Defining Technology for Learning: Cognitive and Physical Tools of Inquiry

This essay explores definitions of technology and educational technology. The authors argue the following points: 1. Educational stakeholders, and the public at large, use the term technology as though it has a universally agreed upon definition. It does not, and how technology is defined matters. 2. For technology in schools to support student learning, it must to be defined in a way that describes technology as a tool for problem-solving. 3. Integration of technology, particularly when paired with teacher-centered practices, has the potential of reinforcing and heightening the negative consequences of a conception of learning that positions students as recipients of knowledge instead constructors of knowledge. Essay concludes with a call for leaders in the field of educational technology to provide guidance by adopting a definition that encapsulates the third point above

Don’t turn your back on the symptoms of psychosis : the results of a proof-of-principle, quasi-experimental intervention to reduce duration of untreated psychosis

Background No evidence based approach to reduce duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) has been effective in the UK. Existing interventions have many components and have been difficult to replicate. The majority of DUP in Birmingham, UK is accounted for by delays within mental health services (MHS) followed by help-seeking delay and, we hypothesise, these require explicit targeting. This study examined the feasibility and impact of an intervention to reduce DUP, targeting help-seeking and MHSs delays. Methods A dual-component intervention, comprising a direct care pathway, for 16-25 year olds, and a community psychosis awareness campaign, using our youth-friendly website as the central hub, was implemented, targeting the primary sources of care pathway delays experienced by those with long DUP. Evaluation, using a quasi-experimental, design compared DUP of cases in two areas of the city receiving early detection vs detection as usual, controlling for baseline DUP in each area. Results DUP in the intervention area was reduced from a median 71 days (mean 285) to 39 days (mean 104) following the intervention, with no change in the control area. Relative risk for the reduction in DUP was 0.74 (95 % CI 0.35 to 0.89; p = .004). Delays in MHSs and help-seeking were also reduced. Conclusions Our targeted approach appears to be successful in reducing DUP and could provide a generalizable methodology applicable in a variety of healthcare contexts with differing sources of delay. More research is needed, however, to establish whether our approach is truly effective

What Else Do I Need to Know? The Effect of Background Information on Users' Reliance on QA Systems

NLP systems have shown impressive performance at answering questions by retrieving relevant context. However, with the increasingly large models, it is impossible and often undesirable to constrain models' knowledge or reasoning to only the retrieved context. This leads to a mismatch between the information that the models access to derive the answer and the information that is available to the user to assess the model predicted answer. In this work, we study how users interact with QA systems in the absence of sufficient information to assess their predictions. Further, we ask whether adding the requisite background helps mitigate users' over-reliance on predictions. Our study reveals that users rely on model predictions even in the absence of sufficient information needed to assess the model's correctness. Providing the relevant background, however, helps users better catch model errors, reducing over-reliance on incorrect predictions. On the flip side, background information also increases users' confidence in their accurate as well as inaccurate judgments. Our work highlights that supporting users' verification of QA predictions is an important, yet challenging, problem

Household and area determinants of emergency department attendance and hospitalisation in people with multimorbidity:a systematic review

OBJECTIVES: Multimorbidity is one of the greatest challenges facing healthcare internationally. Emergency department (ED) attendance and hospitalisation rates are higher in people with multimorbidity, but most research focuses on associations with individual characteristics, ignoring household or area mediators of service use. DESIGN: Systematic review reported using the synthesis without meta-analysis framework. DATA SOURCES: Twelve electronic databases (1 January 2000–21 September 2021): MEDLINE/OVID, Embase, Global Health, PsycINFO, ASSIA, CAB Abstracts, Science Citation Index Expanded/ISI Web of Science, Scopus, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Sociological Abstracts, the Cochrane Library, and OpenGrey. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: Adults aged ≥16 years, with multimorbidity. Exposure(s) were household and/or area determinants of health. Outcomes were ED attendance and/or hospitalisation. The literature search was limited to publications in English. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: Independent double screening of titles and abstracts to select relevant full-text studies. Methodological quality was assessed using an adaptation of the Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale tool. Given high study heterogeneity, narrative synthesis was performed. RESULTS: After deduplication, 10 721 titles and abstracts were screened, and 142 full-text articles were reviewed, of which 10 were eligible for inclusion. In people with multimorbidity, household food insecurity was associated with hospitalisation (OR 1.58 (95% CI 1.06 to 2.36) in concordant multimorbidity). People with multimorbidity living in the most versus least deprived areas attended ED more frequently (8.9% (95% CI 8.6 to 9.1) in most versus 6.3% (95% CI 6.1 to 6.6) in least), had higher rates of hospitalisation (26% in most versus 22% in least), and higher probability of hospitalisation (6.4% (95% CI 5.8 to 7.2) in most versus 4.2% (95% CI 3.8 to 4.7) in least). There was non-conclusive evidence that household income is associated with ED attendance and hospitalisation. No statistically significant relationships were found between marital status, living with others with multimorbidity, or rurality with ED attendance or hospitalisation. CONCLUSIONS: There is some evidence that household and area contexts mediate associations of multimorbidity with ED attendance and hospitalisation, but firm conclusions are constrained by the small number of studies published and study design heterogeneity. Further research is required on large population samples using robust analytical methods. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42021283515

Role of cyclooxygenase in the vascular responses to extremity cooling in Caucasian and African males

