The Pathway to Making Change: How Parents Promote Health for Their Overweight or Obese Child

Informed by the grounded theory method, the aim of this study was to discover, explore, and explain how parents promote the health of their overweight or obese child. Implicit within this goal was to discover the worldview of the parents and to understand the context, properties, and dimensions in which this process occurred. Interviews from 17 participants were analyzed using constant comparison and theoretical sampling techniques. The concepts and constructs that emerged from the data analysis depict the basic social process of how parents come to know their child is overweight or obese and how they promote their child\u27s health given this awareness. Findings revealed five core process concepts, discovery, taking the lead, making change, engagement, and teamwork. Parental movement and action within the process of making change occurred through the core process linking concepts of parental buy-in, parental worry, finding the hook, and creating the gel. Embedded and antecedent to the process of making change are influential contextual conditions at a micro and macro level. The substantive theory that emerged from this study, The Pathway to Making Change, was derived from the data and was comprised of the relationships of the core process concepts, core process linking concepts, and the contextual conditions that clustered from the data during analysis. The Pathway to Making Change represents a dynamic and fluid model founded upon the interaction between parent-child dyad and their lived world. The Pathway to Making Change explains how parents come to know their child is overweight or obese and based upon this awareness how they promote the health of their child. The findings from this study have important implications for nursing practice, future research, public health services, health education, and public policy

RAPTOR: Routing Attacks on Privacy in Tor

The Tor network is a widely used system for anonymous communication. However, Tor is known to be vulnerable to attackers who can observe traffic at both ends of the communication path. In this paper, we show that prior attacks are just the tip of the iceberg. We present a suite of new attacks, called Raptor, that can be launched by Autonomous Systems (ASes) to compromise user anonymity. First, AS-level adversaries can exploit the asymmetric nature of Internet routing to increase the chance of observing at least one direction of user traffic at both ends of the communication. Second, AS-level adversaries can exploit natural churn in Internet routing to lie on the BGP paths for more users over time. Third, strategic adversaries can manipulate Internet routing via BGP hijacks (to discover the users using specific Tor guard nodes) and interceptions (to perform traffic analysis). We demonstrate the feasibility of Raptor attacks by analyzing historical BGP data and Traceroute data as well as performing real-world attacks on the live Tor network, while ensuring that we do not harm real users. In addition, we outline the design of two monitoring frameworks to counter these attacks: BGP monitoring to detect control-plane attacks, and Traceroute monitoring to detect data-plane anomalies. Overall, our work motivates the design of anonymity systems that are aware of the dynamics of Internet routing

Fate and pathways of dredged estuarine sediment spoil in response to variable sediment size and baroclinic coastal circulation

Most of the world’s megacities are located in estuarine regions supporting commercial ports. Such locations are subject to sedimentation and require dredging to maintain activities. Liverpool Bay, northwest UK, is a region of freshwater influence and hypertidal conditions used to demonstrate the impact of baroclinicity when considering sediment disposal. Although tidal currents dominate the time-varying current and onshore sediment movement, baroclinic processes cause a 2-layer residual circulation that influences the longer-term sediment transport. A nested modelling system is applied to accurately simulate the circulation during a three month period. The hydrodynamic model is validated using coastal observations, and a Lagrangian particle tracking model is used to determine the pathways of 2 sediment mixtures representative of locally dredged material: a mix of 70% silt and 30% medium sand and a mix of 50% fine sand and 50% medium sand. Sediments are introduced at 3 active disposal sites within the Mersey Estuary in 2 different quantities (500 and 1500 Tonnes). Following release the majority (83% or more) of the particles remain within the estuary due to baroclinic influence. However, particles able to leave follow 2 distinct pathways, which primarily depend on the sediment grain size. Typically the finer sediment moves north and the coarser sediment west. Under solely barotropic conditions larger sediment volumes (up to 5 times more) can leave the estuary in a diffuse plume moving north. This demonstrates the necessity of considering baroclinic influence even within a hypertidal region with low freshwater inflow for accurate particle tracking

Exploration des points de contrôle du cycle cellulaire dans un modèle 3D, le sphéroïde

