Answering Wicked Questions: Dealing With Opposing Truths as a Nursing Associate Professor

Nursing associate professors frequently are confronted with increasing responsibilities and fewer resources. These challenges commonly contribute to declines in job satisfaction and may result in departing academe. This article addresses these challenges by providing answers to four common “wicked questions” experienced by nursing associate professors: (a) How do I decline a request from a supervisor to take on additional responsibilities while continuing to support the mission of the school and advance my own scholarly productivity? (b) How do I handle the workload of multiple doctoral students with a variety of content areas that are different from my own and maintain my own level of productivity? (c) How do I handle expectations for more service, and leadership for the school, university, and professional organizations, yet the teaching and research responsibilities have not changed or have increased? and (d) What are some additional tips to being a more productive nursing associate professor

Pregnant, Donor Oocyte Recipient Women Describe Their Lived Experience of Establishing the “Family Lexicon”

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72928/1/j.1552-6909.2007.00128.x.pd

Family and Peer Influences on Substance Attitudes and Use among Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth

Juvenile justice-involved youth experience high rates of substance use, which is concerning given associated negative consequences, including health and functional deficits. Family and peer factors are associated with a high risk of substance use among justice-involved youth. It is hypothesized that this risk process operates through pro-drug attitudes. However, limited research has been conducted on the mechanisms through which family and peer factors increase risk for substance use among juvenile justice involved youth. The current study examined both the direct and indirect effects of family and peer substance use on youth's substance use (alcohol and illicit drug use). We also examined whether this relationship differs by race. 226 detained youth (81.9% male; 74.3% Black) were recruited from an urban county in the Midwest and completed a clinical interview and substance use assessment battery. A direct effect of family/peer risk on illicit drug use was found for all youth, though the effect was stronger among White youth. Results also supported the indirect effect pathway from family/peer risk to both illicit drug use and alcohol use through pro-drug attitudes. This pathway did not vary by race. These findings suggest that interventions should focus on targeting both family/peer risk and pro-drug attitudes to reduce substance use. Given the racial difference in the direct effect of family/peer risk on illicit drug use, there may be other factors that influence risk more strongly for White youth, which warrants further investigation

The Effectiveness of the Use of Probiotics in the Prevention of Necrotizing Enterocolitis

PICO Question: In very low birth weight infants (VLBW), does the use of prophylactic probiotics decrease the incidence of necrotizing enterocolitis? Method: Databases searched include PubMed, Cochrane, Medline, ScienceDirect, UpToDate, and CINAHL databases, resulting in 10 relevant articles (four meta-analyses, two systematic reviews, three randomized controlled trials, and one cohort study). Results: The review of literature concluded that overall there is a decrease in the incidence of NEC when VLBW infants are given prophylactic probiotics. Recommendations: In conclusion, probiotics have shown efficacy in preventing NEC with no confirmed reports of adverse effects to VLBW infants. The final recommendation would be to implement the use of probiotics for VLBW infants. The conclusions strongly suggest a change in practice, and hospital NICUs would greatly benefit from the use of probiotics

To know or not to know? Dilemmas for women receiving unknown oocyte donation

BACKGROUND: This study aims to provide insight into the reasons for choosing an unknown oocyte donor and to explore recipients’ feelings and wishes regarding donor information. METHODS: In-depth interviews were carried out with 11 women at different stages of treatment. Seven were on a waiting list and four have given birth to donor oocyte babies. The interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. RESULTS: The choice of unknown donor route was motivated by a wish to feel secure in the role of mother as well as to avoid possible intrusions into family relationships. The information that is available about unknown donors is often very limited. In the preconception phase of treatment, some participants wanted more information about the donor but others adopted a not-knowing stance that protected them from the emotional impact of needing a donor. In the absence of information that might normalize her, there was a tendency to imagine the donor in polarised simplistic terms, so she may be idealized or feared. Curiosity about the donor intensified once a real baby existed, and the task of telling a child was more daunting when very little was known about the donor. A strong wish for same-donor siblings was expressed by all of the participants who had given birth. CONCLUSIONS: This qualitative study throws light on the factors that influence the choice of unknown donation. It also highlights the scope for attitudes to donor information to undergo change over the course of treatment and after giving birth. The findings have implications for pretreatment counselling and raise a number of issues that merit further exploration

Minimizing the stabbing number of matchings, trees, and triangulations

The (axis-parallel) stabbing number of a given set of line segments is the maximum number of segments that can be intersected by any one (axis-parallel) line. This paper deals with finding perfect matchings, spanning trees, or triangulations of minimum stabbing number for a given set of points. The complexity of these problems has been a long-standing open question; in fact, it is one of the original 30 outstanding open problems in computational geometry on the list by Demaine, Mitchell, and O'Rourke. The answer we provide is negative for a number of minimum stabbing problems by showing them NP-hard by means of a general proof technique. It implies non-trivial lower bounds on the approximability. On the positive side we propose a cut-based integer programming formulation for minimizing the stabbing number of matchings and spanning trees. We obtain lower bounds (in polynomial time) from the corresponding linear programming relaxations, and show that an optimal fractional solution always contains an edge of at least constant weight. This result constitutes a crucial step towards a constant-factor approximation via an iterated rounding scheme. In computational experiments we demonstrate that our approach allows for actually solving problems with up to several hundred points optimally or near-optimally.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, Latex. To appear in "Discrete and Computational Geometry". Previous version (extended abstract) appears in SODA 2004, pp. 430-43

Genome-wide approaches for identification of nuclear receptor target genes

Large-scale genomics analyses have grown by leaps and bounds with the rapid advances in high throughput DNA sequencing and synthesis techniques. Nuclear receptor signaling is ideally suited to genomics studies because receptors function as ligand-regulated gene switches. This review will survey the strengths and limitations of three major classes of high throughput techniques widely used in the nuclear receptor field to characterize ligand-dependent gene regulation: expression profiling studies (microarrays, SAGE and related techniques), chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by microarray (ChIP-on-chip), and genome-wide in silico hormone response element screens. We will discuss each technique, and how each has contributed to our understanding of nuclear receptor signaling