Removing Barriers to Health Care: Healthy Starts for New Americans

Objectives: • To determine if refugees completing a Medical Orientation Program for New Americans are better with several aspects of medicine in the US, such as making appointments; knowing more about diet and hygiene; and understanding the implications of mental and chronic illnesses. • To determine if Medical Passports provided to these individuals to improve continuity of care are useful and effective. • To make recommendations for improvements to the Medical Orientation Program for New Americans to the Community Health Center of Burlington (CHCB).https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1052/thumbnail.jp

A Frequency Bin Analysis of Distinctive Ranges Between Human and Deepfake Generated Voices

Deepfake technology has advanced rapidly in recent years. The widespread availability of deepfake audio technology has raised concerns about its potential misuse for malicious purposes, and a need for more robust countermeasure systems is becoming ever more important. Here we analyse the differences between human and deepfake audio and introduce a novel audio pre-processing approach. Our analysis aims to show the specific locations in the frequency spectrum where these artefacts and distinctions between human and deepfake audio can be found. Our approach emphasises specific frequency ranges that we show are transferable across synthetic speech datasets. In doing so, we explore the use of a bespoke filter bank derived from our analysis of the WaveFake dataset to exploit commonalities across algorithms. Our filter bank was constructed based on a frequency bin analysis of the WaveFake dataset, we apply this filter bank to adjust gain/attenuation to improve the effective signal-to-noise ratio, doing so we reduce the similarities while accentuating differences. We then take a baseline performing model and experiment with improving the performance using these frequency ranges to show where these artefacts lie and if this knowledge is transferable across mel-spectrum algorithms. We show that there exist exploitable commonalities between deepfake voice generation methods that generate audio in the mel-spectrum and that artefacts are left behind in similar frequency regions. Our approach is evaluated on the ASVSpoof 2019 Logical Access dataset of which the test set contains unseen generative methods to test the efficacy of our filter bank approach and transferability. Our experiments show that there is enhanced classification performance to be gained from utilizing these transferable frequency bands where there are more artefacts and distinctions. Our highest-performing model provided a 14.75% improvement in Equal Error Rate against our baseline model

Conducting robust ecological analyses with climate data

Although the number of studies discerning the impact of climate change on ecological systems continues to increase, there has been relatively little sharing of the lessons learnt when accumulating this evidence. At a recent workshop entitled ‘Using climate data in ecological research’ held at the UK Met Office, ecologists and climate scientists came together to discuss the robust analysis of climate data in ecology. The discussions identified three common pitfalls encountered by ecologists: 1) selection of inappropriate spatial resolutions for analysis; 2) improper use of publically available data or code; and 3) insufficient representation of the uncertainties behind the adopted approach. Here, we discuss how these pitfalls can be avoided, before suggesting ways that both ecology and climate science can move forward. Our main recommendation is that ecologists and climate scientists collaborate more closely, on grant proposals and scientific publications, and informally through online media and workshops. More sharing of data and code (e.g. via online repositories), lessons and guidance would help to reconcile differing approaches to the robust handling of data. We call on ecologists to think critically about which aspects of the climate are relevant to their study system, and to acknowledge and actively explore uncertainty in all types of climate data. And we call on climate scientists to make simple estimates of uncertainty available to the wider research community. Through steps such as these, we will improve our ability to robustly attribute observed ecological changes to climate or other factors, while providing the sort of influential, comprehensive analyses that efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change so urgently require

Screening ethnically diverse human embryonic stem cells identifies a chromosome 20 minimal amplicon conferring growth advantage

The International Stem Cell Initiative analyzed 125 human embryonic stem (ES) cell lines and 11 induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines, from 38 laboratories worldwide, for genetic changes occurring during culture. Most lines were analyzed at an early and late passage. Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis revealed that they included representatives of most major ethnic groups. Most lines remained karyotypically normal, but there was a progressive tendency to acquire changes on prolonged culture, commonly affecting chromosomes 1, 12, 17 and 20. DNA methylation patterns changed haphazardly with no link to time in culture. Structural variants, determined from the SNP arrays, also appeared sporadically. No common variants related to culture were observed on chromosomes 1, 12 and 17, but a minimal amplicon in chromosome 20q11.21, including three genes expressed in human ES cells, ID1, BCL2L1 and HM13, occurred in >20% of the lines. Of these genes, BCL2L1 is a strong candidate for driving culture adaptation of ES cells

Contesting just transitions:Climate delay and the contradictions of labour environmentalism

The notion of ‘just transition’ (JT) is an attempt to align climate and energy objectives with the material concerns of industrial workers, frontline communities, and marginalised groups. Despite the potential for fusing social and environmental justice, there is growing concern that the concept is being mobilised in practice as a form of ‘climate delayism’: a problem more ambiguous than open forms of denialism as it draws in multiple and conflictual agents, practices, and discourses. Using an historical materialist framework, attentive to both energy-capital and capital-labour relations, we show how JT is vulnerable to forces and relations of climate delay across both fossil capital and climate capital hegemonic projects. We review this through an engagement with the climate obstructionism literature and the theory of labour environmentalism: the political engagement of trade unionists and workers with environmental issues. As tensions within the labour movement surface amidst the unsettling of the carbon capital hegemony, we assess the degree to which (organised) labour—as an internally differentiated, contradictory movement—is participating in climate breakdown through a ‘praxis of delay’. Trade unions and industrial workers are often implicated in resisting or undermining transitions, but this is related significantly to their structural power relations vis a vis the fossil hegemony. Notably, JT negotiations are themselves structurally embedded within the carbon capital economy. The general preferences of trade unions for social over environmental justice might be prevalent but are neither universal nor inevitable; JT is open and contested political terrain, and labour-environmental struggles remain imperative for building just energy futures

Enhancing Employee Voice: Are Voluntary Employer–Employee Partnerships Enough?

employment, unions, partnerships, consent,