Risk for a Price: Sexual Activity Solicitations in Online Male Sex Worker Profiles

ABSTRACT

The use of social- and sexual networking-based Web sites designed to provide easy and more anonymous access to sexual partners is rising. The popularity of the use of Web sites by male sex workers to promote their services and find clients is also rising. To date, very little inquiry has been devoted to studying the sexual behaviors solicited within online advertisement profiles of male sex workers and men who have sex with men. This study utilized a widely used popular Internet site designed to advertise to clients and gathered demographic, advertised sexual and nonsexual behaviors, pricing, and safety risk category data from profiles within the state of Florida (n = 163). Pearson chi-square analyses indicated that location and several sexual behaviors were significantly related to how often the men reported the degree to which they had safer sex with clients. These findings suggest some male sex workers do not consistently maintain safer-sex behaviors and that some of these men are engaging in sexual activity while under the influence of drugs. Future recommendations support the need for effective public health outreach that emphasizes the importance of safer sexual decision making.     

Palliative Healthcare: Cost Reduction and Quality Enhancement Using End-of-Life Survey Methodology

ABSTRACT

American medical institutions throughout the 20th century prescribed high customer satisfaction, but when it came to death, largely ignored it. An accelerated accumulation of esoteric medical information and the application of this knowledge to affect new cures and longer lives instilled an unquestioning reverence for the medical community among the patient population. Diminishing marginal gains in life expectancy, escalating costs related to life sustaining technologies, and a psychographic shift in the dominant consumer base have challenged this traditional reverence. Armed with unprecedented access to medical information, a more knowledgeable and assertive patient population has emerged in the 21st century to institute its own standards of what constitutes quality health care. In terms of end of life care, this has meant recognition that the emotional needs of the dying have been largely underserved by the current American medical model. Patients and their families are no longer willing to accept the traditional medical perspective of death as failure and have numerous international palliative care models that serve as benchmarks of success when it comes to quality of dying. When cure is a possibility, Americans will pursue it at all costs, but when it is not a possibility, they want honest communication and the opportunity to say good-bye to their loved ones. In the context of these emergent needs, life review is offered as a solution. The value proposition targets not only dying patients and their families, but also society as a whole.     

Concordance of Carcinogenic Response between Rodent Species: Potency Dependence and Potential Underestimation

The use of average qualitative concordance between two bioassay endpoints is considered, with emphasis directed at agreement between rats and mice from results of long-term carcinogenicity studies. It is noted that concordance varies as a function of the underlying potency or toxicity of the chemicals over which the averaging is performed. Thus, the averaging process dilutes large observed concordances from potent chemicals, and possibly inflates lower observed concordances from weakly active chemicals. Stratification over some measure of potency is suggested as a method for taking these effects into account. Statistical simulations of concordance analyses limited to low-potency ranges are employed to examine the concordance measure in greater detail. It is seen that at low potencies, observed concordance is consistently underestimated, reaching maximum levels of only about 80%.     

Multiple-site updates in maximum a posteriori and marginal posterior modes image estimation

We describe standard single-site Monte Carlo Markov chain methods, the Hastings and Metropolis algorithms, the Gibbs sampler and simulated annealing, for maximum a posteriori and marginal posterior modes image estimation. These methods can experience great difficulty in traversing the whole image space in a finite time when the target distribution is multi-modal. We present a survey of multiple-site update methods, including Swendsen and Wang's algorithm, coupled Markov chains and cascade algorithms designed to tackle the problem of moving between modes of the posterior image distribution. We compare the performance of some of these algorithms for sampling from degraded and non-degraded Ising models     

Sex differences in the effects of noise and nightwork on performance efficiency

An experimental investigation of the combined effects of noise and nightwork revealed the following sex differences. Female subjects showed a large night-time impairment on a test of manual dexterity, but performed working memory tasks better at night than in the day. In contrast to this, male subjects showed a small impairment at night on both types of task. Other tasks, such as the simple reaction time task, were impaired at night for both sexes, and some tasks, such as the high memory load search task, showed no night-time impairment in males or females. There was no evidence of noise producing different effects in the two sexes, and few instances of sex differences in the size of post-meal impairments. Overall, these results show mat the effect of working at night depends on the nature of the task and also the sex of the person performing it.     

Sexual and physical child abuse and the developtnent of dissociative personality traits. Canadian and British evidence from adolescent child welfare and child care populations

An attempt was made to construct a measure of dissociative personality traits from file review of 61 Canadian adolescents with a known history of sexual abuse before the age of six. The study was then extended to 55 British adolescents in residential care and therapy centres. Between 18 and 29% of adolescents displayed several features of dissociative personality, implying the possibility of multiple personality disorder. Those with two or more indicators of dissociative personality style tended to have more problematic behavioural histories, including a particularly high prevalence of deliberate self-harm. In the UK group the Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein and Putnam, 1986) completed by 55 adolescents correlated 0.67 with the dissociative personality trait index constructed from case file review. Implications for treatment of abused children are discussed.