The process of recovery of people with mental illness: The perspectives of patients, family members and care providers: Part 1

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It is a qualitative design study that examines points of divergence and convergence in the perspectives on recovery of 36 participants or 12 triads. Each triad comprising a patient, a family member/friend, a care provider and documents the procedural, analytic of triangulating perspectives as a means of understanding the recovery process which is illustrated by four case studies. Variations are considered as they relate to individual characteristics, type of participant (patient, family, member/friend and care provider), and mental illness. This paper which is part of a larger study and is based on a qualitative research design documents the process of recovery of people with mental illness: Developing a Model of Recovery in Mental Health: A middle range theory.</p> <p><b>Methods</b></p> <p>Data were collected in field notes through semi-structured interviews based on three interview guides (one for patients, one for family members/friends, and one for caregivers). Cross analysis and triangulation methods were used to analyse the areas of convergence and divergence on the recovery process of all triads.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In general, with the 36 participants united in 12 triads, two themes emerge from the cross-analysis process or triangulation of data sources (12 triads analysis in 12 cases studies). Two themes emerge from the analysis process of the content of 36 interviews with participants: (1) <it>Revealing dynamic context</it>, situating patients in their dynamic context; and (2) <it>Relationship issues in a recovery process</it>, furthering our understanding of such issues. We provide four case studies examples (among 12 cases studies) to illustrate the variations in the way recovery is perceived, interpreted and expressed in relation to the different contexts of interaction.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The perspectives of the three participants (patients, family members/friends and care providers) suggest that recovery depends on constructing meaning around mental illness experiences and that the process is based on each person's dynamic context (e.g., social network, relationship), life experiences and other social determinants (e.g., symptoms, environment). The findings of this study add to existing knowledge about the determinants of the recovery of persons suffering with a mental illness and significant other utilizing public mental health services in Montreal, Canada.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Dark Energy and Modified Gravity

Despite two decades of tremendous experimental and theoretical progress, the riddle of the accelerated expansion of the Universe remains to be solved. On the experimental side, our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the major dark energy probes has evolved; here we summarize the major probes and their crucial challenges. On the theoretical side, the taxonomy of explanations for the accelerated expansion rate is better understood, providing clear guidance to the relevant observables. We argue that: i) improving statistical precision and systematic control by taking more data, supporting research efforts to address crucial challenges for each probe, using complementary methods, and relying on cross-correlations is well motivated; ii) blinding of analyses is difficult but ever more important; iii) studies of dark energy and modified gravity are related; and iv) it is crucial that R&D for a vibrant dark energy program in the 2030s be started now by supporting studies and technical R&D that will allow embryonic proposals to mature. Understanding dark energy, arguably the biggest unsolved mystery in both fundamental particle physics and cosmology, will remain one of the focal points of cosmology in the forthcoming decade

Dark Energy and Modified Gravity

Despite two decades of tremendous experimental and theoretical progress, the riddle of the accelerated expansion of the Universe remains to be solved. On the experimental side, our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the major dark energy probes has evolved; here we summarize the major probes and their crucial challenges. On the theoretical side, the taxonomy of explanations for the accelerated expansion rate is better understood, providing clear guidance to the relevant observables. We argue that: i) improving statistical precision and systematic control by taking more data, supporting research efforts to address crucial challenges for each probe, using complementary methods, and relying on cross-correlations is well motivated; ii) blinding of analyses is difficult but ever more important; iii) studies of dark energy and modified gravity are related; and iv) it is crucial that R&D for a vibrant dark energy program in the 2030s be started now by supporting studies and technical R&D that will allow embryonic proposals to mature. Understanding dark energy, arguably the biggest unsolved mystery in both fundamental particle physics and cosmology, will remain one of the focal points of cosmology in the forthcoming decade

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press