Detecting critical responses from deliberate self-harm videos on YouTube

YouTube is one of the leading social media platforms and online spaces for people who self-harm to search and view deliberate self-harm videos, share their experience and seek help via comments. These comments may contain information that signals a commentator could be at risk of potential harm. Due to a large amount of responses generated from these videos, it is very challenging for social media teams to respond to a vulnerable commentator who is at risk. We considered this issue as a multi-class problem and triaged viewers' comments into one of four severity levels. Using current state-of-the-art classifiers, we propose a model enriched with psycho-linguistic and sentiment features that can detect critical comments in need of urgent support. On average, our model achieved up to 60% precision, recall, and f1-score which indicates the effectiveness of the model

The 2nd United Kingdom Extracellular Vesicle Forum Meeting Abstracts

The UK Extracellular Vesicles (UKEV) Forum meetings were born of the realization that there were a number of UK laboratories studying extracellular vesicle biology and using similar techniques but without a regular national meeting dedicated to EVs at which to share their findings. This was compounded by the fact that many of these labs were working in different fields and thus networking and sharing of ideas and best practice was sometimes difficult. The first workshop was organized in 2013 by Dr Charlotte Lawson, under the auspices of the Society for Endocrinology, led to the founding of the UKEV Forum and the organization of a British Heart Foundation sponsored 1-day conference held in London in December 2014. Although growing in size every year, the central aims of these workshops have remained the same: to provide a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas, to allow young scientists to present their data in the form of short talks and poster presentations and to discuss their work with more established scientists in the field. Here we include the presented abstracts for the 2015 1-day conference hosted by Cardiff University. This meeting was attended by approximately 130 delegates throughout the United Kingdom, but also attended by delegates from Belgium, Netherlands, France, Ireland and other nations. The day composed of plenary presentations from Prof Matthias Belting, Lund University, Sweden and Dr Guillaume van Niel, Institut Curie, Paris together with 10 short presentations from submitted abstracts. The topics covered were broad, with sessions on Mechanisms of EV production, EVs in Infection, EVs in Cancer and in Blood and Characterizing EVs in Biological fluids. This hopefully gives a reflection of the range of EV-related studies being conducted currently in the UK. There were also 33 poster presentations equally broad in subject matter. The organizers are grateful to the Life Science Research Network Wales – a Welsh government-funding scheme that part-sponsored the conference. We are also grateful to commercial sponsors, and 3 paid-presentations are included in the abstracts. The UK EV Forum is expected to become an established annual event held at different Universities across the UK and continue to attract increasing delegate numbers and abstract submissions. We look forward to the next planned conference, which will be hosted by David Carter and his colleagues at Oxford Brookes University on 13th December 2016

Good eggs, fixers and movers: the cultural elite in Wales

This thesis explores the attitudes, beliefs and opinions of members of the cultural elite in Wales. This term is used to mean people who hold prominent, high profile and prestigious positions within the culture sector in Wales, specifically located around the capital city of Cardiff. Through the analysis of data collected from in-depth semi-structured interviews with twenty key informants I examine how they construct their biographies and make sense of the social world which they inhabit. I address two main research questions, firstly whether they see themselves as belonging to a closed, restricted and self-referencing network. Secondly, how do they try to justify their positions of power and privilege in society? Using themes from the literature I also consider to what extent the different sectors (culture, business and political) overlap, how the network is constructed in terms of a core and a periphery, what purpose this serves, and how the network is at once generally cohesive but also not without some internal divisions. This is all done in a specifically Welsh context and I argue that their national identity has a very important role to play in how they define and experience culture, and that this directly impacts on how they explain their reasons and motivations for their involvement. I use Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and social capital and demonstrate how these are exchangeable commodities. While members of the cultural elite are in possession of large amounts of cultural capital, success in the network depends on them being able to demonstrate this, and this in turn increases their social capital. The act of networking is fundamental for sustaining the network and this is a performance on their part. How the interviewees performed for me, the interviewer, lies at the heart of the discussion

Inferring brain-wide interactions using data-constrained recurrent neural network models

Behavior arises from the coordinated activity of numerous anatomically and functionally distinct brain regions. Modern experimental tools allow unprecedented access to large neural populations spanning many interacting regions brain-wide. Yet, understanding such large-scale datasets necessitates both scalable computational models to extract meaningful features of inter-region communication and principled theories to interpret those features. Here, we introduce Current-Based Decomposition (CURBD), an approach for inferring brain-wide interactions using data-constrained recurrent neural network models that directly reproduce experimentally-obtained neural data. CURBD leverages the functional interactions inferred by such models to reveal directional currents between multiple brain regions. We first show that CURBD accurately isolates inter-region currents in simulated networks with known dynamics. We then apply CURBD to multi-region neural recordings obtained from mice during running, macaques during Pavlovian conditioning, and humans during memory retrieval to demonstrate the widespread applicability of CURBD to untangle brain-wide interactions underlying behavior from a variety of neural datasets

Web-based internet searches for digital health products in the United Kingdom before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: a time-series analysis using app libraries from the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Applications (ORCHA)

