The Influence of Sleep Quantity on Externalizing Behaviors in Adolescents: The Mediating Effect of Inhibition

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to sleep disruptions due both to hormonal changes (causing a shift in circadian rhythms, Pieters et al., 2015) and to school and extra-curricular commitments leading to sleep restriction (Carskadon, 2011). Sleep quantity, in turn, has been independently linked to low response inhibition as well as externalizing behaviors (Lowe et al., 2017; Gregory & Sadeh, 2012). This study aims to build upon these findings by testing the hypothesis that decreased inhibition will mediate the relationship between low quantity of sleep and externalizing behaviors. A representative sample of adolescents in Chicago, Illinois was recruited to participate in a larger study of stress processes. Ninety-four of the participants were randomly selected from the larger study to also take part in a 4-day actigraph watch collection to track sleep quantity. Regression analyses identified associations between sleep quantity and inhibition and externalizing symptoms, whereas there were no associations identified between sleep quantity and inhibition. Results of mediational analyses wherein inhibition was tested as a mediator of the effects of sleep quantity on externalizing symptoms were not significant. Yet, the findings of this study can inform prevention and intervention strategies for at-risk youth as well as guide future research on risk and protective factors

Broadway: Adapting and Overcoming Post-COVID

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, a Broadway usher tested positive for COVID-19. A day later, on March 12, 2020, one of New York’s most significant cultural institutions, and a symbol of the city itself, entered an indiscernibly long hiatus when The Broadway League, an organization representing Broadway theater owners and producers, announced that Broadway would be shutting down. What was initially meant to be a short break for Broadway’s 41 theatres quickly evolved to an extended one. Although the theatres intended to reopen in June 2020, this deadline was moved first to January 2021, and subsequently to May 2021. While the move was undoubtedly necessary for the health and safety of New Yorkers, tourists, and patrons it was a significant blow in many respects. One of Broadway’s greatest icons stated: “Broadway — I’m romanticizing, but that’s the heartbeat of the city, and to think that they’ve been forced into darkness is shocking.” This post was originally published on the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal website on November 16, 2020. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

Invest In The Success Of Online Programs At The University? Mentor Professors

The Distance Education Mentoring Program (DEMP) is a unique program designed to assist faculty with developing and teaching quality online courses. This paper describes a survey assessment of the 92 faculty members who completed the program over the last four years and looks at preliminary data determining the program’s success

Who trusts Twitter? Openness to ideas as a predictor of trust and interest in news of an international disaster presented in Twitter and traditional on-line journalism formats

Twitter is an increasingly utilized tool for communication during major events including natural disasters; however, there is little research investigating this topic and how individual differences might predict reactions to information in this medium. The current study seeks to understand how the personality trait of openness to ideas predicts perceptions of a Twitter source\u27s trustworthiness and interest relative to a journalistic source. Participants were randomly assigned to read a simulated account of a flood presented either as a Twitter account or a journalistic account and then rated perceptions of the sources. Results indicate that Twitter is trusted less than a journalistic account; however, moderator effects revealed that openness to ideas was positively correlated with trust in the Twitter condition but negatively correlated with trust in the journalistic format. The present study helps to clarify the role of personality in the process of consuming information on-line

Barriers and Challenges to Treatment Alternatives for Early-Stage Cervical Cancer in Lower-Resource Settings

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers among women worldwide, and approximately 85% of new diagnoses occur in less-developed regions of the world. Global efforts in cervical cancer to date have focused on primary and secondary prevention strategies of human papillomavirus vaccination and cervical cancer screening. Cervical cancer screening is effective to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer and can result in diagnosis at earlier stages, but it will take time to realize its full impact. With expansion of screening programs, there is now a greater imperative to increase access to treatment for women who have cervical cancer, particularly in earlier stages of disease, when it is still curable. Resources for multimodality treatment can be limited—or even absent—in many less-developed regions of the world and may be associated with geographic, social, and financial barriers for the patient. However, there is evidence that, in many cases, less-invasive and less–resource-intensive treatment options are still effective. To this end, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and American Society of Clinical Oncology have published guideline adaptations for specific resource constraints, and research about more conservative approaches to the treatment of cervical cancer continues. This review focuses on potential barriers and challenges to provision of safe and effective treatment of early-stage cervical cancer in lower-resource settings, and it suggests future directions for expansion of access to cervical cancer treatment around the world

Causes of Death on Antiretroviral Therapy: A Post-Mortem Study from South Africa

Background: Mortality in the first months of antiretroviral therapy (ART) is a significant clinical problem in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, no post-mortem study has investigated the causes of mortality in these patients. Methods: HIV-positive adults who died as in-patients at a Johannesburg academic hospital underwent chart-review and ultrasound-guided needle autopsy for histological and microbiological examination of lung, liver, spleen, kidney, bone marrow, lymph node, skin and cerebrospinal fluid. A clinico-pathologic committee considered all available data and adjudicated immediate and contributing causes of death. Results: Thirty-nine adults were enrolled: 14 pre-ART, 15 early-ART (7–90 days), and 10 late-ART (>90 days). Needle sampling yielded adequate specimen in 100% of kidney, skin, heart and cerebrospinal fluid samples, 97% of livers and lungs, 92% of bone marrows, 87% of spleens and 68% of lymph nodes. Mycobacterial infections were implicated in 69% of deaths (26 of 27 of these due to M. tuberculosis), bacterial infections in 33%, fungal infections in 21%, neoplasm in 26%, and non-infectious organ failure in 26%. Immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS) was implicated in 73% of early-ART deaths. Post-mortem investigations revealed previously undiagnosed causes of death in 49% of cases. Multiple pathologies were common with 62% of subjects with mycobacterial infection also having at least one other infectious or neoplastic cause of death. Conclusions: Needle biopsy was efficient and yielded excellent pathology. The large majority of deaths in all three groups were caused by M. tuberculosis suggesting an urgent need for improved diagnosis and expedited treatment prior to and throughout the course of antiretroviral therapy. Complex, unrecognized co-morbidities pose an additional challenge

