Is Music Therapy Intervention Effective in Decreasing Pain After Standard Wound Care in Hospitalized Burn Patients?

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this selective evidence based medicine review is to determine whether or not music therapy intervention is effective in decreasing pain after standard wound care in hospitalized burn patients. STUDY DESIGN: Systematic review compiling data from three randomized controlled trials in 2016, all in the English language. DATA SOURCES: After a thorough search of PubMed and Cochrane, three pertinent studies were found to include in this review. The selected studies were evaluated to assess the effectiveness of music therapy in decreasing pain after wound care in hospitalized burn patients. OUTCOMES MEASURED: Decrease in pain symptoms were measured by three self-reported pain scales: The Persian version of burn specific pain anxiety scale (BSPAS) ranging from 0– 10011, a self-reported numeric rating scale of 0-1012, and a patient reported score on a visual analog scale from 0-10013. RESULTS: Two of the three randomized control trials showed a statistically significant decrease in pain amongst the group receiving music intervention.11,13 One study showed a mean pain score amongst the control group of 91.17 versus 68.12 amongst the intervention group with a p-value of \u3c0.001.11 Another showed a reduction in pain of 29.20 in the intervention group and an increase of 1.03 in the control group with a p-value of \u3c0.001.13 The last study did show a lower overall pain score amongst the intervention group of 1.828 versus 2.000 in the control group, but the p-value showed no statistical significance at p=0.57.12 CONCLUSION: Based on the systematic review of these three studies, music therapy does likely aid in relieving post-procedural burn pain, but the evidence is not conclusive and warrants more research. With that said, the findings in all three studies are encouraging that music therapy is in fact effective and will be proven effective with further research

Cosmic shear as a tool for precision cosmology: minimising intrinsic galaxy alignment-lensing interference

Cosmic shear leads to a correlation of the observed ellipticities of galaxies, an effect which is used to place constraints on cosmological parameters, and to explore the evolution of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. However, a possible systematic contaminant of the lensing signal is intrinsic galaxy alignment, with a correlation length of a few Mpc. Hirata & Seljak (2004) have recently demonstrated that for some models of intrinsic distortions, there may also be a cross-correlation between the intrinsic and lensing signals, which may dominate the intrinsic signal, and suppress the lensing power spectrum by several tens of percent. Unlike the pure intrinsic signal, this new term cannot be accounted for by neglecting or down-weighting pairs of galaxies which are physically close. Extending the correlation function tomography method of King & Schneider (2003) we illustrate how the impact of both intrinsic and cross-correlations can be significantly reduced, in the context of surveys with photometric redshift information. For a ground-based cosmic shear survey of ~100 sq. degrees with photometric redshifts, even in the presence of systematic contaminants at the level considered here, cosmological models degenerate in the Omega_m-sigma_8 plane can be distinguished well in excess of the 3-sigma level.Comment: To appear in A&A; 7 pages, 4 figure

An entrepreneurial mindset: Not just for entrepreneurs

Abstract: An entrepreneurial mindset is beneficial for all individuals regardless of their career aspirations. College students, in particular, can benefit from the development of an entrepreneurial mindset as they will be inclined to desire to achieve more and continually strive for personal growth. Entrepreneurial development within college students can be realized through experiential learning aimed to cultivate entrepreneurial capabilities such as critical, creative, and innovative thought. These capabilities, coupled with a passion for personal achievement through life-long learning, an entrepreneurial mindset can be developed. This study first proposed an abbreviated measure of College Student Entrepreneurial Development (CSED) by revising an existing instrument, and then used the measure to assess growth in students’ entrepreneurial development from participating in an experiential learning course intervention. Results indicated that the newly reduced measure of CSED did reliably fit a two-factor model of entrepreneurial development, containing the two subscales of self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Students receiving the curricular intervention were shown to have post-test CSED scores statistically higher than those who did not receive the intervention. Implications for offering a general education course for all students that incorporates entrepreneurial thinking are discussed. Considerations for university leadership, including both administrators and faculty, for implementing a course encouraging an entrepreneurial mindset are also presented

Improving CMB non-Gaussianity estimators using tracers of local structure

Local non-Gaussianity causes correlations between large scale perturbation modes and the small scale power. The large-scale CMB signal has contributions from the integrated Sachs Wolfe (ISW) effect, which does not correlate with the small scale power. If this ISW contribution can be removed, the sensitivity to local non-Gaussianity is improved. Gravitational lensing and galaxy counts can be used to trace the ISW contribution; in particular we show that the CMB lensing potential is highly correlated with the ISW signal. We construct a nearly-optimal estimator for the local non-Gaussianity parameter \fnl and investigate to what extent we can use this to decrease the variance on {\fnl}. We show that the variance can be decreased by up to $20\%$ at Planck sensitivity using galaxy counts. CMB lensing is a good bias-independent ISW tracer for future more sensitive observations, though the fractional decrease in variance is small if good polarization data is also available.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Comments welcom

Modeling eating pathology: The role of gender, sociocultural, and individual factors

Eating pathology is an increasing problem in the United States and other Western countries. This study examined gender differences and specific known psychological correlates of eating pathology. Sociocultural variables, such as thin-ideal internalization, and individual factors, such as perfectionism and experiential avoidance, were also evaluated. A sample of 257 female and 165 male undergraduates (n = 423) completed a battery of surveys online. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to model the relationships among the variables. The results show that the best fitting model included perfectionism rather than thin-ideal internalization leading to body dissatisfaction. There is support for experiential avoidance as a mediating variable between body dissatisfaction, dieting, and thin-idealization and binge eating. Results also show that men engaged in more binge eating and exercise than women and less vomiting and laxative use than women. These findings suggest that individual factors, specifically perfectionism and experiential avoidance, are strongly related to eating pathology, particularly binge eating

Pavlovian Processes in Consumer Choice: The Physical Presence of a Good Increases Willingness-to-Pay

This paper describes a series of laboratory experiments studying whether the form in which items are displayed at the time of decision affects the dollar value that subjects place on them. Using a Becker-DeGroot auction under three different conditions — (i) text displays, (ii) image displays, and (iii) displays of the actual items — we find that subjects' willingness-to-pay is 40-61 percent larger in the real than in the image and text displays. Furthermore, follow-up experiments suggest the presence of the real item triggers preprogrammed consummatory Pavlovian processes that promote behaviors that lead to contact with appetitive items whenever they are available

Customer satisfaction, training and TQM: a comparative study of Western and Thai hotels

Managers within the hospitality industry make frequent reference to TQM principles. The extent to which these principles are applied effectively within the human resource management area of hospitality however remains under-researched. By applying TQM principles, this paper focusses on the relationship between customer service and training drawing upon comparative data from Western and Thai hotels. The paper also examines the perceptions of staff towards of hotels' guest-orientation and the provision of quality guest services. The researchers found that guest assessments of the performance of hotel frontline staff depend on their services function (e.g., front-office, housekeeping). The service quality skills needed by frontline staff were also found to differ in the case of Western and Thai hotels. Such differences merit proper consideration on the part of managers within the major hotel chains. The various findings may assist hospitality managers to determine appropriate strategies for the enhancement of guest services particularly in cross-cultural settings