Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 341)

This bibliography lists 133 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during September 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Evaluating Usage, Preferences, and Perceived Restorative Qualities of Staff Break Areas in Healthcare Facilities

Nurses are extremely important to the healthcare industry, and maintaining the quality of nursing care is one of the central concerns of today’s healthcare managers. Unfortunately, the nursing profession in the U.S. is on the precipice of a crisis. Healthcare facilities are suffering from high rates of staff burnout and turnover, and interest in the profession among younger students is on the decline. Healthcare leaders are concerned for improving nurses’ satisfaction, performance, and job retention, but they often overlook the importance of respite for nurses, and underestimate the value of well-furnished staff break areas. A healthy break area can improve nurses’ mood, attitude, and alertness, factors that have been associated with a higher quality of patient care and better facility outcomes. In this study, the researcher gathered empirical evidence regarding nurses’ desires and responses to different environmental features of staff break areas. The design interventions that were tested included (a) the proximity of break areas to work areas, (b) levels of socializing vs. privacy, (c) visual and physical access to the outdoors, (d) the presence of artworks, plants, and natural light, and (e) amenities for indoor and outdoor break spaces. These break-room features were examined in regard to their perceived restorative qualities and their potential to affect staff usage and satisfaction. A multi-method approach was used in the research, employing both qualitative explorations (focused interviews and narrative survey questions) and quantitative measurements (discrete survey questions and a visual ranking of break-room spaces). Important findings include the result that staff break areas are more likely to be used if they are in close proximity to nurses’ work areas, that these spaces need complete privacy from patients and families, and that it is most effective to provide a mixture of opportunities for individual privacy and socialization with co-workers. Having physical access to private outdoor spaces (e.g., balconies or porches) was shown to have a significantly greater restorative effect in comparison with window views, artwork, or indoor plants. The study outcomes were incorporated into a set of design and policy suggestions to encourage effective improvements in the quality of nurses’ rest breaks

Sustainability education: a systemic framework for evaluating educational outcomes towards the Sustainable Development Goals

The UN 2030 agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) envisions a future of inclusive equity, justice and prosperity within environmental limits, and places an important emphasis on education as stated in Goal 4. Education is acknowledged as a means for achieving the remaining Goals, with Sustainability as a goal for education in target 4.7. However, the interconnectedness of the SDGs and the complexity of Sustainability as a concept make it difficult to relate the SDGs to educational learning outcomes, with what Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aims to achieve remaining ambiguous. To address this, the aim of the thesis was to develop a framework to redefine ESD as a tool that can deliver the Sustainability transformation required. Using the SDGs as end points for a Sustainability state, and through a participatory approach, education stakeholders and learners work together to construct a localised vision of Sustainability, relate this to educational outcomes and identify the competences the learners need to develop as citizens for the Sustainability vision to emerge. The framework allows for the development of evaluation tools that can support educational institutions to monitor and manage their progress in transforming societies towards Sustainability. Universities are engines of societal transformation, can nurture future citizens and can navigate them towards Sustainability through their educational programmes. The contribution of these programmes to Sustainability depends on how well aligned their intended learning outcomes are to Sustainability and then how effective they are in developing these as competences in students. The tool developed therefore first reviews the alignment of University programmes intended learning outcomes to the enabling conditions for a vision of Sustainability based on the SDGs to emerge and then how effective the programmes are in developing Sustainability competences in their students. The first part is based on a systemic grouping of the SDGs into eight Sustainability attributes, using multi-criteria analysis to compare and rank programmes according to the alignment of their learning outcomes to the Sustainability attributes and their contribution to Sustainability. From its testing using data from a University’s eighteen master’s programmes on a range of subjects and then application to compare forty UK and European master’s programmes focusing on environment and Sustainability, findings demonstrated that even environmental programmes face some important gaps related to health, wellbeing, diversity, inclusion, and collaboration, amongst others, and reinforce the need for all universities to understand the contribution of their programmes to Sustainability. The second part of the tool developed covered the effectiveness of educational programmes by evaluating the attainment of Sustainability competences in University students. Its application was demonstrated through a case study of a Master’s programme, offering insights of how it can benefit Higher Education practitioners to improve how they deliver their programmes’ learning outcomes as Sustainability competences in students, and how they can use the evidence created to monitor progress. As an example, the potential of the tool to inform the programme’s ongoing curriculum review was discussed. Considering the potential to shape learners from a young age towards behaviours aligned with promotion of planetary health and wellbeing, the framework was then applied and further developed for school education. Its application for selecting and assessing learning outcomes for Sustainability was researched in two case studies in the UK, conducted in a primary and a secondary school that followed different approaches in integrating ESD into their curricula. The primary school introduced ESD as the thread that pervades and links all curricular subjects, whereas the secondary school introduced a new course on the SDGs. Both schools were found to be effective in developing the intended learning outcomes in their students, with some weaknesses related to their approach identified as well. Overall the thesis delivered its objectives, demonstrating the framework’s potential to evaluate the contribution of education to Sustainability, as well as to assess students’ Sustainability competences development at different stages, contributing to the operationalisation of the role of educational programmes to Sustainability transformation.Open Acces

