Cues and knowledge structures used by mental-health professionals when making risk assessments

Background: Research into mental-health risks has tended to focus on epidemiological approaches and to consider pieces of evidence in isolation. Less is known about the particular factors and their patterns of occurrence that influence clinicians’ risk judgements in practice. Aims: To identify the cues used by clinicians to make risk judgements and to explore how these combine within clinicians’ psychological representations of suicide, self-harm, self-neglect, and harm to others. Method: Content analysis was applied to semi-structured interviews conducted with 46 practitioners from various mental-health disciplines, using mind maps to represent the hierarchical relationships of data and concepts. Results: Strong consensus between experts meant their knowledge could be integrated into a single hierarchical structure for each risk. This revealed contrasting emphases between data and concepts underpinning risks, including: reflection and forethought for suicide; motivation for self-harm; situation and context for harm to others; and current presentation for self-neglect. Conclusions: Analysis of experts’ risk-assessment knowledge identified influential cues and their relationships to risks. It can inform development of valid risk-screening decision support systems that combine actuarial evidence with clinical expertise

FIELD TESTING OF REMOTE SENSOR GAS LEAK DETECTION SYSTEMS FINAL REPORT

The natural gas pipeline industry routinely checks their pipeline right-of-ways to ensure that leaks are detected. Pipeline companies use various processes to detect signs of leaking pipes, including using vehicles or low-flying aircraft. The leak detection methods range from directly sensing the gas to looking for indirect signs of leakage. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) have provided funding to several commercial companies and research laboratories to develop advanced remote sensor systems to provide high quality, cost-effective leak detection information. To aid in the development and availability of these remote detection systems, the DOE funded a project to conduct field testing of five remote sensor leak detection systems. OPS provided co-funding for this project. The five systems chosen to be included in the field test were being developed by En’Urga Inc., ITT Industries, Inc., LaSen, Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and Physical Sciences Inc. The technologies included passive infrared multi-spectral scanning, laser-based differential absorption LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), hyperspectral imaging, and tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy. The sensor systems were mounted in an unmodified automobile, a helicopter, or a fixed-wing aircraft. A “virtual pipeline,” that simulated conditions of an actual pipeline was created at the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center field site at NPR-3, north of Casper, Wyoming. The pipeline route was approximately 7.5 miles long and was marked by 14 direction change markers and 22 sets of road crossing markers. Fifteen leak sites, which included three types of gas releases, were established along the route, with natural gas leak rates ranging from 1 scfh to 5,000 scfh. One leak site was designated as a “calibration” site, and the location and leak rate for this site were provided to the equipment providers. Leak sites that were designed to cause plant stress were on continuously from August 30, 2004 through September 17, 2004. The remaining leak sites were set daily during the test week of September 13 to 17, 2004. Four equipment providers were scheduled to collect data along the pipeline path twice each test day. One equipment provider, at their request, was scheduled to collect data once each day for one of their platforms and twice during the entire week for their other platform. Reports of the findings for the individual equipment providers were due to Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) within two weeks after the testing period and are included in this report as Appendix I. Based on the data provided, leaks at many of the leak sites were successfully detected. Leak rates of 500 scfh or higher were detected at least 50% of the time. Leak rates of 100 scfh were only detected 15% of the time. Leak rates of 15 scfh and 10 scfh were only detected about 5% of the time. The 1-scfh leak was never detected. There were also a large number of “false positive” leak sites identified by the equipment providers. Some of the equipment providers made system improvements during the week including repairing malfunctioning equipment, mechanical modifications to improve performance in field applications, and developing improved data handling schemes. Other modifications have been defined for future work by some of the equipment providers. Improvements for potential future testing efforts have been identified and include improving the pipeline route and adding more leak sites

An experimental demonstration of blind ocean acoustic tomography

Despite the advantages clearly demonstrated by ocean acoustic tomography OAT when compared to other ocean monitoring techniques, it suffers from several technical-related drawbacks. One is the requirement for rather expensive equipment to be maintained and operated at several locations in order to obtain sufficient source–receiver propagation paths to cover a given ocean volume. This paper presents the preliminary feasibility tests of a concept that uses ships of opportunity as sound sources for OAT. The approach adopted in this paper views the tomographic problem as a global inversion that includes determining both the emitted signal and the environmental parameters, which is a similar problem to that seen in blind channel identification and was therefore termed blind ocean acoustic tomography BOAT . BOAT was tested on a data set acquired in October 2000 in a shallow-water area off the west coast of Portugal, including both active and passive ship noise data. Successful results show that BOAT is able to estimate detailed water column temperature profiles coherent with independent measurements in intervals where the uncontrolled source signal ship noise presents a sufficient bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, which clearly define the limitations of the presented method.FCT; CN

