Police Stress: An Analysis of the Impact on Child Sexual Exploitation Investigators

The psychological and physiological effects of work-related stress on law enforcement causes high morbidity and mortality rates and rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide higher than the national average. The purpose of this explanatory sequential mixed-methods study was to examine whether work-related stress experienced by child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse (CSA) investigators differ from that of other duty assigned subgroups. I used Karasek\u27s job demands-control model as the theoretical framework for this study. I conducted the study within a medium sized law enforcement agency in eastern Washington State. The sample in the quantitative study consisted of 27 law enforcement officers from 17 duty-assigned subgroups who completed McCreary and Thompson\u27s Operational Police Stress Survey (PSQ-Op) and Organizational Police Stress Questionnaire (PSQ-Org). The sample in the qualitative study consisted of 7 law enforcement officers who answered 5 researcher developed questions during a telephone interview. Descriptive statistics, a Pearson\u27s correlation analysis, and linear regression analysis of the PSQ-Op and PSQ-Org revealed no significant difference in reported work-related stress experienced within the duty-assigned subgroups, revealing no correlative difference of stress experienced by CSE and CSA investigators and the other duty assigned subgroups due to job demands and job control. Content analysis of the qualitative interviews revealed themes that supported the finding of the quantitative study. The findings of this study support the need for law enforcement leaders to take preemptive measures to mitigate the effects of work-related stress on all law enforcement officers

Optimizing the Ethiopian health extension programme: strategies to address workforce challenges

The Health Extension Programme (HEP) serves as a flagship programme in the delivery of primary health care (PHC) in Ethiopia. However, its implementation has faced various health system barriers. By laying out transformative strategies, the HEP Optimization Roadmap (2020–2035) presents an opportunity to restructure and standardize the programme’s service delivery approach to ensure long-term sustainability and impact

Integrated Polarization of Sources at lambda ~1m and New Rotation Measure Ambiguities

We present an analysis of the polarization of compact radio sources from six pointings of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) at 350 MHz with 35% coverage in lambda^2. After correcting for the off-axis instrumental polarization with a simple analytical model, only a small number of 585 strong sources have significant polarizations at these wavelengths. The median depolarization ratio from 1.4 GHz for the strongest sources is <0.2, reinforcing the likelihood that radio galaxies are found in magnetized environments, even outside of rich clusters. Seven sources with significant 350 MHz polarization were selected for a more in-depth Faraday structure analysis. We fit the observed values Q/I and U/I as a function of lambda^2 using both a depolarizing screen and two component models. We also performed RM Synthesis/Clean and standard fitting of polarization angle vs. lambda^2. We find that a single rotation measure (RM), as found using polarization angle fitting or simple screen models, commonly provides a poor fit when the solutions are translated back into Q, U space. Thus, although a single "characteristic" rotation measure may be found using these techniques, the Faraday structure of the source may not be adequately represented. We also demonstrate that RM Synthesis may yield an erroneous Faraday structure in the presence of multiple, interfering RM components, even when cleaning of the Faraday spectrum is performed. We briefly explore the conditions under which rotation measures and Faraday structure results can be reliable. Many measurements in the literature do not meet these criteria; we discuss how these influence the resulting scientific conclusions and offer a prescription for obtaining reliable RMs.Comment: 26 pages, 24 figures. Published in The Astronomical Journa

Self‐Concepts, Domain Values, and Self‐Esteem: Relations and Changes at Early Adolescence

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97452/1/j.1467-6494.1989.tb00484.x.pd

Future changes in climate, ocean circulation, ecosystems, and biogeochemical cycling simulated for a business-as-usual CO2 emission scenario until year 4000 AD

A new model of global climate, ocean circulation, ecosystems, and biogeochemical cycling, including a fully coupled carbon cycle, is presented and evaluated. The model is consistent with multiple observational data sets from the past 50 years as well as with the observed warming of global surface air and sea temperatures during the last 150 years. It is applied to a simulation of the coming two millennia following a business-as-usual scenario of anthropogenic CO2 emissions (SRES A2 until year 2100 and subsequent linear decrease to zero until year 2300, corresponding to a total release of 5100 GtC). Atmospheric CO2 increases to a peak of more than 2000 ppmv near year 2300 (that is an airborne fraction of 72% of the emissions) followed by a gradual decline to ∼1700 ppmv at year 4000 (airborne fraction of 56%). Forty-four percent of the additional atmospheric CO2 at year 4000 is due to positive carbon cycle–climate feedbacks. Global surface air warms by ∼10°C, sea ice melts back to 10% of its current area, and the circulation of the abyssal ocean collapses. Subsurface oxygen concentrations decrease, tripling the volume of suboxic water and quadrupling the global water column denitrification. We estimate 60 ppb increase in atmospheric N2O concentrations owing to doubling of its oceanic production, leading to a weak positive feedback and contributing about 0.24°C warming at year 4000. Global ocean primary production almost doubles by year 4000. Planktonic biomass increases at high latitudes and in the subtropics whereas it decreases at midlatitudes and in the tropics. In our model, which does not account for possible direct impacts of acidification on ocean biology, production of calcium carbonate in the surface ocean doubles, further increasing surface ocean and atmospheric pCO2. This represents a new positive feedback mechanism and leads to a strengthening of the positive interaction between climate change and the carbon cycle on a multicentennial to millennial timescale. Changes in ocean biology become important for the ocean carbon uptake after year 2600, and at year 4000 they account for 320 ppmv or 22% of the atmospheric CO2 increase since the preindustrial era

