Framing climate change as national security: a survey-experiment on climate change perceptions.

The issues surrounding climate change continue to have polarizing effects on many Americans. In this thesis I offer a potential bridge to this divide with a comprehensive study on how issue frames can impact how individuals shape their opinions on environmental issues. Focusing on a national security frame, I ask the central research “Will the public perceive issues of climate change differently when they are framed as threats to national security?” For this thesis I design an original experimental survey to measure the impact security framing has on participants’ perception of both climate change and environmental policy options. The survey was designed using Qualtrics online survey software and I recruited participants using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd-sourced labor platform. I use data from this original framing experiment to show that exposure to a national security frame does, indeed, affect perceptions on environmental issues and raise support for environmental policies

On DBI Textures with Generalized Hopf Fibration

In this letter we show numerical existence of O(4) Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) Textures living in (N +1) dimensional spacetime. These defects are characterized by $S^N\rightarrow S^3$ mapping, generalizing the well-known Hopf fibration into ?$\pi_N (S^3)$, for all N > 3. The nonlinear nature of DBI kinetic term provides stability against size perturbation and thus renders the defects having natural scale.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys.Lett.

cis-Inhibition of Notch by Endogenous Delta Biases the Outcome of Lateral Inhibition

SummaryLateral inhibition mediated by Delta/Notch (Dl/N) signaling is used throughout development to limit the number of initially equivalent cells that adopt a particular fate [1–3]. Although adjacent cells express both Dl ligand and N receptor, signaling between them ultimately occurs in only one direction. Classically, this has been explained entirely by feedback: activated N can downregulate Dl, amplifying even slight asymmetries in the Dl or N activities of adjacent cells [1–5]. Here, however, we present an example of lateral inhibition in which unidirectional signaling depends instead on Dl's ability to inhibit N within the same cell, a phenomenon known as cis-inhibition [6–11]. By genetically manipulating individual R1/R6/R7 photoreceptor precursors in the Drosophila eye, we show that loss of Dl-mediated cis-inhibition reverses the direction of lateral signaling. Based on our finding that Dl in R1/R6s requires endocytosis to trans-activate but not to cis-inhibit N, we reexamine previously published data from other examples of lateral inhibition. We conclude that cis-inhibition generally influences the direction of Dl/N signaling and should therefore be included in standard models of lateral inhibition

Family Violence Within LGBTQ Communities in Australia: Intersectional Experiences and Associations with Mental Health Outcomes

BackgroundWhile prior research has documented intimate partner violence (IPV) and family of origin violence (FOV) experienced by LGBTQ communities at rates at least comparable to heterosexual and/or cisgender populations, little knowledge exists of how this experience occurs within intersections of these communities and who is most at risk.MethodsThis study utilised data from a from a large nationwide Australian survey of the health and wellbeing of 6835 LGBTQ adults aged 18 + years. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify individual factors associated with reporting ever having experienced FOV or IPV.ResultsIn total, 2675 (43.18%) participants reported ever experiencing FOV and 3716 (60.7%) reported ever experiencing IPV. Non-binary people, cisgender women, and trans men were most likely to have experienced FOV. Non-binary people and cisgender women were most likely to experience IPV. Participants aged 55 + years (compared to 18–24 years) were less likely to have experienced FOV, while the likelihood of experiencing IPV increased with age. Education was associated with both FOV and IPV (highest among the non-university tertiary educated). Having a moderate or severe disability and ever experiencing homelessness were associated with a greater likelihood of experiencing FOV and IPV. Recent experiences of suicidal ideation, suicide attempt and high/very high psychological distress were associated with experiences of FOV and IPV.ConclusionsThis new knowledge regarding the factors that identify LGBTQ people at greater risk of family or intimate partner violence can ensure the tailoring of family violence practice and policy to those most in need

