Risk and Protective Factors associated with Bullying among Vermont Students

Background: Recent research has linked depressive episodes and behavior to bullying victimization, adding to a decade of research associating bullying victimization with multiple risk and protective factors. Objective: We aimed to determine how risk and protective factors differ among Vermont high school students who are bullied electronically as compared to in-person. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional analysis and applied descriptive and logistic regression on the 2015 Vermont Youth Risk Behavior Survey (n=20,013). Results: We found that students who reported depression, suicide attempts, or physical fighting were more likely to report both in-person and electronic bullying victimization, compared to those who only reported one form of bullying or those who did not report bullying at all. Additionally, students who were bullied and reported feeling disengaged within their community were less likely to report depression, suicide attempts, and physical violence than students who reported community engagement. Conclusions: Students who experienced both in-person and electronic bullying were associated with higher levels of depression, suicide attempts, and physical violence. While students who were disengaged within their community reported higher levels of bullying. Other risk factors that may have contributed to this association should be explored further. The relationship between the risk and protective factors associated with bullying and community engagement have important implications for public health in Vermont

Promoting healthy eating in pregnancy: What kind of support services do women say they want?

Aim: To identify characteristics of the services and support women want to enable them to eat healthily during pregnancy to make a potential future service acceptable to this population. Background: An unhealthy diet during pregnancy may have a significant influence on pregnancy outcome, either directly through nutrient deficiencies or indirectly through maternal weight gain. Many pregnant women in the United Kingdom gain too much weight in pregnancy, and this weight gain may lead to an increased risk of preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and having an obese child. Thus, there is a need for interventions aimed at improving healthy eating in pregnancy. It is crucial in developing successful interventions to understand how participation can be maximised by optimising intervention acceptability. Methods: Four focus groups were conducted; two with prenatal women (n = 9) and two with postnatal women (n = 14). Discussion focused on identifying relevant characteristics of a service targeting prenatal and postnatal women's eating to ensure that a future service was acceptable to the women. Findings: The participants’ responses were clustered into three broad themes: (1) early information leading to routine formation of healthier eating habits, (2) the delivery of practical sessions to increase information and (3) health professionals providing support and signposting to services. The participants reported wanting a practical service held in a convenient location, preferably led by women who have been pregnant themselves. The participants also reported wanting to be offered this service in pregnancy to help them get into a routine before they gave birth. Several suggestions for how this service should be marketed were mentioned, including through midwives and the internet. This research provides practical information for how to design support for prenatal women to increase their knowledge and practical skills regarding eating healthily during their pregnancy

Young people living in the YMCA

This article presents interim findings and reflections from a case study of multiply excluded homeless people in Stoke-on-Trent. The article focuses on the experiences reported by a group of twelve such people living in the YMCA hostel. From the interviews, a large number of thematic structures were identified, of which only a few are outlined here, due to restrictions on the article length. The article concludes that the YMCA has had an important impact on their lives, mostly for the better, but the nature of this impact is complex and far from being fully understood

Toward Reproducible Baselines: The Open-Source IR Reproducibility Challenge

The Open-Source IR Reproducibility Challenge brought together developers of open-source search engines to provide reproducible baselines of their systems in a common environment on Amazon EC2. The product is a repository that contains all code necessary to generate competitive ad hoc retrieval baselines, such that with a single script, anyone with a copy of the collection can reproduce the submitted runs. Our vision is that these results would serve as widely accessible points of comparison in future IR research. This project represents an ongoing effort, but we describe the first phase of the challenge that was organized as part of a workshop at SIGIR 2015. We have succeeded modestly so far, achieving our main goals on the Gov2 collection with seven opensource search engines. In this paper, we describe our methodology, share experimental results, and discuss lessons learned as well as next steps

Author-choice open access publishing in the biological and medical literature: a citation analysis

In this article, we analyze the citations to articles published in 11 biological and medical journals from 2003 to 2007 that employ author-choice open access models. Controlling for known explanatory predictors of citations, only 2 of the 11 journals show positive and significant open access effects. Analyzing all journals together, we report a small but significant increase in article citations of 17%. In addition, there is strong evidence to suggest that the open access advantage is declining by about 7% per year, from 32% in 2004 to 11% in 2007.Comment: citation changes; final manuscrip

Establishing a new service role in tuberculosis care: the tuberculosis link worker

Aim.  This paper is a report of a study to develop a social outreach model of care, including the role of a link worker in developing collaborative care pathways, for marginalized groups with tuberculosis. Background.  Social risk factors such as homelessness and substance misuse are associated with poor treatment outcomes. Models of interprofessional practice to address the health and social care of patients are needed to improve outcomes. Methods.  A process evaluation involving a prospective cohort study of 100 patients and interviews with eight agencies involved in their care was conducted in London between January 2003 and April 2005. Outcome measures included a profile of patient need to guide service development; referrals to care providers; goal attainment; social improvement and treatment outcomes; and agencies’ views on the benefits of link working. Findings.  The median age of the sample was 32·4 years and 62% were males. Reasons for referral to the link worker included housing need (56%); welfare benefits (42%); immigration (29%) and clinical management issues (28%). One-third of the patients were referred to other agencies. Goals, as agreed in the care plan, were attained totally or partially for 88% (59/67) of patients and 78% of patients successfully completed treatment. Barriers to attaining goals included service criteria which excluded some groups of patients and, in some cases, a patient’s inability to follow a course of action. Conclusion.  Link workers can mitigate some of the social risk factors that complicate the treatment of tuberculosis by enabling integrated health and social care

