An Observational Analysis of ‘Me Too’ Narratives from YouTube

The ‘me too’ movement originated to help survivors of sexual violence by providing resources and building a community of advocates to exemplify the magnitude of sexual violence victimization. This movement gained momentum via Twitter due to the viral hashtag—#metoo. YouTube is often used as a means of expression in younger generations, thus sexual violence survivors began using the platform as a way to disseminate ‘me too’ narratives. Therefore, this study aimed to examine how sexual violence narratives resulting from the ‘me too’ movement are being told on YouTube and understand the components of the narratives related to self-blaming mindsets. Based on predetermined search criteria, researchers identified and screened YouTube videos of people sharing ‘me too’ narratives, and developed themes and codes (e.g., type of violence, perpetrator characteristics). Descriptive statistics and a logistic regression were conducted using demographic, experience, and attitudinal data to predict self-blaming mindsets. Sixty-two YouTube videos were included, consisting of 96 individual ‘me too’ stories. The sample was mostly female, and perpetrators were predominately strangers. The model explained 19.3% of the variance in self-blaming attitudes. Odds of self-blaming rose 4.589 times for those who experienced sexual harassment, and 6.109 times for those who experienced rape. If the perpetrator was not mentioned in the video, odds of self-blaming dropped by 89.4%. This study suggests self-blaming beliefs are prominent among victims, even when they have the space to share their story. Overall, our findings support the continued need for further education and support for victims

Methodological choices in brucellosis burden of disease assessments: A systematic review

Background Foodborne and zoonotic diseases such as brucellosis present many challenges to public health and economic welfare. Increasingly, researchers and public health institutes use disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) to generate a comprehensive comparison of the population health impact of these conditions. DALYs calculations, however, entail a number of methodological choices and assumptions, with data gaps and uncertainties to accommodate. Thisreview identifies existing brucellosis burden of disease studies and analyzes their methodological choices, assumptions, and uncertainties. It supports the Global Burden of Animal Diseases programme in the development of a systematic methodology to describe the impact of animal diseases on society, including human health. Methods/Principal findings A systematic search for brucellosis burden of disease calculations was conducted in pre-selected international and grey literature databases. Using a standardized reporting framework, we evaluated each estimate on a variety of key methodological assumptions necessary to compute a DALY. Fourteen studies satisfied the inclusion criteria (human brucellosis and quantification of DALYs). One study reported estimates at the global level, the rest were national or subnational assessments. Data regarding different methodological choices were extracted, including detailed assessments of the adopted disease models. Most studies retrieved brucellosis epidemiological data from administrative registries. Incidence data were often estimated on the basis of laboratory-confirmed tests. Not all studies included mortality estimates (Years of Life Lost) in their assessments due to lack of data or the assumption that brucellosis is not a fatal disease. Only two studies used a model with variable health states and corresponding disability weights. The rest used a simplified singular health state approach. Wide variation was seen in the duration chosen for brucellosis, ranging from 2 weeks to 4.5 years, irrespective of the whether a chronic state was included. Conclusion Available brucellosis burden of disease assessments vary widely in their methodology and assumptions. Further research is needed to better characterize the clinical course of brucellosis and to estimate case-fatality rates. Additionally, reporting of methodological choices should be improved to enhance transparency and comparability of estimates. These steps will increase the value of these estimates for policy makers

Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost four hundred thousand polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of western and far eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ~8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary, and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ~24,000 year old Siberian6 . By ~6,000-5,000 years ago, a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry had occurred throughout much of Europe, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ~4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ~3/4 of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ~3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for the theory of a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe

Pharmacotherapeutic intervention in impulsive preschool children: The need for a comprehensive therapeutic approach

Impulsive and aggressive behaviour symptoms often are serious problems in children, even already at preschool age. Thus, effective treatment approaches are requested. In this comment pharmacotherapeutic treatment approaches, first of all risperidone, their limitations and alternative psychotherapeutic approaches are outlined

Expression of Toll-Like Receptors in the Developing Brain

Toll-like receptors (TLR) are key players of the innate and adaptive immune response in vertebrates. The original protein Toll in Drosophila melanogaster regulates both host defense and morphogenesis during development. Making use of real-time PCR, in situ hybridization, and immunohistochemistry we systematically examined the expression of TLR1–9 and the intracellular adaptor molecules MyD88 and TRIF during development of the mouse brain. Expression of TLR7 and TLR9 in the brain was strongly regulated during different embryonic, postnatal, and adult stages. In contrast, expression of TLR1–6, TLR8, MyD88, and TRIF mRNA displayed no significant changes in the different phases of brain development. Neurons of various brain regions including the neocortex and the hippocampus were identified as the main cell type expressing both TLR7 and TLR9 in the developing brain. Taken together, our data reveal specific expression patterns of distinct TLRs in the developing mouse brain and lay the foundation for further investigation of the pathophysiological significance of these receptors for developmental processes in the central nervous system of vertebrates

Successful recruitment to trials : findings from the SCIMITAR+ Trial

BACKGROUND: Randomised controlled trials (RCT) can struggle to recruit to target on time. This is especially the case with hard to reach populations such as those with severe mental ill health. The SCIMITAR+ trial, a trial of a bespoke smoking cessation intervention for people with severe mental ill health achieved their recruitment ahead of time and target. This article reports strategies that helped us to achieve this with the aim of aiding others recruiting from similar populations. METHODS: SCIMITAR+ is a multi-centre pragmatic two-arm parallel-group RCT, which aimed to recruit 400 participants with severe mental ill health who smoke and would like to cut down or quit. The study recruited primarily in secondary care through community mental health teams and psychiatrists with a smaller number of participants recruited through primary care. Recruitment opened in October 2015 and closed in December 2016, by which point 526 participants had been recruited. We gathered information from recruiting sites on strategies which led to the successful recruitment in SCIMITAR+ and in this article present our approach to trial management along with the strategies employed by the recruiting sites. RESULTS: Alongside having a dedicated trial manager and trial management team, we identified three main themes that led to successful recruitment. These were: clinicians with a positive attitude to research; researchers and clinicians working together; and the use of NHS targets. The overriding theme was the importance of relationships between both the researchers and the recruiting clinicians and the recruiting clinicians and the participants. CONCLUSIONS: This study makes a significant contribution to the limited evidence base of real-world cases of successful recruitment to RCTs and offers practical guidance to those planning and conducting trials. Building positive relationships between clinicians, researchers and participants is crucial to successful recruitment

