Intergenerational Program Design Recommendations for Arts Organizations

66 pagesIntergenerational art programs bridge generations while inspiring the creative process. Although projects involving participants of different generations have been in existence for centuries, the development of intergenerational arts program design for nonprofits, museums, and senior centers is relatively new. In this new field, recent research has been promising, revealing improved health and social outcomes for older adults participating in arts programs and an increased understanding of aging for youth participating in intergenerational programs. The purpose of this study is to understand the program design behind current, exemplary examples of intergenerational arts programs. This study investigated three organizations, seeking out overarching themes and key elements. Three organizations were highlighted as case studies: Opening Minds through Art (OMA), TimeSlips, and the Geezer Gallery. Each case study provided a unique style of program design, based upon their community, resources, and needs. These case studies were used to inform a set of recommendations for beginning an intergenerational arts program. This project builds upon existing research covering the impact of lifelong learning, intergenerational programs, and arts programs for both children and older adults. It serves as a reference point for professionals in the field of Arts and Healthcare, marking current, key organizations offering intergenerational arts programs alongside program design recommendations

The semileptonic decays η(′)→π0ℓ+ℓ−\eta^{(\prime)} \to \pi^0 \ell^+ \ell^- and η′→ηℓ+ℓ−\eta' \to \eta \ell^+ \ell^- in the standard model

We perform a theoretical analysis of the semileptonic decays $\eta^{(\prime)} \to \pi^0 \ell^+ \ell^-$ and $\eta' \to \eta \ell^+ \ell^-$, where $\ell = e, \mu$, via a charge-conjugation-conserving two-photon mechanism. The underlying form factors are modeled using vector-meson dominance, phenomenological input, and $\mathrm{U}(3)$ flavor symmetry. We consider both a monopole and a dipole model, the latter tailored such that the expected high-energy behavior is ensured. Furthermore, we benchmark the effect of $S$-wave rescattering contributions to the decays. We infer significant effects of the form factors neglected in the literature so far, still finding branching ratios of the various decays well below the current experimental upper limits.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, 13 tables; C++ interface for Collier and Passarino-Veltman decompositions as ancillary file

Methods for assessing guideline adherence for invasive procedures in the care of chronic coronary artery disease: a scoping review

Objectives In the care of coronary artery disease (CAD), evidence questions the adequate application of guidelines for cardiovascular procedures, particularly coronary angiographies (CA) and myocardial revascularisation. This review aims to examine how care providers’ guideline adherence for CA and myocardial revascularisation in the care of chronic CAD was assessed in the literature.Design Scoping review.Data sources PubMed and EMBASE were searched through in June 2021 (rerun in September 2022).Eligibility criteria We included studies assessing care providers’ adherence to evidence-based guidelines for CA or myocardial revascularisation in the care of chronic CAD. Studies had to list the evaluation of guideline adherence as study objective, describe the evaluation methods used and report the underlying guidelines and recommendations.Data extraction and synthesis Two independent reviewers used standardised forms to extract study characteristics, methodological aspects such as data sources and variables, definitions of guideline adherence and quantification methods and the extent of guideline adherence. To elucidate the measurement of guideline adherence, the main steps were described.Results Twelve studies (311 869 participants) were included, which evaluated guideline adherence by (1) defining guideline adherence, (2) specifying the study population, (3) assigning (classes of) recommendations and (4) quantifying adherence. Thereby, primarily secondary data were used. Studies differed in their definitions of guideline adherence, where six studies each considered only recommendation class I/grade A/strong recommendations as adherent or additionally recommendation classes IIa/IIb. Furthermore, some of the studies reported a priori definitions and allocation rules for the assignment of recommendation classes. Guideline adherence results ranged from 10% for percutaneous coronary intervention with prior heart team discussion to 98% for coronary artery bypass grafting.Conclusion Due to remarkable inconsistencies in the assessment, a cautious interpretation of the guideline adherence results is required. Future efforts should endeavour to establish a consistent understanding of the concept of guideline adherence

“I guess it's quite trendy”: A qualitative insight into young meat-eaters’ sustainable food consumption habits and perceptions towards current and future protein alternatives

