Accommodating quality and service improvement research within existing ethical principles

Funds were provided by a Canadian Institute of Health Research grant (Nominated PI: Monica Taljaard, PJT – 153045). Funds were also generously provided by Charles Weijer, who is funded by a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Guidelines for Affirmative Social Work Education: Enhancing the Climate for LGBQQ Students, Staff, and Faculty in Social Work Education

This report is intended to provide guidelines for the creation of social work educational environments that are affirmative of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and questioning (LGBQQ) students, faculty, administrators, and staff. Creating affirmative social work educational environments for transgender and gender nonconforming populations is addressed in a companion document, Guidelines for Transgender and Gender Nonconforming (TGNC) Inclusive Social Work Education

The UniTrap resource: tools for the biologist enabling optimized use of gene trap clones

We have developed a comprehensive resource devoted to biologists wanting to optimize the use of gene trap clones in their experiments. We have processed 300 602 such clones from both public and private projects to generate 28 199 ‘UniTraps’, i.e. distinct collections of unambiguous insertions at the same subgenic region of annotated genes. The UniTrap resource contains data relative to 9583 trapped genes, which represent 42.3% of the mouse gene content. Among the trapped genes, 7 728 have a counterpart in humans, and 677 are known to be involved in the pathogenesis of human diseases. The aim of this analysis is to provide the wet lab researchers with a comprehensive database and curated tools for (i) identifying and comparing the clones carrying a trap into the genes of interest, (ii) evaluating the severity of the mutation to the protein function in each independent trapping event and (iii) supplying complete information to perform PCR, RT-PCR and restriction experiments to verify the clone and identify the exact point of vector insertion. To share this unique resource with the scientific community, we have designed and implemented a web interface that is freely accessible at http://unitrap.cbm.fvg.it/

Communicative-Pragmatic Assessment Is Sensitive and Time-Effective in Measuring the Outcome of Aphasia Therapy

A range of methods in clinical research aim to assess treatment-induced progress in aphasia therapy. Here, we used a crossover randomized controlled design to compare the suitability of utterance-centered and dialogue-sensitive outcome measures in speech-language testing. Fourteen individuals with post- stroke chronic non-fluent aphasia each received two types of intensive training in counterbalanced order: conventional confrontation naming, and communicative-pragmatic speech-language therapy (Intensive Language-Action Therapy, an expanded version of Constraint-Induced Aphasia Therapy). Motivated by linguistic-pragmatic theory and neuroscience data, our dependent variables included a newly created diagnostic instrument, the Action Communication Test (ACT). This diagnostic instrument requires patients to produce target words in two conditions: (i) utterance-centered object naming, and (ii) communicative- pragmatic social interaction based on verbal requests. In addition, we administered a standardized aphasia test battery, the Aachen Aphasia Test (AAT). Composite scores on the ACT and the AAT revealed similar patterns of changes in language performance over time, irrespective of the treatment applied. Changes in language performance were relatively consistent with the AAT results also when considering both ACT subscales separately from each other. However, only the ACT subscale evaluating verbal requests proved to be successful in distinguishing between different types of training in our patient sample. Critically, testing duration was substantially shorter for the entire ACT (10–20 min) than for the AAT (60–90 min). Taken together, the current findings suggest that communicative-pragmatic methods in speech- language testing provide a sensitive and time-effective measure to determine the outcome of aphasia therapy

Efficacy of Infection Control Interventions in Reducing the Spread of Multidrug-Resistant Organisms in the Hospital Setting

Multidrug-resistant organisms (MDRO) continue to spread in hospitals globally, but the population-level impact of recommended preventive strategies and the relative benefit of individual strategies targeting all MDRO in the hospital setting are unclear. To explore the dynamics of MDRO transmission in the hospital, we develop a model extending data from clinical individual-level studies to quantify the impact of hand hygiene, contact precautions, reducing antimicrobial exposure and screening surveillance cultures in decreasing the prevalence of MDRO colonization and infection. The effect of an ongoing increase in the influx of patients colonized with MDRO into the hospital setting is also quantified. We find that most recommended strategies have substantial effect in decreasing the prevalence of MDRO over time. However, screening for asymptomatic MDRO colonization among patients who are not receiving antimicrobials is of minimal value in reducing the spread of MDRO

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011

Measurements of Higgs boson production and couplings in diboson final states with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements are presented of production properties and couplings of the recently discovered Higgs boson using the decays into boson pairs, H →γ γ, H → Z Z∗ →4l and H →W W∗ →lνlν. The results are based on the complete pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at centre-of-mass energies of √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 25 fb−1. Evidence for Higgs boson production through vector-boson fusion is reported. Results of combined fits probing Higgs boson couplings to fermions and bosons, as well as anomalous contributions to loop-induced production and decay modes, are presented. All measurements are consistent with expectations for the Standard Model Higgs boson

Expected Performance of the ATLAS Experiment - Detector, Trigger and Physics

A detailed study is presented of the expected performance of the ATLAS detector. The reconstruction of tracks, leptons, photons, missing energy and jets is investigated, together with the performance of b-tagging and the trigger. The physics potential for a variety of interesting physics processes, within the Standard Model and beyond, is examined. The study comprises a series of notes based on simulations of the detector and physics processes, with particular emphasis given to the data expected from the first years of operation of the LHC at CERN

Measurement of the top quark-pair production cross section with ATLAS in pp collisions at \sqrt{s}=7\TeV

A measurement of the production cross-section for top quark pairs(\ttbar) in $pp$ collisions at \sqrt{s}=7 \TeV is presented using data recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events are selected in two different topologies: single lepton (electron $e$ or muon $\mu$) with large missing transverse energy and at least four jets, and dilepton ($ee$, $\mu\mu$ or $e\mu$) with large missing transverse energy and at least two jets. In a data sample of 2.9 pb-1, 37 candidate events are observed in the single-lepton topology and 9 events in the dilepton topology. The corresponding expected backgrounds from non-\ttbar Standard Model processes are estimated using data-driven methods and determined to be $12.2 \pm 3.9$ events and $2.5 \pm 0.6$ events, respectively. The kinematic properties of the selected events are consistent with SM \ttbar production. The inclusive top quark pair production cross-section is measured to be \sigmattbar=145 \pm 31 ^{+42}_{-27} pb where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. The measurement agrees with perturbative QCD calculations.Comment: 30 pages plus author list (50 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, CERN-PH number and final journal adde