Conwal (United States)

Community based organizations (CBOs) play a frontline role in HIV/AIDS prevention activities. CBOs face formidable challenges to effective delivery of HIV prevention services including client characteristics such as homelessness and CBO characteristics such as limited resources and staff turnover. Despite these obstacles, CBOs are generally well positioned to deliver services to specific high-risk populations because they understand their local communities and are connected to the groups they serve. [C1]This qualitative study illustrates that structural, sociocultural, organizational, and individual client factors both facilitate and act as barriers to delivery of HIV prevention services. These challenges and successes help identify critical technical assistance needs.

After 70 years, the public now recognizes infectious disease control as “belonging” to the local health department, water quality to the public works department, and blood supply to the Red Cross. Substance abuse prevention, in contrast, lacks a traditional organizational home in the community infrastructure. Instead, every community has been expected to create its own structure for drug abuse prevention with little or no guidance from historical experience, but with lots of advice on the need to be “participatory” or “stakeholder-driven.” Without an overall structure, however, substance abuse prevention is guaranteed to be wasteful and inefficient simply because so many groups are willing to independently finance and organize potentially competing prevention efforts.

In 1987, Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen proclaimed “alcohol is a drug” and ordered his department to refer to “alcohol and other drug abuse” in place of “substance abuse.” These actions were hailed by many preventionists as a victory in treating alcohol as part of the national drug problem. Others argued that describing alcohol as a “drug” ignores important differences between alcohol and other abused substances.

The musical West Side Story premiered 40 years ago, but the satiric lyrics for the song “Officer Krupke” still ring true. Throughout the comic lament, gang members portray a judge, a psychiatrist, and a social worker who listen to teenagers#x2019; descriptions of chaotic home lives, argue over diagnoses (“The problem is he’s growing!/The problem is he’s grown!”) and then dispose of the cases by dumping them on another professional#x2019;s doorstep. Bewildered and insulted, the gang members respond by attacking the closest available representative of Authority, an equally bewildered beat patrolman.

This paper reports the progress on the development of an interferometric acousto-optic receiver. The receiver is designed to receive radio frequency (RF) signals as input and generate digital words as output which includes frequency, pulse amplitude, pulse width and time of arrival (TOA). The system consists of the following basic building blocks: the optical bench, the RF reference, the IF portion and the digital encoder. This paper presents alternative designs and corresponding receiver performance. This paper also describes some of the problems and suggests possible solutions to improve the performance.