Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities: a guide for academics and researchers

Twitter is a form of free micro-blogging which allows users to send and receive short public messages called tweets. Tweets are limited to no more than 140 characters, and can include links to blogs, web pages, images, videos and all other material online. You can start tweeting in 10 minutes, anytime, from your computer, smart phone or tablet.By following other people and sources you are able to build up an instant, personalized Twitter feed that meets your full range of interests, both academic and personal. Thousands of academics and researchers at all levels of experience and across all disciplines already use Twitter daily, alongside more than 200 million other users.Yet how can such a brief medium have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?This guide answers these questions, showing you how to get started on Twitter and showing you how Twitter can be used as a resource for research, teaching and impact activities

Sexism of Fat: Is it sufficient to use only one sex in obesity research?

There is a weight issue weighing down the public health care systems across the world. Although obesity is prevalent in both males and females, the location of fat and impact on cardiometabolic health is strikingly different. These differences are apparent in the clinical setting, but there remains a bias towards using a single sex in mouse models to create simpler and cheaper experiments. The bias towards using a single sex in experiments skews the results and only offers translational research to one half of the human population. We examined sex differences and their effect on obesity by inducing obesity in both male and female mice by feeding them high fat diet (HFD) for 10 weeks. Mice were weighed weekly and after 10 weeks of HFD feeding, mice underwent metabolic tests to determine the impact of obesity. Male mice became obese after only 1 week of HFD feeding, however it took female mice 9 weeks of HFD feeding to become obese. Male mice were more susceptible to diabetes and male mice lost increased metabolic difference when fed HFD. This study highlights the importance of using both sexes to study obesity and associated diseases while highlighting novel differences in metabolism between sexes

Bayesian joint modeling of chemical structure and dose response curves

Today there are approximately 85,000 chemicals regulated under the Toxic Substances Control Act, with around 2,000 new chemicals introduced each year. It is impossible to screen all of these chemicals for potential toxic effects either via full organism in vivo studies or in vitro high-throughput screening (HTS) programs. Toxicologists face the challenge of choosing which chemicals to screen, and predicting the toxicity of as-yet-unscreened chemicals. Our goal is to describe how variation in chemical structure relates to variation in toxicological response to enable in silico toxicity characterization designed to meet both of these challenges. With our Bayesian partially Supervised Sparse and Smooth Factor Analysis (BS3FA) model, we learn a distance between chemicals targeted to toxicity, rather than one based on molecular structure alone. Our model also enables the prediction of chemical dose-response profiles based on chemical structure (that is, without in vivo or in vitro testing) by taking advantage of a large database of chemicals that have already been tested for toxicity in HTS programs. We show superior simulation performance in distance learning and modest to large gains in predictive ability compared to existing methods. Results from the high-throughput screening data application elucidate the relationship between chemical structure and a toxicity-relevant high-throughput assay. An R package for BS3FA is available online at https://github.com/kelrenmor/bs3fa

Expanding Faculty Knowledge on Title IX

Having trouble engaging faculty in Title IX-related work? This session will go over tactics to better collaborate with faculty and offer them resources on how to support students. This session focuses on innovative ways to collaborate with faculty and remind them of their Title IX requirements. Learn how to create engaging presentations for smaller audiences and trauma-informed Title IX materials that are easy to distribute on a larger scale. While this session is geared towards medium to large institutions, information for small schools will also be shared

Fire Effects on Three Trophic Levels in a Central Arkansas Grassland

We studied the effect of a late growing-season fire on the plant and foliar arthropod communities in a naturally occurring grassland. In central Arkansas, these grasslands are common on south-facing slopes where shallow soils and hot/dry weather conditions during the summer cannot support the growth of a forest community. Patches of grassland were burned in the autumn (4 November, late growing season), often the time of natural fires in Arkansas, and compared to unburned areas. Fire increased the biomass of forbs and decreased the biomass of grasses, although overall biomass was not different between treatments. Among the foliar arthropods, herbivores were significantly reduced by burning, especially the Homoptera. Carnivorous arthropods as a whole were not affected by burning, although spiders showed a small but significant reduction. The response of arthropods to fire occurred almost one year after the burn, showing that fire effects can be delayed for a substantial period of time. This experiment shows that fire occurring during the natural burning period in Arkansas can have substantial effects on grasslands communities. The response of plants in Arkansas is similar to that of plants in nearby grasslands on the Great Plains and southeastern United States which also show a great increase in forbs under late growing season burning regimes. The changes seen in this experiment demonstrate that the suppression of fire by humans has probably modified the structure of Arkansas grasslands. With the increasing use of fire as a management tool in Arkansas, changes to grassland systems are likely to be profound

