Exploring childhood immunization uptake with first nations mothers in north-western Ontario, Canada

Background. Childhood immunization is an important component of preventive health care for young children. Successful control of vaccine-preventable diseases depends on high levels of immunization coverage. Immunization statistics show that on-reserve First Nations (Native Indian) children have lower vaccination coverage than children in the general Canadian population. There has been little research, however, conducted with First Nations populations on this topic. Aim of the study. This study explored First Nations parents' beliefs about childhood immunizations and examined factors influencing immunization uptake. Methods. This study used a qualitative descriptive design to explore the issue of childhood immunization uptake. Twenty-eight mothers from two First Nations communities in north-western Ontario, Canada, were interviewed about their perceptions of childhood immunizations and vaccine-preventable diseases. The interviews were transcribed and content analysis was used to examine the data. Findings. Data analysis revealed the following six themes: (1) the fear of disease; (2) the efficacy of immunizations; (3) the immunization experience; (4) the consequences of immunization; (5) interactions with health professionals; and (6) barriers to immunizations. Participants were motivated to seek immunizations for their children by a fear of vaccine preventable diseases. A small proportion of mothers, however, questioned the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing disease. Traumatic immunization experiences, vaccine side-effects and sequelae, negative interactions with health professionals, and barriers such as time constraints and childhood illnesses all served as deterrents to immunization. Conclusions. The research outcomes highlight the varied beliefs of First Nations parents about childhood immunizations and the numerous factors that both positively and negatively influence immunization uptake. Further research is needed to explore the issue of childhood immunizations in First Nations communities and to determine strategies to improve uptake.postprin

Interactive Multi-Submission Deposit Workflows for Desktop Applications

Online submission and publishing is the norm for academic researchers. With the pressure on these authors to submit their work to conferences, journals and Institutional Repositories, this leads to demands on the author to go through multiple web based interfaces, filling in forms with the same information multiple times before they can submit. At the same time, each of these services in turn will have made policy decisions on what types of format they allow and what templates the content has to conform to. The amount of work expected of the author does not adding up to the potential gain, thus most authors will only submit into the repository or publication where they foresee the most benefit. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem that embeds the workflow for multiple submissions into the desktop application of the author, most commonly Microsoft Word. We also propose extending the work done on the Microsoft Word Author Add-in tool to allow two-way negotiation between each repository and the desktop application

The Aesthetic Dimensions of U.S. and South Korean Responses to Web Home Pages: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Culturally influenced preferences in website aesthetics is a topic often neglected by scholars in human-computer interaction. Kim, Lee, and Choi (2003) identified aesthetic design factors of web home pages that elicited particular responses in South Korean web users based on 13 secondary emotional dimensions. This study extends Kim et al.'s work to U.S. participants, comparing the original South Korean findings with U.S. findings. Results show that U.S. participants reliably applied translations of the emotional adjectives used in the South Korean study to the home pages. However, factor analysis revealed that the aesthetic perceptions of U.S. and South Korean participants formed different aesthetic dimensions composed of different sets of emotional adjectives, suggesting that U.S. and South Korean people perceive the aesthetics of home pages differently. These results indicate that website aesthetics can vary significantly between cultures

Implementation research for the prevention of antimicrobial resistance and healthcare-associated infections; 2017 Geneva infection prevention and control (IPC)-think tank (part 1)

Background Around 5–15% of all hospital patients worldwide suffer from healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and years of excessive antimicrobial use in human and animal medicine have created emerging antimicrobial resistance (AMR). A considerable amount of evidence-based measures have been published to address these challenges, but the largest challenge seems to be their implementation. Methods In June 2017, a total of 42 experts convened at the Geneva IPC-Think Tank to discuss four domains in implementation science: 1) teaching implementation skills; 2) fostering implementation of IPC and antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) by policy making; 3) national/international actions to foster implementation skills; and 4) translational research bridging social sciences and clinical research in infection prevention and control (IPC) and AMR. Results Although neglected in the past, implementation skills have become a priority in IPC and AMS. They should now be part of any curriculum in health care, and IPC career paths should be created. Guidelines and policies should be aligned with each other and evidence-based, each document providing a section on implementing elements of IPC and AMS in patient care. International organisations should be advocates for IPC and AMS, framing them as patient safety issues and emphasizing the importance of implementation skills. Healthcare authorities at the national level should adopt a similar approach and provide legal frameworks, guidelines, and resources to allow better implementation of patient safety measures in IPC and AMS. Rather than repeating effectiveness studies in every setting, we should invest in methods to improve the implementation of evidence-based measures in different healthcare contexts. For this, we need to encourage and financially support collaborations between social sciences and clinical IPC research. Conclusions Experts of the 2017 Geneva Think Tank on IPC and AMS, CDC, and WHO agreed that sustained efforts on implementation of IPC and AMS strategies are required at international, country, and hospital management levels, to provide an adequate multimodal framework that addresses (not exclusively) leadership, resources, education and training for implementing IPC and AMS. Future strategies can build on this agreement to make strategies on IPC and AMS more effective