A Preliminary Investigation of the Validity of Time-Based Measures of Sustained Attention for Children

This study is a preliminary investigation of the validity of using time-based measures to quantify sustained attention in children ages 6-12. Problems with sustained attention negatively affect childhood learning and development. The prevalence of disorders known to impact sustained attention performance continue to rise in the United States. Currently, commercially available, objective measures of sustained attention use normative comparisons that provide limited information about the effect such problems have on child performance in natural settings. We reviewed test data from 290 charts of children ages 6-12 referred for neuropsychological evaluation. The Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch) is an ecologically oriented measure of attention; however, the test provides only normative data about child sustained attention. We examined the validity of two time-based scores derived from the Code Transmission subtest of the TEA-Ch. The Code Transmission Time on Task (CT-TOT) estimates the total time a child spends processing the subtest stimulus and the Code Transmission Longest Duration (CT-LD) estimates the maximum duration of a child\u27s sustained attention before an attentional lapse. We correlated CT-TOT and CT-LD scores with age, criterion sustained attention measures from the TEA-Ch, and a measure of intelligence. Analysis of the data revealed significant differences in performance on the time-based measures by age-band. Correlations reached significance for both measures with the four criterion measures, with the CT-TOT achieving higher correlations with all criterion measures. Correlations were non-significant between both measures and intelligence. Overall, the findings of the present study suggest that the CT-TOT may provide additional, valid performance-based information about childrens\u27 sustained attention that, to date, is missing from any commercially available measure of sustained attention for children. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in the open-access Ohiolink ETD Center www.ohiolink.edu/et

Banking for the future: An ethnographic study on the local food bank, its role on food justice, and patron perception

Food banks are antithetical to the food justice movement because they usually rely on government commodity surplus to alleviate need and promote notions of dependence through the charity model. This research examines Food for People, the only food bank in Humboldt County, within the context of local food security and patron perception using ethnographic observation, surveys, literature review, and interviews to generate data that would allow the food bank to fulfill its mission of ending hunger. Through ethnographic approaches, this thesis focuses on food security, what affects perception and actual food security in the context of food justice and food sovereignty, and the power dynamics discovered in the food bank. Questions to the study include: Does the food bank empower its patrons and does it fit under the food justice model? What are the patrons’ perception of their food security, and what are their attitudes and beliefs about their shopping locations? This ethnography critically examines the food banking system and attempts to place Food for People within the spectrum of food justice/sovereignty and dependence. To contribute to the food bank’s mission of ending hunger, this research suggests the organization could create an environment more conducive to self-empowerment by an integration of horizontal power structures, and addressing patron needs that affect food security beyond the immediate distribution of food

Chapter The Presence of Absence. Longing and Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Art and Literature

This article explores the phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet era found in contemporary Russian society and manifested both in contemporary art, such as in the installations of Il'ja Kabakov, Sergej Volkov, and Jevgenij Fiks, and in modern literature, especially in the prose of Andrej Astvacaturov. Such regret for a bygone past primarily mourns not the apparatus of the Soviet state, but the routine and the quality of familiar daily life. Insights from the fields of visual studies and trauma studies undergird this exploration of the relationship between a work of art's visual composition and its representation of toska, memory, and material culture in the Soviet era. By juxtaposing artwork with literary prose, we reveal the significant role had by 'reflective' toska-nostalgia (as defined by Svetlana Boym, 2001) in the formation of post-Soviet identity

The aural skills acquisition process of undergraduate electroacoustic (EA) music majors in the context of a new aural learning method