Defining functional diversity for lignocellulose degradation in a microbial community using multi-omics studies

Abstract\ud \ud Background\ud Lignocellulose is one of the most abundant forms of fixed carbon in the biosphere. Current industrial approaches to the degradation of lignocellulose employ enzyme mixtures, usually from a single fungal species, which are only effective in hydrolyzing polysaccharides following biomass pre-treatments. While the enzymatic mechanisms of lignocellulose degradation have been characterized in detail in individual microbial species, the microbial communities that efficiently breakdown plant materials in nature are species rich and secrete a myriad of enzymes to perform “community-level” metabolism of lignocellulose. Single-species approaches are, therefore, likely to miss important aspects of lignocellulose degradation that will be central to optimizing commercial processes.\ud \ud \ud Results\ud Here, we investigated the microbial degradation of wheat straw in liquid cultures that had been inoculated with wheat straw compost. Samples taken at selected time points were subjected to multi-omics analysis with the aim of identifying new microbial mechanisms for lignocellulose degradation that could be applied in industrial pre-treatment of feedstocks. Phylogenetic composition of the community, based on sequenced bacterial and eukaryotic ribosomal genes, showed a gradual decrease in complexity and diversity over time due to microbial enrichment. Taxonomic affiliation of bacterial species showed dominance of Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria and high relative abundance of genera Asticcacaulis, Leadbetterella and Truepera. The eukaryotic members of the community were enriched in peritrich ciliates from genus Telotrochidium that thrived in the liquid cultures compared to fungal species that were present in low abundance. A targeted metasecretome approach combined with metatranscriptomics analysis, identified 1127 proteins and showed the presence of numerous carbohydrate-active enzymes extracted from the biomass-bound fractions and from the culture supernatant. This revealed a wide array of hydrolytic cellulases, hemicellulases and carbohydrate-binding modules involved in lignocellulose degradation. The expression of these activities correlated to the changes in the biomass composition observed by FTIR and ssNMR measurements.\ud \ud \ud Conclusions\ud A combination of mass spectrometry-based proteomics coupled with metatranscriptomics has enabled the identification of a large number of lignocellulose degrading enzymes that can now be further explored for the development of improved enzyme cocktails for the treatment of plant-based feedstocks. In addition to the expected carbohydrate-active enzymes, our studies reveal a large number of unknown proteins, some of which may play a crucial role in community-based lignocellulose degradation.This work was funded by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research\ud Council (BBSRC) Grants BB/1018492/1, BB/K020358/1 and BB/P027717/1, the\ud BBSRC Network in Biotechnology and Bioenergy BIOCATNET and São Paulo\ud Research Foundation (FAPESP) Grant 10/52362-5. ERdA thanks EMBRAPA\ud Instrumentation São Carlos and Dr. Luiz Alberto Colnago for providing the\ud NMR facility and CNPq Grant 312852/2014-2. The authors would like to thank\ud Deborah Rathbone and Susan Heywood from the Biorenewables Develop‑\ud ment Centre for technical assistance in rRNA amplicon sequencing

DNA Barcode Sequence Identification Incorporating Taxonomic Hierarchy and within Taxon Variability

For DNA barcoding to succeed as a scientific endeavor an accurate and expeditious query sequence identification method is needed. Although a global multiple–sequence alignment can be generated for some barcoding markers (e.g. COI, rbcL), not all barcoding markers are as structurally conserved (e.g. matK). Thus, algorithms that depend on global multiple–sequence alignments are not universally applicable. Some sequence identification methods that use local pairwise alignments (e.g. BLAST) are unable to accurately differentiate between highly similar sequences and are not designed to cope with hierarchic phylogenetic relationships or within taxon variability. Here, I present a novel alignment–free sequence identification algorithm–BRONX–that accounts for observed within taxon variability and hierarchic relationships among taxa. BRONX identifies short variable segments and corresponding invariant flanking regions in reference sequences. These flanking regions are used to score variable regions in the query sequence without the production of a global multiple–sequence alignment. By incorporating observed within taxon variability into the scoring procedure, misidentifications arising from shared alleles/haplotypes are minimized. An explicit treatment of more inclusive terminals allows for separate identifications to be made for each taxonomic level and/or for user–defined terminals. BRONX performs better than all other methods when there is imperfect overlap between query and reference sequences (e.g. mini–barcode queries against a full–length barcode database). BRONX consistently produced better identifications at the genus–level for all query types