Women, men and coronary heart disease: a review of the qualitative literature

Aim. This paper presents a review of the qualitative literature which examines the experiences of patients with coronary heart disease. The paper also assesses whether the experiences of both female and male patients are reflected in the literature and summarizes key themes. Background. Understanding patients' experiences of their illness is important for coronary heart disease prevention and education. Qualitative methods are particularly suited to eliciting patients' detailed understandings and perceptions of illness. As much previous research has been 'gender neutral', this review pays particular attention to gender. Methods. Published papers from 60 qualitative studies were identified for the review through searches in MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PREMEDLINE, PsychINFO, Social Sciences Citation Index and Web of Science using keywords related to coronary heart disease. Findings. Early qualitative studies of patients with coronary heart disease were conducted almost exclusively with men, and tended to generalize from 'male' experience to 'human' experience. By the late 1990s this pattern had changed, with the majority of studies including women and many being conducted with solely female samples. However, many studies that include both male and female coronary heart disease patients still do not have a specific gender focus. Key themes in the literature include interpreting symptoms and seeking help, belief about coronary 'candidates' and relationships with health professionals. The influence of social roles is important: many female patients have difficulties reconciling family responsibilities and medical advice, while male patients worry about being absent from work. Conclusions. There is a need for studies that compare the experiences of men and women. There is also an urgent need for work that takes masculinity and gender roles into account when exploring the experiences of men with coronary heart disease

Particle Dark Matter Constraints from the Draco Dwarf Galaxy

It is widely thought that neutralinos, the lightest supersymmetric particles, could comprise most of the dark matter. If so, then dark halos will emit radio and gamma ray signals initiated by neutralino annihilation. A particularly promising place to look for these indicators is at the center of the local group dwarf spheroidal galaxy Draco, and recent measurements of the motion of its stars have revealed it to be an even better target for dark matter detection than previously thought. We compute limits on WIMP properties for various models of Draco's dark matter halo. We find that if the halo is nearly isothermal, as the new measurements indicate, then current gamma ray flux limits prohibit much of the neutralino parameter space. If Draco has a moderate magnetic field, then current radio limits can rule out more of it. These results are appreciably stronger than other current constraints, and so acquiring more detailed data on Draco's density profile becomes one of the most promising avenues for identifying dark matter.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Surveying the Dynamic Radio Sky with the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array

This paper presents a search for radio transients at a frequency of 73.8 MHz (4 m wavelength) using the all-sky imaging capabilities of the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array (LWDA). The LWDA was a 16-dipole phased array telescope, located on the site of the Very Large Array in New Mexico. The field of view of the individual dipoles was essentially the entire sky, and the number of dipoles was sufficiently small that a simple software correlator could be used to make all-sky images. From 2006 October to 2007 February, we conducted an all-sky transient search program, acquiring a total of 106 hr of data; the time sampling varied, being 5 minutes at the start of the program and improving to 2 minutes by the end of the program. We were able to detect solar flares, and in a special-purpose mode, radio reflections from ionized meteor trails during the 2006 Leonid meteor shower. We detected no transients originating outside of the solar system above a flux density limit of 500 Jy, equivalent to a limit of no more than about 10^{-2} events/yr/deg^2, having a pulse energy density >~ 1.5 x 10^{-20} J/m^2/Hz at 73.8 MHz for pulse widths of about 300 s. This event rate is comparable to that determined from previous all-sky transient searches, but at a lower frequency than most previous all-sky searches. We believe that the LWDA illustrates how an all-sky imaging mode could be a useful operational model for low-frequency instruments such as the Low Frequency Array, the Long Wavelength Array station, the low-frequency component of the Square Kilometre Array, and potentially the Lunar Radio Array.Comment: 20 pages; accepted for publication in A

Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing using resazurin bulk modified screen-printed electrochemical sensing platforms

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the most common types of bacterial infection. UTIs can be associated with multidrug resistant bacteria and current methods of determining an effective antibiotic for UTIs can take up to 48 hours, which increases the chances of a negative prognosis for the patient. In this paper we report for the first time, the fabrication of resazurin bulk modified screen-printed macroelectrodes (R-SPEs) demonstrating them to be effective platforms for the electrochemical detection of antibiotic susceptibility in complicated UTIs. Using differential pulse voltammetry (DPV), resazurin was able to be detected down to 15.6 μM. R-SPEs were utilised to conduct antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) of E. coli (ATCC® 25922) to the antibiotic gentamicin sulphate using DPV to detect the relative concentrations of resazurin between antibiotic treated bacteria, and bacteria without antibiotic treatment. Using R-SPEs, antibiotic susceptibility was determined after a total elapsed time of 90 minutes including the inoculation of the artificial urine, preincubation and testing time. The use of electrochemistry as a phenotypic means of identifying an effective antibiotic to treat a complicated UTI offers a rapid and accurate alternative to culture based methods for AST with R-SPEs offering an inexpensive and simpler alternative to other AST methods utilising electrochemical based approaches