Identifying domains of quality of life in children with cancer undergoing palliative care : a qualitative study with professionals

Objective: The goal of pediatric palliative care (PPC) is to maintain the quality of life (QoL) of children whose lives are threatened. However, there are sparse scientific data on the domains of QoL in this particular context, and no measurement strategies are available. The present study aims to describe the domains of QoL in the context of PPC in oncology, according to the perceptions of professional caregivers. Method: Semistructured interviews were conducted with a random sample of 20 professional caregivers from the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Le Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine (Montréal, Canada). The caregivers were asked about their perceptions about the QoL of the children they have cared for in this context. The data were analyzed using inductive thematic content analysis. Results: The analysis allowed us to identify seven domains of QoL: “physical comfort,” “alleviation of psychological suffering,” “fun and the present moment,” “sense of control,” “feeling valued and appreciated,” “feeling that life goes on,” and “meaningful social relationships.” Significance of Results: Caregivers recount the regard that should be accorded to maintaining well-being and a sense of fun, as well as fostering the child's abilities, taking account of the progression of the disease, and to fulfilling his or her needs, especially social ones. Our results also demonstrate that all domains were positively referred to by professional caregivers. The data from our study will lead to better assessment of QoL according to the trajectory of a child with advanced cancer while undergoing PPC

Refining Obstacle Perception Safety Zones via Maneuver-Based Decomposition

A critical task for developing safe autonomous driving stacks is to determine whether an obstacle is safety-critical, i.e., poses an imminent threat to the autonomous vehicle. Our previous work showed that Hamilton Jacobi reachability theory can be applied to compute interaction-dynamics-aware perception safety zones that better inform an ego vehicle's perception module which obstacles are considered safety-critical. For completeness, these zones are typically larger than absolutely necessary, forcing the perception module to pay attention to a larger collection of objects for the sake of conservatism. As an improvement, we propose a maneuver-based decomposition of our safety zones that leverages information about the ego maneuver to reduce the zone volume. In particular, we propose a "temporal convolution" operation that produces safety zones for specific ego maneuvers, thus limiting the ego's behavior to reduce the size of the safety zones. We show with numerical experiments that maneuver-based zones are significantly smaller (up to 76% size reduction) than the baseline while maintaining completeness.Comment: * indicates equal contribution. Accepted into the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium 202

Parents living within the paradoxes of infant death from life-limiting anomaly: A grounded theory study

BACKGROUND: Life-limiting congenital anomalies are the leading cause of death of infants in the United States. Most of these infants die in intensive care units with limited access to adequate palliative/end-of-life care. There is an extensive knowledge gap about the experience of the parent of infants who died from life-limiting anomaly. PURPOSE: The aims of the study was to explore the process a parent goes through as they experience the birth, life and ultimate death of an infant from a life-limiting explore the process a parent goes through as they experience the birth, life and ultimate death of an infant from a life-limiting congenital anomaly and (b) develop a substantive theory to describe the process parenting an infant with a life-limiting congenital anomaly from birth to death. METHODS: Classic grounded methodology was used to analyze field notes of open-ended interviews with 11 parents whose infant died from a life-limiting congenital anomaly between the ages of 48 hours and 15 months. FINDINGS: The grounded theory Parents Living within the Paradoxes of Infant Death from Life-Limiting Anomaly describes the experience of parents from pregnancy to life after the infant\u27s death. The theory contains three stages and two cutting points. The first stage of the theory is living in innocence in which the pregnant/expectant parent anticipates or has a healthy baby. This stage ends with the first cutting point of getting the bad news or getting the diagnosis of a life-limiting anomaly. The second stage is being a good mom/dad in the new reality in which the parent experiences being the parent of a baby expected to die from a life-limiting anomaly. The second stage ends with the second cutting point, death of the baby. The final stage of the theory is going on describes how a parent goes on with life after the death of the baby. CONCLUSIONS: Parents living within the paradoxes of infant death from life-limiting anomaly has great implications for nursing in education, practice and research. This new grounded theory has the potential to assist in improving palliative and end-of-life care for infants

