Mental illness stigma in mental health professionals

Mental illness is still associated with myths, prejudices and stereotypes, despite the growing investment in research and treatment in this area. The stigma still one of the major obstacle to recovery of persons with severe mental illnesses. Stigma affects an individuaĺs self-esteem, increases dysfunction, and poses problems to patients with regard to housing and employment. Stigma is a culturally induced barrier to recovery. Although studies have examined experiences of stigma by users of mental health services and stigmatizing attitudes in the general public, little attention has been paid to the experiences and attitudes of mental health professionals.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Roadmap to Gamify Programming Education

Learning programming relies on practicing it which is often hampered by the barrier of difficulty. The combined use of automated assessment, which provides fast feedback to the students experimenting with their code, and gamification, which provides additional motivation for the students to intensify their learning effort, can help pass the barrier of difficulty in learning programming. In such environment, students keep receiving the relevant feedback no matter how many times they try (thanks to automated assessment), and their engagement is retained (thanks to gamification). While there is a number of open software and programming exercise collections supporting automated assessment, up to this date, there are no available open collections of gamified programming exercises, no open interactive programming learning environment that would support such exercises, and even no open standard for the representation of such exercises so that they could be developed in different educational institutions and shared among them. This gap is addressed by Framework for Gamified Programming Education (FGPE), an international project whose primary objective is to provide necessary prerequisites for the application of gamification to programming education, including a dedicated gamification scheme, a gamified exercise format and exercises conforming to it, software for editing the exercises and an interactive learning environment capable of presenting them to students. This paper presents the FGPE project, its architecture and main components, as well as the results achieved so far. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Social and professional topics ! Computer science education

Flux networks in metabolic graphs

A metabolic model can be represented as bipartite graph comprising linked reaction and metabolite nodes. Here it is shown how a network of conserved fluxes can be assigned to the edges of such a graph by combining the reaction fluxes with a conserved metabolite property such as molecular weight. A similar flux network can be constructed by combining the primal and dual solutions to the linear programming problem that typically arises in constraint-based modelling. Such constructions may help with the visualisation of flux distributions in complex metabolic networks. The analysis also explains the strong correlation observed between metabolite shadow prices (the dual linear programming variables) and conserved metabolite properties. The methods were applied to recent metabolic models for Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Methanosarcina barkeri. Detailed results are reported for E. coli; similar results were found for the other organisms.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, RevTeX 4.0, supplementary data available (excel

Basilic Vein Transposition: improvement of the surgical technique

Introdução: O aumento crescente da população em hemodiálise tem implicado o recurso a acessos vasculares de maior complexidade técnica. A introdução de modificações na técnica cirúrgica da transposição da veia basílica (TVB) pretende agilizar o procedimento e diminuir a sua morbilidade. Métodos: Análise prospectiva das TVB efectuadas no CHP-HSA entre Setembro de 2005 e Setembro de 2009. Resultados: Efectuaram-se 74 TVB em 74 doentes, os quais tinham,em média, 2 acessos autólogos prévios. A TVB foi o primeiro acesso em 20,3% dos doentes. O intervalo médio de seguimento foi de 14,5 meses. Ocorreram 2 falências nos primeiros 30 dias. A taxa de patência secundária aos 3, 12 e 24 meses foi de 95,7%, 85,1% e 62,2%, respectivamente. A Diabetes associou-se a pior taxa de patência(p=0,018). A taxa de complicações perioperatórias foi de 28,4%, sendo a infecção a mais frequente (n=6, 8,1% do total de TVB). A trombose foi a principal causa de falência, tendo ocorrido em 24,3% de todas as TVB. Conclusões: Reconhece-se a superioridade do acesso autólogo, como a melhor opção de acesso vascular para hemodiálise. A TVB é subutilizada, devido às exigências técnicas e necessidades logísticas. Melhoramos a técnica cirúrgica e de tunelização, ao reduzir o tamanho das incisões e o tempo cirúrgico. Os nossos resultados revelaram uma boa patência a longo prazo, pelo que consideramos que deve ser mais utilizada

Urinary Hydration Biomarkers and Water Sources in Older Adults with Neurocognitive Disorder

