Working with Traumatic Brain Injury in Schools: Transition, Assessment, and Intervention

Every day, children and adolescents worldwide return to the educational setting having sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The possible negative consequences of TBI range from mild to severe and include neurological, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral difficulties. Within the school setting, the negative effects of TBI tend to persist or worsen over time, often resulting in academic and social difficulties that require formal and informal educational assistance and support. School psychologists and other educational professionals are well-positioned to help ensure students with TBI receive this assistance and support

Re-analysis of the Levanluhta skeletal material : Sex and stature estimation of individuals in an Iron Age water burial in Finland

Levanluhta, an Iron Age water burial site in Finland, and its material consisting of commingled skeletal remains and artifacts, has been studied by several researchers over the past 100 years, resulting in multiple interpretations of the people and the site. Previous skeletal analyses have concluded that the majority of the individuals represented in the remains were females and children and were of relatively short stature, so possibly nutritionally deprived. This study re-analyzed the commingled adult human remains with updated methods. The methods applied in this study to estimate sex and stature were based on more representative European reference samples than the previously applied methods. The methods included morphology, osteometrics, and computed tomography (CT) scans. Our results indicated that depending on the reference data, the majority of the individual adult bones including os coxae (73%, n = 45) and long bones (humerus 83%-89%, n = 52; radius 72%-89%, n = 47; ulna 50%-65%, n = 58; femur 92%-100%, n = 25; tibia 77%-85%, n = 26) were classified as females based on their size and morphology. The cross-sectional bone properties of humerii, femora, and tibiae visualized using CT scanning also supported these findings. However, the cranial morphology did not show as clear female-biased sex ratio as other methods (42% females, 33% males, 24% undetermined, n = 33). In females, the mean stature based on the tibia (155.3 cm, n = 10) was within the range of the coeval European females and did not necessarily indicate nutritional deprivation, which is in line with previously published stable isotope findings from the site. The mean stature based on the tibia suggested that the Levanluhta males were short (164.0 cm, n = 3), but final interpretations were limited due to the small number of male individuals. The current study affirmed that the Levanluhta skeletal assemblage was female biased and gave new insights into interpretation of the stature.Peer reviewe

Influences on achieving motor milestones: A twin-singleton study

In order to determine if twinning impacted achievement of motor milestones the attainment of early motor milestones in twins was examined and compared to published data from singletons of the same age from the same culture and birth years. We examined the influence of twinning, sex, zygosity and birth cohort (1987-2001) on the motor development of twins aged 0 to 24 months. Data on the attainment of motor milestones (turn, sit, crawl, stand and walk) of twins were collected from maternal reports. All data were corrected for gestational age. Data from the twin sample were compared to normative data from singletons, which were available from Child Health Clinics (CHC). Analyses across twin data and the CHC singleton data revealed no differences between twins and singletons in achievement of motor milestones. Girls were able to sit without support slightly earlier than boys, otherwise there were no other sex differences. Birth-order analyses revealed minimal but significant differences in turning over from back to belly and for sitting without support between the first- and second-born. Dizygotic (DZ) twins were faster than monozygotic (MZ) twins in achieving the moment of sit, crawl, stand and walk. Twins born in earlier cohorts were faster in reaching the moment of crawl, sit and walk. It is concluded that there are no differences in time of reaching motor milestones between twins and singletons within the normal range. Sex has minimal to no effect on motor development in early childhood. DZ twins achieve motor milestones sooner than MZ twins. Attainment of gross motor milestones (crawl, stand and walk) is delayed in later birth cohorts

Change in Terrestrial Human Footprint Drives Continued Loss of Intact Ecosystems

Human pressure mapping is important for understanding humanity's role in shaping Earth's patterns and processes. We provide the latest maps of the terrestrial human footprint and provide an assessment of change in human pressure across Earth. Between 2000 and 2013, 1.9 million km2 of land relatively free of human disturbance became highly modified. Our results show that humanity's footprint is eroding Earth's last intact ecosystems and that greater efforts are urgently needed to retain them

