Background/Objectives To determine the initial efficacy of a mailed screening and brief intervention to reduce at-risk drinking among persons aged 50 years and older. Design Pilot randomized controlled trial. Setting UCLA Department of Medicine Community Offices and Primary Care Network. Participants: 86 adults aged 50 years and above who were identified as at-risk drinkers by the Comorbidity Alcohol Risk Evaluation Tool (CARET). Intervention Participants were assigned randomly to receive personalized mailed feedback outlining their specific risks associated with alcohol use, an educational booklet on alcohol and aging, and the NIH Rethinking Drinking: Alcohol and Your Health booklet (intervention group) or nothing (control group). Measurements Alcohol-related assessments at baseline and at 3 months. CARET assessed at-risk drinking, number of risks, and types of risks. Results At 3 months, relative to controls, fewer intervention group participants were: at-risk drinkers (66% versus 88%), binge drinking (45% versus 68%), used alcohol with a medical or psychiatric condition (3% versus 17%) or with symptoms of such a condition (29% versus 49%). Conclusion A mailed brief intervention may be an effective approach to intervening with at-risk drinkers aged 50 and older.

Abstract-Network coding, the notion of performing coding operations on the contents of packets while in transit through the network, was originally developed for wired networks; recently, however, it has been also applied with success also to wireless ad hoc networks. In fact, it has been shown that network coding can yield substantial performance gains, e.g., reduced energy consumption, in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we compare, using linear programming formulations, the maximum throughput that a multicast application can achieve with and without network coding in unreliable ad hoc networks; we show that network coding achieves 65% higher throughput than conventional multicast in a typical ad hoc network scenario. The superiority of network coding, already established by the analytic results, is confirmed by simulation experiments.