The notion that many minors have the capacity and, indeed, the right to make important decisions about health care has been well established in federal and state policy. Many states specifically authorize minors to consent to contraceptive services, testing and treatment for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, prenatal care and delivery services, treatment for alcohol and drug abuse, a...

The algebra of quantum matrices of a given size supports a rational torus action by automorphisms. It follows from work of Letzter and the first named author that to understand the prime and primitive spectra of this algebra, the first step is to understand the prime ideals that are invariant under the torus action. In this paper, we prove that a family of quantum minors is the set of all quant...

Understanding the positive Grassmannian has been a highly significant question in mathematics for several decades. We discuss arrangements of equal minors in the totally positive Grassmannian. It was previously shown that arrangements of equals minors of largest value correspond to the simplices in Sturmfels triangulation. Here we discuss arrangements of equals minors of second largest value, a...

BACKGROUND Many underage drinkers obtain alcohol from legal-age family, friends, and acquaintances. This study aimed to understand the attitudes and behaviors of young adults related to providing alcohol to underage drinkers. METHODS Participants were 755 current or recent college students of legal drinking age (ages 22 to 26) who were approached by a minor to provide alcohol at least once si...

The relation between positivity of principal minors, sign symmetry and stability of matrices is studied. It is shown that for sign symmetric matrices, having positive principal minors is equivalent to stability, to D-stability, and to having a positive scaling into a stable matrix. The relation between spectra of matrices some of whose powers have positive principal minors and matrices whose co...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of implementation and enforcement of the California STAKE Act on minors' access to tobacco by examining sales over time in the same stores. DESIGN Sixteen year old girls and boys attempted to purchase cigarettes in the same 72 stores, in the same manner, in five time periods: August 1994 (before implementation of legislation); August 1995 (immediately after impl...

The definitions of these matroids, with a summary of their interesting properties, can be found in the Appendix. Except for P"8 , they were all known to be excluded minors for GF(4)-representability (see Oxley [15, 17]). The matroid P"8 is obtained by relaxing the unique pair of disjoint circuit-hyperplanes of P8 . Ever since Whitney's introductory paper [28] on matroid theory, researchers have...

A graph is Y ∆Y reducible if it can be reduced to isolated vertices by a sequence of series-parallel reductions and Y ∆Y transformations. It is still an open problem to characterize Y ∆Y reducible graphs in terms of a finite set of forbidden minors. We obtain a characterization of such forbidden minors that can be written as clique k-sums for k = 1, 2, 3. As a result we show constructively that...

Background Commitment to psychiatric care is in Finland allowed for minors in broader terms than for adults. Minors can be committed to and detained in involuntary psychiatric treatment if they suffer from severe mental disorder and fullfil the additional commitment criteria defined in the Mental Health Act. Adults can be committed to involuntary psychiatric care only if they are mentally ill (...