A qualitative study of the fidelity of implementation of an evidence-based healthy relationships program

This case study examined the factors that are important to successful implementation of a violence prevention program, The Fourth R Program, in one school district in a large, urban city in Alberta, Canada. Teachers, school administrators, and a school district program coordinator participated in a structured interview. Students in Fourth R classes participated in a focus group. The interview focused on potential facilitators and barriers to implementation and perspectives on fidelity and adaptation of the Fourth R program in the classroom. The focus group focused on students’ experience, responsiveness and self-reported knowledge of program content. Teachers completed a survey at the end of teacher training to assess efficacy and confidence in delivering the program and an implementation survey to assess program fidelity. Based on survey and interview data, teachers were classified as high or low implementers. The interviews were transcribed and coded to identify the similarities and differences among the responses as well as themes that cut across participants. The results indicated that characteristics related to the program, the teacher, and the broader school environment influenced implementation fidelity. The Fourth R’s standardized manual and content made for a high level of receptivity by all teachers which facilitated implementation. High implementers uniquely noted the programs’ focus on teaching students about healthy relationships as a facilitator of implementation. School administrator support emerged as an important facilitator to implementation fidelity, but the quality of support differed for high and low implementers. Barriers to fidelity of implementation included difficulty in meeting the time frames for program lessons, external influences and school disruptions, and implementation experience. Implementing role plays was a challenge for all teachers, but low implementers expressed more discomfort in the methodology than high implementers. School administrators and school district program coordinator echoed many of the same themes as did teachers. Students in classrooms that received more of the Fourth R program expressed more positive classroom experience and responsiveness to the curriculum but not necessarily more perceived knowledge of health outcomes. Implications for strengthening the connection between research and practice in the delivery of prevention programs in schools are discussed

Health Relationships Plus Program Facilitator Implementation Experience Feedback

The Fourth R Healthy Relationships Plus Program (HRPP) is an evidence-informed small groups program that aims to equip students with the skills they need to build healthy relationships and help themselves and their peers reduce risky behaviours. The HRPP consists of 14 one-hour sessions covering topics such as peer pressure, helpseeking, media literacy, healthy and unhealthy peer and dating relationships, healthy communication, mental health and wellbeing, suicide prevention, and the impacts of substance use and abuse

Syzygies of torsion bundles and the geometry of the level l modular variety over M_g

We formulate, and in some cases prove, three statements concerning the purity or, more generally the naturality of the resolution of various rings one can attach to a generic curve of genus g and a torsion point of order l in its Jacobian. These statements can be viewed an analogues of Green's Conjecture and we verify them computationally for bounded genus. We then compute the cohomology class of the corresponding non-vanishing locus in the moduli space R_{g,l} of twisted level l curves of genus g and use this to derive results about the birational geometry of R_{g, l}. For instance, we prove that R_{g,3} is a variety of general type when g>11 and the Kodaira dimension of R_{11,3} is greater than or equal to 19. In the last section we explain probabilistically the unexpected failure of the Prym-Green conjecture in genus 8 and level 2.Comment: 35 pages, appeared in Invent Math. We correct an inaccuracy in the statement of Prop 2.

I soffi carotidei asintomatici scoperti in corso di bilancio preoperatorio. Condotta diagnostica e terapeutica.

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Maintenance Activity, Reliability, Availability, and Related Energy Losses in Ten Operating Photovoltaic Systems up to 1.8 MW

In general, photovoltaic (PV) plants do not include components with moving parts and, as a consequence, they are wrongly considered maintenance-free. Thus, this article presents a maintenance, reliability, and availability analysis of ten PV systems, with different inverter configurations, in the context of the intermittent renewable energy source systems, including the wind farms. The first part of the analysis consists of the evaluation of reliability using failure rates from the literature. In the second part, these results are compared with data obtained from industrial maintenance reports in the years 2016-2018. Finally, the yearly energy losses and the availability of each PV plant are assessed

A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Evaluation of a Universal Healthy Relationships Promotion Program for Youth

Bullying and mental health problems are pressing concerns for adolescents. Given their burden, we need to find efficacious ways to prevent these experiences. However, existing prevention programs tend to be single-issue and may not focus on the universal capacities required to reduce these problems among youth. To this end, we evaluated the universal, small groups Healthy Relationships Plus (HRP) program, which focuses on the promotion of positive mental health and the reduction of bullying and substance misuse. A sample of 212 youth from Southwestern Ontario were randomly assigned to the HRP or an attention-control condition over an 8-day period during summer 2014. Primary outcome measures (i.e., most important outcomes for this evaluation) were positive mental health, bullying victimization/perpetration, and substance misuse (alcohol, marijuana). We also examined a mediator (help-seeking) and two moderators (sex, adverse childhood experiences) of main effects. Participation in HRP was associated with reduced odds of physical bullying victimization at 1-year follow-up, compared with adolescents in the attention-control condition. This finding was mediated by increased intention to seek help from a mental health professional following HRP participation. We did not find main effects for positive mental health or substance misuse in this sample; however, there was an interaction effect whereby youth with significant trauma experiences reported less marijuana use at 1-year follow-up compared with control students. Findings reiterate the importance of help-seeking for bullying prevention and demonstrate the preliminary efficacy of the HRP as a universal strategy for preventing bullying victimization among mid-adolescents within school and community settings