Adapting cartesian cut cell methods for flood risk evaluation

Assessing the risks of flooding, and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies, is an important part of any river management strategy. This is improved greatly by the accurate simulation of surface hydraulics, and moving to two-dimensional simulations that can capture the dynamics of surface processes has clear advantages. Only with the increased availability of accurate topographic data, has this become practical for many cases. In chapter two the methodologies of river flood modeling are described. A number of concerns peculiar to that field are discussed. These include roughness parameterisation and heterogeneity of features on the domain. Finite Volume (FV) methods can simulate shallow water flows effciently. Their shock-capturing ability makes them especially useful for flash-flood events. A particular FV package AMAZON-CC is adapted, which uses an approximate twoshock Riemann solver over a regular orthogonal grid. The Cartesian cut-cell method allows solid regions to be included as local modifcations to individual cells. Wetting and drying causes particular difficulties with FV methods. The Volume to Free-Surface Relationship (VFSR) method provides a framework in which a variety of mitigation strategies can be adopted. A modifed form of this was used, adapted to the rectangular grid with a piecewise level interpretation of topography. Several strategies are tested, and the most successful adopted thereafter. The Cartesian cut-cell method was extended to include large scale but complex features as vector, or polygon data-sets. The approach here concentrates on the fluxes across boundaries, to represent linear features such as hedgerows and fences. Preliminary results are presented and analysed and compared to classical results for headloss from interaction with structures. Test cases based on physical expreriments and real-life events are successfully reproduced. These demonstrate the suitability of AMAZON as a tool to model inland flooding

Mapping the landscape: Peer review in computing education research

Peer review is a mainstay of academic publication – indeed, it is the peer-review process that provides much of the publications’ credibility. As the number of computing education conferences and the number of submissions increase, the need for reviewers grows. This report does not attempt to set standards for reviewing; rather, as a first step toward meeting the need for well qualified reviewers, it presents an overview of the ways peer review is used in various venues, both inside computing education and, for com- parison, in closely-related areas outside our field. It considers four key components of peer review in some depth: criteria, the review process, roles and responsibilities, and ethics and etiquette. To do so, it draws on relevant literature, guidance and forms associated with peer review, interviews with journal editors and conference chairs, and a limited survey of the computing education research community. In addition to providing an overview of practice, this report identifies a number of themes running through the discourse that have relevance for decision making about how best to conduct peer review for a given venue

Continuous Enrollment Experiences of Nontraditional Career and Technical Education Students at the Community College

This transcendental phenomenological study described the continuous enrollment experiences of nontraditional career and technical education (CTE) students at the community college. The focus was on understanding the collegiate experience to decrease students\u27 chances of dropping out of college and contribute to the retention scholarship in higher education. The theory guiding this study was Bean and Metzner’s (1985) conceptual model of nontraditional undergraduate student attrition. It explains how background, academic, environmental, psychological outcomes, and social integration affect student retention. The design of this study was grounded in transcendental phenomenological research that explored the continuous enrollment phenomenon from the personal lived experiences of CTE community college students. A sample of 17 students from Lake County Community College participated in face-to-face interviews and focus groups on describing and making meaning of negative and positive experiences as they persisted in their college studies. An emphasis on document analysis was also a part of the data collection strategy to ensure data triangulation. To examine all aspects of the experiences shared by nontraditional CTE students, this study employed inductive data analysis that focused on common aspects of student courses, school withdrawal reports, student attendance reports, student appeals, and graduation reports. These artifacts were used to uncover relevant insights into understanding and ultimately increasing student retention. Ten themes emerged in the results of the research: positive attitudes; progress acknowledgment; self-improvement, career motivations; balancing college with family life; having to maintain work commitments; engaging instructors; concerned advisors; flexible course offerings; and smaller classroom settings

Assessment of the impact of agriculture and industry on the changing geochemical regimes, macro invertebrate communities and wetland areas : a case study of Sezela estuary and wetland areas, KwaZulu-Natal.

