Farmers are not seeking help: what does service provision have to do with it?

Aim The rate of suicide in farmers is twice that of the general population. Help-seeking from health professionals, if this occurs in a timely manner, can significantly minimise the negative consequences of mental ill-health. However, it has now been demonstrated that farmers as a group are reluctant to seek help for mental ill-health, which likely contributes to this problem. Previous research has demonstrated that General Practitioners are the most commonly visited health professional in rural farming areas, however, they are under-utilised as a means of seeking help. This research aimed to examine the potential barriers and facilitators of mental health help-seeking in farmers, that relate to the provision of service from the perspective of farmers. Methods The present research draws on findings from semi‐structured interviews with 10 farmers residing in Queensland. The techniques of Braun and Clarke (2006) were used to guide the thematic analysis. Results Several key factors relating to services were identified as having the potential to directly or indirectly influence mental health help-seeking. These include: how services are marketed/packaged and delivered, availability and accessibility, continuity of care, having ‘knowledgeable bush practitioners’ as well as perception of good outcomes. Conclusion It is expected that this research will create a better understanding of the farmers’ perspective relating to service provision for the purpose of seeking help for mental health. The outcomes have implications for developing and providing interventions for farmers to promote services for the purpose of mental health help-seeking as well as create awareness in service provider and other stakeholders of issues that prevent timely help-seeking

Deployment of churn prediction model in financial services industry

© 2016 IEEE. Nowadays, data analytics techniques are playing an increasingly crucial role in financial services due to the huge benefits they bring. To ensure a successful implementation of an analytics project, various factors and procedures need to be considered besides technical issues. This paper introduces some practical lessons from our deployment of a data analytics project in a leading wealth management company in Australia. Specifically, the process of building a customer churn prediction model is described. Besides common steps of data analysis, how to deal with other practical issues like data privacy and change management that are encountered by many financial companies are also introduced

Evaluation of a novel method for controlling bovine trypanosomiasis

The problem of controlling tsetse flies in Africa is an old one. The tsetse fly transmits the trypanosome parasites which cause sleeping sickness in humans and disease in cattle. Because cattle are a favoured food source for tsetse much work has been done looking at the use of insecticide treated cattle as a control strategy for the tsetse fly. Such treatment methods possess many advantages; they are safe and relatively environmentally benign, they can be applied by individual farmers without the need for logistically demanding and costly traditional control programmes and, in addition to tsetse flies the insecticides are effective against a wide range of other harmful cattle parasites. The cost of the insecticide is however a significant constraint to the number of livestock keepers who can afford to employ the technique and as a result many cattle remain untreated. Following the discovery that tsetse had a significant predilection for feeding on the legs and belly of cattle, it was hypothesised that restricting the insecticide to only those areas could offer comparable protection to treating the whole animal. Such an approach would use up to 80% less drug and thus make the treatment per animal much cheaper. In addition, preferentially targeting areas favoured by tsetse, and leaving the rest of the animal untreated, preserves some important ecological balances between cattle and their parasites which traditional treatment methods destabilise. This thesis describes the design, implementation and analysis of a longitudinal study run over 8 months in south east Uganda that sought to compare the effect of applying insecticide to cattle only on the regions favoured by tsetse flies. Cattle were recruited to the study and assigned one of four treatment groups; a whole body application of deltamethrin insecticide pour-on; a restricted application of deltamethrin spray, applied to the front legs, ears and belly; a prophylactic trypanocide injection of isometamidium chloride, and a control group, that received no further treatments. All animals in the study were however cleared using twin doses of a trypanocide diminazene aceturate at the start of the study

A Multiple Source based Transfer Learning Framework for Marketing Campaigns

© 2018 IEEE. The rapid growing number of marketing campaigns demands an efficient learning model to identify prospective customers to target. Transfer learning is widely considered as a major way to improve the learning performance by using the generated knowledge from previous learning tasks. Most recent studies focused on transferring knowledge from source domains to target domains which may result in knowledge missing. To avoid this, we proposed a multiple source based transfer learning framework to do it reversely. The data in target domains is transferred into source domains by normalizing them into the same distributions and then improving the learning task in target domains by its generated knowledge in source domains. The proposed method is general and can deal with supervised and unsupervised inductive and transductive learning simultaneously with a compatibility to work with different machine learning models. The experiments on real-world campaign data demonstrate the performance of the proposed method

Towards new ecologically relevant markers of health for cetaceans

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Cost-sensitive churn prediction in fund management services

