Some considerations for various positioning systems and their science capabilities

Containerless processing of materials at elevated temperatures is discussed with emphasis on high temperature chemistry, thermophysical properties, materials science, and materials processing. Acoustic and electromagnetic positioning of high temperature melts are discussed. Results from recent ground based experiments, including KC-135 testing of an acoustic levitator, are presented. Some current positioning technologies and the potential for enhancing them are considered. Further, a summary of these technologies and their science capabilities for the development of future experiments is given

Speaking Up for Fundamental Care: the ILC Aalborg Statement.

OBJECTIVE: The International Learning Collaborative (ILC) is an organisation dedicated to understanding why fundamental care, the care required by all patients regardless of clinical condition, fails to be provided in healthcare systems globally. At its 11th annual meeting in 2019, nursing leaders from 11 countries, together with patient representatives, confirmed that patients' fundamental care needs are still being ignored and nurses are still afraid to 'speak up' when these care failures occur. While the ILC's efforts over the past decade have led to increased recognition of the importance of fundamental care, it is not enough. To generate practical, sustainable solutions, we need to substantially rethink fundamental care and its contribution to patient outcomes and experiences, staff well-being, safety and quality, and the economic viability of healthcare systems. KEY ARGUMENTS: We present five propositions for radically transforming fundamental care delivery:Value: fundamental care must be foundational to all caring activities, systems and institutionsTalk: fundamental care must be explicitly articulated in all caring activities, systems and institutions.Do: fundamental care must be explicitly actioned and evaluated in all caring activities, systems and institutions.Own: fundamental care must be owned by each individual who delivers care, works in a system that is responsible for care or works in an institution whose mission is to deliver care. RESEARCH: fundamental care must undergo systematic and high-quality investigations to generate the evidence needed to inform care practices and shape health systems and education curricula. CONCLUSION: For radical transformation within health systems globally, we must move beyond nursing and ensure all members of the healthcare team-educators, students, consumers, clinicians, leaders, researchers, policy-makers and politicians-value, talk, do, own and research fundamental care. It is only through coordinated, collaborative effort that we will, and must, achieve real change

Field independence associates with mathematics and science performance in 5- to 10-year-olds after accounting for domain-general factors

Field independence describes the extent to which individuals are influenced by context when trying to identify embedded targets. It associates with cognitive functioning and is a predictor of academic achievement. However, little is known about the neural and cognitive underpinnings of field independence which lead to these associations. Here we investigated behavioural associations between two measures of field independence (Children’s Embedded Figures Test (CEFT) and Design Organisation Test (DOT)) and performance on mathematics (reasoning and written arithmetic) and science tests (reasoning and scientific inquiry) in 135 children aged 5-10 years. There were strong associations between field independence and mathematics and science, which were largely explained by individual differences in age, IQ, and verbal working memory. However, regression analyses indicated that after controlling for these variables, the CEFT explained additional variance on the mathematical reasoning and science tests, whereas the DOT predicted unique variance on the written arithmetic test

Speaking up for Fundamental Care: The ILC Aalborg Statement

This is the final version. Available on open access from BMJ Publishing Group via the DOI in this recordObjective The International Learning Collaborative (ILC) is an organisation dedicated to understanding why fundamental care, the care required by all patients regardless of clinical condition, fails to be provided in healthcare systems globally. At its 11th annual meeting in 2019, nursing leaders from 11 countries, together with patient representatives, confirmed that patients' fundamental care needs are still being ignored and nurses are still afraid to 'speak up' when these care failures occur. While the ILC's efforts over the past decade have led to increased recognition of the importance of fundamental care, it is not enough. To generate practical, sustainable solutions, we need to substantially rethink fundamental care and its contribution to patient outcomes and experiences, staff well-being, safety and quality, and the economic viability of healthcare systems. Key arguments We present five propositions for radically transforming fundamental care delivery: Value: fundamental care must be foundational to all caring activities, systems and institutions Talk: fundamental care must be explicitly articulated in all caring activities, systems and institutions. Do: fundamental care must be explicitly actioned and evaluated in all caring activities, systems and institutions. Own: fundamental care must be owned by each individual who delivers care, works in a system that is responsible for care or works in an institution whose mission is to deliver care. Research: fundamental care must undergo systematic and high-quality investigations to generate the evidence needed to inform care practices and shape health systems and education curricula. Conclusion For radical transformation within health systems globally, we must move beyond nursing and ensure all members of the healthcare team - educators, students, consumers, clinicians, leaders, researchers, policy-makers and politicians - value, talk, do, own and research fundamental care. It is only through coordinated, collaborative effort that we will, and must, achieve real change

The ENIGMA sports injury working group - an international collaboration to further our understanding of sport-related brain injury

Sport-related brain injury is very common, and the potential long-term effects include a wide range of neurological and psychiatric symptoms, and potentially neurodegeneration. Around the globe, researchers are conducting neuroimaging studies on primarily homogenous samples of athletes. However, neuroimaging studies are expensive and time consuming, and thus current findings from studies of sport-related brain injury are often limited by small sample sizes. Further, current studies apply a variety of neuroimaging techniques and analysis tools which limit comparability among studies. The ENIGMA Sports Injury working group aims to provide a platform for data sharing and collaborative data analysis thereby leveraging existing data and expertise. By harmonizing data from a large number of studies from around the globe, we will work towards reproducibility of previously published findings and towards addressing important research questions with regard to diagnosis, prognosis, and efficacy of treatment for sport-related brain injury. Moreover, the ENIGMA Sports Injury working group is committed to providing recommendations for future prospective data acquisition to enhance data quality and scientific rigor

