Local Election Officials Survey (March 2022)

As Amer­ican demo­cracy finds itself under assault from lies about the 2020 pres­id­en­tial race being "stolen", elec­tion offi­cials are a prime target in the attempt to under­mine future elec­tions. This poll of local elec­tion offi­cials around the coun­try shows how damaging the sustained attacks against them and their colleagues have been, putting apolit­ical elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion and our demo­cratic system in seri­ous danger

In Adult Patients Aged 18 and Over, What Is the Effect of Telemedicine, As Compared to Traditional Office Visits, On Missed Appointment Rates

During the COVID-19 pandemic public health officials sought out different options to limit the spread of the disease and continue providing the much-needed care that patients deserved. Telemedicine became one of the leading initiatives to assist in caring for patients while limiting potential exposures. Prior to the pandemic telemedicine was primarily utilized in the psychology and neurology settings. The lost of life during the pandemic was unimaginable additionally, many healthcare entities begin to suffer from lack of protective supplies. Due to the unknown and newly implemented stay at home mandates made throughout the country many people became fearful of COVID-19 which led to an inundation of no-shows and missed appointments in the primary care setting. As the pandemic continues missed appointments seem to parallel its trend. The benefits of telemedicine implementation in relation to reducing missed appointments has yet to be thoroughly examined. This project aims to explore the impact of telemedicine implementation in a primary care clinic in Pensacola, Florida. The goal of the project is to measure patient satisfaction and evaluate the affect of telemedicine on missed appointments.https://jagworks.southalabama.edu/scholarsday2023_spring-posters/1000/thumbnail.jp

Valuable carcasses: postmortem preservation of fatty acid composition in heart tissue

In order to effectively conserve species, we must understand the structure and function of integral mechanisms at all levels of organismal organisation, from intracellular biochemistry to whole animal ecophysiology. The accuracy of biochemical analyses depend on the quality and integrity of the samples analysed. It is believed that tissue samples collected immediately postmortem provide the most reliable depiction of the living animal. Yet, euthanasia of threatened or protected species for the collection of tissue presents a number of ethical complications. Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) are essential to the cardiovascular system of all animals and the structure of PUFA can be degraded by peroxidation, potentially modifying the fatty acid composition of the tissue over postmortem time. Here, we assessed the composition of PUFA in cardiac tissue of bats (Carollia perspicillata) over the course of 12-h postmortem. We show that PUFA are resistant to naturally occurring postmortem degradation in heart tissue, with no difference in the overall composition of fatty acids across all time classes (0, 3, 6 or 12-h postmortem). Our results suggest that carcasses that would otherwise be discarded may actually be viable for the assessment of fatty acid composition in a number of tissues. We hope to spur further investigations into the viability of carcasses for other biochemical analyses as they may be an untapped resource available to biologists

Post-fire recovery of torpor and activity patterns of a small mammal

To cope with the post-fire challenges of decreased availability of food and shelter, brown antechinus (Antechinus stuartii), a small marsupial mammal, increase the use of energy conserving torpor and reduce activity. However, it is not known how long it takes for animals to resume pre-fire torpor and activity patterns during the recovery of burnt habitat. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that antechinus will adjust torpor use and activity after a fire depending on vegetation recovery. We simultaneously quantified torpor and activity patterns for female antechinus from three adjacent areas: (i) the area of a management burn one year post-fire, (ii) an area that was burned two years prior and (iii) a control area. In comparison to shortly after the management burn, antechinus in all three groups displayed less frequent and less pronounced torpor while being more active. We provide the first evidence that only one year post-fire antechinus resume pre-fire torpor and activity patterns, likely in response to the return of herbaceous ground cover and foraging opportunities

Supernurse:Nurses' workarounds informing the design of interactive technologies for home wound care

The increasing aging population needing homecare is leading to additional clinical work for homecare nurses. Wound care and documentation are substantial components of this work required to monitor patients and make appropriate clinical decisions. However, due to barriers in the systems that nurses are expected to use, and context of their activities, they create and use workarounds to get their job done. In this study, the most common themes of workarounds were identified and used to inform design iterations of a wound documentation application: SuperNurse. The exploratory and experimental design iterations involved homecare nurses, who expressed: curiosity, leading to further reflection; frustration, leading to identifying problems; and surprise, leading to identifying useful and easy to use designs. We found that nurse-centred design, informed by workarounds, led to using mobile, wearable, and speech recognition technology and improving ease of use and usefulness in SuperNurse

