Developmentally Informed Community Treatment for Adolescents with Problem Sexual Behavior

The sexual abuse of children often results in profound intrapersonal and interpersonal dysfunction or difficulties for the victims. In 2010, sexual assault was perpetrated upon more than 63,000 children in the United States, and in more than 35% of those incidents, adolescents were the perpetrators. Research suggests that adolescents with problem sexual behavior act from their own vulnerabilities. Understanding the developmental seeds and pathways that become etiological factors in the commission of sexual assaults against children is only one important step in a mission to protect them. The treatment that emerges from a comprehensive understanding of adaptive and maladaptive adolescent development and its behavioral expression provides a framework from which to address both the diverse and unique characteristics of these youth. This dissertation intends to contribute to the field of the treatment of adolescents with problem sexual behavior with an outpatient program design, theoretically rooted in the discipline of developmental psychopathology and aligned with the Ward & Beech Integrated Theory of Sexual Offending. A review of literature explores the discipline of developmental psychopathology, developmental neuroscience, adolescent development, and facets of the fields related to the study of problem sexual behavior, including characteristics of problem sexual behavior in adolescents, various risk factors and theories, and current treatment models. Together these foci will function as the groundwork for the program design. Implementation of the program could contribute to a reduction of recidivism for successful adolescent participants, and so also a reduction in incidences of children perpetrating assaultive, sexual acts upon other children, by providing tools to heal wounds, and promote growth, consolidation, competency and opportunities for adolescents to re-direct their developmental trajectories

Unbiased Decisions Reduce Regret: Adversarial Domain Adaptation for the Bank Loan Problem

In many real world settings binary classification decisions are made based on limited data in near real-time, e.g. when assessing a loan application. We focus on a class of these problems that share a common feature: the true label is only observed when a data point is assigned a positive label by the principal, e.g. we only find out whether an applicant defaults if we accepted their loan application. As a consequence, the false rejections become self-reinforcing and cause the labelled training set, that is being continuously updated by the model decisions, to accumulate bias. Prior work mitigates this effect by injecting optimism into the model, however this comes at the cost of increased false acceptance rate. We introduce adversarial optimism (AdOpt) to directly address bias in the training set using adversarial domain adaptation. The goal of AdOpt is to learn an unbiased but informative representation of past data, by reducing the distributional shift between the set of accepted data points and all data points seen thus far. AdOpt significantly exceeds state-of-the-art performance on a set of challenging benchmark problems. Our experiments also provide initial evidence that the introduction of adversarial domain adaptation improves fairness in this setting

Dual Bayesian ResNet: a deep learning approach to heart murmur detection

This study presents our team PathToMyHeart’s contribution to the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2022. Two models are implemented. The first model is a Dual Bayesian ResNet (DBRes), where each patient’s recording is segmented into overlapping log mel spectrograms. These undergo two binary classifications: present versus unknown or absent, and unknown versus present or absent. The classifications are aggregated to give a patient’s final classification. The second model is the output of DBRes integrated with demographic data and signal features using XGBoost. DBRes achieved our best weighted accuracy of 0.771 on the hidden test set for murmur classification, which placed us fourth for the murmur task. (On the clinical outcome task, which we neglected, we scored 17th with costs of 12637.) On our held-out subset of the training set, integrating the demographic data and signal features improved DBRes’s accuracy from 0.762 to 0.820. However, this decreased DBRes’s weighted accuracy from 0.780 to 0.749. Our results demonstrate that log mel spectrograms are an effective representation of heart sound recordings, Bayesian networks provide strong supervised classification performance, and treating the ternary classification as two binary classifications increases performance on the weighted accuracy

Perioperative VTE Chemical Prophylaxis at Jefferson Hospital: A Retrospective Review of the Department of Surgery

Only 26.1% of patients are receiving perioperative VTE chemical prophylaxis for elective cases in the Department of Surger

Forecasting environmental equity: Air quality responses to road user charging in Leeds, UK

Sustainable development requires that the goals of economic development, environmental protection and social justice are considered collectively when formulating development strategies. In the context of planning sustainable transport systems, trade-offs between the economy and the environment, and between the economy and social justice have received considerable attention. In contrast, much less attention has been paid to environmental equity, the trade-off between environmental and social justice goals, a significant omission given the growing attention to environmental justice by policy makers in the EU and elsewhere. In many countries, considerable effort has been made to develop clean transport systems by using, for example, technical, economic and planning instruments. However, little effort has been made to understand the distributive and environmental justice implications of these measures. This paper investigates the relationship between urban air quality (as NO2) and social deprivation for the city of Leeds, UK. Through application of a series of linked dynamic models of traffic simulation and assignment, vehicle emission, and pollutant dispersion, the environmental equity implications of a series of urban transport strategies, including road user cordon and distance based charging, road network development, and emission control, are assessed. Results indicate a significant degree of environmental inequity exists in Leeds. Analysis of the transport strategies indicates that this inequity will be reduced through natural fleet renewal, and, perhaps contrary to expectations, road user charging is also capable of promoting environmental equity. The environmental equity response is however, sensitive to road pricing scheme design

