Support for Academic Women in Political Science 1890-1945

Between 1893, when the first woman took a PhD in political science, and 1945, about 150 women became political scientists. Support for their professional lives came primarily from other women who were their teachers or their colleagues in women's colleges. Most early women did not marry; those who did found domestic roles detrimental to their careers. Graduate departments channeled women back to women's colleges and did not recruit women for their own faculties. Women are included in the professional organization primarily as representatives of women's colleges. The condition of entry into a secure academic life was to remain sigle and accept a sex-segregated place; but this security did not provide the necessary credential of a prestigious home department for leadership of the nationally organized profession.     

Modelling the spread in space and time of an airborne plant disease

Summary.  A spatiotemporal model is developed to analyse epidemics of airborne plant diseases which are spread by spores. The observations consist of measurements of the severity of disease at different times, different locations in the horizontal plane and different heights in the vegetal cover. The model describes the joint distribution of the occurrence and the severity of the disease. The three-dimensional dispersal of spores is modelled by combining a horizontal and a vertical dispersal function. Maximum likelihood combined with a parametric bootstrap is suggested to estimate the model parameters and the uncertainty that is attached to them. The spatiotemporal model is used to analyse a yellow rust epidemic in a wheatfield. In the analysis we pay particular attention to the selection and the estimation of the dispersal functions.     

Selecting Nonpharmaceutical Interventions for Influenza

Models of influenza transmission have focused on the ability of vaccination, antiviral therapy, and social distancing strategies to mitigate epidemics. Influenza transmission, however, may also be interrupted by hygiene interventions such as frequent hand washing and wearing masks or respirators. We apply a model of influenza disease transmission that incorporates hygiene and social distancing interventions. The model describes population mixing as a Poisson process, and the probability of infection upon contact between an infectious and susceptible person is parameterized by p. While social distancing interventions modify contact rates in the population, hygiene interventions modify p. Public health decision making involves tradeoffs, and we introduce an objective function that considers the direct costs of interventions and new infections to determine the optimum intervention type (social distancing versus hygiene intervention) and population compliance for epidemic mitigation. Significant simplifications have been made in these models. However, we demonstrate that the method is feasible, provides plausible results, and is sensitive to the selection of model parameters. Specifically, we show that the optimum combination of nonpharmaceutical interventions depends upon the probability of infection, intervention compliance, and duration of infectiousness. Means by which realism can be increased in the method are discussed.     

Motor unit number estimation using reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo methods

Summary.  We present an application of reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling from the field of neurophysiology where we seek to estimate the number of motor units within a single muscle. Such an estimate is needed for monitoring the progression of neuromuscular diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Our data consist of action potentials that were recorded from the surface of a muscle in response to stimuli of different intensities applied to the nerve supplying the muscle. During the gradual increase in intensity of the stimulus from the threshold to supramaximal, all motor units are progressively excited. However, at any given submaximal intensity of stimulus, the number of units that are excited is variable, because of random fluctuations in axonal excitability. Furthermore, the individual motor unit action potentials exhibit variability. To account for these biological properties, Ridall and co-workers developed a model of motor unit activation that is capable of describing the response where the number of motor units, N , is fixed. The purpose of this paper is to extend that model so that the possible number of motor units, N , is a stochastic variable. We illustrate the elements of our model, show that the results are reproducible and show that our model can measure the decline in motor unit numbers during the course of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Our method holds promise of being useful in the study of neurogenic diseases.     

Physical and Mental Health Correlates of Self-Efficacy in Dementia Family Caregivers

This study examined whether self-efficacy for controlling upsetting caregiving thoughts would longitudinally predict mental and physical health as well as utilization of psychotropic medications in help-seeking dementia family caregivers (N = 53). Positive associations were found between self-efficacy and self-reported mental health and physical health subscales of the Short Form Health Questionnaire-12, and negative correlations were found between self-efficacy for controlling upsetting thoughts about caregiving and the number of psychotropic medications being utilized both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. These results suggest that self-efficacy for controlling upsetting thoughts may be a fruitful target area for further intervention research with dementia family caregivers.     

Statistical disease mapping for heterogeneous neuroimaging studies

Many cancers and neuro‐related diseases display significant phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity across subjects and subpopulations. Characterizing such heterogeneity could transform our understanding of the etiology of these conditions and inspire new approaches to urgently needed prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. However, most existing statistical methods face major challenges in delineating such heterogeneity at both the group and individual levels. The aim of this article is to propose a novel statistical disease‐mapping (SDM) framework to address some of these challenges. We develop an efficient estimation method to estimate unknown parameters in SDM and delineate individual and group disease maps. Statistical inference procedures such as hypothesis‐testing problems are also investigated for parameters of interest. Both simulation studies and real data analysis on the ADNI hippocampal surface dataset show that our SDM not only effectively detects diseased regions in each patient but also provides a group disease‐mapping analysis of Alzheimer subgroups.     

甘肃省新型农村合作医疗制度现状分析与对策

新型农村合作医疗制度是一项系统且复杂的惠民工程,它是社会保障体系的重要组成部分,对保障广大农民身体健康、促进农村经济和社会发展起着重要作用。甘肃省的新农合在各级政府政策大力支持下取得了一定的成绩并充分发挥了作用,但其在运行过程中仍然存在着很多问题,如农民人均收入与医疗费用上涨比例失调、地方政府筹资困难、医疗卫生基础设施落后等。提出如控制医药费用不合理增长,建立科学筹资机制,加强农村卫生服务机构建设、提高卫生技术人员素质,加大宣传力度、提高参合积极性以及相关配套措施等相关建议。为完善甘肃省新农合制度的持续有效运行提供借鉴。     

我国农村地方病型贫困的思考——以贵州省地方病氟中毒为例

农村地方病型贫困是农村居民致贫的一大根源,分析农村地方病型贫困的成因、危害,可提出相应的扶贫对策,以缓解贫困压力.     

80例中老年女性平板运动试验假阳性原因分析

目的探讨中老年女性患者平板运动试验假阳性的鉴别。方法回顾性总结我院2001年11月～2006年12月80例中老年女性患者出现平板运动试验假阳性的原因。结果临床最后诊断:心脏植物神经功能紊乱32例,高血压病14例,单纯高脂血症8例,糖尿病6例,X综合征6例,高血压合并糖尿病6例,冠状动脉心肌桥5例,心尖部肥厚型心肌病3例。结论平板运动试验假阳性与心脏植物神经功能紊乱、X综合征、冠状动脉肌桥、高血压病、糖尿病等因素有关,心脏植物神经功能紊乱为最常见病因,正确分析平板运动试验的假阳性原因,对提高冠心病无创性检查的确诊率有一定的意义。     

The Promise of Molecular Epidemiology for Quantitative Risk Assessment

In the long run, molecular epidemiological techniques can provide important insights for understanding a wide variety of important issues in current risk assessment and are applicable across a broad spectrum of adverse effects in addition to carcinogenesis. Unfortunately, current risk assessment practices make very little use of the kind of detailed mechanistic information that molecular epidemiology can provide. Eventually, there is reason to hope that the availability of mechanistic insights provided in part by molecular epidemiology can produce some of the "essential tension" required to reform paradigms for the formulation of quantitative risk assessment models in general.