Designing Capacity-Building Supports to Promote Evidence-Based Programs in Community-Based Organizations Working with Underserved Populations.

Background: It is critical to build capacity to use evidence-based health promotion programs in community-based organizations (CBOs), particularly those working with underserved populations. Packages of ongoing capacity-building supports seem to be critical, but it is not clear how best to design and deploy them.

Objectives: PLANET MassCONECT was a participatory research project to increase capacity for the use of evidence-based programs (EBPs) among CBO staff members in three Massachusetts communities experiencing health disparities.

Factors influencing adoption of and adherence to indoor smoking bans among health disparity communities.

Objectives: We assessed current home smoking behaviors and secondhand smoke (SHS) levels among parents of children in low-income, racial/ethnic minority communities in Massachusetts.

Methods: We used a cross-sectional design to assess home smoking rules, smoking status, cigarettes smoked in the home, and barriers and benefits to attaining a smoke-free home among 138 caregivers (mean age=30.0 years; 92% women) of children aged 0 to 6 years, between April 2010 and September 2012.

Honeycomb pattern formation by laser-beam filamentation in atomic sodium vapor.

We have observed transverse pattern formation leading to highly regular structures in both the near and far fields when a near-resonant laser beam propagates without feedback through an atomic sodium vapor. One example is a regular far-field honeycomb pattern, which results from the transformation of the laser beam within the vapor into a stable three-lobed structure with a uniform phase distribution and highly correlated power fluctuations. The predictions of a theoretical model of the filamentation process are in good agreement with these observations.