Web based survey to measuring social interactions, values, attitudes and travel behavior

This paper presents the data collection methodology developed for Minerva research project. The aim of Minerva is to study the influence of values, attitudes and social interactions on travel behavior. For this purpose, a web based survey has been developed, which consists of several questionnaires to collect respondents’ values and attitudes; a two-day activity-travel diary; information about social interactions; and socio-demographic characteristics.To identify the social contacts, it is being used a contact diary methodology together with the activity-travel diary

Prospectives

Tiré de: Prospectives, vol. 6, no 2 (avril 1970)Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 24 janv. 2013

Gut microbiome and antibiotic resistance effects during travelers\u27 diarrhea treatment and prevention

The travelers\u27 gut microbiome is potentially assaulted by acute and chronic perturbations (e.g., diarrhea, antibiotic use, and different environments). Prior studies of the impact of travel and travelers\u27 diarrhea (TD) on the microbiome have not directly compared antibiotic regimens, and studies of different antibiotic regimens have not considered travelers\u27 microbiomes. This gap is important to be addressed as the use of antibiotics to treat or prevent TD-even in moderate to severe cases or in regions with high infectious disease burden-is controversial based on the concerns for unintended consequences to the gut microbiome and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) emergence. Our study addresses this by evaluating the impact of defined antibiotic regimens (single-dose treatment or daily prophylaxis) on the gut microbiome and resistomes of deployed servicemembers, using samples collected during clinical trials. Our findings indicate that the antibiotic treatment regimens that were studied generally do not lead to adverse effects on the gut microbiome and resistome and identify the relative risks associated with prophylaxis. These results can be used to inform therapeutic guidelines for the prevention and treatment of TD and make progress toward using microbiome information in personalized medical care

Non-hexagonal neural dynamics in vowel space

Are the grid cells discovered in rodents relevant to human cognition? Following up on two seminal studies by others, we aimed to check whether an approximate 6-fold, grid-like symmetry shows up in the cortical activity of humans who "navigate" between vowels, given that vowel space can be approximated with a continuous trapezoidal 2D manifold, spanned by the first and second formant frequencies. We created 30 vowel trajectories in the assumedly flat central portion of the trapezoid. Each of these trajectories had a duration of 240 milliseconds, with a steady start and end point on the perimeter of a "wheel". We hypothesized that if the neural representation of this "box" is similar to that of rodent grid units, there should be an at least partial hexagonal (6-fold) symmetry in the EEG response of participants who navigate it. We have not found any dominant n-fold symmetry, however, but instead, using PCAs, we find indications that the vowel representation may reflect phonetic features, as positioned on the vowel manifold. The suggestion, therefore, is that vowels are encoded in relation to their salient sensory-perceptual variables, and are not assigned to arbitrary gridlike abstract maps. Finally, we explored the relationship between the first PCA eigenvector and putative vowel attractors for native Italian speakers, who served as the subjects in our study

Prenatal exposures and exposomics of asthma

This review examines the causal investigation of preclinical development of childhood asthma using exposomic tools. We examine the current state of knowledge regarding early-life exposure to non-biogenic indoor air pollution and the developmental modulation of the immune system. We examine how metabolomics technologies could aid not only in the biomarker identification of a particular asthma phenotype, but also the mechanisms underlying the immunopathologic process. Within such a framework, we propose alternate components of exposomic investigation of asthma in which, the exposome represents a reiterative investigative process of targeted biomarker identification, validation through computational systems biology and physical sampling of environmental medi