Objectives To explore if consumer interest in digital health products (DHPs), changed following the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures that ensued. Design Retrospective time-series analysis of web-based internet searches for DHPs in the UK, split over two periods, pre-COVID- 19 lockdown (January 2019–23 March 2020) and post-COVID- 19 lockdown (24 March 2020–31 December 2020). Setting The UK. Participants Members of the UK general population using health-app libraries provided by the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Applications. Primary and secondary outcome measures The primary outcome was volume of searches for DHPs. Secondary outcomes considered search volumes for 25 different therapeutic areas. Outcomes were assessed for significance using a two-stage Poisson test. Results There were 126 640 searches for DHPs over the study period. Searches for DHPs increased by 343% from 2446 per month prior to COVID-19 lockdown measures being introduced to 8996 per month in the period following the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. In total, 23/25 (92%) of condition areas experienced a significant increase in searches for DHPs, with the greatest increases occurring in the first 2 months following lockdown. Musculoskeletal conditions (2,036%), allergy (1,253%) and healthy living DHPs (1,051%) experienced the greatest increases in searches compared with pre-lockdown. Increased search volumes for DHPs were sustained in the 9 months following the introduction of lockdown measures, with 21/25 (84%) of condition areas experiencing monthly search volumes at least 50% greater than pre-lockdown levels. Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly disrupted the routine delivery of healthcare, making face-to- face interaction difficult, and contributing to unmet clinical needs. This study has demonstrated significant increases in internet searches for DHPs by members of the UK population since COVID-19, signifying an increased interest in this potential therapeutic medium. Future research should clarify whether this increased interest has resulted in increased acceptance and utilisation of these technologies also

Evolving protocols for research in equitation science

Within the emerging discipline of Equitation Science the application of consistent methodology, including robust objective measures, is required for sound scientific evaluation. This report aims to provide an evaluation of current methodology and to propose some initial guidelines for future research. The value of research, especially that involving small sample sizes, can be enhanced by the application of consistent methodology and reporting enabling results to be compared across studies. This paper includes guidelines for experimental design in studies involving the ridden horse. Equine ethograms currently used are reviewed and factors to be considered in the development of a riddenhorse ethogram are evaluated. An assessment of methods used to collect behavioral and physiological data is included and the use of equipment for measurements (e.g., rein-tension and pressure-sensing instruments) is discussed. Equitation science is a new discipline, subject to evolving viewpoints on research foci and design. Technological advances may improve the accuracy and detail of measurements, but must be used within appropriate and valid experimental designs

Corvid Re-Caching without ‘Theory of Mind’: A Model

Scrub jays are thought to use many tactics to protect their caches. For instance, they predominantly bury food far away from conspecifics, and if they must cache while being watched, they often re-cache their worms later, once they are in private. Two explanations have been offered for such observations, and they are intensely debated. First, the birds may reason about their competitors' mental states, with a ‘theory of mind’; alternatively, they may apply behavioral rules learned in daily life. Although this second hypothesis is cognitively simpler, it does seem to require a different, ad-hoc behavioral rule for every caching and re-caching pattern exhibited by the birds. Our new theory avoids this drawback by explaining a large variety of patterns as side-effects of stress and the resulting memory errors. Inspired by experimental data, we assume that re-caching is not motivated by a deliberate effort to safeguard specific caches from theft, but by a general desire to cache more. This desire is brought on by stress, which is determined by the presence and dominance of onlookers, and by unsuccessful recovery attempts. We study this theory in two experiments similar to those done with real birds with a kind of ‘virtual bird’, whose behavior depends on a set of basic assumptions about corvid cognition, and a well-established model of human memory. Our results show that the ‘virtual bird’ acts as the real birds did; its re-caching reflects whether it has been watched, how dominant its onlooker was, and how close to that onlooker it has cached. This happens even though it cannot attribute mental states, and it has only a single behavioral rule assumed to be previously learned. Thus, our simulations indicate that corvid re-caching can be explained without sophisticated social cognition. Given our specific predictions, our theory can easily be tested empirically

Considerations towards a roadmap for collection, handling and storage of blood extracellular vesicles

There is an increasing interest in exploring clinically relevant information that is present in body fluids, and extracellular vesicles (EVs) are intrinsic components of body fluids (?liquid biopsies?). In this report, we will focus on blood. Blood contains not only EVs but also cells, and non-EV particles including lipoproteins. Due to the high concentration of soluble proteins and lipoproteins, blood, plasma and serum have a high viscosity and density, which hampers the concentration, isolation and detection of EVs. Because most if not all studies on EVs are single-centre studies, their clinical relevance remains limited. Therefore, there is an urgent need to improve standardization and reproducibility of EV research. As a first step, the International Society on Extracellular Vesicles organized a biomarker workshop in Birmingham (UK) in November 2017, and during that workshop several working groups were created to focus on a particular body fluid. This report is the first output of the blood EV work group and is based on responses by work group members to a questionnaire in order to discover the contours of a roadmap. From the answers it is clear that most respondents are in favour of evidence-based research, education, quality control procedures, and physical models to improve our understanding and comparison of concentration, isolation and detection methods. Since blood is such a complex body fluid, we assume that the outcome of the survey may also be valuable for exploring body fluids other than blood.Non peer reviewe

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