Master of Science in Environmental Science. University of KwaZulu-Natal. Durban, 2017.The Sezela estuary and wetlands make up a vast area of the Sezela in which these environments impacted by anthropogenic activities. The Sezela area is located along the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa in which the predominant land uses are commercial dryland sugarcane plantation cultivation and the Sezela Sugar Mill. Due to the anthropogenic activities in the area, several coastal environments have been degraded. The degradation of these environments can be detrimental to the organisms that are dependent on them for ecosystem services and even poverty-stricken people that require these environments for basic needs (Kotze et al., 2007). In addition, due to the water crisis currently in South Africa, further degrading these estuarine and wetland environments can rapidly increase the processes of drought. Therefore, assessing the quality of these environments is imperative to identify their functionality and need for rehabilitation (Macfarlane et al., 2007). The identification of estuarine and wetland functionality are conducted through field, laboratory analysis and statistical analysis. The determination of the health of the Sezela estuary was conducted through a step-by-step method which involved sediment granulometric analysis, sediment and water quality (utilisation of ICP-OES) and macro invertebrate indicators in the sediment. The health status of wetlands were determined through the PES and ecological services provided by the wetland utilising tools such as WET-Health and WET-EcoServices. It was determined that the Sezela estuary contained relatively coarse material and lacked species composition and richness due to past pollution of the estuary by the mill. The Sezela wetland areas were degraded as a result of dryland sugarcane plantation in which two of the three wetlands were predominantly impacted drastically which were the channelled valley bottom wetlands and not the floodplain wetland. It was necessary for the Sezela estuary and wetlands to be mitigated and rehabilitated in order to re-establish past conditions or conditions that will promote the return of organisms into the estuary and wetland environments. The measures that can be implemented are improve sediment and water quality, removal of alien invasive vegetation and re-vegetation with indigenous vegetation

Transition to the Circular Economy in the Fashion Industry: The Case of the Inditex Family Business

Society is increasingly concerned about aspects of work related to sustainability. This leads organizations to reflect on the economic, environmental, and social problems that affect both current and future generations. When companies identify an environmental problem, they try to respond to it through changes in their environmental policies, aiming at the transition towards sustainability. In this context, the circular economy appears as a regenerative industrial system that replaces the concept of “end of life” with that of “restoration”. It is oriented to the use of renewable energies, eliminating the use of toxic chemicals, which are harmful to reuse. The theory of socio-emotional wealth describes the behavior patterns of family businesses in response to the environmental changes that occur and the reasons derived from the family character that make them move towards the circular economy model. This article studies the case of the Spanish textile manufacturing and distribution multinational Inditex, analyzing the information collected in its environmental balances in the period 2013–2018. The analysis allows us to observe the speed of Inditex’s transition to the circular economy. For this, transition speed indicators were formed in each of the dimensions of the circular economy model. The results of the study indicate areas in which the company is moving faster and those in which more effort is needed. Finally, a collection of good practices related to the CE used by Inditex is provided

Problem Gambling, General-Strain Theory, and Gender

Prior research identified a host of factors that increase the likelihood that an individual will become a problem gambler, most of which would be identified by criminologists as “strains” under the framework of General Strain Theory (GST). Yet, GST has not been widely used as a possible explanation for why people become problem gamblers. In addition, there has been little examination of how gender interacts with those variables to affect problem gambling. In this research, I display how propositions from GST provide a framework for understanding why people become problem gamblers and whether gender is a moderating factor in this relationship. Findings demonstrate that non-gambling strains play a role in why people become problem gamblers. More relevant factors include having a non-substance behavioral problem and experiencing strain from a spouse/partner who is a problem gambler. Gender was found to have a strong direct effect on problem gambling (with men more likely to be problem gamblers than women), but few moderating effects were found, with one exception—men were more likely be problem gamblers than women if they experienced strain from their spouse/partner’s gambling behavior. Findings from the current study may help identify and treat problem gamblers

When a child dies: The experience of families during the first year of bereavement as seen through their weblog entries

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. March 2013. Major: Nursing. Advisor: Cynthia Peden-McAlpine, PhD. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 107 pages, appendices A-D.The study of CaringBridge weblog entries, written by10 bereaved families during the first year after their child's death from cancer, were analyzed for meaning of the experience using von Mannen's lifeworld existential as a framework: lived space, lived time, lived body, and lived other. In unscripted, real time journaling, families described their grief and the strategies employed to maintain connectedness to the deceased child: creating special places where they could feel close to the child (lived space); reflecting on time past, mourning the loss of future, and experiencing the firsts/lasts without the child (lived time); regarding metaphysical signs as messages from the child (lived other); and acknowledging their grief as a family (lived body). The results provide information to help health care professionals anticipate what families may need during the first year of bereavement and to guide intervention during that time