A randomized clinical trial comparing family-focused treatment and individual supportive therapy for depression in childhood and early adolescence

OBJECTIVE: Despite the morbidity and negative outcomes associated with early-onset depression, few studies have examined the efficacy of psychosocial treatment for depressive disorders during childhood. Integrating family in treatment could have particularly salutary effects during this developmental period. This trial compared immediate posttreatment effects of family-focused treatment for childhood depression (FFT-CD) with those of individual supportive psychotherapy (IP) for children 7 to 14 years old with depressive disorders. METHOD: Children were randomized to 15 sessions of FFT-CD (n = 67) or IP (n = 67) over 4 months. The primary treatment outcome was adequate clinical depression response, defined as at least a 50% decrease in score on the Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised (CDRS-R). Additional outcomes included patient-centered outcomes (parent- and child-reported treatment satisfaction), remission (defined as CDRS-R score ≤28), change in continuous CDRS-R score, and change in child and parent reports of depressive and non-depressive symptoms and social adjustment. RESULTS: Significant improvement was evident across groups for depressive and non-depressive symptoms, global response, and functioning and social adjustment. Compared with children randomized to IP, children randomized to FFT-CD showed higher rates of adequate clinical depression response (77.7% versus 59.9%; number needed to treat = 5.72; odds ratio 2.29; 95% CI 1.001-5.247; t = 1.97, p = .0498). Across treatments, families reported high satisfaction; compared with IP families, FFT-CD families reported greater knowledge and skills for managing depression. There were no significant differences between treatment arms on secondary outcomes. CONCLUSION: Results support the value of psychosocial intervention, emphasize the important role that families play, and highlight the potential for FFT-CD for supporting recovery in children with depression. Clinical trial registration information-Systems of Support Study for Childhood Depression; http://clinicaltrials.gov; NCT01159041.R01 MH082856 - NIMH NIH HHS; R01 MH082861 - NIMH NIH HH

Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

The focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social interaction and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices

Parental expectations of maternal and child health services

This article reports on survey research (N=1,418) aimed at examining whether parental expectations of maternal and child health (MCH) services are influenced by group characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status [SES], ethnicity, at risk of poverty) and/or individual parenting context variables (e.g., received social support) in a context where these services are available to all. The findings reveal that parents have different expectations about the technical and relational expertise of MCH nurses. However, the authors found only very weak associations between family characteristics and parental expectations, suggesting that individual differences matter more than SES and other more traditional distinctions. Implications for MCH services are made

Deliberate Multimodality of the Newspaper Text (Front Pages – Case Study)

The focus of the present study is the notion that texts are multimodal and that language is realised through various semiotic modes. Kress and Leeuwen’s theory is tested comparing two front pages of the British daily - The Times and two front pages of the Bulgarian daily - Trud

Innovative collaborative design in international interaction design summer schools

[About the book]: Design is changing, and to educate the next generation of designers, these changes need to be addressed. In light of the growing role research and interdisciplinary collaboration play in contemporary design performance, Design Integrations calls for an innovative shake up in design education. Poggenpohl asserts that design research is developed through a typology within academic and business contexts, and follows different research theories and strategies. Such issues in design collaboration are explored in-depth, with essays on an inter-institutional academic project, cross-cultural learning experiences, and a multi-national healthcare project, demonstrating the importance of shared values, interdisciplinary negotiated process and clear communication for tomorrow’s designers

Assessing Learning-Centered Leadership: Connections to Research, Professional Standards, and Current Practices

Describes an assessment model designed to evaluate school leaders' performance. Unlike existing tools, this new system will assess both individuals and teams, and focuses specifically on instructional leadership and behaviors that improve learning

BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

Near-infrared colors of minor planets recovered from VISTA - VHS survey (MOVIS)

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) provide information about the surface composition of about 100,000 minor planets. The resulting visible colors and albedos enabled us to group them in several major classes, which are a simplified view of the diversity shown by the few existing spectra. We performed a serendipitous search in VISTA-VHS observations using a pipeline developed to retrieve and process the data that corresponds to solar system objects (SSo). The colors and the magnitudes of the minor planets observed by the VISTA survey are compiled into three catalogs that are available online: the detections catalog (MOVIS-D), the magnitudes catalog (MOVIS-M), and the colors catalog (MOVIS-C). They were built using the third data release of the survey (VISTA VHS-DR3). A total of 39,947 objects were detected, including 52 NEAs, 325 Mars Crossers, 515 Hungaria asteroids, 38,428 main-belt asteroids, 146 Cybele asteroids, 147 Hilda asteroids, 270 Trojans, 13 comets, 12 Kuiper Belt objects and Neptune with its four satellites. The colors found for asteroids with known spectral properties reveal well-defined patterns corresponding to different mineralogies. The distributions of MOVIS-C data in color-color plots shows clusters identified with different taxonomic types. All the diagrams that use (Y-J) color separate the spectral classes more effectively than the (J-H) and (H-Ks) plots used until now: even for large color errors (<0.1), the plots (Y-J) vs (Y-Ks) and (Y-J) vs (J-Ks) provide the separation between S-complex and C-complex. The end members A, D, R, and V-types occupy well-defined regions.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figure

ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains