Alcohol consumption messages in Korean dramas: the globalization of South Korean drinking norms.

South Korea has one of the highest rates of monthly alcohol consumption, high-risk drinking, and alcohol-related problems. Global viewers of Korean dramas consume messages about the cultural norms regarding alcohol consumption. There is limited data on the portrayal of alcohol in Korean dramas.

Melanoma and other skin lesion detection using smart handheld devices.

Smartphones of the latest generation featuring advanced multicore processors, dedicated microchips for graphics, high-resolution cameras, and innovative operating systems provide a portable platform for running sophisticated medical screening software and delivering point-of-care patient diagnostic services at a very low cost. In this chapter, we present a smartphone digital dermoscopy application that can analyze high-resolution images of skin lesions and provide the user with feedback about the likelihood of malignancy. The same basic procedure has been adapted to evaluate other skin lesions, such as the flesh-eating bacterial disease known as Buruli ulcer.

Lesion border detection in Buruli ulcer images.

Buruli ulcer, a disease caused by infection with Mycobacterium ulcerans, is one of the most neglected but treatable tropical diseases. In this paper, a novel segmentation scheme is proposed to detect the border of Buruli lesions in cross-polarization dermoscopic images that were obtained under white light illumination. The method consists of three main steps: first, segmentations in different color spaces by thresholding are fused to form an initial contour, then a level set segmentation is applied to both the luminance and color components of the image, and finally, decisions for each pixel are made by a support vector machine classifier.

Self-managed work teams in nursing homes: implementing and empowering nurse aide teams.

Purpose: This article describes the progress of our study to examine the advantages and costs of using self-managed nurse aide teams in nursing homes, steps that are being taken to implement such teams, and management strategies being used to manage the teams.

Design And Methods: A quasi-experimental design is underway where certified nurse aide (CNA) teams are being established in five nursing homes (NHs) in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, and five additional NHs are being treated as comparison NHs.

Results: As of March 2004 CNA teams were established in five NHs, and baseline survey data were collected from the CNAs, nurses, residents, and family members in each of these NHs as well as from those in the five comparison homes.