As the market for sustainable food continues to expand, there is a need to understand how consumers’ consumption habits and perceptions are changing. Targeting the younger populations is of interest as they arguably will shape the future of food. Therefore, the present study aimed to provide in-depth consumer insights on a range of topics from current consumption habits (i.e., meat reduction, plant-based meat/seafood (PBM/S)), towards future protein alternatives (i.e., cell-based meat/seafood (CBM/S), precision fermented dairy (PFD)). Online focus groups were conducted in the UK with meat-eaters (n = 38) aged 18–34. Codebook thematic analysis was applied using the Framework Matrix as a tool for data analysis. Key themes were presented using the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation), which identified areas of behavioural change. Results found a trend towards meat reduction, partially initiated by moving away from home and limited food budgets. Overall, participants acknowledged the environmental impact of food, but a notable knowledge gap was apparent when quantifying the effect, especially for dairy and seafood. Compared to PBM, few participants had tried PBS products, partially due to lower availability and familiarity. Enablers for PBM/S included convenience, positive sensory experiences and the influence of others, whilst barriers related to negative health connotations and over-processing. For CBM/S and PFD, animal welfare, curiosity and optimised nutrition acted as enablers, whilst barriers related to wider consumer acceptance, affordability and unnaturalness. In general, participants felt changing food consumption habits can have an impact on climate change and were optimistic about novel technologies supporting future protein transitions. Increasing public understanding around the environmental impact of food, especially seafood and dairy, and prioritising the affordability of sustainable food are suggested as intervention strategies to encourage sustainable food consumption

Multispecies Livelihoods: A Posthumanist Approach to Wildlife Ecotourism That Promotes Animal Ethics

Research on animal ethics in tourism has gained traction but posthumanist approaches to wildlife (eco)tourism remain sparse. There has never been a more urgent need to redress this paucity in theory and practice. More than 60% of the world’s wildlife has died-off in the last 50 years, 100 million-plus nonhuman animals are used for entertainment in wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs), more than one billion “wildlife” live in captivity, and some scholars argue that earth has entered its sixth mass extinction event known as the Anthropocene. This paper presents a posthumanist multispecies livelihoods framework (MLF) based on an applied ethnographic study of 47 wildlife ecotourism (WE) operators and wildlife researchers in protected area WTAs across four countries. Like any framework, it is a snapshot of the authors’ thinking at a particular time and must be improved upon. The MLF does not purport to solve the negative treatment of nonhumans that can occur in tourism settings, but rather responds to calls in the tourism literature to acknowledge our effects on other species and advocates for equitable human-nonhuman livelihoods. This paper argues that we have a moral responsibility to nonhumans and the environment, and the authors hope to generate reflexive discourse concerning the role tourism can play in redressing the ecological crisis and improving the treatment of individual nonhumans to foster wildlife-human coexistence

An Intriguing Solar Microflare Observed with RHESSI, Hinode and TRACE

Investigate particle acceleration and heating in a solar microflare. In a microflare with non-thermal emission to remarkably high energies ($>50$ keV), we investigate the hard X-rays with RHESSI imaging and spectroscopy and the resulting thermal emission seen in soft X-rays with Hinode/XRT and in EUV with TRACE. The non-thermal footpoints observed with RHESSI spatially and temporally match bright footpoint emission in soft X-rays and EUV. There is the possibility that the non-thermal spectrum extends down to 4 keV. The hard X-ray burst clearly does not follow the expected Neupert effect, with the time integrated hard X-rays not matching the soft X-ray time profile. So although this is a simple microflare with good X-ray observation coverage it does not fit the standard flare model.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, accepted by A&

A vision for hydrological prediction

IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes (IMPREX) was a European Union Horizon 2020 project that ran from September 2015 to September 2019. Its aim was to improve society’s ability to anticipate and respond to future extreme hydrological events in Europe across a variety of uses in the water-related sectors (flood forecasting, drought risk assessment, agriculture, navigation, hydropower, and water supply utilities). Through the engagement with stakeholders and continuous feedback between model outputs and water applications, progress was achieved in better understanding the way hydrological predictions can be useful to (and operationally incorporated into) problem solving in the water sector. The work and discussions carried out during the project nurtured further reflections towards a common vision for hydrological prediction. In this article, we summarize the main findings of the IMPREX project within a broader overview of hydrological prediction, providing a vision for improving such predictions. In so doing, we firstly present a synopsis of hydrological and weather forecasting, with a focus on medium-range to seasonal scales of prediction for increased preparedness. Second, the lessons learnt from IMPREX are discussed. The key findings are the gaps highlighted in the global observing system of the hydrological cycle, the degree of accuracy of hydrological models and the techniques of post-processing to correct biases, the origin of seasonal hydrological skill in Europe, and user requirements of hydrometeorological forecasts to ensure their appropriate use in decision-making models and practices. Lastly, a vision for how to improve these forecast systems/products in the future is expounded and these include advancing numerical weather and hydrological models, improved earth monitoring, and more frequent interaction between forecasters and users to tailor the forecasts to applications. We conclude that if these improvements can be implemented in the coming years, earth system and hydrological modelling will become more skilful, thus leading to socioeconomic benefits for the citizens of Europe and beyond

Direct prediction of genetic aberrations from pathology images in gastric cancer with swarm learning.

