6,143 research outputs found
Fostering Critical Thinking about Climate Change: Applying Community Psychology to an Environmental Education Project with Youth
This article argues for the participation of community psychology in issues of global climate change. The knowledge accumulated and experience gained in the discipline of community psychology have great relevance to many topics related to the environment. Practitioners of community psychology could therefore make significant contributions to climate change mitigation. To illustrate this assertion, we describe an education project conducted with youth engaged in a community-based environmental organization. This initiative was motivated by the idea that engaged and critically aware youth often become change agents for social movements. Towards this purpose, rather than using mass marketing strategies to motivate small behavior changes, this project focused intensively on a few youth with the vision that these youth would also influence those around them to rethink their environmental habits. This project was influenced by five community psychology concepts: stakeholder participation, ecological and systems thinking, social justice, praxis, and empirical grounding. In this article we discuss the influence of these concepts on the project’s outcomes, as measured through an evaluative study conducted to assess the impacts of the project on the participating youth in terms of their thinking and action. The contributions of community psychology were found to have greatly impacted the quality of the project and the outcomes experienced by the youth
"Virus hunting" using radial distance weighted discrimination
Motivated by the challenge of using DNA-seq data to identify viruses in human
blood samples, we propose a novel classification algorithm called "Radial
Distance Weighted Discrimination" (or Radial DWD). This classifier is designed
for binary classification, assuming one class is surrounded by the other class
in very diverse radial directions, which is seen to be typical for our virus
detection data. This separation of the 2 classes in multiple radial directions
naturally motivates the development of Radial DWD. While classical machine
learning methods such as the Support Vector Machine and linear Distance
Weighted Discrimination can sometimes give reasonable answers for a given data
set, their generalizability is severely compromised because of the linear
separating boundary. Radial DWD addresses this challenge by using a more
appropriate (in this particular case) spherical separating boundary.
Simulations show that for appropriate radial contexts, this gives much better
generalizability than linear methods, and also much better than conventional
kernel based (nonlinear) Support Vector Machines, because the latter methods
essentially use much of the information in the data for determining the shape
of the separating boundary. The effectiveness of Radial DWD is demonstrated for
real virus detection.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS869 in the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
The Figure of the Refugee in Superhero Cinema
In this paper we argue that superhero cinema offers an opportunity to think through the narratives and affects of the refugee crisis, which are distinct from, but related to, the relatively well-attended-to tropes of journalism. To do so we adopt both the ethical stance of feminist political geography and the analytic methods of popular geopolitics. Our analysis focuses on two films from the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): Thor: Ragnarok and Captain Marvel. Both films are not ‘refugee films’ per se, but they illustrate the ways in which the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ is being dealt with in mainstream, corporate Hollywood blockbusters. The two films are considered both in their narrative and affective engineering, as part of an effort to understand the ways in which political subjects might be shaped by the act of viewing. Our analysis uncovers three themes: 1) mobility as power, 2) the aesthetic of modernity, and 3) refugee bodies. We conclude that studies like this can contribute to a broader understanding of the role of whiteness and securitisation in the portrayal of refugees in the Global North
The Walk-in Counselling Model of Service Delivery: Who Benefits Most?
The walk-in counselling (WIC) model of service delivery has been found to reduce psychological distress more quickly than a traditional model of service delivery involving a wait list. A question remains, however, as to the relative benefit of the WIC model for different client groups. The present study uses graphical inspection and multilevel modeling to conduct moderator analyses comparing two agencies, one with a WIC clinic and the other with a traditional wait list approach, and their relative impact on psychological distress. Key findings regarding the differential benefits for different types of presenting problems as well as clients at different stages of change are discussed.
