A collaborative citizen science platform for real-time volunteer computing and games

Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience (CCS) community and present extensive opportunities for scientists to make use of computing power donated by volunteers to undertake large-scale scientific computing tasks. Volunteer computing is generally a non-interactive process for those contributing computing resources to a project whereas volunteer thinking (VT) or distributed thinking, which allows volunteers to participate interactively in citizen cyberscience projects to solve human computation tasks. In this paper we describe the integration of three tools, the Virtual Atom Smasher (VAS) game developed by CERN, LiveQ, a job distribution middleware, and CitizenGrid, an online platform for hosting and providing computation to CCS projects. This integration demonstrates the combining of volunteer computing and volunteer thinking to help address the scientific and educational goals of games like VAS. The paper introduces the three tools and provides details of the integration process along with further potential usage scenarios for the resulting platform.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure

Correlates of Annual Testing for Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) in an Online Sample of Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM): Study Sample Validity, Measure Reliability, and Behavioral Typologies

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2013. Major: Epidemiology. Advisors: Simon Rosser, Pamela Schrieiner. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 172 pages.Objective: Testing for STIs has been prioritized as part of a comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention plan. Internet-based studies of STI testing among men who have sex with men (MSM) are efficient methods of recruiting non-clinic samples from diverse geographic areas. However, online survey methods raise unique concerns regarding threats to the validity of study samples and unknown measurement properties. Thus, this dissertation had two aims. The first was to examine methods related to online survey research by evaluating a protocol to detect invalid survey entries and determining the test-retest reliability of online measures of sexual behavior and STI testing. The second aim was to use the validated sample and reliable measures to examine correlates of STI testing in the year prior to the survey. Methods: In Manuscript 1, survey submissions were classified as valid and invalid according to a de-duplication and cross-validation protocol. Logistic regression models were used to determine associations between invalidity and key demographic and behavioral variables. In Manuscript 2, test-retest reliability over one week was evaluated using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and kappa statistics for measures of sexual behavior, HIV status, HIV testing, and STI diagnoses. Finally, in Manuscript 3, the valid sample from Manuscript 1 and measures that were evaluated in Manuscript 2 were used to examine the clustering and correlates of STI testing behaviors. Results: In Manuscript 1, three components of the protocol for detecting invalid submissions were responsible for identifying the most invalid survey submissions: duplicate IP address, changed eligibility responses, and duplicate payment name. A total of 146 (11.6%) of the submissions were identified as invalid. Invalid submissions had lower odds of reporting HIV testing in the past year. Hispanic/Latino identity, age, and HIV status were also significantly associated with invalidity. In Manuscript 2, counts of sexual partners (three months), HIV status, HIV testing, and STI diagnoses were found to have substantial (0.61-0.80) to almost perfect (0.81-1.00) seven-day test-retest reliabilities, according to commonly used cutpoints. Partner-specific data, however, were only fairly or moderately reliable (0.21-0.60). Finally, in Manuscript 3, a latent class analysis indicated five STI testing classes: no STIs, all STIs, bacterial STIs and hepatitis, bacterial STIs only, and hepatitis only. The largest class was no STIs, indicating that 45.8% of the validated sample had not been tested for STIs in the past year. Predictors of being in a testing class versus no STI testing included age, education, outness about having sex with men, HIV status, and having a sexual partner in the last three months. Conclusions: This dissertation served two primary aims. The first was to evaluate sample validity and measure reliability in an online study of MSM. The second was to apply the information from those analyses to examine the presence and correlates of a latent variable of STI testing. Across all three manuscripts, online survey research appears to be a viable method of studying STI testing in Internet-based samples of MSM

Disassortative Age-Mixing Does Not Explain Differences in HIV Prevalence between Young White and Black MSM: Findings from Four Studies

Objective Age disassortativity is one hypothesis for HIV disparities between Black and White MSM. We examined differences in age mixing by race and the effect of partner age difference on the association between race and HIV status. Design We used data from four studies of MSM. Participants reported information about recent sexual partners, including age, race, and sexual behavior. Two studies were online with a US sample and two focused on MSM in Atlanta. Methods We computed concordance correlation coefficients (CCCs) by race across strata of partner type, participant HIV status, condom use, and number of partners. We used Wilcoxon ranksum tests to compare Black and White MSM on partner age differences across five age groups. Finally, we used logistic regression models using race, age, and partner age difference to determine the odds ratio of HIV-positive serostatus. Results Of 48 CCC comparisons, Black MSM were more age-disassortative than White MSM in only two. Furthermore, of 20 comparisons of median partner age, Black and White MSM differed in two age groups. One indicated larger age gaps among the Black MSM (18-19). Prevalent HIV infection was associated with race and age. Including partner age difference in the model resulted in a 2% change in the relative odds of infection among Black MSM. Conclusions Partner age disassortativity and partner age differences do not differ by race. Partner age difference offers little predictive value in understanding prevalent HIV infection among Black and White MSM, including diagnosis of HIV-positive status among self-reported HIVnegative individuals

The institutional shaping of management: in the tracks of English individualism

Globalisation raises important questions about the shaping of economic action by cultural factors. This article explores the formation of what is seen by some as a prime influence on the formation of British management: individualism. Drawing on a range of historical sources, it argues for a comparative approach. In this case, the primary comparison drawn is between England and Scotland. The contention is that there is a systemic approach to authority in Scotland that can be contrasted to a personal approach in England. An examination of the careers of a number of Scottish pioneers of management suggests the roots of this systemic approach in practices of church governance. Ultimately this systemic approach was to take a secondary role to the personal approach engendered by institutions like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but it found more success in the different institutional context of the USA. The complexities of dealing with historical evidence are stressed, as is the value of taking a comparative approach. In this case this indicates a need to take religious practice as seriously as religious belief as a source of transferable practice. The article suggests that management should not be seen as a simple response to economic imperatives, but as shaped by the social and cultural context from which it emerges

Clinical care of pregnant and postpartum women with COVID-19: Living recommendations from the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce

To date, 18 living recommendations for the clinical care of pregnant and postpartum women with COVID-19 have been issued by the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce. This includes recommendations on mode of birth, delayed umbilical cord clamping, skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding, rooming-in, antenatal corticosteroids, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, disease-modifying treatments (including dexamethasone, remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine), venous thromboembolism prophylaxis and advanced respiratory support interventions (prone positioning and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation). Through continuous evidence surveillance, these living recommendations are updated in near real-time to ensure clinicians in Australia have reliable, evidence-based guidelines for clinical decision-making. Please visit https://covid19evidence.net.au/ for the latest recommendation updates

A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e., a controlling message) compared with no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. On the other hand, the autonomy-supportive message lowered feelings of defiance compared with the controlling message, but the controlling message did not differ from receiving no message at all. Unexpectedly, messages did not influence autonomous motivation (a highly internalized form of motivation relying on one’s core values) or behavioral intentions. Results supported hypothesized associations between people’s existing autonomous and controlled motivations and self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing. Controlled motivation was associated with more defiance and less long-term behavioral intention to engage in social distancing, whereas autonomous motivation was associated with less defiance and more short- and long-term intentions to social distance. Overall, this work highlights the potential harm of using shaming and pressuring language in public health communication, with implications for the current and future global health challenges

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe