Barriers To Student Connectedness and Engagement: How Socioeconomic Status Affects Student Involvement

Today, as students prepare for post-secondary opportunities, a greater and greater emphasis is placed on the importance of engaging learners both in and out of the classroom. While many students are inclined to get involved, there is a growing number of young people who face barriers that prevent them from connecting and engaging in the high school experience. Importantly, socioeconomic status plays a key role in determining how engaged a student may be, as well as serving as a key identifier in what must be addressed to ensure more young people get involved in their academic and co-curricular learning. This study focuses on the role that socioeconomic status plays in students perceived ability to connect and engage in their secondary education, and proposes a policy where schools must include professional development and training on teaching young people who come from poor backgrounds

Information system support in construction industry with semantic web technologies and/or autonomous reasoning agents

Information technology support is hard to find for the early design phases of the architectural design process. Many of the existing issues in such design decision support tools appear to be caused by a mismatch between the ways in which designers think and the ways in which information systems aim to give support. We therefore started an investigation of existing theories of design thinking, compared to the way in which design decision support systems provide information to the designer. We identify two main strategies towards information system support in the early design phase: (1) applications for making design try-outs, and (2) applications as autonomous reasoning agents. We outline preview implementations for both approaches and indicate to what extent these strategies can be used to improve information system support for the architectural designer

Validation of a new prognostic model to easily predict outcome in renal cell carcinoma: The GRANT score applied to the ASSURE trial population

Background: Prognostic scores have been developed to estimate the risk of recurrence and the probability of survival after nephrectomy for renal cell carcinoma (RCC). The use of these tools, despite being helpful to plan a customized schedule of follow-up, to the patient's tailored counselling and to select individuals who could potentially benefit from adjuvant treatment, currently is not routine, due to their relative complexity and to the lack of histological data (i.e. necrosis).Patients and methods: We developed a simple score called GRade, Age, Nodes and Tumor (GRANT) based on four easily obtained parameters: Fuhrman grade, age, pathological nodal status and pathological tumor size. Patients with 0 or 1 factor are classified as favorable risk, whereas patients with two or more risk factors as unfavorable risk. The large population of RCC patients from the ASSURE adjuvant trial was used as independent dataset for this external validation, to investigate the prognostic value of the new score in terms of disease-free survival and overall survival and to evaluate its possible application as predictive tool. Statistical analyses were carried out by the Department of Biostatistics & Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, USA) for the ASSURE trial patients' population.Results: The performance of the new model is similar to that of the already validated score systems, but its strength, compared with the others already available, is the ease and clarity of its calculation, with great speed of use during the clinical practice. Limitations are the use of the Fuhrman nuclear grade, not valid for rare histologies, and the TNM classification modifications over time.Conclusion: The GRANT score demonstrated its potential usefulness for clinical practice

Extreme precipitation in the Netherlands: An event attribution case study

Attributing the change in likelihood of extreme weather events, particularly those occurring at small spatiotemporal scales, to anthropogenic forcing is a key challenge in climate science. While a warmer world is associated with an increase in atmospheric moisture on a global scale, the impact on the magnitude of extreme precipitation episodes has substantial regional variability. Analysis of individual cases is important in understanding the extent of these changes on spatial scales relevant to stakeholders. Here, we present a probabilistic attribution analysis of the extreme precipitation that fell in large parts of the Netherlands on 28 July 2014. Using a step-by-step approach, we aim to identify changes in intensity and likelihood of such an event as a result of anthropogenic global warming while highlighting the challenges in performing robust event attribution on high-impact precipitation events that occur at small scales. A method based on extreme value theory is applied to observational data in addition to global and regional climate model ensembles that pass a robust model evaluation process. Results based on observations suggest a strong and significant increase in the intensity and frequency of a 2014-type event as a result of anthropogenic climate change but trends in the model ensembles used are considerably smaller. Our results are communicated alongside considerable uncertainty, highlighting the difficulty in attributing events of this nature. Application of our approach to convection-resolving models may produce a more robust attribution.</p

Ventricular pacemaker lead in the left hemithorax: Mechanisms and evidence-based management of a late-onset hazardous complication

Late-onset migration of pacing leads in the left hemithorax is a rare but potentially life-threatening complication. Radiological examinations are required to detect any involvement of either left ventricle or lung parenchyma, prompting immediate surgical extraction in this setting. Identification of high-risk patients is mandatory to prevent this complex iatrogenic complication

Asociación entre el uso de métodos anticonceptivos y violencia doméstica contra la mujer en edad fértil en Perú

Introduction. Intimate partner violence against women is a global health problem of epidemic proportion.&nbsp;Objectives. Establish the association between contraception use and intimate partner violence against women&nbsp;of reproductive age in Peru. Methods. Analytical cross-sectional study of the 2017 Demographic and Family&nbsp;Health Survey. The association was established based on the complete surveys. Bivariate and adjusted&nbsp;prevalence ratios (PRa) of having suffered intimate partner violence and contraceptive use were estimated.&nbsp;Results. Data from 21 392 women were analyzed, 10,6% suffered intimate partner violence, 10% used&nbsp;contraceptives, 14,8% was between 15 and 24 years old, 11,7% completed primary education, 12,8% lived in&nbsp;the highlands. In the adjusted prevalence ratio, the use of modern contraception was related to a decreased&nbsp;likelihood of intimate partner violence compared with non-use. Conclusions. The use of modern contraception&nbsp;was related to a decreased likelihood of intimate partner violence.Introducción. La violencia doméstica contra la mujer es considerada como un problema de salud global de&nbsp;proporciones epidémicas. Objetivos. Determinar la asociación entre el uso de métodos anticonceptivos con&nbsp;la violencia doméstica contra la mujer en edad fértil en Perú. Métodos. Estudio transversal analítico de la&nbsp;Encuesta Demográfica y de Salud Familiar 2017 (ENDES). Se estimó la prevalencia de la violencia doméstica&nbsp;y uso de métodos anticonceptivo; se midió la asociación entre el uso de métodos anticonceptivos con sufrir&nbsp;violencia doméstica. Resultados. Se incluyeron 21 392 mujeres, 10,6% sufrió violencia doméstica, 10% usaba&nbsp;métodos anticonceptivos, 14,8% tenía 15 a 24 años, 11,7% con nivel educativo primario y 12,8% vivía en la&nbsp;sierra. En el análisis ajustado, el uso de anticoncepción moderna se asoció con menor probabilidad de ser&nbsp;violentada comparado con el no uso. Conclusiones. El uso de métodos de anticoncepción moderna se asoció&nbsp;a menor probabilidad de sufrir violencia doméstica

Control de calidad y proceso de homogeneización de series térmicas catalanas

Ponencia presentada en: I Congreso de la Asociación Española de Climatología “La climatología española en los albores del siglo XXI”, celebrado en Barcelona del 1 al 3 de diciembre de 1999.[ES]La falta de homogeneidad de las series climáticas dificulta la detección y caracterización del cambio climático a diferentes escalas espaciales, por lo que previamente a su utilización con esta finalidad, deben ser sometidas a un proceso riguroso de control de calidad y de homogeneización. En esta comunicación se aborda la aplicación de la prueba SNHT de Alexandersson y Moberg (1997) a los registros de la temperatura del aire de la región catalana. La finalidad de esta aplicación es obtener una base de datos térmicos homogeneizados.[EN]Lack of homogeneity in climatic data series is an obstacle to detecting and characterising climatic change in different space scales; especially if inhomogeneities and actual change are expected to be figures of the same order of magnitude. Hence, before data can be used to determine the existence of this climatic change and its magnitude, a rigorous process of quality control and homogenization must be followed. In this communication, Alexandersson and Moberg’s test (SNHT) is used, with some modifications, with the object of obtaining a set of adjusted data for Catalonia.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por CICYT, Proyecto de Investigación de I+D CLI96-1842-C05-01

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results