Alcohol, assault and licensed premises in inner-city areas

This report contains eight linked feasibility studies conducted in Cairns during 2010. These exploratory studies examine the complex challenges of compiling and sharing information about incidents of person-to-person violence in a late night entertainment precinct (LNEP). The challenges were methodological as well as logistical and ethical. The studies look at how information can be usefully shared, while preserving the confidentiality of those involved. They also examine how information can be compiled from routinely collected sources with little or no additional resources, and then shared by the agencies that are providing and using the information.Although the studies are linked, they are also stand-alone and so can be published in peer-reviewed literature. Some have already been published, or are ‘in press’ or have been submitted for review. Others require the NDLERF board’s permission to be published as they include data related more directly to policing, or they include information provided by police.The studies are incorporated into the document under section headings. In each section, they are introduced and then presented in their final draft form. The final published form of each paper, however, is likely to be different from the draft because of journal and reviewer requirements. The content, results and implications of each study are discussed in summaries included in each section.Funded by the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund, an initiative of the National Drug StrategyAlan R Clough (PhD) School of Public Health, Tropical Medicine and Rehabilitation Sciences James Cook UniversityCharmaine S Hayes-Jonkers (BPsy, BSocSci (Hon1)) James Cook University, Cairns.Edward S Pointing (BPsych) James Cook University, Cairns

De verwerking van werkwoorden door personen met afasie:de rol van instrumentaliteit en naamsverwantschap

In het hier gepresenteerde onderzoek is de invloed van twee factoren op het verwerken van werkwoorden door personen met afasie onderzocht. Zowel de rol van een conceptuele factor, instrumentaliteit, als van een lexicaal-fonologische factor, naamsverwantschap tussen een werkwoord en een bijbehorend zelfstandig naamwoord, komen aan de orde. Instrumentele werkwoorden (werkwoorden die een actie uitdrukken, waarbij voor de uitvoering van die actie een instrument nodig is) werden beter opgeroepen dan niet-instrumentele werkwoorden door personen met een amnestische afasie, terwijl een dergelijk effect niet werd gevonden voor personen met een afasie van Broca. Ook naamsverwantschap tussen een werkwoord en een zelfstandig naamwoord had een positieve invloed op het aantal correcte reacties bij het benoemen van acties bij de personen met een amnestische afasie, maar niet bij personen met een afasie van Broca. Op een werkwoordsbegripstest bleken beide bovengenoemde factoren eveneens een rol te spelen. Instrumentaliteit had een positief effect op het begrijpen van werkwoorden door niet-vloeiend sprekende personen met afasie, terwijl naamsverwantschap met een zelfstandig naamwoord een negatieve rol speelde bij het begrijpen van werkwoorden door personen met een vloeiende afasie. De gevonden resultaten worden besproken aan de hand van de theorie van gespreide activatie (Dell, 1986)

How expertise and language familiarity influence perception of speech of people with Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder characterized by several motor and non-motor manifestations. PD frequently leads to hypokinetic dysarthria, which affects speech production and often has a detrimental impact on everyday communication. Among the typical manifestations of hypokinetic dysarthria, speech and language therapists (SLTs) identify prosody as the most affected cluster of speech characteristics. However, less is known about how untrained listeners perceive PD speech and how affected prosody influences their assessments of speech. This study explores the perception of sentence type intonation and healthiness of PD speech by listeners with different levels of familiarity with speech disorders in Dutch. We investigated assessments and classification accuracy differences between Dutch-speaking SLTs (n = 18) and Dutch/non-Dutch speaking untrained listeners (n = 27 and n = 124, respectively). We collected speech data from 30 Dutch speakers diagnosed with PD and 30 Dutch healthy controls. The stimuli set consisted of short phrases from spontaneous and read speech and of phrases produced with different sentence type intonation. Listeners participated in an online experiment targeting classification of sentence type intonation and perceived healthiness of speech. Results indicate that both familiarity with speech disorders and with speakers’ language are significant and have different effects depending on the task type, as different listener groups demonstrate different classification accuracy. There is evidence that untrained Dutch listeners classify PD speech as unhealthy more accurately than both trained Dutch and untrained non-Dutch listeners, while trained Dutch listeners outperform the other two groups in sentence type classification

A practical view of fine-mapping and gene prioritization in the post-genome-wide association era

Over the past 15 years, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have enabled the systematic identification of genetic loci associated with traits and diseases. However, due to resolution issues and methodological limitations, the true causal variants and genes associated with traits remain difficult to identify. In this post-GWAS era, many biological and computational fine-mapping approaches now aim to solve these issues. Here, we review fine-mapping and gene prioritization approaches that, when combined, will improve the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of complex traits and diseases. Fine-mapping of genetic variants has become increasingly sophisticated: initially, variants were simply overlapped with functional elements, but now the impact of variants on regulatory activity and direct variant-gene 3D interactions can be identified. Moreover, gene manipulation by CRISPR/Cas9, the identification of expression quantitative trait loci and the use of co-expression networks have all increased our understanding of the genes and pathways affected by GWAS loci. However, despite this progress, limitations including the lack of cell-type- and disease-specific data and the ever-increasing complexity of polygenic models of traits pose serious challenges. Indeed, the combination of fine-mapping and gene prioritization by statistical, functional and population-based strategies will be necessary to truly understand how GWAS loci contribute to complex traits and diseases