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Churn prediction is vital to companies as to identify potential churners and prevent losses in advance. Although it has been addressed as a classification task and a variety of models have been employed in practice, fund management services have presented several special challenges. One is that financial data is extremely imbalanced since only a tiny proportion of customers leave every year. Another is a unique cost-sensitive learning problem, i.e., costs of wrong predictions for churners should be related to their account balances, while costs of wrong predictions for non-churners should be the same. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new churn prediction model based on ensemble learning. In our model, multiple classifiers are built using sampled datasets to tackle the imbalanced data issue while exploiting data fully. Moreover, a novel sampling strategy is proposed to deal with the unique cost-sensitive issue. This model has been deployed in one of the leading fund management institutions in Australia, and its effectiveness has been fully validated in real applications

Empathy Measurement in Autism

Introduction A deficit in empathy is so often assumed in autistic individuals, that poor social outcomes are treated through empathy interventions without investigating other contributing factors. To target interventions to client needs, we need to determine whether an empathy intervention is required, or whether poor social outcomes are best improved through an alternative focus of support. Practitioners often overlook the fact that our understandings of empathy in autism are limited by the measures we use, and some do not evaluate client empathy at all, instead assuming a client will need an empathy intervention simply because they are autistic. Practitioners, therefore, need access to high quality empathy measures to determine whether an empathy intervention is the best approach for their autistic clients. The quality of these measures is paramount. Method A systematic literature review was conducted to examine the measurement properties of empathy self-reports used with both autistic and predominant neurotype adults. Articles were obtained from 7 databases, followed by ancestral searching for grey literature. I, an autistic researcher, will discuss how we critically evaluated the evidence for some of the most popular empathy measures, and will discuss the implications for research and practice. Results The systematic review obtained data on several empathy self-reports, including the Empathy Quotient and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Preliminary findings will be discussed, including how features such as poor reliability and non-literal language may bias the scores of autistic people. Discussion This study highlights gaps in our knowledge about measuring empathy in autistic adults and considers how these gaps affect our knowledge of empathy in the autistic population. Finally, I will propose solutions to improve empathy measurement for autistic adults. Improved measurement will help clinicians to determine where an empathy intervention is the best approach to supporting an autistic client with social difficulties

Intracranial injection of AAV expressing NEP but not IDE reduces amyloid pathology in APP+PS1 transgenic mice

The accumulation of β-amyloid peptides in the brain has been recognized as an essential factor in Alzheimer\u27s disease pathology. Several proteases, including Neprilysin (NEP), endothelin converting enzyme (ECE), and insulin degrading enzyme (IDE), have been shown to cleave β-amyloid peptides (Aβ). We have previously reported reductions in amyloid in APP+PS1 mice with increased expression of ECE. In this study we compared the vector-induced increased expression of NEP and IDE. We used recombinant adeno-associated viral vectors expressing either native forms of NEP (NEP-n) or IDE (IDE-n), or engineered secreted forms of NEP (NEP-s) or IDE (IDE-s). In a six-week study, immunohistochemistry staining for total Aβ was significantly decreased in animals receiving the NEP-n and NEP-s but not for IDE-n or IDE-s in either the hippocampus or cortex. Congo red staining followed a similar trend revealing significant decreases in the hippocampus and the cortex for NEP-n and NEP-s treatment groups. Our results indicate that while rAAV-IDE does not have the same therapeutic potential as rAAV-NEP, rAAV-NEP-s and NEP-n are effective at reducing amyloid loads, and both of these vectors continue to have significant effects nine months post-injection. As such, they may be considered reasonable candidates for gene therapy trials in AD

Stranding collections indicate broad-scale connectivity across the range of a pelagic marine predator, the Atlantic white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus acutus)

Understanding the extent of population genetic connectivity in highly mobile marine species is vital for delineating management units. However, obtaining samples for generating genetic data is challenging for species inhabiting inaccessible pelagic waters. As a result, management strategies do not always align with underlying population biology. Marine strandings provide an accessible and cost-effective sample source for research on elusive cetaceans and can be used collaboratively among stranding networks to generate ecosystem-wide population genetic assessments. Here, we used samples collected from strandings and free-ranging individuals across the North Atlantic to investigate population structure, genetic diversity, and individual relatedness in the Atlantic white-sided dolphin (AWSD; Lagenorhynchus acutus), a widely distributed marine predator. Mitochondrial DNA sequences and nuclear DNA single-nucleotide polymorphisms showed a complete lack of population differentiation across the species’ range, implying an unusual pattern of strong connectivity. No differences in genetic diversity among geographic regions and weak within-group relatedness further support the existence of species-wide panmixia in AWSD. This study emphasises the value of long-term stranding collections for cetacean research and has important implications for AWSD conservation management