Scientific access into Mercer Subglacial Lake: scientific objectives, drilling operations and initial observations

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Priscu, J. C., Kalin, J., Winans, J., Campbell, T., Siegfried, M. R., Skidmore, M., Dore, J. E., Leventer, A., Harwood, D. M., Duling, D., Zook, R., Burnett, J., Gibson, D., Krula, E., Mironov, A., McManis, J., Roberts, G., Rosenheim, B. E., Christner, B. C., Kasic, K., Fricker, H. A., Lyons, W. B., Barker, J., Bowling, M., Collins, B., Davis, C., Gagnon, A., Gardner, C., Gustafson, C., Kim, O-S., Li, W., Michaud, A., Patterson, M. O., Tranter, M., Ryan Venturelli, R., Trista Vick-Majors, T., & Elsworth, C. Scientific access into Mercer Subglacial Lake: scientific objectives, drilling operations and initial observations. Annals of Glaciology, 62(85–86), (2021): 340–352, https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2021.10.The Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) Project accessed Mercer Subglacial Lake using environmentally clean hot-water drilling to examine interactions among ice, water, sediment, rock, microbes and carbon reservoirs within the lake water column and underlying sediments. A ~0.4 m diameter borehole was melted through 1087 m of ice and maintained over ~10 days, allowing observation of ice properties and collection of water and sediment with various tools. Over this period, SALSA collected: 60 L of lake water and 10 L of deep borehole water; microbes >0.2 μm in diameter from in situ filtration of ~100 L of lake water; 10 multicores 0.32–0.49 m long; 1.0 and 1.76 m long gravity cores; three conductivity–temperature–depth profiles of borehole and lake water; five discrete depth current meter measurements in the lake and images of ice, the lake water–ice interface and lake sediments. Temperature and conductivity data showed the hydrodynamic character of water mixing between the borehole and lake after entry. Models simulating melting of the ~6 m thick basal accreted ice layer imply that debris fall-out through the ~15 m water column to the lake sediments from borehole melting had little effect on the stratigraphy of surficial sediment cores.This material is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation, Section for Antarctic Sciences, Antarctic Integrated System Science program as part of the interdisciplinary (Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA): Integrated study of carbon cycling in hydrologically-active subglacial environments) project (NSF-OPP 1543537, 1543396, 1543405, 1543453 and 1543441). Ok-Sun Kim was funded by the Korean Polar Research Institute. We are particularly thankful to the SALSA traverse personnel for crucial technical and logistical support. The United States Antarctic Program enabled our fieldwork; the New York Air National Guard and Kenn Borek Air provided air support; UNAVCO provided geodetic instrument support. Hot water drilling activities, including repair and upgrade modifications of the WISSARD hot water drill system, for the SALSA project were supported by a subaward from the Ice Drilling Program of Dartmouth College (NSF-PLR 1327315) to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. J. Lawrence assisted with manuscript preparation. Finally, we are grateful to C. Dean, the SALSA Project Manager, and R. Ricards, SALSA Project Coordinator at McMurdo Station, for their organizational skills, and B. Huber of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory for providing the SBE39 PT sensors and the Nortek Aquadopp current meter and assisting with interpretation of the data. B. Huber also provided helpful input on programing and calibrating the SBE19PlusV2 6112 CTD

Identifying Contributions to the Stellar Halo from Accreted, Kicked-Out, and In Situ Populations

[Abridged] We present a medium-resolution spectroscopic survey of late-type giant stars at mid-Galactic latitudes of (30$^{\circ}<|b|<60^{\circ}$), designed to probe the properties of this population to distances of $\sim$9 kpc. Because M giants are generally metal-rich and we have limited contamination from thin disk stars by the latitude selection, most of the stars in the survey are expected to be members of the thick disk ($\sim$-0.6) with some contribution from the metal-rich component of the nearby halo. Here we report first results for 1799 stars. The distribution of radial velocity (RV) as a function of l for these stars shows (1) the expected thick disk population and (2) local metal-rich halo stars moving at high speeds relative to the disk, that in some cases form distinct sequences in RV-$l$ space. High-resolution echelle spectra taken for 34 of these "RV outliers" reveal the following patterns across the [Ti/Fe]-[Fe/H] plane: seventeen of the stars have abundances reminiscent of the populations present in dwarf satellites of the Milky Way; eight have abundances coincident with those of the Galactic disk and more metal-rich halo; and nine of the stars fall on the locus defined by the majority of stars in the halo. The chemical abundance trends of the RV outliers suggest that this sample consists predominantly of stars accreted from infalling dwarf galaxies. A smaller fraction of stars in the RV outlier sample may have been formed in the inner Galaxy and subsequently kicked to higher eccentricity orbits, but the sample is not large enough to distinguish conclusively between this interpretation and the alternative that these stars represent the tail of the velocity distribution of the thick disk. Our data do not rule out the possibility that a minority of the sample could have formed from gas {\it in situ} on their current orbits.Comment: 43 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables, published in the Astrophysical Journa

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy