Has suffering become the ‘new normal’? (Polis summer school guest blog)

This article by Polis Summer School student Janine Eduljee As an American and someone involved in broadcast journalism, I found something highly resonant in our recent class discussions at LSE about the media’s portrayal of suffering and how it shapes and is shaped by people’s interest and feelings towards tragedy. In particular the idea or phenomenon of ‘compassion fatigue,’ the idea that people can be so thoroughly inundated with violent or pathetic imagery that after a while it becomes just too much for a mind to handle, and they in effect shut down and stop feeling any sort of empathy or concern towards it

Exploring Attitudes Towards the Internet: A Study of Indian College Students

This empirical study was aimed at exploring attitudes towards the internet with 323 Indian College students (44.9% males, 53.9% females).  Surveys aimed at assessing computer skills, computer confidence, internet experience, and attitudes towards the internet (Internet Attitude Scale; Tsai, Lin, & Tsai, 2001) were administered to the participants.  The results indicated that the most positive internet attitude was obtained for perceived usefulness, while the least positive internet attitude was for perceived control.  Students who rated their computer skills as expert and had more than 4 years of internet experience had the highest perceived usefulness, perceived control, affection, and in general the most positive internet attitudes.  Students who were very confident in their computer skills had the most positive attitudes for perceived control and affection.  Implications of the results are discussed

Recent developments in the application of risk analysis to waste technologies.

The European waste sector is undergoing a period of unprecedented change driven by business consolidation, new legislation and heightened public and government scrutiny. One feature is the transition of the sector towards a process industry with increased pre-treatment of wastes prior to the disposal of residues and the co-location of technologies at single sites, often also for resource recovery and residuals management. Waste technologies such as in-vessel composting, the thermal treatment of clinical waste, the stabilisation of hazardous wastes, biomass gasification, sludge combustion and the use of wastes as fuel, present operators and regulators with new challenges as to their safe and environmentally responsible operation. A second feature of recent change is an increased regulatory emphasis on public and ecosystem health and the need for assessments of risk to and from waste installations. Public confidence in waste management, secured in part through enforcement of the planning and permitting regimes and sound operational performance, is central to establishing the infrastructure of new waste technologies. Well-informed risk management plays a critical role. We discuss recent developments in risk analysis within the sector and the future needs of risk analysis that are required to respond to the new waste and resource management agenda

The Development of Medical Record Items: a User-centered, Bottom-up Approach

Objectives: Clinical documents (CDs) have evolved from traditional paper documents containing narrative text information into the electronic record sheets composed of itemized records, where each record is expressed as an item with a specific value. We defined medical record (MR) items to be information entities with a specific value. These entities were then used to compile form-based clinical documents as part of an electronic health record system (EHR-s). Methods: We took a reusable bottom-up developmental approach for the MR items, which provided three things: efficient incorporation of the local needs and requirements of the medical professionals from various departments in the hospital, comprehensive inclusion of the essential concepts of the basic elements required in clinical documents, and the provision of a structured means for meaningful data entry and retrieval. This paper delineates our experiences in developing and managing medical records at a large tertiary university hospital in Korea. Results: We collected 63,232 MR items from paper records scanned into 962 CDs. The MR item database was constructed using 13,287 MR items after removing redundant items. During the first year of service users requested changes to be made to 235 (1.8%) attributes of the MR items and also requested the additional 9,572 new MR items. In the second year, the attributes of 70 (0.5%) of the existing MR items were changed and 3,704 new items were added. The number of registered MR items increased by 72.0 % in the first year and 27.9 % in the second year. Conclusions: The MR item concept provides an easier and more structured means of data entry within an EHR-s. By using these MR items, various kinds of clinical documents can be easily constructed and allows for medical information to be reused and retrieved as data

Relationship between polychlorinated dibenzo- p -dioxin, polychlorinated dibenzofuran, and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyl concentrations in vegetation and soil on residential properties

The University of Michigan Dioxin Exposure Study was undertaken to address concerns that the industrial discharge of dioxin-like compounds in the Midland, Michigan, USA area had resulted in the contamination of soil and vegetation in the Tittabawassee River floodplain and downwind of the incinerator in the City of Midland. The study included the analysis of 597 vegetation samples, predominantly grass and weeds, from residential properties selected through a multistage probabilistic sample design in the Midland area, and in Jackson and Calhoun Counties (Michigan), as a background comparison, for 29 polychlorinated dibenzo- p -dioxins (PCDDs), polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The mean toxic equivalent (TEQ) of the house perimeter vegetation samples ranged from 4.2 to 377 pg/g. The ratio of TEQs (vegetation to soil) was about 0.3, with a maximum of 3.5. Based on a calculation of the similarity of the congener patterns between the soil and the vegetation, it appeared that the source of the contamination on the vegetation was the surrounding soil. This conclusion was supported by linear regression analysis, which showed that the largest contributor to the R 2 for the outcome variable of log 10 of the vegetation concentration was log 10 of the surrounding soil concentration. Models of vegetation contamination usually focus on atmospheric deposition and partitioning. The results obtained here suggest that the deposition of soil particles onto vegetation is a significant route of contamination for residential herbage. Thus, the inclusion of deposition of soil particles onto vegetation is critical to the accurate modeling of contamination residential herbage in communities impacted by historic industrial discharges of persistent organic compounds. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 2010;29:2660–2668. © 2010 SETACPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78291/1/344_ftp.pd

Regulation of slow inactivation in Kv1.5 by the turret

In Kv channels, slow, P/C-type, inactivation is thought to eliminate ionic current via a concerted structural rearrangement of the outer pore mouth. However, little is known regarding the contributions of other pore regions to the regulation of slow inactivation. Our experiments now indicate that the turret region of Kv1.5 can be an important determinant of slow inactivation. Application of extracellular protons, or divalent cations such as Zn²⁺ or Ni²⁺, was found to reduce the peak current amplitude, and with protons, also increase the rate of depolarization-induced inactivation. These effects were alleviated by the substitution of residue H463 in the turret with a glutamine, indicating that the interaction of this turret residue with extracellular ligands facilitated the inhibition of current. Based on macroscopic, unitary and gating current analyses, we have attributed the effects of protonation and divalent cations to an enhancement of depolarization-induced and closed-state inactivation. These findings provide strong evidence that the turret region contributes to the regulation of slow inactivation in Kv1.5. To determine which properties of position 463 were important in modulating inactivation, various side chain substitutions of this position were examined and several were found to mimic the effects of proton or divalent cation binding. However, the properties of the substituted side chains were not well correlated with the effects on channel function, and it appeared that the turret and inactivation gate did not interact strictly via an electrostatic interaction, as suggested by others. A SCAM analysis was subsequently conducted by substituting cysteine residues into each turret position to determine which regions of the turret were important for regulating slow inactivation. Modification of substituted cysteine residues in the distal turret by MTS reagents produced an inhibition that could also be related to an enhancement of slow inactivation and demonstrated that position 463 was contained within a distinct locus of turret residues that could influence slow inactivation. These results indicate that in Kv1.5 a specific region of the turret modulates the state of the inactivation gate and provide constraints on the mechanisms of interaction between the turret and inactivation gate.Medicine, Faculty ofCellular and Physiological Sciences, Department ofGraduat