Perceptual Grouping and Distance Estimates in Typical and Atypical Development: Comparing Performance across Perception, Drawing and Construction Tasks

Perceptual grouping is a pre-attentive process which serves to group local elements into global wholes, based on shared properties. One effect of perceptual grouping is to distort the ability to estimate the distance between two elements. In this study, biases in distance estimates, caused by four types of perceptual grouping, were measured across three tasks, a perception, a drawing and a construction task in both typical development (TD; Experiment 1) and in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, perceptual grouping distorted distance estimates across all three tasks. Interestingly, the effect of grouping by luminance was in the opposite direction to the effects of the remaining grouping types. We relate this to differences in the ability to inhibit perceptual grouping effects on distance estimates. Additive distorting influences were also observed in the drawing and the construction task, which are explained in terms of the points of reference employed in each task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the above distortion effects are also observed in WS. Given the known deficit in the ability to use perceptual grouping in WS, this suggests a dissociation between the pre-attentive influence of and the attentive deployment of perceptual grouping in WS. The typical distortion in relation to drawing and construction points towards the presence of some typical location coding strategies in WS. The performance of the WS group differed from the TD participants on two counts. First, the pattern of overall distance estimates (averaged across interior and exterior distances) across the four perceptual grouping types, differed between groups. Second, the distorting influence of perceptual grouping was strongest for grouping by shape similarity in WS, which contrasts to a strength in grouping by proximity observed in the TD participants

Motion-Sensitive 3-D Optical Coherence Microscope Operating at 1300 nm for the Visualization of Early Frog Development

We present 3-dimensional volume-rendered in vivo images of developing embryos of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis taken with our new en-face-scanning, focus-tracking OCM system at 1300 nm wavelength. Compared to our older instrument which operates at 850 nm, we measure a decrease in the attenuation coefficient by 33%, leading to a substantial improvement in depth penetration. Both instruments have motion-sensitivity capability. By evaluating the fast Fourier transform of the fringe signal, we can produce simultaneously images displaying the fringe amplitude of the backscattered light and images showing the random Brownian motion of the scatterers. We present time-lapse movies of frog gastrulation, an early event during vertebrate embryonic development in which cell movements result in the formation of three distinct layers that later give rise to the major organ systems. We show that the motion-sensitive images reveal features of the different tissue types that are not discernible in the fringe amplitude images. In particular, we observe strong diffusive motion in the vegetal (bottom) part of the frog embryo which we attribute to the Brownian motion of the yolk platelets in the endoderm

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: the growth rate of cosmic structure since redshift z=0.9

We present precise measurements of the growth rate of cosmic structure for the redshift range 0.1 < z < 0.9, using redshift-space distortions in the galaxy power spectrum of the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey. Our results, which have a precision of around 10% in four independent redshift bins, are well-fit by a flat LCDM cosmological model with matter density parameter Omega_m = 0.27. Our analysis hence indicates that this model provides a self-consistent description of the growth of cosmic structure through large-scale perturbations and the homogeneous cosmic expansion mapped by supernovae and baryon acoustic oscillations. We achieve robust results by systematically comparing our data with several different models of the quasi-linear growth of structure including empirical models, fitting formulae calibrated to N-body simulations, and perturbation theory techniques. We extract the first measurements of the power spectrum of the velocity divergence field, P_vv(k), as a function of redshift (under the assumption that P_gv(k) = -sqrt[P_gg(k) P_vv(k)] where g is the galaxy overdensity field), and demonstrate that the WiggleZ galaxy-mass cross-correlation is consistent with a deterministic (rather than stochastic) scale-independent bias model for WiggleZ galaxies for scales k < 0.3 h/Mpc. Measurements of the cosmic growth rate from the WiggleZ Survey and other current and future observations offer a powerful test of the physical nature of dark energy that is complementary to distance-redshift measures such as supernovae and baryon acoustic oscillations.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication by MNRA

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: the selection function and z=0.6 galaxy power spectrum

We report one of the most accurate measurements of the three-dimensional large-scale galaxy power spectrum achieved to date, using 56,159 redshifts of bright emission-line galaxies at effective redshift z=0.6 from the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. We describe in detail how we construct the survey selection function allowing for the varying target completeness and redshift completeness. We measure the total power with an accuracy of approximately 5% in wavenumber bands of dk=0.01 h/Mpc. A model power spectrum including non-linear corrections, combined with a linear galaxy bias factor and a simple model for redshift-space distortions, provides a good fit to our data for scales k < 0.4 h/Mpc. The large-scale shape of the power spectrum is consistent with the best-fitting matter and baryon densities determined by observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. By splitting the power spectrum measurement as a function of tangential and radial wavenumbers we delineate the characteristic imprint of peculiar velocities. We use these to determine the growth rate of structure as a function of redshift in the range 0.4 < z < 0.8, including a data point at z=0.78 with an accuracy of 20%. Our growth rate measurements are a close match to the self-consistent prediction of the LCDM model. The WiggleZ Survey data will allow a wide range of investigations into the cosmological model, cosmic expansion and growth history, topology of cosmic structure, and Gaussianity of the initial conditions. Our calculation of the survey selection function will be released at a future date via our website wigglez.swin.edu.au.Comment: 21 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA