Teledentistry: An Innovative Workforce Model for Dental Hygienists

Objective/Aims: This review of literature seeks to explore teledentistry as an alternative dental hygiene workforce model that places a dental hygienist in the role of the mid-level practitioner as part of a digitally-connected oral healthcare team. It will also emphasize the innovative methods of teledentistry giving better health care delivery to diverse populations. Methods: The review of literature analyzed the conclusions and discussions of primary and secondary scholarly articles from PubMed, Google Scholar, Embase, and CINAHL. Specific key terms included teledentistry, telehealth, teleconsultation, dental hygiene, dentistry, workforce model, health care delivery. Articles included in this review were published within the five last years. Results: Multiple scholarly articles were compiled together to emphasize the importance of technology-centered dental health care for patients who were unable to travel long distances to retrieve the care they were seeking, Key limitations the research often indicated include geographic, socioeconomic barriers or distance. Conclusion: The teledentistry-assisted model presents one way to answer the call to expand overall access to oral healthcare. The comparison of articles supported the efficiency and cost-effectiveness method of teledentistry in comparison to face to face consultations. Teledentistry is especially beneficial to addressing the access to care issue particularly populations in rural areas and even penitentiary institutions.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/denh_student/1025/thumbnail.jp

Crossing Symmetry Violation of Unitarized Pion-Pion Amplitude in the Resonance Region

Pion-pion scattering amplitude obtained from one-loop Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT) is crossing symmetric, however the corresponding partial wave amplitudes do not respect exact unitarity relation. There are different approaches to get unitarized partial wave amplitudes from ChPT. Here we consider the inverse amplitude method (IAM) that is often used to fit pion-pion phase shifts to experimental data, by adjusting free parameters. We measure the amount of crossing symmetry violation (CSV) in this case and we show that crossing symmetry is badly violated by the IAM unitarized ChPT amplitude in the resonance region. Important CSV also occurs when all free parameters are set equal to zero.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Aspect-based video browsing - a user study

In this paper, we present a user study on a novel video search interface based on the concept of aspect browsing. We aim to confirm whether automatically suggesting new aspects can increase the performance of an aspect-based browser. The proposed strategy is to assist the user in exploratory video search by actively suggesting new query terms and video shots. We use a clustering technique to identify potential aspects and use the results to propose suggestions to the user to help them in their search task. We evaluate this approach by analysing the users' perception and by exploiting the log files

Supporting aspect-based video browsing - analysis of a user study

In this paper, we present a novel video search interface based on the concept of aspect browsing. The proposed strategy is to assist the user in exploratory video search by actively suggesting new query terms and video shots. Our approach has the potential to narrow the "Semantic Gap" issue by allowing users to explore the data collection. First, we describe a clustering technique to identify potential aspects of a search. Then, we use the results to propose suggestions to the user to help them in their search task. Finally, we analyse this approach by exploiting the log files and the feedbacks of a user study

Simulating the Impact of X-ray Heating during the Cosmic Dawn

Upcoming observations of the 21-cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization will soon provide the first direct detection of this era. This signal is influenced by many astrophysical effects, including long range X-ray heating of the intergalactic gas. During the preceding Cosmic Dawn era the impact of this heating on the 21-cm signal is particularly prominent, especially before spin temperature saturation. We present the largest-volume (349\,Mpc comoving=244~$h^{-1}$Mpc) full numerical radiative transfer simulations to date of this epoch that include the effects of helium and multi-frequency heating, both with and without X-ray sources. We show that X-ray sources contribute significantly to early heating of the neutral intergalactic medium and, hence, to the corresponding 21-cm signal. The inclusion of hard, energetic radiation yields an earlier, extended transition from absorption to emission compared to the stellar-only case. The presence of X-ray sources decreases the absolute value of the mean 21-cm differential brightness temperature. These hard sources also significantly increase the 21-cm fluctuations compared the common assumption of temperature saturation. The 21-cm differential brightness temperature power spectrum is initially boosted on large scales, before decreasing on all scales. Compared to the case of the cold, unheated intergalactic medium, the signal has lower rms fluctuations and increased non-Gaussianity, as measured by the skewness and kurtosis of the 21-cm probability distribution functions. Images of the 21-cm signal with resolution around 11~arcmin still show fluctuations well above the expected noise for deep integrations with the SKA1-Low, indicating that direct imaging of the X-ray heating epoch could be feasible.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

