for the AIC method and a range of 1.8–9.4% for the conventional Fixed Threshold method at different threshold levels

Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education in Geography

This paper describes the development, implementation, and preliminary outcomes of Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education (EDGE) in Geography, a multi-year project begun in 2005 to study the process of professional development in graduate geography in the U.S and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. As a research and action project responding to the needs of graduate geography programs, EDGE seeks to provide academic geographers with an empirical perspective of disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary and generic skills that M.A./M.S. and Ph.D. students develop as a result of graduate education. Related objectives are to understand how disciplinary skills are applied by geography graduates once they enter the professional workforce in both academic and non-academic professional settings, and to gauge the extent graduate programs are sufficiently preparing geography graduates for those careers. We begin by summarizing the research goals and design of EDGE, highlighting the roles and contributions of geographers and educational researchers, and noting the interplay and synergy between disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies and practices. To date, research has focused on: 1) assessing contemporary workforce competencies in professional geography and 2) examining the role of department climate and culture on student experience and faculty development within masters and doctoral programs. Although the EDGE research efforts are still underway, we present some preliminary research findings and discuss the implications of those outcomes for professional development in geography and related social and environmental sciences. Also discussed is the complementary nature of discipline-based and interdisciplinary professional development efforts

An economist reports from Baghdad: reviving the Iraqi economy in the aftermath of war

A Boston Fed economist chronicles his three-month stint helping to stabilize the Iraqi economy and put its economic institutions on a solid foundation.Economic conditions - Iraq