Le décryptage des mécanismes de contrôle du cycle cellulaire est essentiel pour comprendre les mécanismes régulateurs de la prolifération ainsi que leurs dérégulations au cours du développement tumoral. Cependant, les données actuelles ont pour la plupart été acquises sur des modèles de culture cellulaire en monocouche ne permettant pas de prendre en compte les interactions cellulaires, l'hétérogénéité tumorale et le microenvironnement, paramètres déterminants pour la croissance tumorale et dans la sensibilité aux agents anti-cancéreux. Les sphéroïdes sont des modèles de culture 3D multicellulaires caractérisés par la mise en place au cours de leur croissance de gradients de nutriments, d'hypoxie et de prolifération mimant l'organisation cellulaire de micro-régions tumorales. Ainsi, le modèle sphéroïde permet de considérer les interactions et l'hétérogénéité cellulaire ainsi que le microenvironnement. Dans ce contexte, l'objectif de ce projet est d'étudier la dynamique spatiale et temporelle de régulation du cycle cellulaire et d'activation des points de contrôle en 3D dans des modèles de sphéroïdes. Cette étude a été réalisée sur des sphéroïdes de cellules d'adénocarcinome du pancréas de la lignée Capan-2. Nous avons tout d'abord caractérisé la mise en place du gradient de prolifération au cours de la croissance grâce à des incorporations d'EdU, ou des marquages dirigés contre l'antigène Ki-67. Grâce à des modèles originaux de sphéroïdes exprimant des marqueurs fluorescents indicatifs de la position dans le cycle cellulaire, les Fucci, nous avons caractérisé la distribution des cellules dans le cycle cellulaire ainsi que la régionalisation de cette distribution au cours de la croissance des sphéroïdes. La deuxième partie des travaux réalisés a été consacrée à l'évaluation de l'utilisation des modèles de sphéroïdes Capan-2/Fucci pour l'exploration de la dynamique spatiale et temporelle de l'activation des points de contrôle du cycle cellulaire en réponse à une exposition à divers types de stress comme une privation en facteur de croissance, des traitements pharmacologiques ou des dommages à l'ADN induits par des radiations ionisantes. Les résultats obtenus montrent l'intérêt de l'utilisation de sphéroïdes génétiquement modifiés pour étudier l'activation des points de contrôle au sein d'une population cellulaire tumorale hétérogène et régionalisée, prenant en compte les interactions cellulaires et l'importance du microenvironnement. Cette étude ouvre la possibilité d'explorer les mécanismes moléculaires de l'activation des points de contrôle du cycle cellulaire en 3D, ainsi que l'étude dynamique de la réponse à de nouveaux agents anti-prolifératifs dans la perspective d'identifier de nouvelles cibles thérapeutiques.Deciphering cell cycle control mechanism is essential to understand the involvement of its deregulation in tumor development and to identify new therapeutic targets. However, many studies have been performed on monolayer-cell based models that do not allow considering cell interaction, heterogeneity and tumor microenvironment that are essential parameters of tumor growth and resistance to treatments. Multi Cellular Tumor Spheroid (MCTS) 3D model mimics the organization of a non-vascularized tumor micro-region and is considered as an invaluable model to study cancer cell biology and to evaluate new antiproliferative drugs. In that context, the objective of this project is to study the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell cycle regulation and checkpoints activation in 3D by using original spheroids models. We used a model of tumor pancreatic Capan-2 cells spheroid. In a first part, we characterized the proliferation gradient during the growth of spheroids by using EdU incorporation and KI-67. By using an original genetically modified spheroid model expressing the fluorescent Fucci cell cycle reporters, we quantitatively correlate the rate of proliferation and the distribution of cells in the cell cycle phases depending on their position inside spheroids. In a second part, we evaluated the use of these models to explore the response to the activation cell cycle checkpoints following exposure to various types of stress like growth factor deprivation, pharmacological treatments or exposition to DNA damage induced by ionizing radiation. Our data demonstrate the interest of using such genetically modified spheroids to study at the cellular level the response to checkpoint activation in a regionalized heterogeneous tumor cell population taking into account cell-microenvironment interactions. This study paves the way for the investigation of the molecular aspects of checkpoint response in 3D models and the dynamic studies of the 3D response to novel antiproliferative agents

Some extensions in continuous models for immunological correlates of protection

Detail of results of case-cohort investigation. (DOCX 41 kb