Physical and Psychological Adjustments Associated with Home and Family Management Problems of Selected Normal and Handicapped Homemakers

The purpose of this study was to determine some physical and psychological adjustments associated with home and family management problems of homemakers. The hypotheses formulated were: (1) There is no significant difference between the experimental and control groups either in the number of responses made or the intensity of attitude expressed toward physical disability, homemaker's role, family life, or life in general; (2) there is no significant difference between paired subjects with respect to their attitude toward these aforementioned factors; and (3) there is no correlation between the duration of the disability and attitudes expressed toward these identical factors. The experimental group consisted of ten physically-disabled homemakers, while the control group was comprised of ten normal ones, all between the ages of twenty and fifty. Personal interviews and case studies were utilized to collect data concerning physical and psychological adjustments of test subjects. Two somewhat structured interviews were conducted in the home of each subject. Data were tabulated and treated statistically. Major findings indicate that: (1) The two groups did not differ in intensity of attitude toward selected aspects of personal and family life; (2) paired test subjects were not significantly different in their attitudes toward selected aspects of personal and family life; and (3) disabled homemakers related the duration of disability to attitudes toward their disability and selected aspects of personal and family living. Two conclusions were drawn, namely: (1) Those homemakers who reflected the greatest insight into educational opportunities for the handicapped tended to reflect better understanding of inherent problems and to have more wholesome attitudes toward life in general, and (2) disabled homemakers were approachable in terms of assistance needed to strengthen management practices, and sought resources available to them. In light of the findings and conclusions, the following implications for further study are identified: (1) Experimental use of specifically trained management aides to implement multiple-purpose programs to assist disabled homemakers; (2) experimentation to provide maximum help to families confronted with temporary disability; and (3) investigation to test for specific changes in attitudes in light of given conditions. This study points up the nature and extent of problems faced by disabled homemakers and their interest and concern for specific professional help in their day-to-day living experiences

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

Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England

AbstractThe evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021.</jats:p

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 science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press