Attitude diagnostique et therapeutique devant un souffle carotidien asymptomatique decouvert en pre-operatoire

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Two Years of Relationship-Focused Mentoring for First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Adolescents: Promoting Positive Mental Health

First Nations, Métis, and Inuit (FNMI) youth are disproportionately affected by a range of negative health outcomes including poor emotional and psychosocial well-being. At the same time, there is increasing awareness of culturally-specific protective factors for these youth, such as cultural connectedness and identity. This article reports the findings of a mixed-methods, exploratory longitudinal study on the effects of a culturally-relevant school-based mentoring program for FNMI youth that focuses on promoting mental well-being and the development of cultural identity. Participants included a cohort of FNMI adolescents whom we tracked across the transition from elementary to secondary school. We utilized data from annual surveys (n = 105) and a subset of youth whom we interviewed (n = 28). Quantitative analyses compared youth who participated in 1 or 2 years of mentoring programs with those who did not participate. At Wave 3, the 2-year mentoring group demonstrated better mental health and improved cultural identity, accounting for Wave 1 functioning. These results were maintained when sex and school climate were accounted for in the models. Sex did not emerge as a significant moderator; however, post hoc analyses with simple slopes indicated that the mentoring program benefited girls more than boys for both outcomes. Interview data were coded and themed through a multi-phase process, and revealed that the mentoring program helped participants develop their intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, and enhanced their cultural and healthy relationships knowledge base. Collectively, the quantitative and qualitative components of this study identify multiple years of culturally-relevant mentoring as a promising approach for promoting well-being among FNMI youth

An interactive stratospheric aerosol model intercomparison of solar geoengineering by stratospheric injection of SO2 or accumulation-mode sulfuric acid aerosols

Studies of stratospheric solar geoengineering have tended to focus on modification of the sulfuric acid aerosol layer, and almost all climate model experiments that mechanistically increase the sulfuric acid aerosol burden assume injection of SO2. A key finding from these model studies is that the radiative forcing would increase sublinearly with increasing SO2 injection because most of the added sulfur increases the mass of existing particles, resulting in shorter aerosol residence times and aerosols that are above the optimal size for scattering. Injection of SO3 or H2SO4 from an aircraft in stratospheric flight is expected to produce particles predominantly in the accumulation-mode size range following microphysical processing within an expanding plume, and such injection may result in a smaller average stratospheric particle size, allowing a given injection of sulfur to produce more radiative forcing. We report the first multi-model intercomparison to evaluate this approach, which we label AM-H2SO4 injection. A coordinated multi-model experiment designed to represent this SO3- or H2SO4-driven geoengineering scenario was carried out with three interactive stratospheric aerosol microphysics models: the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Earth System Model (CESM2) with the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) atmospheric configuration, the Max-Planck Institute's middle atmosphere version of ECHAM5 with the HAM microphysical module (MAECHAM5-HAM) and ETH's SOlar Climate Ozone Links with AER microphysics (SOCOL-AER) coordinated as a test-bed experiment within the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). The intercomparison explores how the injection of new accumulation-mode particles changes the large-scale particle size distribution and thus the overall radiative and dynamical response to stratospheric sulfur injection. Each model used the same injection scenarios testing AM-H2SO4 and SO2 injections at 5 and 25 Tg(S) yr-1 to test linearity and climate response sensitivity. All three models find that AM-H2SO4 injection increases the radiative efficacy, defined as the radiative forcing per unit of sulfur injected, relative to SO2 injection. Increased radiative efficacy means that when compared to the use of SO2 to produce the same radiative forcing, AM-H2SO4 emissions would reduce side effects of sulfuric acid aerosol geoengineering that are proportional to mass burden. The model studies were carried out with two different idealized geographical distributions of injection mass representing deployment scenarios with different objectives, one designed to force mainly the midlatitudes by injecting into two grid points at 30° N and 30° S, and the other designed to maximize aerosol residence time by injecting uniformly in the region between 30° S and 30° N. Analysis of aerosol size distributions in the perturbed stratosphere of the models shows that particle sizes evolve differently in response to concentrated versus dispersed injections depending on the form of the injected sulfur (SO2 gas or AM-H2SO4 particulate) and suggests that prior model results for concentrated injection of SO2 may be strongly dependent on model resolution. Differences among models arise from differences in aerosol formulation and differences in model dynamics, factors whose interplay cannot be easily untangled by this intercomparison. Copyright © 2022 Debra K. Weisenstein et al

Imaging Photoelectron Transmission through Self-Assembled Monolayers: The Work-Function of Alkanethiols Coated Gold

In this paper, we present a new approach for studying the electronic properties of self-assembled monolayers and their interaction with a conductive substrate, the low-energy photoelectron imaging spectroscopy (LEPIS). LEPIS relies on imaging of photoelectrons ejected from a conductive substrate and subsequently transmitted through organic monolayers. Using this method, we measure the relative work-function of alkanethiols of different length on gold substrate, and we are able to follow the changes occurring when the surface coverage is varied. We also computed the work-function of model alkanethiols using a plane-wave density functional theory approach, in order to demonstrate the correlation between changes in the work-function with the monolayer organization and density