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston UniversityElectroacoustic (EA) musicians require aural skills that exist beyond tonality and meter; however, specialized ear training courses for EA music are rare in university and college music programs that offer EA studies (EaSt) in their curricula. Since 2005, this researcher has been developing and teaching EA aural training at a Canadian university in that was inspired by concepts from Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA) studies, primarily integration and segregation. In the 2009/10 academic year, the researcher conducted an action study with his intact EA aural training class of 25 first year undergraduate students majoring in EaSt for the purposes of better understanding and improving the students' aural skill acquisition process. and of refining the teaching and learning sequence. The action study was organized into four cycles of observation, critical reflection, and action, and focused on optimizing and autonomizing the skill acquisition process within the large, varied group. Actions were designed in response to critical reflection on emerging problems, evaluations of students' views about the process, their moods and attitudes, and measurements of students' achievements-with specific attention to eight EA-oriented skills and seven tonal and metric skills. Qualitative and quantitative data gathered from questionnaires, in-class surveys and tests, homework, and competence tests provided evidence of skill acquisition, primarily in loudness discrimination, timbral discrimination, tonal awareness, interval discrimination, meter discrimination, and descriptive ability. The most notable emerging problems in the skill acquisition process were related to the group's variety of ability levels, including imbalances in difficulty levels, in students' level of interest in the activities, and in the all-inclusive effectiveness of the training. The main transformational aspects of the action study were autonomization of the skill acquisition process at home through weekly reflective practice reports and developing a cooperative learning environment in the classroom through regular in-class discussion

Effects of light interventions for adaptation to night work : Simulated night work experiments

In modern society, the need for 24-hr operation and services requires some people to work outside normal daytime work hours (i.e. shift work), including the night. For instance, healthcare, police, and transportation, are sectors where night work is common. Exposure to shift work, and particularly night work, can have negative impact on the workers’ health. Especially, sleep is reported to be disturbed among night workers, as they must be awake at times they would normally be sleeping, and sleep at times they would normally be awake. This circadian misalignment of the sleep-wake rhythm may in a long-term perspective lead to ill health and diseases. Also, in a short-term perspective night work may cause adverse effects. Night workers experience increased sleepiness and performance deterioration during night shifts, and especially in the early morning hours, the sleep propensity and performance decrements are high. As such, night work has also been associated with increased risk of accidents and injuries. Several countermeasures to reduce the adverse impact of night work have been suggested. Common strategies involve scheduled naps and caffein use. However, there is increasing interest in the use of light interventions for eliciting beneficial effects for night workers. Light exposure has the potential to entrain the biological circadian rhythm in humans, and as such can be used to produce circadian adaptation to a night work schedule. In addition, light has acute alerting effects which can reduce alertness deficits and improve performance during the night shift. Such effects rely on several characteristics of the light, such as timing, intensity, and wavelengths (spectral distribution). With the development of light emitting diode (LED) technology, new strategies for illumination of workplaces have emerged. This thesis is based on three papers using standard ceiling mounted LED-luminaires to administer different light conditions during simulated night shift experiments. The main aim has been to investigate and elucidate how such LED lighting strategies can be used to facilitate adaptation to night work on measures of sleepiness, performance, and circadian rhythm. In paper 1, the objective was to investigate how a full spectrum (4000 K) bright light (~ 900 lx), compared to a standard light (~ 90 lx), affected alertness and performance during three consecutive simulated night shifts (23:00–07:00 hrs), as well as circadian phase shift after the simulated night shifts. Results indicated that bright light effectively reduces sleepiness, and improves performance during three consecutive night shifts, compared to standard light. Bright light seems to be beneficial in the later parts of the shifts, when sleep propensity is particularly high. For instance, in the later parts of night 2 and 3 it was found that the number of lapses of attention on a vigilance task revealed half as many lapses with bright light, compared to standard light. Furthermore, bright light induced a larger phase delay as compared with standard light, although data were incomplete, hence validation of these findings are needed. The objective in the second paper was to investigate how short-wavelength monochromatic blue light (λmax = 455 nm), compared to red light (λmax = 625 nm) with similar photon density (~ 2.8 x 1014 photons/cm2/s), affected alertness and task performance during one simulated night shift (23:00–06:45 hrs), as well as circadian phase shift following the night shift. The results in paper 2 suggest that monochromatic blue light reduces sleepiness and improves performance in the later parts of the night shift. Similar to the findings in paper 1, the number of attentional lapses with blue light was half of that seen with red light. Blue light also led to a larger phase delay of the circadian rhythm. There were indications of improved visual comfort with blue light, although both light conditions overall produced visual discomfort. In the third paper the main aims were to investigate how polychromatic blue-enriched white light (7000 K; ~ 200 lx), compared to warm white light (2500 K) of similar photon density (~ 1.6 x 1014 photons/cm2/s), affected alertness and performance during three consecutive simulated night shifts (23:00–06:45 hrs), as well as circadian adaptation to the night work schedule. The results indicated minor, yet beneficial effects of 7000 K light compared to 2500 K light, mainly in terms of fewer performance errors on a vigilance task in the end of night 1 and 2. No significant difference in terms of circadian phase shifts were found between these two light conditions. In conclusion, the papers suggest that standard ceiling mounted LED-luminaires have the potential to produce light conditions that may facilitate adaptation to night work. Paper 1 suggests that bright light improves performance and reduces sleepiness during three consecutive simulated night shifts. Results from paper 2 indicate that short-wavelength blue light improves performance, reduces sleepiness, and causes a larger phase delay than long-wavelength red light during one simulated night shift. Paper 3 indicates that using polychromatic blue-enriched white light has minor, yet beneficial effects on performance measures, compared to warm white light during three consecutive simulated night shifts. Further research is needed to validate and support the findings and investigate the impact and feasibility of similar light conditions in real-life workplaces. Future research should also explore more light conditions that can be favourable for night workers, in order to develop recommendations for illumination of night workers workplaces. Moreover, there is a need to elucidate potential long-term adverse health impacts of exposure to LED lighting.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Continuous Estimation of Smoking Lapse Risk from Noisy Wrist Sensor Data Using Sparse and Positive-Only Labels