UNDERSTANDING THE GRAY: AGING WOMEN IN VICTORIAN CULTURE AND FICTION

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She

Give Up the Ghost

Give Up the Ghost is a series of six paintings created in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019. The paintings are an introspective examination of transgender subjectivity in visual narrative. In this paper, I separate the personal and research through first and third person, similarly to how I separate imagery and mark making in my paintings. The paper is broken up into a description of the project, the history and theory which informs the work, and why painting is used to describe bodies and spaces. Give Up the Ghost refers to giving up social expectations as determined by gender. The paintings hint at the unexamined experiences one encounters through a transgender perspective. My aim is to show the interconnections between an experience and the social which allows experiences to transpire. Using impasto and layered paint, I slowly build bodies and spaces, to show a deeper subjectivity in how bodies and spaces relate with one another

Exploratory Research into the RNA Transcripts Present within Beluga Whale Blow Samples

Research with beluga whales is important because climate change is affecting their environment, which can impact their health. The usual approach for obtaining working samples is an invasive procedure. However, previous work has successfully developed non-invasive methods using exhales to obtain samples for hormonal and genetic analysis. DNA has been isolated from beluga whale exhales and can provide important information about whale gender and population genetics. The isolation and amplification of RNA in beluga whale exhales has not been reported. Amplification of RNA can lead to insights into gene expression related to animal health, including immune system function. In this project, messenger RNA (mRNA) was isolated using the RNeasy Microkit from beluga whale exhale samples consisting of 1-3 exhales. RNA from 3 exhale samples was isolated in concentrations from 1.95-18.66 ng/μl. The 1 exhale samples result in isolated RNA numbers from 1.889-6.661 ng/μl. Transcripts Rpl8, TNF-α, and IL-12 have been amplified in these isolations by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and visualized by gel electrophoresis. Rpl8 is theoretically present in every cell and is used to determine if the RNA is isolated properly from the exhale samples. TNF-α and IL-12 are cytokine genes that can provide information about immune system health. Sequencing of the amplified products confirmed that the transcripts were amplified. This is the first report of the amplification of transcripts related to immune function from exhale samples, which could provide a non-invasive way of gathering this information. Future research could investigate if changes in expression of these genes can indicate changes in the environment via the change in health of individual beluga whales

Chlorinated organic contaminants in breast milk of New Zealand women.

Breast milk samples from 38 women in New Zealand were analyzed for organochlorine pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) as part of a World Health Organization collaborative study of breast-milk contaminants. The women were recruited from two urban areas (Auckland and Christchurch) and two rural areas (Northland and North Canterbury) in the North and South Islands of New Zealand. The best predictor of contaminant concentrations in breast milk was found to be the age of the mother. Regional differences were found for hexachlorobenzene, dieldrin, and pp-DDE, reflecting historical use patterns. Urban-rural differences were found for several PCBs, PCDDs, and PCDFs when contaminant concentrations were calculated on a whole-milk basis. However, these differences could be attributed to variation in breast-milk fat concentrations between urban and rural mothers. Urban mothers had about 50% more breast-milk fat than rural mothers. Evidence suggests that breast-milk consumption by babies is regulated by caloric intake. Almost all of the caloric content of milk is in the fat fraction. This suggests that breast-milk contaminant levels calculated on a whole-milk basis do not necessarily reflect the relative levels of exposure of infants to these contaminants. However, the factors that influence breast-milk fat concentration deserve further study