Biological sex influences antibody responses to routine vaccinations in the first year of life

AIM: We investigated the effect of early-life factors, namely sex, delivery mode, feeding method and antibiotic exposure, on antibody responses to routine vaccinations administered during the first year of life. METHODS: One and seven months after the primary course of routine vaccines and 1 month after routine vaccines at 12 months of age, antibodies against 26 vaccine antigens were measured in 398 healthy infants. The geometric mean concentration (GMC) of antibodies (adjusted for effect modifiers with multiple linear regression) and the seroprotection rate for each vaccine were compared for each early-life factor. RESULTS: Sex had an influence on GMCs. Antibody concentrations were significantly lower at 7 months of age in females for tetanus and filamentous haemagglutinin and at 13 months of age for pertactin. In contrast, at 13 months of age, antibody concentrations were significantly higher in females for polio type 3, pneumococcal serotype 6A and measles. Sex did not have an influence on seroprotection rates. Delivery mode, feeding method and antibiotic exposure did not exert a substantial influence on vaccine antibody concentrations. CONCLUSION: There is a difference between males and females in the humoral response to routine vaccinations in the first year of life

It is too hot: an in-situ study of three designs for heating

Smart technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and consequently transforming our lives. Domestic energy use is one of the most talked domain that people may greatly benefit from these technologies. Given this, it is important to understand interactions with smart systems within people’s everyday lives. To this end, we developed and deployed the first heating system that allows its users to control their home heating with real-time prices. In particular, we implemented three different designs of our heating system, and evaluated them with 30 UK households in a four-week in the wild study. Our findings through thematic analysis show that our participants formed different understandings and expectations of the system, and used it in various ways to effectively respond to real-time prices while maintaining their thermal comfort. These findings contribute to our understanding of interactions with smart energy systems and provide key design implications for developing them

Parker Palmer on Servant-Leadership: An Interview

The following transcript is excerpted from an interview with Parker Palmer conducted for the Gonzaga University online Servant-Leadership Mentor Gallery. Questions have been removed for freedom of content flow. Parker Palmer: What really fascinates me is how visible our brokenness is. A rational person would think nobody needs to be led toward seeing it or understanding it; it\u27s all around us all the time. It\u27s on the nightly news and it\u27s in the morning newspaper and it\u27s in the self-reports that people give of their own lives. So I think we\u27re talking about a network of mythologies or illusions that we maintain in order to try to convince ourselves that things aren\u27t as bad as they seem, maybe in the manner of a dysfunctional family which keeps pretending that everything is fine here even though Dad is drinking way too much and hitting people way too often. The way that leaders can help people see their brokenness, I think, is by acknowledging their own. I don\u27t think we are willing to trust anybody on the issue of how broken we are until that person has acknowledged his or her own brokenness. And I understand that that\u27s a tricky business for leaders. There\u27s a strange dance that goes on between leaders and followers where followers want leaders to pretend that they\u27re totally together and totally in charge, and then they resent them for acting as if they were superhuman, making all the rest of us feel like dorks. So we do this sort of strange dance in which we project on leaders our need for the very thing nobody has, we don\u27t have, so we need somebody to pretend that they have it

Smart Thermostat Dataset

Smart energy systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and consequently transforming our lives. Domestic energy use is one of the most talked-about domains where people may greatly benefit from these systems. Given this, it is important to understand interactions with smart energy systems within people&#39;s everyday lives. To this end, we developed and deployed the first heating system that allows its users to control their home heating with real-time prices. In particular, we implemented three different designs of our heating system, and evaluated them with 30 UK households in a four-week in the wild study. This dataset contains anonymous quantitative data from the deployment of these three designs.</span