Weaving Child-Plastic Relations with Early Childhood Educators in the Ecuadorian Andes

In a small village in the Ecuadorian Andes called Racar, plastics are intimately woven into social and ecological structures. These entanglements move beyond human control and generate toxic dependencies between humans, plastics, and others. This requires a pedagogical shift in how early childhood educators understand and respond to plastics. Drawing on field research with educators in Racar, this paper attempts to interrupt human-centric discourses of the child as separate from Andean ecologies and resituates childhoods as differentially embedded in complex place relations

Hurry Up and Wait: Differential Impacts of Congestion, Bottleneck Pressure, and Predictability on Patient Length of Stay

High work load, from high inventory levels, impacts unit processing times, but prior operations management studies have found conflicting results regarding direction. Thus, it is difficult to predict inventory’s effects on productivity a priori, inhibiting effective capacity management in high load systems. We categorize load into in-process inventory (congestion) and incoming inventory, decomposing the latter into its levels of bottleneck (BN) pressure and predictability, and quantify the magnitudes and directions of change on processing times. Using data from 283 hospitals, we find (1) high congestion increases a patient’s hospital stay up to 28%, indicating inefficiencies from overloaded resources; (2) a patient stays up to 11.7% longer if there is a high load of incoming low BN pressure patients, consistent with the slowdown associated with “social loafing”; (3) a patient’s stay is up to 10.2% shorter when there is a high incoming load of predictable patients, consistent with workload smoothing

Creating a French brewing heritage through terroir

The relevance of terroir in the creation of a French brewing heritage Drinking is a performance that reveals our identity and is shared by a community to become a distinctive behavioural pattern. In France this notion is particularely relevant through the promotion of terroir referring to the soil, the art and craft that went into the creation of the product. The importance and global recognition of the terroir is the basis of recognition for French wines on the international market, linking the product to a regional identity and craft. The need for craft, heritage and authenticity through terroir has spread to the brewing industry with French breweries opening every week to achieve one goal: brewing craft and local. The development of autonomous breweries that cultivate their ingredients is developing the concept of bière de terroir. Different beer styles can in fact be directly linked to their terroir as a result of a region's geography, topography, economy, politics and cultural heritage. My research will look at the importance of terroir in the creation of a French gastronomic heritage and its influence on the brewing industry. Though my research I want to find out if this terroir heritage can enable and be relevant in the creation of a French brewing heritage

Characteristics of patients with haematological and breast cancer (1996–2009) who died of heart failure-related causes after cancer therapy

Aims: To describe the characteristics and time to death of patients with breast or haematological cancer who died of heart failure (HF) after cancer therapy. Patients with an index admission for HF who died of HF-related causes (IAHF) and those with no index admission for HF who died of HF-related causes (NIAHF) were compared. Methods and results: We performed a linked data analysis of cancer registry, death registry, and hospital administration records (n = 15 987). Index HF admission must have occurred after cancer diagnosis. Of the 4894 patients who were deceased (30.6% of cohort), 734 died of HF-related causes (50.1% female) of which 279 (38.0%) had at least one IAHF (41.9% female) post-cancer diagnosis. Median age was 71 years [interquartile range (IQR) 62–78] for IAHF and 66 years (IQR 56–74) for NIAHF. There were fewer chemotherapy separations for IAHF patients (median = 4, IQR 2–9) compared with NIAHF patients (median = 6, IQR 2–12). Of the IAHF patients, 71% had died within 1 year of the index HF admission. There was no significant difference in HF-related mortality in IAHF patients compared with NIAHF (HR, 1.10, 95% CI, 0.94–1.29, P = 0.225). Conclusions: The profile of IAHF patients who died of HF-related causes after cancer treatment matched the current profile of HF in the general population (over half were aged ≥70 years). However, NIAHF were younger (62% were aged ≤69 years), female patients with breast cancer that died of HF-related causes before hospital admission for HF-related causes—a group that may have been undiagnosed or undertreated until death

Weaving Child-plastic Relations in the Ecuadorian Andes

In the small Andean town of Racar, Ecuador, plastics are deeply woven into land and culture. Within postqualitative framings, this dissertation puts into conversation research-creation and curriculum-making to invent pedagogical responses to plastics with children and early childhood educators at a local school named Santana. This pedagogical project interferes with prevailing Euro-western visions of the human in education that separate children in the Ecuadorian Andes from their relations with place and plastics. Together we think with material/conceptual contradictions and possibilities proposed through Andean weaving techniques as minor, but important, entry points to figuring the child within increasingly synthetic worlds in the Ecuadorian Andes. The dissertation takes shape as a collection that interlaces five key threads of inquiry: two articles, a research blog, the project’s Exhibit, and a series of websites that speak to the ongoing trajectories of the work. Woven together, these threads inhabit and further activate the ebbs and flows of the first year of an ongoing pedagogical project with Santana. Opening to the toxic/life-giving natures of plastics that figure this community, this research seeks to cultivate orientations to curriculum and pedagogy that enable children, educators and researchers to weave together a life with plastics in Racar

More than a feeling: A unified view of stress measurement for population science.