La recherche montre qu\u27un service de consultation sans rendez-vous réduit la détresse psychologique plus rapidement qu\u27un modèle traditionnel fonctionnant avec liste d\u27attente. Les bénéfices relatifs du modèle de consultation sans rendez-vous pour différentes clientèles demeurent cependant méconnus. Cette étude utilise l\u27inspection de graphiques et la modélisation multiniveau afin de mener une analyse de modération qui compare deux cliniques: sans rendez-vous ou suivant le modèle traditionnel avec liste d\u27attente. L\u27étude examine les impacts relatifs de ces modèles sur la détresse psychologique. Les principaux résultats portent sur les bénéfices différentiels selon les problématiques de santé mentale présentées et selon les stades de changement des usagers
Automatic Monitoring of dairy cows’ lying behaviour using a computer vision system in open barns
Received: January 31st, 2023 ; Accepted: April 9th, 2023 ; Published: April 27th, 2023 ; Correspondence: [email protected] Livestock Farming offers opportunities for automated, continuous
monitoring of animals, their productivity, welfare and health. The video-based assessment of
animal behaviour is an automated, non-invasive and promising application. The aim of this study
is to identify possible parameters in dairy cows’ lying behaviour that are the basis for a holistic
computer vision-based system to assess animal health and welfare. Based on expert interviews
and a literature review, we define parameters and their optimum in form of gold standards to
evaluate lying behaviour automatically. These include quantitative parameters such as daily lying
time, lying period length, lying period frequency and qualitative parameters such as extension of
the front and hind legs, standing in the lying cubicles, or total lateral position. The lying behaviour
is an example within the research context for the development of a computer vision-based tool
for automated detection of animal behaviour and appropriate housing design
Epstein-Barr Virus-Positive Cancers Show Altered B-Cell Clonality
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is convincingly associated with gastric cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and certain lymphomas, but its role in other cancer types remains controversial. To test the hypothesis that there are additional cancer types with high prevalence of EBV, we determined EBV viral expression in all the Cancer Genome Atlas Project (TCGA) mRNA sequencing (mRNA-seq) samples (n 10,396) from 32 different tumor types. We found that EBV was present in gastric adenocarcinoma and lymphoma, as expected, and was also present in 5% of samples in 10 additional tumor types. For most samples, EBV transcript levels were low, which suggests that EBV was likely present due to infected infiltrating B cells. In order to determine if there was a difference in the B-cell populations, we assembled B-cell receptors for each sample and found B-cell receptor abundance (P 1.4 1020) and diversity (P 8.3 1027) were significantly higher in EBV-positive samples. Moreover, diversity was independent of B-cell abundance, suggesting that the presence of EBV was associated with an increased and altered B-cell population. IMPORTANCE Around 20% of human cancers are associated with viruses. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) contributes to gastric cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and certain lymphomas, but its role in other cancer types remains controversial. We assessed the prevalence of EBV in RNA-seq from 32 tumor types in the Cancer Genome Atlas Project (TCGA) and found EBV to be present in 5% of samples in 12 tumor types. EBV infects epithelial cells and B cells and in B cells causes proliferation. We hypothesized that the low expression of EBV in most of the tumor types was due to infiltration of B cells into the tumor. The increase in B-cell abundance and diversity in subjects where EBV was detected in the tumors strengthens this hypothesis. Overall, we found that EBV was associated with an increased and altered immune response. This result is not evidence of causality, but a potential novel biomarker for tumor immune status
Evolution of the IBDM Structural Latch Development into a Generic Simplified Design
This paper presents the evolution in the development of the structural latch for the International Berthing Docking Mechanism (IBDM, see Figure 1). It reports on the lessons learned since completion of the test program on the engineering development unit of the first generation latching system in 2007. The initial latch design has been through a second generation concept in 2008, and now evolved into a third generation of this mechanism. Functional and structural testing on the latest latch hardware has recently been completed with good results. The IBDM latching system will provide the structural connection between two mated space vehicles after berthing or docking. The mechanism guarantees that the interface seals become compressed to form a leak-tight pressure system that creates a passageway for the astronauts
Review forum. Reading Ian Klinke's Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey into Cold War Germany, Wiley Blackwell RGS-IBG Book Series, Chichester (2018), 192 pp. £24.99 (paperback) ISBN: 9781119261117
Cytosine methylation in the HPV16 3’ L1/ 5’LCR region characterized from anal epithelia of HPV-HIV coinfected men
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