The impact of intraoperative adverse events on orthopaedic surgery residents

Background: The goal of this study was to quantify the impact of intraoperative adverse events on orthopaedics residents to better understand how these occurrences affect resident training. Additionally, the study identified the emotional toll of adverse events on trainees and barriers to reporting.Methods: An anonymous 26 question web-based survey was adapted from the Boston intraoperative adverse events surgeons’ attitude study (BISA) survey to be applicable to orthopaedic residents. The survey was sent to orthopaedic residency program coordinators listed in the Council of Orthopaedic Residency Directors (CORD) database. The coordinators then distributed the survey to each program’s residents and fellows.Results: 77 orthopaedic residents and fellows completed the survey. Almost all (84.4%) reported having been involved in an IAE during their training, and the majority (80.6%) experienced emotional distress as a result. 50.7% of respondents have never been involved in discussions with patients or their family regarding a complication during their training.Conclusions: The majority of residents have experienced emotional distress following an intraoperative adverse event, but residents are not routinely involved in subsequent discussions with patients and families following complications. This represents a significant area for improvement in both supporting and training surgical residents

Dual Bayesian ResNet: a deep learning approach to heart murmur detection

This study presents our team PathToMyHeart’s contribution to the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2022. Two models are implemented. The first model is a Dual Bayesian ResNet (DBRes), where each patient’s recording is segmented into overlapping log mel spectrograms. These undergo two binary classifications: present versus unknown or absent, and unknown versus present or absent. The classifications are aggregated to give a patient’s final classification. The second model is the output of DBRes integrated with demographic data and signal features using XGBoost. DBRes achieved our best weighted accuracy of 0.771 on the hidden test set for murmur classification, which placed us fourth for the murmur task. (On the clinical outcome task, which we neglected, we scored 17th with costs of 12637.) On our held-out subset of the training set, integrating the demographic data and signal features improved DBRes’s accuracy from 0.762 to 0.820. However, this decreased DBRes’s weighted accuracy from 0.780 to 0.749. Our results demonstrate that log mel spectrograms are an effective representation of heart sound recordings, Bayesian networks provide strong supervised classification performance, and treating the ternary classification as two binary classifications increases performance on the weighted accuracy

Skepticism Motivated: On the Skeptical Import of Motivated Reasoning

Empirical work on motivated reasoning suggests that our judgments are influenced to a surprising extent by our wants, desires and preferences (Kahan 2016; Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979; Molden and Higgins 2012; Taber and Lodge 2006). How should we evaluate the epistemic status of beliefs formed through motivated reasoning? For example, are such beliefs epistemically justified? Are they candidates for knowledge? In liberal democracies, these questions are increasingly controversial as well as politically timely (Beebe et al. 2018; Lynch forthcoming, 2018; Slothuus and de Vreese 2010). And yet, the epistemological significance of motivated reasoning has been almost entirely ignored by those working in mainstream epistemology. We aim to rectify this oversight. Using politically motivated reasoning as a case study, we show how motivated reasoning gives rise to three distinct kinds of skeptical challenges. We conclude by showing how the skeptical import of motivated reasoning has some important ramifications for how we should think about the demands of intellectual humility

Energy and Storage Reduction in Data Intensive Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Recording large data sets in current wireless sensor networks is difficult if not impossible, as sensor network nodes feature extremely limited capabilities. Meager amounts of memory limit storage and slow network transmission rates limit data transfer. Even if enough data is recorded, network lifetime may be brief due to energy consumption. In this paper, we discuss using Bloom filters to reduce the memory and network transmission requirements for sending or storing large amounts of data. Using our approach, we can gather more information from our wireless sensor network and simultaneously extend the network lifetime.Engineering and Applied Science

Assessing the Current State and Potential Needs of the Community for Autism Spectrum Awareness in the Classroom

Introduction: • Number of children with autism and related disorders has been growing in Vermont in the last ten years. • Puppets in Education, Inc (PiE) recently added a new program Friend 2 Friend Programs-Vermont (F2F), that will work with grades K?8 to educate students and teachers about autism spectrum disorders (ASD). • Goal is to promote understanding, acceptance, empathy and mutual friendships between children with ASD or other social communication disorders • Students from the University of Vermont College of Medicine partnered with PiE to evaluate the current needs of the community, determining what information would be most useful in the F2F program.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1036/thumbnail.jp