Stress can influence health throughout the lifespan, yet there is little agreement about what types and aspects of stress matter most for human health and disease. This is in part because "stress" is not a monolithic concept but rather, an emergent process that involves interactions between individual and environmental factors, historical and current events, allostatic states, and psychological and physiological reactivity. Many of these processes alone have been labeled as "stress." Stress science would be further advanced if researchers adopted a common conceptual model that incorporates epidemiological, affective, and psychophysiological perspectives, with more precise language for describing stress measures. We articulate an integrative working model, highlighting how stressor exposures across the life course influence habitual responding and stress reactivity, and how health behaviors interact with stress. We offer a Stress Typology articulating timescales for stress measurement - acute, event-based, daily, and chronic - and more precise language for dimensions of stress measurement

Increased Speed Equals Increased Wait: The Impact of a Reduction in Emergency Department Ultrasound Order Processing Time

We exploit an exogenous process change at two emergency departments (EDs) within a health system to test the theory that increasing capacity in a discretionary work setting increases wait times due to additional services being provided to customers as a consequence of reduced marginal costs for a task. We find that an increase in physician’s capacity for ordering ultrasounds (U/S) resulted in an 11.5 percentage point increase in the probability of an U/S being ordered, confirming that resource availability induces demand. Furthermore, we find that the additional U/S demand increased the time to return other radiological tests due to the higher demand placed on radiologists from the additional U/S. Consequently, the average length of stay (LOS) for patients with an abdominal complaint increased by nearly 30 minutes, and the waiting time to enter the ED increased by 26 minutes. We do not find any indications of improved performance on clinical metrics, with no statistical change in the number of admissions to the hospital or readmissions to the ED within 72 hours. Our study highlights an important lesson for process improvement in interdependent service settings: increasing process capacity at one step in the process can increase demand at that step, as well as for a subsequent shared service, and both can result in an overall negative impact on performance

A chemical proteomic approach to investigate Rab prenylation in living systems

Protein prenylation is an important post-translational modification that occurs in all eukaryotes; defects in the prenylation machinery can lead to toxicity or pathogenesis. Prenylation is the modification of a protein with a farnesyl or geranylgeranyl isoprenoid, and it facilitates protein-membrane and protein-protein interactions. Proteins of the Ras superfamily of small GTPases are almost all prenylated and of these the Rab family of proteins forms the largest group. Rab proteins are geranylgeranylated with up to two geranylgeranyl groups by the enzyme Rab geranylgeranyltransferase (RGGT). Prenylation of Rabs allows them to locate to the correct intracellular membranes and carry out their roles in vesicle trafficking. Traditional methods for probing prenylation involve the use of tritiated geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate which is hazardous, has lengthy detection times, and is insufficiently sensitive. The work described in this thesis developed systems for labelling Rabs and other geranylgeranylated proteins using a technique known as tagging-by-substrate, enabling rapid analysis of defective Rab prenylation in cells and tissues. An azide analogue of the geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate substrate of RGGT (AzGGpp) was applied for in vitro prenylation of Rabs by recombinant enzyme. Alternatively, geranylgeranylated proteins (including Rabs) were labelled with AzGG via metabolic labelling of live cells with AzGGOH. Once Rabs were tagged with an azide moiety they could be labelled via a bioorthogonal ligation reaction with a trifunctional alkyne probe. The probe contained a fluorophore for in-gel fluorescence analysis and a biotin affinity label for affinity purification of labelled proteins. The conditions for protein tagging, labelling, affinity purification and LC-MS/MS analysis were optimised significantly during this work. Affinity purified proteins were identified and in some cases quantified using LC-MS/MS techniques, with iTRAQ labelling for quantification. Rab prenylation was probed in cell culture, in cells treated with the drug Mevastatin and in tissue from mouse models with defects in the prenylation machinery