INTRODUCTION Little research has been conducted to determine the psychosocial and behavioral impacts of smoke-free policies in middle-income countries. METHODS Cross-sectional data were analyzed from the 2006 waves of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation. Survey comparing adult smokers in Mexico (n = 1,080), where smoke-free legislation at that time was weak, and Uruguay (n = 1...

Smoke-free policies have been an important tobacco control intervention. As recently as 20 years ago, few communities required workplaces and hospitality venues to be smoke-free, but today approximately 11% of the world's population live in countries with laws that require these places to be smoke-free. This paper briefly summarises important milestones in the history of indoor smoke-free polic...

Realist reviews are a new form of knowledge synthesis aimed at providing middle-range theories (MRTs) that specify how interventions work, for which populations, and under what circumstances. This approach opens the 'black box' of an intervention by showing how it triggers mechanisms in specific contexts to produce outcomes. We conducted a realist review of health user fee exemption policies (U...

BACKGROUND A certain level of public support for smoke-free environments is a prerequisite for adoption and enforcement of policies and can be used as an indicator of readiness for legislative action. This study assessed support for comprehensive smoke-free policies in a range of settings such as hotels and colleges among government workers in China and identified factors associated with suppor...

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a vital component of the Internet’s content delivery value chain, servicing nearly a third of the Internet’s most popular content sites. However, in spite of their strategic importance little is known about the optimal pricing policies or adoption drivers of CDNs. We address these questions using analytic models of the market structure for Internet content d...

We present PRM-RL, a hierarchical method for long-range navigation task completion that combines samplingbased path planning with reinforcement learning (RL) agents. The RL agents learn short-range, point-to-point navigation policies that capture robot dynamics and task constraints without knowledge of the large-scale topology, while the sampling-based planners provide an approximate map of the...

As a research project supported jointly by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan and the European Commission under its 7th Framework Program, the GreenICN Project has been in operation from 2013 to 2016. The GreenICN project focused on two typical application scenarios, one a disaster scenario and the other a video delivery scenario. The disaster sc...

This is the fourth of a series of yearly conferences on the physiology of prematurity, which are attended by 25 invited persons of varied disciplines. These bring their different approaches to bear in the discussions which center about an informally presented topic on a given day in which one or two of the guests are featured. This conference was built around three topics: heat regulation (pres...

to improve drug selectivity toward target cells, one interesting approach for drug delivery is to use polymer nanoparticles. a two-layered oniom becke3- lyp: uff calculation was carried out to study the structural and thermodynamic properties of the interaction between acetamide derivatives and the pca-peg-pca copolymers. the interaction enthalpies and the gibbs free energies between acetamide ...