HPV self-sampling as an alternative strategy in non-attenders for cervical screening – a randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND: A randomised trial to ascertain whether women who do not attend for cervical screening are more likely to respond to the opportunity to collect a self-sample for human papillomavirus (HPV) testing, or to a further invitation to attend for cervical screening.METHODS: The study was carried out in a Primary Care Trust (PCT) in London between June 2009 and December 2009. In total, 3000 women were randomly selected from persistent non-responders (i. e., who had not responded to at least two invitations to attend for screening). The women were randomised on a 1 : 1 basis to either receive an HPV self-sampling kit or a further invitation to attend for cervical cytology. The main outcome measures were (1) percentage of women attending for cervical cytology compared with those returning a self-sample HPV test or attending for cytology subsequent to receiving the kit and (2) percentage of those testing positive for HPV who attended further investigation.RESULTS: The total response in the self-sampling group for screening was 10.2%. Of the 1500 women in the control group sent a further invitation for cervical screening, 4.5% attended for cytology screening. This difference is highly statistically significant (Po0.0001). Of the 8 women who tested positive for HPV, 7 attended for a cervical smear and had a concurrent colposcopy. Three of these (43%) had high-grade disease (defined as CIN 2+), with one found to have an invasive cancer (stage 1b) and one CIN 3.CONCLUSIONS: The value of this intervention relies on the detection of high-grade CIN and early stage cancer with a good prognosis. The relatively high yield of abnormalities found is consistent with that expected among a hard to reach and relatively high-risk group of women. Our study suggests that self-sampling could increase participation among non-responders in England, but further work is needed to ascertain whether the low response rate seen here is likely to be representative of the rest of the country. Other studies are needed to investigate the response to self-sampling in different demographic and geographic settings. British Journal of Cancer (2011) 104, 915-920. doi: 10.1038/ bjc. 2011.48 www. bjcancer. co

Shared Care, Elder and Family Member Skills Used to Manage Burden

Aim. The aim of this paper is to further develop the construct of Shared Care by comparing and contrasting it to related research, and to show how the construct can be used to guide research and practice. Background. While researchers have identified negative outcomes for family caregivers caused by providing care, less is known about positive aspects of family care for both members of a family dyad. Understanding family care relationships is important to nurses because family participation in the care of chronically ill elders is necessary to achieve optimal outcomes from nursing interventions. A previous naturalistic inquiry identified a new construct, Shared Care, which was used to describe a family care interaction that contributed to positive care outcomes. Methods. A literature review was carried out using the databases Medline, CINAHL, and Psych-info and the keywords home care, care receiver, disability, family, communication, decision-making and reciprocity. The results of the review were integrated to suggest how Shared Care could be used to study care difficulties and guide interventions. Results. The literature confirmed the importance of dyad relationships in family care. Shared Care extended previous conceptualizations of family care by capturing three critical components: communication, decision-making, and reciprocity. Shared Care provides a structure to expand the conceptualization of family care to include both members of a care dyad and account for positive and negative aspects of care. Conclusions. The extended view provided by the construct of Shared Care offers practitioners and scholars tools to use in the context of our ageing population to improve the effectiveness of family care relationships

Co-production of the quality of patient-centered outcomes research partnerships instrument for people with mental health conditions

Mounting scientific evidence over the past decades in the field of psychiatry has shown community engagement in research produces more relevant research, increased uptake of research findings, and better clinical outcomes. Despite the need for the integration of community engagement methodologies into the scientific method, doctoral and master\u27s level competencies in the field of psychiatry commonly do not include dedicated training or coursework on community engagement methodologies. Without appropriate training or research experience, attempts to facilitate community engagement are often ineffective and burdensome and leave stakeholders feeling disenfranchised. The goal of this study was to co-produce an instrument designed to improve the quality of community engagement research practices by measuring the degree to which researchers have partnered with psychiatric patient stakeholders. The development of the Quality of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Partnerships Instrument included an iterative co-production process with psychiatric patient stakeholders and scientists, including item formulation, followed by two phases of cognitive interviews with psychiatric patient stakeholders to assess and refine instrument items. A pilot study was conducted to assess acceptability and feasibility. The pilot study of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Partnerships Instrument suggested feasibility and acceptability among psychiatric patient stakeholders. The Quality of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Partnerships Instrument may be a valuable tool to enhance the quality of community engagement research practices within the field of psychiatry. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Innovation & Technology lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework (https://www.theberylinstitute.org/ExperienceFramework). Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this len

Aurorasaurus:a citizen science platform for viewing and reporting the aurora

A new, citizen science based, aurora observing and reporting platform has been developed with the primary aim of collecting auroral observations made by the general public to further improve the modeling of the aurora. In addition, the real-time ability of this platform facilitates the combination of citizen science observations with auroral oval models to improve auroral visibility nowcasting. Aurorasaurus provides easily understandable aurora information, basic gamification, and real-time location-based notification of verified aurora activity to engage citizen scientists. The Aurorasaurus project is one of only a handful of space weather citizen science projects and can provide useful results for the space weather and citizen science communities. Early results are promising with over 2,000 registered users submitting over 1,000 aurora observations and verifying over 1,700 aurora sightings posted on Twitter