The Stress Management Self-Efficacy Inventory (SMSEI): Development and Initial Psychometrics

The primary purpose of the current study was to develop, pilot, and establish the initial psychometrics of the Stress Management Self-Efficacy Inventory (SMSEI). Once developed and positive psychometrics established, middle school counselors and other mental health professionals can use the SMSEI to identify children who lack self-efficacy in the area of stress management. Once adolescents are identified as having low stress management self-efficacy, this measure can also aid professionals in creating programs and interventions. The SMSEI measures how well adolescents believe they can manage their stress as well as measures specific areas or management techniques that a child believes they are most incapable of handling or implementing. Participants were recruited voluntarily from three area Middle Schools. One hundred seventy six adolescents (male = 49%, female = 51%) aged 11 to 14 agreed to participate in the study. Sixty one percent of the participants were in the sixth grade and 39% in the seventh grade. Caucasians constituted 80% of the sample with the remaining 20% as non-Caucasian. Participants were asked to complete the SMSEI, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC; Speilberger, Edwards, Lushene, Montuori, & Platzek, 1973), The Schoolager’s Coping Strategies Inventory (SCSI; Ryan-Wenger, 1990), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE; Rosenberg, 1989), the Parent Child Stress Report (PCSR), and a demographic sheet. Two weeks later, participants were asked to complete a second SMSEI. Results of testing the initial psychometrics of the SMSEI were mixed. While internal consistency, test-retest reliability, content and criterion validity were promising, results related to the construct validity were less hopeful. After discussing and exploring possible reasons for the poor construct validity results, the researcher developed a revised SMSEI version, which resulted in stronger support for construct validity. While the revised version of the SMSEI had promising reliability and validity results, further research and development is required. Overall results, however, support the future use of the SMSEI as a tool for identifying students with areas of concern related to poor stress management self-efficacy

The Impact of a Ballot Education Program on Arkansas Voters

The University of Arkansas Division Of Agriculture’s Public Policy Center has educated Arkansas voters about statewide ballot issues for 10 years. The ballot issue education program, was evaluated during the 2014 election cycle to determine the program’s impact on voters. This descriptive study sought to describe program participants, to determine knowledge transfer of county agents, to describe knowledge acquisition of program participants, and to measure whether people who attended Cooperative Extension Service presentations made informed choices on Election Day. Researchers found that program participants were mostly older, educated, White women. There were increases in knowledge among participants who read fact sheets or attended a presentation. Ninety percent of the people who attended a presentation were confident in their choices on Election Day. The ballot education program was effective in increasing knowledge and assisting the participants in making informed choices

Emerging Therapies for Stage III Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy and Immunotherapy

The current standard of care for locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) includes radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery in certain individualized cases. In unresectable NSCLC, chemoradiation has been the standard of care for the past three decades. Local and distant failure remains high in this group of patients, so dose escalation has been studied in both single institution and national clinical trials. Though initial studies showed a benefit to dose escalation, phase III studies examining dose escalation using standard fractionation or hyperfractionation have failed to show a benefit. Over the last 17 years, stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) has shown a high degree of safety and local control for stage I lung cancers and other localized malignancies. More recently, phase I/II studies using SBRT for dose escalation after conventional chemoradiation in locally advanced NSCLC have been promising with good apparent safety. Immunotherapy also offers opportunities to address distant disease and preclinical data suggest immunotherapy in tandem with SBRT may be a rational way to induce an abscopal effect although there are little clinical data as yet. By building on the proven concept of conventional chemoradiation for patients with locally advanced NSCLC with a subsequent radiation dose intensification to residual disease with SBRT concurrent with immunotherapy, we hope address the issues of metastatic and local failures. This quadmodality approach is still in its infancy but appears to be a safe and rational approach to the improving the outcome of NSCLC therapy

Second Year Results from Razor C.O.A.C.H.