Bayesian Hierarchical Factor Regression Models to Infer Cause of Death From Verbal Autopsy Data

In low-resource settings where vital registration of death is not routine it is often of critical interest to determine and study the cause of death (COD) for individuals and the cause-specific mortality fraction (CSMF) for populations. Post-mortem autopsies, considered the gold standard for COD assignment, are often difficult or impossible to implement due to deaths occurring outside the hospital, expense, and/or cultural norms. For this reason, Verbal Autopsies (VAs) are commonly conducted, consisting of a questionnaire administered to next of kin recording demographic information, known medical conditions, symptoms, and other factors for the decedent. This article proposes a novel class of hierarchical factor regression models that avoid restrictive assumptions of standard methods, allow both the mean and covariance to vary with COD category, and can include covariate information on the decedent, region, or events surrounding death. Taking a Bayesian approach to inference, this work develops an MCMC algorithm and validates the FActor Regression for Verbal Autopsy (FARVA) model in simulation experiments. An application of FARVA to real VA data shows improved goodness-of-fit and better predictive performance in inferring COD and CSMF over competing methods. Code and a user manual are made available at https://github.com/kelrenmor/farva

Force dysmetria in spinocerebellar ataxia 6 correlates with functional capacity

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 6 (SCA6) is a genetic disease that causes pure cerebellar degeneration affecting walking, balance, and coordination. One of the main symptoms of SCA6 is dysmetria. The magnitude of dysmetria and its relation to functional capacity in SCA6 has not been studied. Our purpose was to quantify dysmetria and determine the relation between dysmetria and functional capacity in SCA6. Ten individuals diagnosed and genetically confirmed with SCA6 (63.7 ± 7.02yrs) and nine age-matched healthy controls (65.9 ± 8.5yrs) performed goal-directed isometric contractions with the ankle joint. Dysmetria was quantified as the force and time error during goal-directed contractions. SCA6 functional capacity was determined by ICARS and SARA clinical assessments. We found that SCA6 participants exhibited greater force dysmetria than healthy controls (P < 0.05), and reduced time dysmetria than healthy controls (P < 0.05). Only force dysmetria was significantly related to SCA6 functional capacity, as measured with ICARS kinetic score (R2 = 0.63), ICARS total score (R2 = 0.43), and SARA total score (R2 = 0.46). Our findings demonstrate that SCA6 exhibit force dysmetria and that force dysmetria is associated to SCA6 functional capacity. Quantifying force and time dysmetria in individuals with SCA6 could provide a more objective evaluation of the functional capacity and disease state in SCA6

Does prison location matter for prisoner wellbeing?: The effect of surrounding greenspace on self-harm and violence in prisons in England and Wales

Research on prison location primarily focuses on relationships with local communities and the impact of distance on visitation. Considering the issue of prison location in a different manner, this paper deploys GIS methodology to determine whether the characteristics of prison location can impact prisoners themselves. The presence of greenspace, blue space and major roads in a 500m buffer zone surrounding prisons in England and Wales was calculated using Geographical Information Systems (GIS). An econometric analysis was then undertaken examining this location data in relation to official statistics on violence and self-harm at the institutional level. Econometric estimations confirmed that there are lower levels of self-harm and violence in prisons with higher percentages of greenspace in the buffer zone. These relationships are statistically robust, and they persist when we control for prison size, type, age, and level of crowding. The findings suggest that prisoners may be influenced by the characteristics of prison sites, and that accordingly, these characteristics should be considered when locations for future prisons are selected. Based on these initial findings, we outline the potential for future research to further examine the effect of environmental features on individuals to whom they are not visible