Asking the experts : developing and validating parental diaries to assess children's minor injuries

The methodological issues involved in parental reporting of events in children's everyday lives are discussed with reference to the development and validation of an incident diary, collecting concurrent data on minor injuries in a community study of children under eight years old. Eighty-two mothers participated in a comparison over nine days of daily telephone interviews and structured incident diaries. Telephone methods resulted in more missing data, and participants in both groups expressed a preference for the diary method. This diary was then validated on a sample of 56 preschool and school-aged children by comparing injury recording by a research health visitor with that of their mothers. Each failed to report some injuries, but there was good agreement overall, and in descriptive data on injuries reported by both. Parental diaries have the potential to provide rich data, of acceptable validity, on minor events in everyday life

Decomposition of coarse woody debris in a long-term litter manipulation experiment: A focus on nutrient availability

The majority of above-ground carbon in tropical forests is stored in wood, which is returned to the atmosphere during decomposition of coarse woody debris. However, the factors controlling wood decomposition have not been experimentally manipulated over time scales comparable to the length of this process.We hypothesized that wood decomposition is limited by nutrient availability and tested this hypothesis in a long-term litter addition and removal experiment in a lowland tropical forest in Panama. Specifically, we quantified decomposition using a 15-year chronosequence of decaying boles, and measured respiration rates and nutrient limitation of wood decomposer communities.The long-term probability that a dead tree completely decomposed was decreased in plots where litter was removed, but did not differ between litter addition and control treatments. Similarly, respiration rates of wood decomposer communities were greater in control treatments relative to litter removal plots; litter addition treatments did not differ from either of the other treatments. Respiration rates increased in response to nutrient addition (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) in the litter removal and addition treatments, but not in the controls.Established decreases in concentrations of soil nutrients in litter removal plots and increased respiration rates in response to nutrient addition suggest that reduced rates of wood decomposition after litter removal were caused by decreased nutrient availability. The effects of litter manipulations differed directionally from a previous short-term decomposition study in the same plots, and reduced rates of bole decomposition in litter removal plots did not emerge until after more than 6 years of decomposition. These differences suggest that litter-mediated effects on nutrient dynamics have complex interactions with decomposition over time

A Study into Detecting Anomalous Behaviours within HealthCare Infrastructures

The theft of medical data, which is intrinsically valuable, can lead to loss of patient privacy and trust. With increasing requirements for valuable and accurate information, patients need to be confident that their data is being stored safely and securely. However, medical devices are vulnerable to attacks from the digital domain, with many devices transmitting data unencrypted wirelessly to electronic patient record systems. As such, it is now becoming more necessary to visualise data patterns and trends in order identify erratic and anomalous data behaviours. In this paper, a system design for modelling data flow within healthcare infrastructures is presented. The system assists information security officers within healthcare organisations to improve the situational awareness of cyber security risks. In addition, a visualisation of TCP Socket Connections using real-world network data is put forward, in order to demonstrate the framework and present an analysis of potential risks

Securing Health Care Information Systems using Visualisation Techniques

Health care information systems form the backbone of health care infrastructures and are increasingly reliant on medical devices to capture and transmit data. These devices, however, are vulnerable to attacks from the digital domain. The number of differing medical devices and information systems interacting with one another in new and increasingly less secure and disparate ways creates new challenges in information systems security. This work-in-progress paper presents a system design and methodology for modelling data interactions and data flow within the health care infrastructure. The system will increase situational awareness for users of information systems and promote stronger cyber security best practices and policies within this rapidly evolving landscape

Generation of otic lineages from integration-free human-induced pluripotent stem cells reprogrammed by mRNAs

Damage to the sensory hair cells and the spiral ganglion neurons of the cochlea leads to deafness. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are a promising tool to regenerate the cells in the inner ear that have been affected by pathology or have been lost. To facilitate the clinical application of iPSCs, the reprogramming process should minimize the risk of introducing undesired genetic alterations while conferring the cells the capacity to differentiate into the desired cell type. Currently, reprogramming induced by synthetic mRNAs is considered to be one of the safest ways of inducing pluripotency, as the transgenes are transiently delivered into the cells without integrating into the genome. In this study, we explore the ability of integration-free human-induced pluripotent cell lines that were reprogrammed by mRNAs, to differentiate into otic progenitors and, subsequently, into hair cell and neuronal lineages. hiPSC lines were induced to differentiate by culturing them in the presence of fibroblast growth factors 3 and 10 (FGF3 and FGF10). Progenitors were identified by quantitative microscopy, based on the coexpression of otic markers PAX8, PAX2, FOXG1, and SOX2. Otic epithelial progenitors (OEPs) and otic neuroprogenitors (ONPs) were purified and allowed to differentiate further into hair cell-like cells and neurons. Lineages were characterised by immunocytochemistry and electrophysiology. Neuronal cells showed inward Na+ () currents and outward () and inward K+ () currents while hair cell-like cells had inward and outward delayed rectifier K+ currents, characteristic of developing hair cells. We conclude that human-induced pluripotent cell lines that have been reprogrammed using nonintegrating mRNAs are capable to differentiate into otic cell types

