Organizational Change: The Experiences of Practitioners Transitioning to a Fee-for-Service Model

Many human service agencies are in the midst of a transition for a fee-for-service model. Through the midst of the transition, organizations must shift the culture of their agency and adapt to the new service delivery approach. Some organizational changes can create feelings of insecurity among staff, fewer resources, and greater potential for employee burnout. Though there is some research that provides valuable information, it often fails to highlight the individual experiences of the worker. This phenomenological study begins to explore the experiences and perceptions of practitioners working in supported housing agencies during the transition to a fee-for-service approach. The researchers utilized two focus groups to collect data and conducted thematic analysis to highlight specific themes to address the benefits and areas of improvements of a fee-for-service model. By understanding the experiences and perspectives from practitioners, other human service providers may have a greater understanding of implications for their practice

Wind Symphony

Center for the Performing Arts February 18, 2018 Sunday Evening 7:00p.m

Perceptions of Recovery While Delivering Medicaid Covered Rehabilitation Services

Many states have shifted to Medicaid reimbursement methods to cover behavioral health services. In doing so, state mental health authorities have incorporated the concept of recovery into mental health policy. Thus, gaining a better understanding of practitioners’ perceptions of recovery in a new fiscal environment is warranted. This qualitative study explores how New Jersey practitioners transitioning to a new state-wide Medicaid payment structure perceive recovery from mental illness. Four themes emerged following a thematic analysis. Future studies that explore perspectives of individuals receiving services could provide useful information for policy makers, agencies, and community stakeholders

Drivers of variation in the migration and foraging strategies of pelagic seabirds

The ability to move and forage efficiently plays a major role in determining the fate of individuals, and has important implications for population dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Migration is a particular type of movement strategy, whereby animals may travel remarkable distances in order to take advantage of seasonality in resource availability or to avoid arduous winter conditions; however, this can be at a cost in terms of increased mortality. Indeed, anthropogenic threats in non-breeding areas are a major cause of population declines and a better understanding of non-breeding spatial ecology is required in order to advance both ecological theory and conservation management. The recent development of animal tracking technologies, in particular light-based geolocation, has made it possible to track large-scale and long-term movements; however, there are still gaps in our knowledge, such as the links between migratory and reproductive performance, connectivity among populations and the ontogeny of migration strategies. In this thesis, I utilise multi-species and longitudinal datasets from albatrosses and petrels, some of the most mobile species on Earth, to explore the drivers of variation in movements, habitat use and foraging behaviour, and the implications for life history and conservation. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of the key topics of this thesis. In Chapter 2, I provide quantitative recommendations of minimum sample sizes needed to track pelagic seabird migrations, using data from 10 species. In Chapter 3, I examine between- and within-population differences in the habitat preferences and distributions of albatrosses, including the relative roles of habitat specialization and intra-specific competition. In Chapter 4, I investigate the year-round movement and foraging strategies of petrels living in nutrient-poor environments. In Chapter 5, I examine potential links between foraging behaviour during the non-breeding season and reproductive senescence. In Chapter 6, I explore the ontogeny of foraging behaviour and foraging site fidelity in young albatrosses, shedding light on their “lost years” at sea. Finally, I conclude with a general discussion summarizing main findings and suggesting future work. Overall, my results highlight the complex relationships among individual traits, the environment, movements and foraging behaviour, and population dynamics across the lifespan of individuals, with implications for the conservation of this highly threatened group of species.NERC Studenship as part of NERC Standard Grant NE/J021083/

Managing Patient Health Across Diverse Spaces: Using Activity Theory to Model Pervasive Decision Support

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems can offer health care providers and patient data that is intelligently filtered and presented in ways to enhance diagnosis and long-term health care management, both within and outside clinical spaces. Challenges to this information management include diagnostic error and inefficiencies from conflicting, incomplete, or suboptimal clinical systems [3] as well as extending care outside the traditional clinical environment. We propose a Clinical Activity Model (CAM) to understand pervasive CDS system design and use across multiple health care spaces as patients move between critical care, recovery, and long-term home care. We discuss CAM in the context of research findings comparing a novel CDS system with traditional modes of data delivery and by describing use of that system as a mobile diagnostic tool to bridge clinical care and home care

Affirmative Action and Socioeconomic Status/Class

This brief shall describe the relationship between affirmative action and socioeconomic status. More specifically, this brief will focus on legislation that led to African-American residential segregation pre-1961, and the effects of this residential segregation on the present African-American community and affirmative action policy. Furthermore, this brief will attempt to examine whether or not low socioeconomic status and race are correlated with affirmative action policy. This brief will conclude that affirmative action simultaneously addresses both race and low socioeconomic status