In this paper, we present the results of a random assignment evaluation on the Razor C.O.A.C.H. (Creating Opportunities for Arkansan’s Career Hopes) program. As the program started in the 2012-13 school year, this evaluation analyzes the impact of the program in its second year of operation and includes two cohorts of students. The focus of the comprehensive evaluation is the impacts of the program on students’ academic outcomes, short-term noncognitive outcomes, short-term college and career readiness outcomes, and post-secondary outcomes

Quantitative proteomic analysis by iTRAQ® for the identification of candidate biomarkers in ovarian cancer serum

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecologic malignancy, with the majority of cases diagnosed at an advanced stage when treatments are less successful. Novel serum protein markers are needed to detect ovarian cancer in its earliest stage; when detected early, survival rates are over 90%. The identification of new serum biomarkers is hindered by the presence of a small number of highly abundant proteins that comprise approximately 95% of serum total protein. In this study, we used pooled serum depleted of the most highly abundant proteins to reduce the dynamic range of proteins, and thereby enhance the identification of serum biomarkers using the quantitative proteomic method iTRAQ^®.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Medium and low abundance proteins from 6 serum pools of 10 patients each from women with serous ovarian carcinoma, and 6 non-cancer control pools were labeled with isobaric tags using iTRAQ^®to determine the relative abundance of serum proteins identified by MS. A total of 220 unique proteins were identified and fourteen proteins were elevated in ovarian cancer compared to control serum pools, including several novel candidate ovarian cancer biomarkers: extracellular matrix protein-1, leucine-rich alpha-2 glycoprotein-1, lipopolysaccharide binding protein-1, and proteoglycan-4. Western immunoblotting validated the relative increases in serum protein levels for several of the proteins identified.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study provides the first analysis of immunodepleted serum in combination with iTRAQ^®to measure relative protein expression in ovarian cancer patients for the pursuit of serum biomarkers. Several candidate biomarkers were identified which warrant further development.</p

From Here to Eternity: An Experiment Applying the e-Framework Infrastructure for Education and Research and the SUMO Ontology to Standards-based Geospatial Web Services

A number of efforts have been made in recent years to define standards for the description of resources (including web services) in services oriented architectures. These standards often use description logic ontologies (for example, OWL-S) and are intended to be machine-readable. They have been applied to geospatial web services to describe the functions that those services perform in a way that can be automatically interpreted by systems. By contrast, little effort has gone into the development of human readable descriptions of resources in a services oriented architecture, other than using unstructured natural language. e-Framework is an infrastructure for the higher education environment that provides a typology of human-readable artefacts that can be used to describe resources, and provides an internal structure for those artefacts. e-Framework has thus far not been used with geospatial information even though geospatial information has a number of important roles in education and research, and has a well-organised community of users and creators. This paper applies the e-Framework infrastructure to OGC web services, and also recommends the refinement of e-Framework with the use of the SUMO Upper Level Ontology to define Service Genres, the most abstract level of artefacts in e-Framework. It then illustrates the ways in which the Open Geospatial Consortium standards and specifications may be described in e-Framework. The work evaluates SUMO for e-Framework purposes, finding that its use for Service Genres is possible and offers a number of gains. It also evaluates e-Framework from a geospatial perspective, and shows that e-Framework’s constraints on resource descriptions do not suit the large and complex nature of geospatial web services

Survival After Sublobar Resection versus Lobectomy for Clinical Stage IA Lung Cancer An Analysis from the National Cancer Data Base

BackgroundRecent data have suggested possible oncologic equivalence of sublobar resection with lobectomy for early-stage non–smallcell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our aim was to evaluate and compare short-term and long-term survival for these surgical approaches.MethodsThis retrospective cohort study utilized the National Cancer Data Base. Patients undergoing lobectomy, segmentectomy, or wedge resection for preoperative clinical T1A N0 NSCLC from 2003 to 2011 were identified. Overall survival (OS) and 30-day mortality were analyzed using multivariable Cox proportional hazards models, logistic regression models, and propensity score matching. Further analysis of survival stratified by tumor size, facility type, number of lymph nodes (LNs) examined, and surgical margins was performed.ResultsA total of 13,606 patients were identified. After propensity score matching, 987 patients remained in each group. Both segmentectomy and wedge resection were associated with significantly worse OS when compared with lobectomy (hazard ratio: 1.70 and 1.45, respectively, both p < 0.001), with no difference in 30-day mortality. Median OS for lobectomy, segmentectomy, and wedge resection were 100, 74, and 68 months, respectively (p < 0.001). Finally, sublobar resection was associated with increased likelihood of positive surgical margins, lower likelihood of having more than three LNs examined, and significantly lower rates of nodal upstaging.ConclusionIn this large national-level, clinically diverse sample of clinical T1A NSCLC patients, wedge and segmental resections were shown to have significantly worse OS compared with lobectomy. Further patients undergoing sublobar resection were more likely to have inadequate lymphadenectomy and positive margins. Ongoing prospective study taking into account LN upstaging and margin status is still needed