It\u27s for Their Health: Encouraging Autonomy During Emerging Adulthood

Improving health behaviors, especially among emerging adults, is no easy task. The present research sought to develop an intervention to improve health behavior by harnessing emerging adults’ desire for autonomy. Ninety-one participants between the ages of 18 and 25 years (M = 19.36 years) were randomly assigned to a control condition (n = 43) or an experimental condition (n = 48) in which they described ways in which they, rather than others, were in control of their health. We hypothesized that, compared to those in the control condition, those in the experimental condition would feel more in control of their health and make healthier food and drink choices when presented with a variety of options. Results indicated that postintervention internal health locus of control scores did not differ between those in the experimental and control conditions. However, there was an effect of the intervention on snack choice such that those in the experimental condition selected significantly fewer unhealthy snacks than those in the control condition, t(89) = -2.02, p = .046. These results suggest that encouraging emerging adults to think about ways in which they are in control of their health may translate into healthier food-related behaviors

Negative Energy: Why Interdisciplinary Physics Requires Multiple Ontologies

Much recent work in physics education research has focused on ontological metaphors for energy, particularly the substance ontology and its pedagogical affordances. The concept of negative energy problematizes the substance ontology for energy, but in many instructional settings, the specific difficulties around negative energy are outweighed by the general advantages of the substance ontology. However, we claim that our interdisciplinary setting (a physics class that builds deep connections to biology and chemistry) leads to a different set of considerations and conclusions. In a course designed to draw interdisciplinary connections, the centrality of chemical bond energy in biology necessitates foregrounding negative energy from the beginning. We argue that the emphasis on negative energy requires a combination of substance and location ontologies. The location ontology enables energies both "above" and "below" zero. We present preliminary student data that illustrate difficulties in reasoning about negative energy, and the affordances of the location metaphor.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to PERC 2013 Proceeding

Puukidega levivad bakteriaalsed patogeenid Eestis

Puuginakkused on põhjapoolkeral kõige levinum zooantroponootiliste haiguste rühm. Aktiivselt külastatavate ulatuslike metsaalade ja muude looduskoosluste olemasolu aitab kaasa suhteliselt sagedastele puugirünnetele nende piirkondade elanike seas. 2020. aastal viis Tervise Arengu Instituut rahvateaduse projekti raames läbi kampaania „Pane puuk posti!“, mille jooksul uuriti Eesti eri paikades leitud ning postiga saadetud puuke nii hästi teada olevate kui ka vähem tuntud haigustekitajate kandluse suhtes. 61% puukidest, mis leiti inimeste nahale kinnitatuna, kandis mõnd bakteriaalset haigustekitajat: rohkem kui 30%-l leiti riketsiaid, 21%-l inimese neoerlihhioosi tekitajat, 5%-l inimese granulotsütaarse anaplasmoosi tekitajat ning 1,5%-l Borrelia miyamotoi’d. Lyme’i tõve tekitajaid leiti ligi 28%-l inimeste nahale kinnitunud puukidest

Screened-exchange Determination of the Electronic Properties of Monoclinic, Tetragonal and Cubic Zirconia

First-principles electronic band structure investigations of monoclinic, tetragonal, and cubic ZrO2 reveal the highly anisotropic nature of the conduction and valence band topologies in the monoclinic phase with electron and hole effective masses differing by over an order of magnitude in perpendicular directions. The planes of relatively high implied electron and hole mobilities intersect along a single crystallographic direction, making this the only direction readily available for exciton motion. Conversely, in the tetragonal and cubic phases, charge carrier effective masses are more isotropic and exciton motion is less restricted. These findings may explain recent experimental observations suggesting that exciton production via gamma irradiation in zirconia crystallites immersed in water is responsible for the accelerated dissociation of adsorbed water molecules on crystallite surfaces, and for the specificity of the effect to the tetragonal zirconia phase

Ontological metaphors for negative energy in an interdisciplinary context

Teaching about energy in interdisciplinary settings that emphasize coherence among physics, chemistry, and biology leads to a more central role for chemical bond energy. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to chemical energy leads to modeling chemical bonds in terms of negative energy. While recent work on ontological metaphors for energy has emphasized the affordances of the substance ontology, this ontology is problematic in the context of negative energy. Instead, we apply a dynamic ontologies perspective to argue that blending the substance and location ontologies for energy can be effective in reasoning about negative energy in the context of reasoning about chemical bonds. We present data from an introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) course in which both experts and students successfully use this blended ontology. Blending these ontologies is most successful when the substance and location ontologies are combined such that each is strategically utilized in reasoning about particular aspects of energetic processes.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Noroviiruse tüved Eestis 2015–2016 ägeda gastroenteriidiga hospitaliseeritud lastel vanuses 0–18 aastat

Eesti Arst 2022; 101(9):50

Extending import detection algorithms for concept import from two to three biomedical terminologies

Background: While enrichment of terminologies can be achieved in different ways, filling gaps in the IS-A hierarchy backbone of a terminology appears especially promising. To avoid difficult manual inspection, we started a research program in 2014, investigating terminology densities, where the comparison of terminologies leads to the algorithmic discovery of potentially missing concepts in a target terminology. While candidate concepts have to be approved for import by an expert, the human effort is greatly reduced by algorithmic generation of candidates. In previous studies, a single source terminology was used with one target terminology. Methods: In this paper, we are extending the algorithmic detection of “candidate concepts for import” from one source terminology to two source terminologies used in tandem. We show that the combination of two source terminologies relative to one target terminology leads to the discovery of candidate concepts for import that could not be found with the same “reliability” when comparing one source terminology alone to the target terminology. We investigate which triples of UMLS terminologies can be gainfully used for the described purpose and how many candidate concepts can be found for each individual triple of terminologies. Results: The analysis revealed a specific configuration of concepts, overlapping two source and one target terminology, for which we coined the name “fire ladder” pattern. The three terminologies in this pattern are tied together by a kind of “transitivity.” We provide a quantitative analysis of the discovered fire ladder patterns and we report on the inter-rater agreement concerning the decision of importing candidate concepts from source terminologies into the target terminology. We algorithmically identified 55 instances of the fire ladder pattern and two domain experts agreed on import for 39 instances. In total, 48 concepts were approved by at least one expert. In addition, 105 import candidate concepts from a single source terminology into the target terminology were also detected, as a “beneficial side-effect” of this method, increasing the cardinality of the result. Conclusion: We showed that pairs of biomedical source terminologies can be transitively chained to suggest possible imports of concepts into a target terminology