Data Quality Assessment of Ungated Flow Cytometry Data in High

Background: The recent development of semi-automated techniques for staining and analyzing flow cytometry samples has presented new challenges. Quality control and quality assessment are critical when developing new high throughput technologies and their associated information services. Our experience suggests that significant bottlenecks remain in the development of high throughput flow cytometry methods for data analysis and display. Especially, data quality control and quality assessment are crucial steps in processing and analyzing high throughput flow cytometry data. Methods: We propose a variety of graphical exploratory data analytic tools for exploring ungated flow cytometry data. We have implemented a number of specialized functions and methods in the Bioconductor package rflowcyt. We demonstrate the use of these approaches by investigating two independent sets of high throughput flow cytometry data. Results: We found that graphical representations can reveal substantial non-biological differences in samples. Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function and summary scatterplots were especially useful in the rapid identification of problems not identified by manual review. Conclusions: Graphical exploratory data analytic tools are quick and useful means of assessing data quality. We propose that the described visualizations should be used as quality assessment tools and where possible, be used for quality control

DIDA: Distributed Indexing Dispatched Alignment

One essential application in bioinformatics that is affected by the high-throughput sequencing data deluge is the sequence alignment problem, where nucleotide or amino acid sequences are queried against targets to find regions of close similarity. When queries are too many and/or targets are too large, the alignment process becomes computationally challenging. This is usually addressed by preprocessing techniques, where the queries and/or targets are indexed for easy access while searching for matches. When the target is static, such as in an established reference genome, the cost of indexing is amortized by reusing the generated index. However, when the targets are non-static, such as contigs in the intermediate steps of a de novo assembly process, a new index must be computed for each run. To address such scalability problems, we present DIDA, a novel framework that distributes the indexing and alignment tasks into smaller subtasks over a cluster of compute nodes. It provides a workflow beyond the common practice of embarrassingly parallel implementations. DIDA is a cost-effective, scalable and modular framework for the sequence alignment problem in terms of memory usage and runtime. It can be employed in large-scale alignments to draft genomes and intermediate stages of de novo assembly runs. The DIDA source code, sample files and user manual are available through http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/dida. The software is released under the British Columbia Cancer Agency License (BCCA), and is free for academic use

Book Reviews

Book reviews of: Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. By Tera W. Hunter. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. 404 pp. $29.95, cloth. ISBN: 9780674045712.) Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi. By Ellen B. Meacham. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Acknowledgements, source notes, bibliography, about the photographers, index, Pp. xi, 293.$28 cloth. ISBN 9781496817457.) Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till. By Elliott J. Gorn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Acknowledgements, source notes, bibliography, index, Pp. xi, 400. $27.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780199335122.) The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. By Mark Wahlgren Summers. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 528 pp., 21 halftones, notes, bibl., index.$40.00 cloth. ISBN: 978-1-4696-1757-2.) Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War. By Catherine Clinton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. $48.00 hardback. ISBN: 978807164570.) Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500- 1850. By Cameron B. Strang. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Acknowledgements, illustrations, index. Pp. vii, 357.$39.95 Cloth. ISBN: 9781469640471.) Vicksburg, Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy. By Donald L. Miller. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Notes, illustrations, index. Pp. 663. $35.00.

The ‘Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids’ community effectiveness trial: study protocol of a community-based healthy lifestyle program for fathers and their children

Background: The \u27Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids\u27 program was designed to help overweight fathers lose weight and positively influence the health behaviors of their children. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the previously established program in a community setting, in a large effectiveness trial. Methods/Design: The Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids community trial consists of three stages: (i) Stage 1 - program refinement and resource development (ii) Stage 2 - community randomized controlled trial (iii) Stage 3 - community effectiveness trial. The program will be evaluated in five Local Government Areas in the Hunter Valley Region of NSW, Australia. For the community randomized controlled trial, 50 overweight/obese men (aged 18-65 years) from one Local Government Area with a child aged between 5-12 years of age will be recruited. Families will be randomized to either the program or a 6-month wait-list control group. Fathers and their children will be assessed at baseline, post-intervention (3-months) and 6-months. Inclusion criteria are: body mass index 25-40 kg/m2; no participation in other weight loss programs during the study; pass a health-screening questionnaire; and access to a computer with Internet facilities. In the community trial, the program will be evaluated using a non-randomized, prospective design in five Local Government Areas. The exclusion criteria is body mass index \u3c 25 kg/m2 or lack of doctor\u27s approval. Measures will be collected at baseline, 3-, 6- and 12-months. The program involves fathers attending seven face-to-face group sessions (three with children) over 3-months. Measures: The primary outcome is fathers\u27 weight. Secondary outcomes for both fathers and children include: waist circumference, blood pressure, resting heart rate, physical activity, sedentary behaviors and dietary intake. Father-only measures include portion size, alcohol consumption, parenting for physical activity and nutrition and parental engagement. Process evaluation will determine the fidelity, dose (delivered and received), reach, recruitment and context of the program. Discussion: As a unique approach to reducing obesity prevalence in men and improving lifestyle behaviours in children, our findings will provide important evidence relating to the translation of Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids, which will enable it to be delivered on a larger scale