Using XML and XSLT for flexible elicitation of mental-health risk knowledge

Current tools for assessing risks associated with mental-health problems require assessors to make high-level judgements based on clinical experience. This paper describes how new technologies can enhance qualitative research methods to identify lower-level cues underlying these judgements, which can be collected by people without a specialist mental-health background. Methods and evolving results: Content analysis of interviews with 46 multidisciplinary mental-health experts exposed the cues and their interrelationships, which were represented by a mind map using software that stores maps as XML. All 46 mind maps were integrated into a single XML knowledge structure and analysed by a Lisp program to generate quantitative information about the numbers of experts associated with each part of it. The knowledge was refined by the experts, using software developed in Flash to record their collective views within the XML itself. These views specified how the XML should be transformed by XSLT, a technology for rendering XML, which resulted in a validated hierarchical knowledge structure associating patient cues with risks. Conclusions: Changing knowledge elicitation requirements were accommodated by flexible transformations of XML data using XSLT, which also facilitated generation of multiple data-gathering tools suiting different assessment circumstances and levels of mental-health knowledge

Mitigating masked pixels in climate-critical datasets

Remote sensing observations of the Earth's surface are frequently stymied by clouds, water vapour, and aerosols in our atmosphere. These degrade or preclude the measurementof quantities critical to scientific and, hence, societal applications. In this study, we train a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm with high-fidelity ocean simulations in order to accurately reconstruct masked or missing data in sea surface temperature (SST)--i.e. one of 54 essential climate variables identified by the Global Climate Observing System. We demonstrate that the Enki model repeatedly outperforms previously adopted inpainting techniques by up to an order-of-magnitude in reconstruction error, while displaying high performance even in circumstances where the majority of pixels are masked. Furthermore, experiments on real infrared sensor data with masking fractions of at least 40% show reconstruction errors of less than the known sensor uncertainty (RMSE < ~0.1K). We attribute Enki's success to the attentive nature of NLP combined with realistic SST model outputs, an approach that may be extended to other remote sensing variables. This study demonstrates that systems built upon Enki--or other advanced systems like it--may therefore yield the optimal solution to accurate estimates of otherwise missing or masked parameters in climate-critical datasets sampling a rapidly changing Earth.Comment: 21 pages, 6 main figure, 3 in Appendix; submitte

Baddies in the classroom: media education and narrative writing

When teachers allow pupils to write stories that include elements of popular media, we must ask what to do with media once it has entered the classroom. This article relates findings from a classroom study which focuses on children’s media-based story writing. The study looks at children as producers of new media texts and describes their activities as a form of ‘media education’. The research shows that through their production of media-based stories, children are reflecting on their consumption of media. Furthermore, children’s media-based stories make explicit some of their implicit knowledge of new media forms. Finally, children’s stories provide ample opportunities for teachers to engage in important discussions about media within the framework of existing writing programmes

'Surely the most natural scenario in the world’: Representations of ‘Family’ in BBC Pre-school Television

Historically, the majority of work on British children’s television has adopted either an institutional or an audience focus, with the texts themselves often overlooked. This neglect has meant that questions of representation in British children’s television – including issues such as family, gender, class or ethnicity - have been infrequently analysed in the UK context. In this article, we adopt a primarily qualitative methodology and analyse the various textual manifestations of ‘family’, group, or community as represented in a selected number of BBC pre-school programmes. In doing so, we question the (limited amount of) international work that has examined representations of the family in children’s television, and argue that nuclear family structures do not predominate in this sphere

What young people want from health-related online resources: a focus group study

The growth of the Internet as an information source about health, particularly amongst young people, is well established. The aim of this study was to explore young people's perceptions and experiences of engaging with health-related online content, particularly through social media websites. Between February and July 2011 nine focus groups were facilitated across Scotland with young people aged between 14 and 18 years. Health-related user-generated content seems to be appreciated by young people as a useful, if not always trustworthy, source of accounts of other people's experiences. The reliability and quality of both user-generated content and official factual content about health appear to be concerns for young people, and they employ specialised strategies for negotiating both areas of the online environment. Young people's engagement with health online is a dynamic area for research. Their perceptions and experiences of health-related content seem based on their wider familiarity with the online environment and, as the online environment develops, so too do young people's strategies and conventions for accessing it

Scaffolding School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation with Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps

This chapter reports pilot work investigating the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping to scaffold young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Our research objective is to better understand pupils’ usage of dialogue maps created in Compendium to write scientific ex-planations. The participants were 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. Through qualitative analysis of three case studies, we investigate the value of dialogue mapping as a mediating tool in the scientific reasoning process during a set of learning activities. These activities were published in an online learning envi-ronment to foster collaborative learning. Pupils mapped their discussions in pairs, shared maps via the online forum and in plenary discussions, and wrote essays based on their dialogue maps. This study draws on these multiple data sources: pupils’ maps in Compendium, writings in science and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Our analysis highlights the diversity of ways, both successful and unsuccessful, in which dialogue mapping was used by these young teenagers