Write-rationing garbage collection for hybrid memories

Emerging Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies offer high capacity and energy efficiency compared to DRAM, but suffer from limited write endurance and longer latencies. Prior work seeks the best of both technologies by combining DRAM and NVM in hybrid memories to attain low latency, high capacity, energy efficiency, and durability. Coarse-grained hardware and OS optimizations then spread writes out (wear-leveling) and place highly mutated pages in DRAM to extend NVM lifetimes. Unfortunately even with these coarse-grained methods, popular Java applications exact impractical NVM lifetimes of 4 years or less. This paper shows how to make hybrid memories practical, without changing the programming model, by enhancing garbage collection in managed language runtimes. We find object write behaviors offer two opportunities: (1) 70% of writes occur to newly allocated objects, and (2) 2% of objects capture 81% of writes to mature objects. We introduce writerationing garbage collectors that exploit these fine-grained behaviors. They extend NVM lifetimes by placing highly mutated objects in DRAM and read-mostly objects in NVM. We implement two such systems. (1) Kingsguard-nursery places new allocation in DRAM and survivors in NVM, reducing NVM writes by 5x versus NVM only with wear-leveling. (2) Kingsguard-writers (KG-W) places nursery objects in DRAM and survivors in a DRAM observer space. It monitors all mature object writes and moves unwritten mature objects from DRAM to NVM. Because most mature objects are unwritten, KG-W exploits NVM capacity while increasing NVM lifetimes by 11x. It reduces the energy-delay product by 32% over DRAM-only and 29% over NVM-only. This work opens up new avenues for making hybrid memories practical

Life-threatening hypersensitivity pneumonitis induced by docetaxel (taxotere)

4 patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with docetaxel developed life-threatening pneumonitis requiring mechanical ventilation. Docetaxel (30–60 mg m−2, according to a different protocol) was infused within one hour with standard premedications. One patient's pneumonitis occurred 5 days after the first dose of docetaxel, and that of the other 3 between the 2nd and 6th cycles. Based on the clinical course, radiological findings of an interstitial pneumonitis, and exclusion of other possible resultant causes, including metastatic cancer, radiation pulmonary injury, infection, or connective tissue disease, hypersensitivity pneumonitis was diagnosed. The patients were treated with hydrocortisone at 1200 mg per day or methylprednisolone at 240 mg per day. Although 3 of the 4 had a partial improvement in lung oxygenation, all patients’ conditions of hypersensitivity pneumonitis persisted and were complicated by other events, such as hospital-acquired infection and tension pneumothorax. The presence of this unusual hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which was so severe as to be life-threatening and refractory to high-dose corticosteroid therapy, should be taken into account during docetaxel treatment. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaig

Modelling urban growth evolution and land-use changes using GIS based cellular automata and SLEUTH models: the case of Sana'a metropolitan city, Yemen.

An effective and efficient planning of an urban growth and land use changes and its impact on the environment requires information about growth trends and patterns amongst other important information. Over the years, many urban growth models have been developed and used in the developed countries for forecasting growth patterns. In the developing countries however, there exist a very few studies showing the application of these models and their performances. In this study two models such as cellular automata (CA) and the SLEUTH models are applied in a geographical information system (GIS) to simulate and predict the urban growth and land use change for the City of Sana’a (Yemen) for the period 2004–2020. GIS based maps were generated for the urban growth pattern of the city which was further analyzed using geo-statistical techniques. During the models calibration process, a total of 35 years of time series dataset such as historical topographical maps, aerial photographs and satellite imageries was used to identify the parameters that influenced the urban growth. The validation result showed an overall accuracy of 99.6 %; with the producer’s accuracy of 83.3 % and the user’s accuracy 83.6 %. The SLEUTH model used the best fit growth rule parameters during the calibration to forecasting future urban growth pattern and generated various probability maps in which the individual grid cells are urbanized assuming unique “urban growth signatures”. The models generated future urban growth pattern and land use changes from the period 2004–2020. Both models proved effective in forecasting growth pattern that will be useful in planning and decision making. In comparison, the CA model growth pattern showed high density development, in which growth edges were filled and clusters were merged together to form a compact built-up area wherein less agricultural lands were included. On the contrary, the SLEUTH model growth pattern showed more urban sprawl and low-density development that included substantial areas of agricultural lands