Highly-mass-loaded hot galactic winds are unstable to cool filament formation

When cool clouds are ram-pressure accelerated by a hot supersonic galactic wind, some of the clouds may be shredded by hydrodynamical instabilities and incorporated into the hot flow. Recent one-dimensional steady-state calculations show how cool cloud entrainment directly affects the bulk thermodynamics, kinematics, and observational characteristics of the hot gas. In particular, mass-loading decelerates the hot flow and changes its entropy. Here, we investigate the stability of planar and spherical mass-loaded hot supersonic flows using both perturbation analysis and three-dimensional time-dependent radiative hydrodynamical simulations. We show that mass-loading is stable over a broad range of parameters and that the 1D time-steady analytic solutions exactly reproduce the 3D time-dependent calculations, provided that the flow does not decelerate sufficiently to become subsonic. For higher values of the mass-loading, the flow develops a sonic point and becomes thermally unstable, rapidly cooling and forming elongated dense cometary filaments. We explore the mass-loading parameters required to reach a sonic point and the radiative formation of these filaments. For certain approximations, we can derive simple analytic criteria. In general a mass-loading rate similar to the initial mass outflow rate is required. In this sense, the destruction of small cool clouds by a hot flow may ultimately spontaneously generate fast cool filaments, as observed in starburst superwinds. Lastly, we find that the kinematics of filaments is sensitive to the slope of the mass-loading function. Filaments move faster than the surrounding wind if mass-loading is over long distances whereas filaments move slower than their surroundings if mass-loading is abrupt.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures, submitted to MNRAS (21 July 2023

Stress Induced Degradation Modes in CIGSS Minimodules

The experimental objectives of this report are: (1) compare the performance of modules exposed to high temperature and humidity; (2) determine the effects of different encapsulants on long term stability of CIGSS modules; and (3) analyze failure modes to determine areas in need of improvement

How Group-Based Interventions Can Improve Services for People with Severe Obesity

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer via the DOI in this recordPurpose of Review Rising demand for specialised “Tier 3” weight management services in England is exceeding capacity, leading many services to offer group-based care programmes. This review considers the organisation of current provision, exploring how group programmes may enhance services and how these could be scaled up for wider implementation. Recent Findings Existing group-based programmes mainly focus on providing patients with information and education about their condition. Evidence suggests that groups themselves offer therapeutic benefits beyond this, by underpinning patients’ engagement with programme materials and contributing to wider health and well-being. To maximise these benefits, there is a need to attend to the group processes that emerge in treatment groups which, left unchecked, may limit or even adversely impact programme outcomes. Summary Group-based interventions may be of benefit to patients in Tier 3 specialist weight management services, although their format is complex and reliant on facilitators’ expertise.National Institute for Health Research (NIHR

Stress Induced Degradation Modes in CIGS Mini-Modules: Preprint

This study demonstrates that the method of encapsulation can affect the long-term stability of CIGS modules, principally through interactions with the ZnO

CIS Modules Process R&D: Final Technical Report, October 2005 - June 2006

The primary objectives of this subcontract were to: address key near-term technical R&D issues for continued improvement in thin-film PV products; continue process development for increased production capacity; pursue long-term R&D contributing to progress toward the MYTP goals for 2020 to increase the conversion efficiency to 15% and reduce module manufacturing costs to less than $50/m2, thus enabling PV systems with a 30-year lifetime at an installed cost of under$2.00/W; and advance the understanding of the requirements needed to achieve better thin-film PV cell and module performance, greater reliability and market acceptance, and investigate materials systems and new devices that can improve the cost/performance ratio of future thin-film PV factories. The demonstrated and maintained high production yield is a major accomplishment supporting attractive cost projections for CIS. Process R&D at successive levels of CIS production has led to the continued demonstration of the prerequisites for commitment to large-scale commercialization. Process and packaging R&D during this and previous subcontracts has demonstrated the potential for further cost and performance improvements

Current directions and future perspectives from the third Nematostella research conference

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2014. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Zoology 118 (2015): 135-140, doi:10.1016/j.zool.2014.06.005.The third Nematostella vectensis Research Conference took place in December 2013 in Eilat, Israel, as a satellite to the 8th International Conference on Coelenterate Biology. The starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, has emerged as a powerful cnidarian model, in large part due to the extensive genomic and transcriptomic resources and molecular approaches that are becoming available for Nematostella, which were the focus of several presentations. In addition, research was presented highlighting the broader utility of this species for studies of development, circadian rhythms, signal transduction, and gene–environment interactions.Research in the authors’ laboratories on Nematostella is supported by National Science Foundation grants MCB-1057354 to A.M.T. and MCB-0924749 to T.D.G. Travel support for the meeting was provided to T.D.G. by Illumina, Inc. (San Diego, CA, USA), to A.M.R. by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and to A.M.T. by the Israel–US Binational Science Foundation (Jerusalem, Israel)