The Romance of Song : Duo Trompiano

Duo Trompiano, consisting of trumpeter Dr. Douglas Lindsey and pianist Judith Cole, present a recital entitled The Romance of Song , featuring the works of Rachmaninoff, Sondheim, Ewazen, Copland, and more.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/2309/thumbnail.jp

Faculty Recital: Duo Trompiano!

KSU School of Music presents Duo Trompiano!https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1088/thumbnail.jp

The Use of Web-Based Support Groups Versus Usual Quit-Smoking Care for Men and Women Aged 21-59 Years: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Existing smoking cessation treatments are challenged by low engagement and high relapse rates, suggesting the need for more innovative, accessible, and interactive treatment strategies. Twitter is a Web-based platform that allows people to communicate with each other throughout the day using their phone. OBJECTIVE This study aims to leverage the social media platform of Twitter for fostering peer-to-peer support to decrease relapse with quitting smoking. Furthermore, the study will compare the effects of coed versus women-only groups on women’s success with quitting smoking. METHODS The study design is a Web-based, three-arm randomized controlled trial with two treatment arms (a coed or women-only Twitter support group) and a control arm. Participants are recruited online and are randomized to one of the conditions. All participants will receive 8 weeks of combination nicotine replacement therapy (patches plus their choice of gum or lozenges), serial emails with links to Smokefree.gov quit guides, and instructions to record their quit date online (and to quit smoking on that date) on a date falling within a week of initiation of the study. Participants randomized to a treatment arm are placed in a fully automated Twitter support group (coed or women-only), paired with a buddy (matched on age, gender, location, and education), and encouraged to communicate with the group and buddy via daily tweeted discussion topics and daily automated feedback texts (a positive tweet if they tweet and an encouraging tweet if they miss tweeting). Recruited online from across the continental United States, the sample consists of 215 male and 745 female current cigarette smokers wanting to quit, aged between 21 and 59 years. Self-assessed follow-up surveys are completed online at 1, 3, and 6 months after the date they selected to quit smoking, with salivary cotinine validation at 3 and 6 months. The primary outcome is sustained biochemically confirmed abstinence at the 6-month follow-up. RESULTS From November 2016 to September 2018, 960 participants in 36 groups were recruited for the randomized controlled trial, in addition to 20 participants in an initial pilot group. Data analysis will commence soon for the randomized controlled trial based on data from 896 of the 960 participants (93.3%), with 56 participants lost to follow-up and 8 dropouts. CONCLUSIONS This study combines the mobile platform of Twitter with a support group for quitting smoking. Findings will inform the efficacy of virtual peer-to-peer support groups for quitting smoking and potentially elucidate gender differences in quit rates found in prior research. CLINICALTRIAL ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02823028; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT0282302

Achieving Communitywide Impact by Changing the Local Culture: Opportunities and Considerations for Foundations

With place-based initiatives foundations generally seek to engage a broad set of local stakeholders in developing high-payoff strategies and to build their capacity. However more fundamental changes may be needed to bring about the ambitious impacts that foundations have in mind. This article explores the idea of changing community culture as a means of achieving large-scale impacts. In trying to shift a community’s culture, a foundation is inherently seeking to change how residents think and act, as well as how the community defines itself. This raises both practical and ethical questions, particularly when the foundation is based outside the community in question. Possibilities and challenges with this line of work are illustrated with the Community Progress Initiative, which sought to build an adaptive culture to revitalize the economy in central Wisconsin following massive dislocations in the papermaking and cranberry industries

Duo Trompiano!

Judy Cole and Doug Lindsey met in the Fall of 2012 and have since performed dozens of concerts all over Georgia and the Southeast. From their very first collaboration, Duo Trompiano! have been committed to making great music accessible to audiences of all ages that spans genres from jazz standards to modern trumpet repertoire.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1959/thumbnail.jp

From Risk to Resilience: Adult Survivors of Childhood Violence Talk About Their Experiences

The main focus of research into family violence has been around the ideas of intergenerational transmission of learned behaviours. We know a good deal about what constitutes risk for children, the outcomes of that risk and the processes that work to translate difficult childhoods into difficult adulthoods - for some children. We also all know children who seem to have 'weathered' the most appalling childhoods and to have emerged strong and resilient and who do not repeat the patterns of relating they experienced as children in their adult lives. It is this group that is the focus of the study. A purposively selected sample of eight, seven women and one man, with a range of backgrounds, was interviewed in depth using qualitative research methods informed by feminist standpoint theory. All of the eight had identified as having experienced significant violence as children, mainly in their families of origin. They also stated that they did not currently relate to their partners or children in violent ways, nor were they the victims of violent relationships. They consequently fell into the category of those who have "broken the cycle" of intergenerational abuse. Each person identified the things that helped them through their experiences and their reflections were then examined in more detail in the context of other studies on resilience. The interviews yielded an interesting array of findings which were consistent with literature which identifies certain attributes of the person and of their environment as protective. Findings are discussed with a view to their relevance to social work practice and policy. The list of protective factors may serve as an 'inventory' of potential resources for those working in the field of family violence. This study supports earlier work which challenges the idea of the inevitability of the intergenerational transmission of abuse, working instead from a paradigm which suggests that there are a multiplicity of 'resilience factors,' both integral to the individual and environmental, which interact in complex ways to enable many people to survive abuse and to relate in healthy ways in their adult lives

The extracellular matrix and the immune system : A mutually dependent relationship

Acknowledgments: We are very grateful to our colleagues at the Wellcome Centre for Cell-Matrix Research and the Lydia Becker Institute for Immunology and Inflammation for many stimulating discussions. We would especially like to thank A. Day, D. Thornton, R. Lennon, A. MacDonald, and T. Hardingham and the anonymous referees for critical review of the manuscript. Figures have been drawn in BioRender. Funding: This work was supported by MRC-UK grant MR/V011235/1 (J.E.A.) and Wellcome Trust grants 106898/A/15/Z (J.E.A.), 218570/Z/19/Z (D.P.D.), and 203128/A/16/Z (T.E.S., D.P.D., and J.E.A.).Peer reviewedPostprin