The “hot potato” topic: challenges and facilitators to promoting respectful maternal care within a broader health intervention in Tanzania

In recent years, mistreatment during childbirth has captured the public health and maternal health consciousness as not only an affront to women’s rights but also a formidable deterrent to the uptake of facility-based childbirth - and thus to reductions in maternal mortality. The challenge ahead is to determine what can be done to address this public health problem. A modest but growing body of research has demonstrated that interventions to foster Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) can enact change, albeit in the relatively controlled context of a trial or study. Herein we describe our experiences in weaving elements of RMC across tiers of an existing maternal and newborn health program. As a commentary, this document does not outline program results, but instead highlights challenges and facilitators to promoting RMC within a large-scale, multi-district health platform. We conclude with lessons learned during the process and urge that others share their program learning experiences in an effort to strengthen the knowledge base on what works and what does not work in terms of addressing this complex, context-sensitive issue

Responding to the weather: energy budgeting by a small mammal in the wild

Energy conservation is paramount for small mammals because of their small size, large surface area to volume ratio, and the resultant high heat loss to the environment. To survive on limited food resources and to fuel their expensive metabolism during activity, many small mammals employ daily torpor to reduce energy expenditure during the rest phase. We hypothesized that a small terrestrial semelparous marsupial, the brown antechinus Antechinus stuartii, would maximize activity when foraging conditions were favorable to gain fat reserves before their intense breeding period, but would increase torpor use when conditions were poor to conserve these fat reserves. Female antechinus were trapped and implanted with small temperature-sensitive radio transmitters to record body temperature and to quantify torpor expression and activity patterns in the wild. Most antechinus used torpor at least once per day over the entire study period. Total daily torpor use increased and mean daily body temperature decreased significantly with a reduction in minimum ambient temperature. Interestingly, antechinus employed less torpor on days with more rain and decreasing barometric pressure. In contrast to torpor expression, activity was directly related to ambient temperature and inversely related to barometric pressure. Our results reveal that antechinus use a flexible combination of physiology and behavior that can be adjusted to manage their energy budget according to weather variables

Complete genome sequence of the encephalomyelitic Burkholderia pseudomallei strain MSHR305

We describe the complete genome sequence of Burkholderia pseudomallei MSHR305, a clinical isolate taken from a fatal encephalomyelitis case, a rare form of melioidosis. This sequence will be used for comparisons to identify the genes that are involved in neurological cases

Complete genome sequence of the encephalomyelitic Burkholderia pseudomallei strain MSHR305

We describe the complete genome sequence of Burkholderia pseudomallei MSHR305, a clinical isolate taken from a fatal encephalomyelitis case, a rare form of melioidosis. This sequence will be used for comparisons to identify the genes that are involved in neurological cases

Dependence of a planet's chaotic zone on particle eccentricity: the shape of debris disc inner edges

The orbit of a planet is surrounded by a chaotic zone wherein nearby particles' orbits are chaotic and unstable. Wisdom (1980) showed that the chaos is driven by the overlap of mean motion resonances which occurs within a distance (da/a)_chaos = 1.3 mu^2/7 of the planet's orbit. However, the width of mean motion resonances grows with the particles' eccentricity, which will increase the width of the chaotic zone at higher eccentricities. Here we investigate the width of the chaotic zone using the iterated encounter map and N-body integrations. We find that the classical prescription works well for particles on low-eccentricity orbits. However, above a critical eccentricity, dependent upon the mass of the planet, the width of the chaotic zone increases with eccentricity. An extension of Wisdom's analytical arguments then shows that, above the critical eccentricity, the chaotic zone width is given by (da/a)_chaos = 1.8 e^1/5 mu^1/5, which agrees well with the encounter map results. The critical eccentricity is given by e_cr = 0.21 mu^3/7. This extended chaotic zone results in a larger cleared region when a planet sculpts the inner edge of a debris disc comprised of eccentric planetesimals. Hence, the planet mass estimated from the classical chaotic zone may be erroneous. We apply this result to the HR8799 system, showing that the masses of HR8799b inferred from the truncation of the disc may vary by up to 50% depending on the disc particles' eccentricities. With a disc edge at 90AU, the necessary mass of planet b to cause the truncation would be 8-10 Jovian masses if the disc particles have low eccentricities (<0.02), but only 4-8 Jovian masses if the disc particles have higher eccentricities. Our result also has implications for the ability of a planet to feed material into an inner system, a process which may explain metal pollution in White Dwarf atmospheres.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to MNRA