Extreme managers, extreme workplaces: capitalism, organizations and corporate psychopaths

This paper reports on in-depth, qualitative research carried out in England in 2013 among five organizational directors and two senior managers who had worked with other senior directors or managers who were Corporate Psychopaths, as measured by a management psychopathy measure. The Corporate Psychopaths reported on in this research displayed remarkable consistency in their approach to management to the extent that they could be called “text book examples” of managerial psychopathy. They were seen as being organizational stars and as deserving of performance awards by those above them, while the Corporate Psychopaths simultaneously subjected those below them to extreme forms of behavior, including bullying, intimidation and coercion and also engaged in extreme forms of mismanagement; such as very poor levels of personnel management, directionless leadership, miss-management of resources and outright fraud

The use of artificial media in fungal ecology

Can experiments conducted in agar really help us to understand the complexity of fungal systems? This question has been the focus of persistent and ongoing debate between fungal ecologists that favor reductionist versus holistic approaches. On one hand, artificial media are unrealistic and fail to reflect the heterogeneity and complexity of natural systems. But on the other hand, they offer simplified model systems that allow us to isolate mechanisms that would otherwise be obscured in natural systems. Following various technological advances that enable us to describe various aspects of complex fungal communities in situ, the dial appears to be tipping in favor of observational field studies, and the use of artificial media has declined. However, we argue that the loss of artificial media from experimental studies would impair our capacity to disentangle the complexities of fungal communities. Here, we discuss the pros and cons of artificial media in fungal ecology and outline the types of questions that are best addressed using fungi growing in artificial media. We conclude that renewed emphasis on the value of artificial media could help us to generate the mechanistic understanding that might be critical to explaining the exciting patterns that are emerging from real-world fungal ecology studies

Density-Based Outlier Detection for Safeguarding Electronic Patient Record Systems

This research concerns the detection of abnormal data usage and unauthorised access in large-scale critical networks, specifically healthcare infrastructures. Hospitals in the UK are now connecting their traditionally isolated equipment on a large scale to Internet-enabled networks to enable remote data access. This step-change makes sensitive data accessible to a broader spectrum of users. The focus of this research is on the safeguarding of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems in particular. With over 83% of hospitals adopting EPRs, access to this healthcare data needs to be proactively monitored for malicious activity. Hospitals must maintain patient trust and ensure that the information security principles of Integrity, Availability and Confidentiality are applied to EPR data. Access to EPR is often heavily audited within healthcare infrastructures. However, this data is regularly left untouched in a data silo and only ever accessed on an ad hoc basis. Without proactive monitoring of audit records, data breaches may go undetected. In addition, external threats, such as phishing or social engineering techniques to acquire a clinician’s logon credentials, need to be identified. Data behaviour within healthcare infrastructures therefore needs to be proactively monitored for malicious, erratic or unusual activity. This paper presents a system that employs a density-based local outlier detection model. The system is intended to add to the defence-in-depth of healthcare infrastructures. Patterns in EPR data are extracted to profile user behaviour and device interactions in order to detect and visualize anomalous activities. The system is able to detect 144 anomalous behaviours in an unlabelled dataset of 1,007,727 audit logs. This includes 0.66% of the users on the system, 0.17% of patient record accesses, 0.74% of routine accesses, and 0.53% of the devices used in a specialist Liverpool (UK) hospital

Experimental warming increases fungal alpha diversity in an oligotrophic maritime Antarctic soil

The climate of maritime Antarctica has altered since the 1950s. However, the effects of increased temperature, precipitation and organic carbon and nitrogen availability on the fungal communities inhabiting the barren and oligotrophic fellfield soils that are widespread across the region are poorly understood. Here, we test how warming with open top chambers (OTCs), irrigation and the organic substrates glucose, glycine and tryptone soy broth (TSB) influence a fungal community inhabiting an oligotrophic maritime Antarctic fellfield soil. In contrast with studies in vegetated soils at lower latitudes, OTCs increased fungal community alpha diversity (Simpson’s index and evenness) by 102–142% in unamended soil after 5 years. Conversely, OTCs had few effects on diversity in substrate-amended soils, with their only main effects, in glycine-amended soils, being attributable to an abundance of Pseudogymnoascus. The substrates reduced alpha and beta diversity metrics by 18–63%, altered community composition and elevated soil fungal DNA concentrations by 1–2 orders of magnitude after 5 years. In glycine-amended soil, OTCs decreased DNA concentrations by 57% and increased the relative abundance of the yeast Vishniacozyma by 45-fold. The relative abundance of the yeast Gelidatrema declined by 78% in chambered soil and increased by 1.9-fold in irrigated soil. Fungal DNA concentrations were also halved by irrigation in TSB-amended soils. In support of regional- and continental-scale studies across climatic gradients, the observations indicate that soil fungal alpha diversity in maritime Antarctica will increase as the region warms, but suggest that the accumulation of organic carbon and nitrogen compounds in fellfield soils arising from expanding plant populations are likely, in time, to attenuate the positive effects of warming on diversity. Antarctica, climate warming, open top chambers (OTCs), organic carbon, organic nitrogen, soil fungal community diversity, yeastspublishedVersio