A global collaboration to study intimate partner violence-related head trauma: The ENIGMA consortium IPV working group

Intimate partner violence includes psychological aggression, physical violence, sexual violence, and stalking from a current or former intimate partner. Past research suggests that exposure to intimate partner violence can impact cognitive and psychological functioning, as well as neurological outcomes. These seem to be compounded in those who suffer a brain injury as a result of trauma to the head, neck or body due to physical and/or sexual violence. However, our understanding of the neurobehavioral and neurobiological effects of head trauma in this population is limited due to factors including difficulty in accessing/recruiting participants, heterogeneity of samples, and premorbid and comorbid factors that impact outcomes. Thus, the goal of the Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium Intimate Partner Violence Working Group is to develop a global collaboration that includes researchers, clinicians, and other key community stakeholders. Participation in the working group can include collecting harmonized data, providing data for meta- and mega-analysis across sites, or stakeholder insight on key clinical research questions, promoting safety, participant recruitment and referral to support services. Further, to facilitate the mega-analysis of data across sites within the working group, we provide suggestions for behavioral surveys, cognitive tests, neuroimaging parameters, and genetics that could be used by investigators in the early stages of study design. We anticipate that the harmonization of measures across sites within the working group prior to data collection could increase the statistical power in characterizing how intimate partner violence-related head trauma impacts long-term physical, cognitive, and psychological health

Analysis of question text properties for equality monitoring.

INTRODUCTION: Ongoing monitoring of cohort demographic variation is an essential part of quality assurance in medical education assessments, yet the methods employed to explore possible underlying causes of demographic variation in performance are limited. Focussing on properties of the vignette text in single-best-answer multiple-choice questions (MCQs), we explore here the viability of conducting analyses of text properties and their relationship to candidate performance. We suggest that such analyses could become routine parts of assessment evaluation and provide an additional, equality-based measure of an assessment's quality and fairness. METHODS: We describe how a corpus of vignettes can be compiled, followed by examples of using Microsoft Word's native readability statistics calculator and the koRpus text analysis package for the R statistical analysis environment for estimating the following properties of the question text: Flesch Reading Ease (FRE), Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Grade), word count, sentence count, and average words per sentence (WpS). We then provide examples of how these properties can be combined with equality and diversity variables, and the process automated to provide ongoing monitoring. CONCLUSIONS: Given the monitoring of demographic differences in assessment for assurance of equality, the ability to easily include textual analysis of question vignettes provides a useful tool for exploring possible causes of demographic variations in performance where they occur. It also provides another means of evaluating assessment quality and fairness with respect to demographic characteristics. Microsoft Word provides data comparable to the specialized koRpus package, suggesting routine use of word processing software for writing items and assessing their properties is viable with minimal burden, but that automation for ongoing monitoring also provides an additional means of standardizing MCQ assessment items, and eliminating or controlling textual variables as a possible contributor to differential attainment between subgroups

Foundations of academic knowledge

This chapter assesses the acquisition of academic knowledge and skills in domains including literacy, numeracy, sciences, arts and physical education. It examines how learning trajectories arise from complex interactions between individual brain development and sociocultural environments. Teaching literacy and numeracy to all students is a goal of most school systems. While there are some fundamental skills children should grasp to succeed in these domains, the best way to support each student’s learning varies depending on their individual development, language, culture and prior knowledge. Here we explore considerations for instruction and assessment in different academic domains. To accommodate the flourishing of all children, flexibility must be built into education systems, which need to acknowledge the diverse ways in which children can progress through learning trajectories and demonstrate their knowledge

Modeling Conformational Ensembles of Slow Functional Motions in Pin1-WW

Protein-protein interactions are often mediated by flexible loops that experience conformational dynamics on the microsecond to millisecond time scales. NMR relaxation studies can map these dynamics. However, defining the network of inter-converting conformers that underlie the relaxation data remains generally challenging. Here, we combine NMR relaxation experiments with simulation to visualize networks of inter-converting conformers. We demonstrate our approach with the apo Pin1-WW domain, for which NMR has revealed conformational dynamics of a flexible loop in the millisecond range. We sample and cluster the free energy landscape using Markov State Models (MSM) with major and minor exchange states with high correlation with the NMR relaxation data and low NOE violations. These MSM are hierarchical ensembles of slowly interconverting, metastable macrostates and rapidly interconverting microstates. We found a low population state that consists primarily of holo-like conformations and is a “hub” visited by most pathways between macrostates. These results suggest that conformational equilibria between holo-like and alternative conformers pre-exist in the intrinsic dynamics of apo Pin1-WW. Analysis using MutInf, a mutual information method for quantifying correlated motions, reveals that WW dynamics not only play a role in substrate recognition, but also may help couple the substrate binding site on the WW domain to the one on the catalytic domain. Our work represents an important step towards building networks of inter-converting conformational states and is generally applicable