Transgender Healthcare Teaching in the Undergraduate Medical School Curriculum

With increasing recognition of the diverse and specific needs of transgender individuals in a health care setting, lack of knowledge, poor attitudes and prejudice towards transgender patients can result in this population being afraid to access medical care. Educating medical students early in their career in a sensitive and inclusive manner could help change these attitudes. It has been shown that medical undergraduates and post-graduates often feel unprepared or uncomfortable in caring for transgender patients due to lack of training and experience2-4. The aim of this study was to address this through introduction of basic transgender healthcare education into the University of Glasgow undergraduate medical curriculum, with the goal of implementing further interactive and fully inclusive teaching

RNNs Implicitly Implement Tensor Product Representations

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can learn continuous vector representations of symbolic structures such as sequences and sentences; these representations often exhibit linear regularities (analogies). Such regularities motivate our hypothesis that RNNs that show such regularities implicitly compile symbolic structures into tensor product representations (TPRs; Smolensky, 1990), which additively combine tensor products of vectors representing roles (e.g., sequence positions) and vectors representing fillers (e.g., particular words). To test this hypothesis, we introduce Tensor Product Decomposition Networks (TPDNs), which use TPRs to approximate existing vector representations. We demonstrate using synthetic data that TPDNs can successfully approximate linear and tree-based RNN autoencoder representations, suggesting that these representations exhibit interpretable compositional structure; we explore the settings that lead RNNs to induce such structure-sensitive representations. By contrast, further TPDN experiments show that the representations of four models trained to encode naturally-occurring sentences can be largely approximated with a bag of words, with only marginal improvements from more sophisticated structures. We conclude that TPDNs provide a powerful method for interpreting vector representations, and that standard RNNs can induce compositional sequence representations that are remarkably well approximated by TPRs; at the same time, existing training tasks for sentence representation learning may not be sufficient for inducing robust structural representations.Comment: Accepted to ICLR 201

The role of ritual and its co-construction in the spiritual care, provided by chaplains, of parents adjusting to the death of their baby in-utero

AIMS: • to deepen understanding of parental grief • to discover parental expectations of chaplaincy support and ritual • to understand the role of ritual in meeting parents' spiritual needs • to comprehend the importance of ritual content and the manner of its construction • to hear the significance for parents of chaplaincy involvement • to appreciate the impact ofthe immediate context in which ritual is sharedMETHODOLOGY: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were used to obtain in-depth parental reflectionsRESULTS: Four main spiritual themes were identified from parents' descriptions of their grief social isolation, loss of meaning and purpose, loss of control and a loss of self worth. Parents' expectations of chaplains and rituals they performed were anxiety inducing. The process of ritualising their baby's life and death enabled parents' spiritual needs to be met by• aiding deeper communication within families and wider social reintegration • providing an opportunity to find meaning and purpose through parenting • helping parents to regain some control, order and sense of reality in their situation • validating their grief and offering them a safe space in which to express feelings • helping to create memories which aided establishment of continuing bonds with their babyCo-authoring their baby's ritual with a chaplain enabled parental affirmation and personalisation of rituals. Whilst relevant words spoken during ritual were appreciated it was being able to act out their relationship with their baby and the chaplain's performance which were of most significance. Parents requested chaplaincy involvement because they perceived them to have ritual authority and enhance ritual efficacy. They perceived chaplains to have both priestly and shamanistic roles during rituals, creating an atmosphere in which families could express or act out their feelings as required.Contextually, of significance was the reverential attitude and approach ofthose present which affirmed a baby's uniqueness and enabled creation of a sacred time and space. Chaplains acted as guides during the co-construction of ritual and offered parents an attentive listening presence. A chaplain's way of being and relating was key in meeting parental spiritual needs.CONCLUSIONS: Baby death in-utero causes considerable parental spiritual distress. Ritual and its co-construction helps to meet spiritual needs and facilitates grieving. Chaplains have a distinctive role to play as part of a healthcare team addressing parents' holistic needs. The nurturing of a chaplain's humanity and spirituality is essential in caring for their inner resources utilised in meeting parents' spiritual needs

Influence of reheating on the trispectrum and its scale dependence

We study the evolution of the non-linear curvature perturbation during perturbative reheating, and hence how observables evolve to their final values which we may compare against observations. Our study includes the evolution of the two trispectrum parameters, \gnl and \taunl, as well as the scale dependence of both \fnl and \taunl. In general the evolution is significant and must be taken into account, which means that models of multifield inflation cannot be compared to observations without specifying how the subsequent reheating takes place. If the trispectrum is large at the end of inflation, it normally remains large at the end of reheating. In the classes of models we study, it is very hard to generate \taunl\gg\fnl^2, regardless of the decay rates of the fields. Similarly, for the classes of models in which \gnl\simeq\taunl during slow--roll inflation, we find the relation typically remains valid during reheating. Therefore it is possible to observationally test such classes of models without specifying the parameters of reheating, even though the individual observables are sensitive to the details of reheating. It is hard to generate an observably large \gnl however. The runnings, \nfnl and \ntaunl, tend to satisfy a consistency relation \ntaunl=(3/2)\nfnl, but are in general too small to be observed for the class of models considered regardless of reheating timescale

A real-time PCR method for quantification of the total and major variant strains of the Deformed wing virus

Funding: ELB was supported by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) EASTBIO Doctoral Training Partnership (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk) [grant number BB/J01446X/1] and an Eastern Association Regional Studentship (EARS) and The Morley Agricultural Foundation awarded to ASB. CRC was supported by a KTN BBSRC CASE studentship (BB/M503526/1) (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk), part-funded by the Scottish Beekeeping Association (https://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/) and the Animal Health - Disease Prevention, Scottish Government awarded to ASB CRC. This project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 613960 (SMARTBEES) (http://www.smartbees-fp7.eu/) awarded to ASB. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Mr W. Thrale, Mr Z. Blackmore, Mr J. Quinlan, and Mr J. Palombo for sample collection from the South East of England and Margie Ramsey for Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve sample collection.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Properties of Trapped Electrons

The current experimental evidence relating to absorption spectra, spontaneous decay and photo-bleaching of electrons trapped in non-ionic media is reviewed and the present state of the trapped electron theories which have been applied to these systems is discussed. Localised molecular orbital studies are performed on the hydrogen bonding interaction and the results are discussed in relation to present semicontinuum theories. The relevance of photoionisation spectra to trapped electron absorption in ice is investigated by considering the sensitivity of spectral features to well parameters for some simple potentials. The spontaneous short term decay of electrons at low temperature is investigated by means of a tunneling model which incorporates electron-scaven-ger distribution features. Electron-parent cation distributions are also considered and the results discussed in relation to the 'spur' model. A general photobleaching scheme is presented and quantum efficiencies are evaluated for ice and two organic media. In the former the wavelength dependence is reproduced by means of a mobile electron capture model whilst in the latter, bleaching by means of tunneling from long lived excited states is considered