The risk of dehydration in older adults with neurocognitive disorder (NCD) is controversial. The purpose of this study was to assess hydration status, its determinants, and water intake sources in older adults with NCD. A sample of 30 participants (>= 60 years) was included. Sociodemographic, clinical data and one 24-h urine sample were collected. Urinary osmolality, sodium, potassium, volume, and creatinine were quantified. Inadequate hydration status corresponded to urine osmolality > 500 mOsm/Kg, or a negative Free Water Reserve (FWR). Two 24-h food recalls were used to assess dietary intake and water sources. The adequacy of total water intake (TWI) was estimated according to EFSA. The contribution of food and beverages to TWI was calculated, and their associations with the urinary osmolality median were tested. Of the total number of participants, 30% were classified as having inadequate hydration status, with no differences between sexes. Regarding TWI, 68.4% of women and 77.8% of men did not reach the reference values. Water (23%), followed by soup (17%), contributed the most to TWI, while vegetables (2%) and alcoholic/other beverages (3%) contributed the least. According to the median urinary osmolality, there was no significant difference in sociodemographic/clinical characteristics. It is critical not to overlook hydration in this vulnerable population

On q-Gaussians and Exchangeability

The q-Gaussians are discussed from the point of view of variance mixtures of normals and exchangeability. For each q< 3, there is a q-Gaussian distribution that maximizes the Tsallis entropy under suitable constraints. This paper shows that q-Gaussian random variables can be represented as variance mixtures of normals. These variance mixtures of normals are the attractors in central limit theorems for sequences of exchangeable random variables; thereby, providing a possible model that has been extensively studied in probability theory. The formulation provided has the additional advantage of yielding process versions which are naturally q-Brownian motions. Explicit mixing distributions for q-Gaussians should facilitate applications to areas such as option pricing. The model might provide insight into the study of superstatistics.Comment: 14 page

Reactive phenotypes after acute and chronic NK‐cell activation

J Biol Regul Homeost Agents. 2004 Jul-Dec;18(3-4):331-4. Reactive phenotypes after acute and chronic NK-cell activation. Lima M, Almeida J, Teixeira MA, Santos AH, Queirós ML, Fonseca S, Moura J, Gonçalves M, Orfão A, Pinto Ribeiro AC. Service of Clinical Hematology, Laboratory of Cytometry, Hospital Geral de Santo António, Porto, Portugal. [email protected] Abstract Several phenotypic changes have been shown to occur after NK-cell stimulation, involving molecules that have been proved to regulate NK-cell migration into tissues and NK-cell activation and proliferation as well as target cell recognition and killing. Here, we review the reactive phenotypes observed in vivo after acute and chronic NK-cell activation. PMID: 15786700 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE

Strictly and asymptotically scale-invariant probabilistic models of NN correlated binary random variables having {\em q}--Gaussians as N→∞N\to \infty limiting distributions

In order to physically enlighten the relationship between {\it $q$--independence} and {\it scale-invariance}, we introduce three types of asymptotically scale-invariant probabilistic models with binary random variables, namely (i) a family, characterized by an index $\nu=1,2,3,...$, unifying the Leibnitz triangle ($\nu=1$) and the case of independent variables ($\nu\to\infty$); (ii) two slightly different discretizations of $q$--Gaussians; (iii) a special family, characterized by the parameter $\chi$, which generalizes the usual case of independent variables (recovered for $\chi=1/2$). Models (i) and (iii) are in fact strictly scale-invariant. For models (i), we analytically show that the $N \to\infty$ probability distribution is a $q$--Gaussian with $q=(\nu -2)/(\nu-1)$. Models (ii) approach $q$--Gaussians by construction, and we numerically show that they do so with asymptotic scale-invariance. Models (iii), like two other strictly scale-invariant models recently discussed by Hilhorst and Schehr (2007), approach instead limiting distributions which are {\it not} $q$--Gaussians. The scenario which emerges is that asymptotic (or even strict) scale-invariance is not sufficient but it might be necessary for having strict (or asymptotic) $q$--independence, which, in turn, mandates $q$--Gaussian attractors.Comment: The present version is accepted for publication in JSTA

A long-range memory stochastic model of the return in financial markets

We present a nonlinear stochastic differential equation (SDE) which mimics the probability density function (PDF) of the return and the power spectrum of the absolute return in financial markets. Absolute return as a measure of market volatility is considered in the proposed model as a long-range memory stochastic variable. The SDE is obtained from the analogy with earlier proposed model of trading activity in the financial markets and generalized within the nonextensive statistical mechanics framework. The proposed stochastic model generates time series of the return with two power law statistics, i.e., the PDF and the power spectral density, reproducing the empirical data for the one minute trading return in the NYSE.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure