Tobacco use and women’s health: an opportunity in international health promotion and a case study of tobacco policy in Canada

Increasing numbers of girls and women are using tobacco worldwide. As a marginalized population, women are targeted for the sale of tobacco products and social structures are organized in a manner that increases their tobacco usage. Furthermore, as a result of their anatomy and physiology, women experience greater health problems than their male counterparts when consuming the same amount of tobacco. Tobacco usage among women must be addressed globally through the lens of health promotion. Health can be increased for women, and in turn, the entire population by taking policy measures to address the issue of tobacco usage. This paper will use Canada as an example for examining the economic and political aspects of the tobacco industry and policy changes that must be made in order to promote health.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/essay-contest-previous/1003/thumbnail.jp

Sexual Trafficking in the Canadian Context: Exploring the Political Landscape, Examining Discourse, and Identifying Health Issues among Women with Lived Experience

Although human trafficking has a long history, it has more recently become a topic of profound interest in popular culture, in political debates on sex work and immigration, and among law enforcement and social service providers. However, the widespread interest in human trafficking has not translated into a clear or consistent understanding of the phenomenon or the experiences of those who have been trafficked. This study sought to explore the perspectives of women who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation and the professionals who work with them. Specifically, the study examined three key issues in sexual trafficking: the political and legal climate of sex trafficking in Canada, the discourses on sex trafficking and how it is defined, and the physical and mental health experiences of sexually trafficked women. These topics are explored within the Canadian context with an emphasis on experiences in Southwestern Ontario (where eight of the 12 participants were trafficked or work). Using qualitative research methods, namely semi-structured individual interviews, and approaches informed by critical feminist theory, data was gathered from four participant groups: women who have been sexually trafficked (n=3), service providers who work with sexually trafficked women (n=3), members of law enforcement (n=3), and service providers for other forms of labour trafficking (n=3). Given the lack of data and empirical research on sexually trafficked women, these findings are unique and of direct value to local service providers, policy stakeholders, and women with lived experience

The Left Atrial Appendage (LAA): Proximity of the Circumflex Artery and Evaluation of a Novel Method of Closure

The left atrial appendage (LAA) is an area of interest because of its thrombogenic potential in patients with atrial fibrillation. The current standard for LAA removal is epicardial excision, which may leave residual volume thereby undermining its effectiveness. Also, LAA surgery may injure the nearby circumflex artery. This investigation aims to measure the proximity of the circumflex artery to the LAA at various points, and evaluate pericardial patch exclusion as a novel method of LAA closure in a cadaveric model. After performing both procedures in all (n=27) hearts, epicardial excision left 24% of the original volume while pericardial patch exclusion left 4%. The circumflex artery was closest to the LAA at the 4 o’clock position. These results suggest that physicians should beware of the injuring the circumflex artery at 4 o’clock and that pericardial patch exclusion may be a viable alternative for surgical LAA closure in patients with atrial fibrillation

Semi-Supervised Domain Generalization for Object Detection via Language-Guided Feature Alignment

Existing domain adaptation (DA) and generalization (DG) methods in object detection enforce feature alignment in the visual space but face challenges like object appearance variability and scene complexity, which make it difficult to distinguish between objects and achieve accurate detection. In this paper, we are the first to address the problem of semi-supervised domain generalization by exploring vision-language pre-training and enforcing feature alignment through the language space. We employ a novel Cross-Domain Descriptive Multi-Scale Learning (CDDMSL) aiming to maximize the agreement between descriptions of an image presented with different domain-specific characteristics in the embedding space. CDDMSL significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 11.7% and 7.5% improvement in DG and DA settings, respectively. Comprehensive analysis and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our method, positioning CDDMSL as a promising approach for domain generalization in object detection tasks.Comment: Accepted at BMVC 202

Work-related stress dimensions among a subsidiary company workers of Iranian oil refining and distribution company

Introduction Work-related stress and its causes are among the most important issues which can seriously challenge organizational efficiency and employees' health. Different occupational environments and groups have different levels of job stress. The present study aimed to investigate relationships between job stress and its dimensions with three occupational groups (administrative, administrative-operational, and operational) among a subsidiary company workers of Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company. Methods The present study had descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional type and was conducted among 468 out of 503 employees (with entry condition of a year of work experience as well as an official and contractual membership) volunteered to participate in research. Data collection tools included demographic questions and job stress questionnaire as well as human resource department information to determine occupational group of employees. Descriptive statistics, statistical tests, Independent test, and one-way ANOVA in addition to SPSS 21 software were used for data analysis. Results There were significant relationships between age, education levels, work experience and smoking with mean score of job stress (P-value 0.05). Conclusions Exposure to different occupational harmful agents, facing with different safety risks, being far from family, heavy workload, and uncertain employee roles have significantly increased job stress in both operational and executive occupation groups compared to other two occupational groups; hence, there is a positive correlation between high job stress and operational jobs

Analysis of RC Deep Beams Considering the Shear Deformations and Bar-concrete Interaction

In this paper, reinforced concrete (RC) deep beams (DBs) have been analyzed numerically and a new approach is proposed to the nonlinear numerical modeling of such structural members. The effect of shear deformations and the interaction between reinforcing steel bar and concrete are considered in modeling and analysis. In order to consider the effect of shear deformations, the Timoshenko beam theory has been applied to formulate the analysis method. In the modeling, the RC DB is divided into several sub-elements which are composed of concrete and reinforcing steel bars. Individual degrees of freedom have been assigned to each reinforcing steel bar. Thus, each reinforcing steel bar is able to slip relative to its surrounding concrete and the bond effect is simulated by nonlinear springs. To consider the interaction between reinforcing steel bar and concrete, the concrete segment acts as a beam element, and each reinforcing steel bar acts as a truss element. The reliability of this method has been confirmed by comparing the obtained results from the numerical analysis and the results of the experimental pushover test

Suicide Prevention and Follow-Up Services: A Narrative Review

Previous suicide attempt is the most important predictor of death by suicide. Thus preventive interventions after attempting to suicide is essential to prevent reattempts. This paper attempts to determine whether phone preventive interventions or other vehicles (postal cards, email and case management) are effective in reattempt prevention and health promotion after discharge by providing an overview of studies on suicide reattempts. The research investigated in this review conducted from 1995 to 2014. A total of 26 cases related to the aim of this research were derived from 36 English articles with the aforementioned keywords Research shows that providing comprehensive aids, social support, and follow-up after discharge can significantly prevent suicide reattempts. Several studies showed that follow-up support (phone calls, crisis cards, mails, postal cards.) after discharge can significantly decrease the risk of suicide. More randomized controlled trials (RCT) are required to determine what factors of follow-up are more effective than other methods

Prediction of Wind Speed and Power with LightGBM and Grid Search: Case Study Based on Scada System in Turkey

Due to the speeding up of climate change, there is an urgent need to switch from using fossil fuels to producing energy using renewable energy sources. This change has to happen as soon as feasibly possible. Thus, in this article, to forecast wind speed and wind energy output in Turkey, the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) approach was applied, the hyperparameters of the LightGBM were tuned to the grid search method, and finally some evaluation criteria such as root mean square error and R2 were calculated to show the performances of the LightGBM. Fortunately, an R2 value of 0.98 for forecasting wind speed was found after 25 s. Additionally, the assessment criterion R2 =1 for predicting the production power of the wind turbine was attained after 90 s