BACKGROUND Computational pathology uses deep learning (DL) to extract biomarkers from routine pathology slides. Large multicentric datasets improve performance, but such datasets are scarce for gastric cancer. This limitation could be overcome by Swarm Learning (SL). METHODS Here, we report the results of a multicentric retrospective study of SL for prediction of molecular biomarkers in gastric cancer. We collected tissue samples with known microsatellite instability (MSI) and Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) status from four patient cohorts from Switzerland, Germany, the UK and the USA, storing each dataset on a physically separate computer. RESULTS On an external validation cohort, the SL-based classifier reached an area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) of 0.8092 (± 0.0132) for MSI prediction and 0.8372 (± 0.0179) for EBV prediction. The centralized model, which was trained on all datasets on a single computer, reached a similar performance. CONCLUSIONS Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of SL-based molecular biomarkers in gastric cancer. In the future, SL could be used for collaborative training and, thus, improve the performance of these biomarkers. This may ultimately result in clinical-grade performance and generalizability

Implications for electron acceleration and transport from non-thermal electron rates at looptop and footpoint sources in solar flares

The interrelation of hard X-ray (HXR) emitting sources and the underlying physics of electron acceleration and transport presents one of the major questions in the high energy solar flare physics. Spatially resolved observations of solar flares often demonstrate the presence of well separated sources of bremsstrahlung emission, so-called coronal and foot-point sources. Using spatially resolved X-ray observations by the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) and recently improved imaging techniques, we investigate in detail the spatially resolved electron distributions in a few well observed solar flares. The selected flares can be interpreted as having a standard geometry with chromospheric HXR foot-point sources related to thick-target X-ray emission and the coronal sources characterised by a combination of thermal and thin-target bremsstrahlung. Using imaging spectroscopy technique, we deduce the characteristic electron rates and spectral indices required to explain the coronal and foot-points X-ray sources. We found that, during the impulsive phase, the electron rate at the loop-top is several times (a factor of 1.7-8) higher than at the foot-points. The results suggest sufficient number of electrons accelerated in the loop-top to explain the precipitation into the foot-points and implies electrons accumulation in the loop-top. We discuss these results in terms of magnetic trapping, pitch-angle scattering and injection properties. Our conclusion is that the accelerated electrons must be subject to magnetic trapping and/or pitch-angle scattering, keeping a fraction of the population trapped inside the coronal loops. These findings put strong constraints on the particle transport in the coronal source, and provide a quantitative limits on deka-keV electron trapping/scattering in the coronal source

Benchmarking weakly-supervised deep learning pipelines for whole slide classification in computational pathology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can extract visual information from histopathological slides and yield biological insight and clinical biomarkers. Whole slide images are cut into thousands of tiles and classification problems are often weakly-supervised: the ground truth is only known for the slide, not for every single tile. In classical weakly-supervised analysis pipelines, all tiles inherit the slide label while in multiple-instance learning (MIL), only bags of tiles inherit the label. However, it is still unclear how these widely used but markedly different approaches perform relative to each other. We implemented and systematically compared six methods in six clinically relevant end-to-end prediction tasks using data from N=2980 patients for training with rigorous external validation. We tested three classical weakly-supervised approaches with convolutional neural networks and vision transformers (ViT) and three MIL-based approaches with and without an additional attention module. Our results empirically demonstrate that histological tumor subtyping of renal cell carcinoma is an easy task in which all approaches achieve an area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) of above 0.9. In contrast, we report significant performance differences for clinically relevant tasks of mutation prediction in colorectal, gastric, and bladder cancer. In these mutation prediction tasks, classical weakly-supervised workflows outperformed MIL-based weakly-supervised methods for mutation prediction, which is surprising given their simplicity. This shows that new end-to-end image analysis pipelines in computational pathology should be compared to classical weakly-supervised methods. Also, these findings motivate the development of new methods which combine the elegant assumptions of MIL with the empirically observed higher performance of classical weakly-supervised approaches. We make all source codes publicly available at https://github.com/KatherLab/HIA, allowing easy application of all methods to any similar task