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Experimental Physiology on 01/06/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1113/EP086186 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2017 The Authors. Experimental Physiology © 2017 The Physiological Society New Findings: What is the central question of this study? Compared with Caucasians, African individuals are more susceptible to non-freezing cold injury and experience greater cutaneous vasoconstriction and cooler finger skin temperatures upon hand cooling. We investigated whether the enzyme cyclooxygenase is, in part, responsible for the exaggerated response to local cooling. What is the main finding and its importance? During local hand cooling, individuals of African descent experienced significantly lower finger skin blood flow and skin temperature compared with Caucasians irrespective of cyclooxygenase inhibition. These data suggest that in young African males the cyclooxygenase pathway appears not to be the primary reason for the increased susceptibility to non-freezing cold injury. Individuals of African descent (AFD) are more susceptible to non-freezing cold injury (NFCI) and experience an exaggerated cutaneous vasoconstrictor response to hand cooling compared with Caucasians (CAU). Using a placebo-controlled, cross-over design, this study tested the hypothesis that cyclooxygenase (COX) may, in part, be responsible for the exaggerated vasoconstrictor response to local cooling in AFD. Twelve AFD and 12 CAU young healthy men completed foot cooling and hand cooling (separately, in 8°C water for 30 min) with spontaneous rewarming in 30°C air after placebo or aspirin (COX inhibition) treatment. Skin blood flow, expressed as cutaneous vascular conductance (as flux per millimetre of mercury), and skin temperature were measured throughout. Irrespective of COX inhibition, the responses to foot cooling, but not hand cooling, were similar between ethnicities. Specifically, during hand cooling after placebo, AFD experienced a lower minimal skin blood flow [mean (SD): 0.5 (0.1) versus 0.8 (0.2) flux mmHg−1, P < 0.001] and a lower minimal finger skin temperature [9.5 (1.4) versus 10.7 (1.3)°C, P = 0.039] compared with CAU. During spontaneous rewarming, average skin blood flow was also lower in AFD than in CAU [2.8 (1.6) versus 4.3 (1.0) flux mmHg−1, P < 0.001]. These data provide further support that AFD experience an exaggerated response to hand cooling on reflection this appears to overstate findings; however, the results demonstrate that the COX pathway is not the primary reason for the exaggerated responses in AFD and increased susceptibility to NFCI.This research was funded by the University of Portsmouth.Published versio

Species-wide Whole Genome Sequencing Reveals Historical Global Spread And Recent Local Persistence In Shigella Flexneri

Shigella flexneri is the most common cause of bacterial dysentery in low-income countries. Despite this, S. flexneri remains largely unexplored from a genomic standpoint and is still described using a vocabulary based on serotyping reactions developed over half-a-century ago. Here we combine whole genome sequencing with geographical and temporal data to examine the natural history of the species. Our analysis subdivides S. flexneri into seven phylogenetic groups (PGs); each containing two-or-more serotypes and characterised by distinct virulence gene complement and geographic range. Within the S. flexneri PGs we identify geographically restricted sub-lineages that appear to have persistently colonised regions for many decades to over 100 years. Although we found abundant evidence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) determinant acquisition, our dataset shows no evidence of subsequent intercontinental spread of antimicrobial resistant strains. The pattern of colonisation and AMR gene acquisition suggest that S. flexneri has a distinct life-cycle involving local persistence. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.07335.0014Wellcome Trust [098051]Wellcome Trust/NISCHR ISSF project at Cardiff UniversityMRC [MR/L015080/1]Cardiff University - Cardiff University Research Infrastructure Fund)Institut PasteurInstitut de Veille SanitaireFrench Government 'Investissement d'Avenir' program (Integrative Biology of Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory of Excellence) [ANR-10-LABX-62-IBEID

Correction: Signatures of Adaptation in Human Invasive Salmonella Typhimurium ST313 Populations from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Correction to: 7 Aug 2015: The PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases Staff (2015) Correction: Correction: Signatures of Adaptation in Human Invasive Salmonella Typhimurium ST313 Populations from Sub-Saharan Africa. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 9(8): e0003970. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0003970

Novel recombinant SARS-CoV-2 lineage detected through genomic surveillance in Wales, UK

Recombination, the process whereby a segment of genetic material from one genome is inserted into another, producing a new chimeric genome, is an important evolutionary mechanism frequently observed in coronaviruses. The risks posed by recombination include the shuffling of advantageous mutations that may increase transmissibility, severity or vaccine escape. We present a genomic and epidemiological description of a new recombinant lineage of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), XR, first identified in Wales. The Pathogen Genomics Unit (Public Health Wales, UK) sequences positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests using the ARTIC SARS-CoV-2 sequencing protocol. Recombinants were detected using an in-house pipeline and the epidemiological data analysed in R. Nosocomial cases were defined as those with samples taken after >7 days in hospital. Between February and March 2022, we identified 78 samples with highly similar genomes, comprising a BA.1-like 5' end, a BA.2-like 3' end and a BA.2-like spike protein. This signature is consistent with recombination and was defined as XR by Pangolin (PANGO v1.8). A total of 50 % of cases had a sample collected whilst in hospital and the first three cases were immunocompromised patients. The patient median age was 58 years (range: 4–95 years) and most of the patients were fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 (74 % third dose/booster). Three patients died within 28 days of their sample collection date, one of whom had COVID-19 listed amongst ICD10 (International Classification of Diseases 10) coded causes of death. Our integrated system enabled real-time monitoring of recombinant SARS-CoV-2 for early detection, in order to rapidly risk assess and respond. This work highlights the importance of setting-based surveillance of recombinant SARS-CoV-2, as well as the need to monitor immunocompromised populations through repeat testing and sequencing

A new hammer to crack an old nut : interspecific competitive resource capture by plants is regulated by nutrient supply, not climate

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