PURPOSE To test a socialization model of polydrug use among Mexican-American and white non-Hispanic school dropouts. METHODS A sample of 910 Mexican-American and white non-Hispanic school dropouts were surveyed regarding their use of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs, and socialization characteristics that have previously been shown to be predictive of adolescent substance use. A structural...

To examine why court mandated offenders dropout of drug treatment and to compare their characteristics, treatment experiences, perceptions, and outcomes with treatment completers, we analyzed self-reported and administrative data on 542 dropouts (59%) and 384 completers (41%) assessed for Proposition 36 treatment by thirty sites in five California counties during 2004. At intake, dropouts had l...

BACKGROUND Efforts to select the appropriate number of implants in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) instrumentation are hampered by a lack of biomechanical studies. The objective was to biomechanically evaluate screw density at different regions in the curve for AIS correction to test the hypothesis that alternative screw patterns do not compromise anticipated correction in AIS when using ...

During the study period of three months, out of 425 patients attending the psychiatric clinic of a general hospital, for the first time, 165 (38.8%) did not complete the treatment as prescribed by the doctors and were considered as dropouts. They were contacted at their homes to find out the reasons of the dropping out, were compared with patients, who completed the treatment fully on socio-dem...

This paper is concerned with stability analysis of a networked control system, wherein communication from the controller to the plant input is through a digital channel subject to packet-dropouts and finite level quantization. No acknowledgments of receipt are available to the controller. To alleviate the effect of packet-dropouts, the controller transmits tentative plant input sequences. Withi...

Dropouts impact clinical trial outcome analyses. Ignoring missing data is not an acceptable option when planning, conducting or interpreting the analysis of a clinical trial. Treatment related efficacy and safety data observed in the trial may not always be sufficient in explaining the dropouts' mechanism. Nevertheless, these dropout data may carry important treatment-related information and pr...

Twenty seven male alcoholics were prospectively studied to find out the characteristics of those who drop out soon after discharge from the hospital. Seven persons, failed to make a single visit over a six-month period, and were termed 'dropouts'.On admission, after detoxification, all 27 patients were individually administered, the following tests:(1) Bhatia's Performance Test of Intelligence(...

We study feedback control over erasure channels with packet-dropouts. To achieve robustness with respect to packet-dropouts, the controller transmits data packets containing plant input predictions, which minimize a finite horizon cost function. To reduce the data size of packets, we propose to adopt sparsity-promoting optimizations, namely, `1-`2 and `2-constrained `0 optimizations, for which ...

This paper addresses control design in networked control system by considering stochastic packet dropouts in the forward path of the control loop. The packet dropouts are modelled by mutually independent stochastic variables satisfying Bernoulli binary distribution. A sliding mode controller is utilized to overcome the adverse influences of stochastic packet dropouts in networked control system...