Estimating the imminent risk of adverse health behaviors provides opportunities for developing effective behavioral intervention mechanisms to prevent the occurrence of the target behavior. One of the key goals is to find opportune moments for intervention by passively detecting the rising risk of an imminent adverse behavior. Significant progress in mobile health research and the ability to continuously sense internal and external states of individual health and behavior has paved the way for detecting diverse risk factors from mobile sensor data. The next frontier in this research is to account for the combined effects of these risk factors to produce a composite risk score of adverse behaviors using wearable sensors convenient for daily use. Developing a machine learning-based model for assessing the risk of smoking lapse in the natural environment faces significant outstanding challenges requiring the development of novel and unique methodologies for each of them. The first challenge is coming up with an accurate representation of noisy and incomplete sensor data to encode the present and historical influence of behavioral cues, mental states, and the interactions of individuals with their ever-changing environment. The next noteworthy challenge is the absence of confirmed negative labels of low-risk states and adequate precise annotations of high-risk states. Finally, the model should work on convenient wearable devices to facilitate widespread adoption in research and practice. In this dissertation, we develop methods that account for the multi-faceted nature of smoking lapse behavior to train and evaluate a machine learning model capable of estimating composite risk scores in the natural environment. We first develop mRisk, which combines the effects of various mHealth biomarkers such as stress, physical activity, and location history in producing the risk of smoking lapse using sequential deep neural networks. We propose an event-based encoding of sensor data to reduce the effect of noises and then present an approach to efficiently model the historical influence of recent and past sensor-derived contexts on the likelihood of smoking lapse. To circumvent the lack of confirmed negative labels (i.e., annotated low-risk moments) and only a few positive labels (i.e., sensor-based detection of smoking lapse corroborated by self-reports), we propose a new loss function to accurately optimize the models. We build the mRisk models using biomarker (stress, physical activity) streams derived from chest-worn sensors. Adapting the models to work with less invasive and more convenient wrist-based sensors requires adapting the biomarker detection models to work with wrist-worn sensor data. To that end, we develop robust stress and activity inference methodologies from noisy wrist-sensor data. We first propose CQP, which quantifies wrist-sensor collected PPG data quality. Next, we show that integrating CQP within the inference pipeline improves accuracy-yield trade-offs associated with stress detection from wrist-worn PPG sensors in the natural environment. mRisk also requires sensor-based precise detection of smoking events and confirmation through self-reports to extract positive labels. Hence, we develop rSmoke, an orientation-invariant smoking detection model that is robust to the variations in sensor data resulting from orientation switches in the field. We train the proposed mRisk risk estimation models using the wrist-based inferences of lapse risk factors. To evaluate the utility of the risk models, we simulate the delivery of intelligent smoking interventions to at-risk participants as informed by the composite risk scores. Our results demonstrate the envisaged impact of machine learning-based models operating on wrist-worn wearable sensor data to output continuous smoking lapse risk scores. The novel methodologies we propose throughout this dissertation help instigate a new frontier in smoking research that can potentially improve the smoking abstinence rate in participants willing to quit