Examining Correlations with Frequency of Walking Trips In Metropolitan Areas

This research assessed correlations between funding for pedestrian facilities, presence of walkways, and daily and weekly walking trips in a sample of United States residents living in metropolitan areas. The purpose of the research was to identify factors at the policy and environmental level which are associated with a greater frequency of walking trips, and therefore may influence physical activity levels. Data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration’s 2001 National Household Travel Survey and the Thunderhead Alliance’s 2007 Benchmarking Report: Bicycling and Walking in the U.S. were combined to provide variables for the number of daily and weekly walking trips, perceived lack of walkways, age, distance to work, housing unit density for each household, household income, and per capita federal and non-federal funding for pedestrian facilities for each metropolitan area. Correlation analysis and analysis of variance was conducted to test for associations with walking trip frequency and lack of walkways. The results suggested that increased walking trips were associated with increased non-federal funding but not with increased federal funding; and that increased federal funding was associated with reduced lack of walkways (but not increased non-federal funding), especially for lower-income respondents. These associations were statistically significant but not strong. Very little research has been conducted on the health effects of funding for pedestrian facilities; this research showed that more extensive study in this area is needed and that further integration of public health into transportation planning is in order

Knowledge Gaps, Barriers, and Facilitators to Fertility Preservation Counseling Among Oncology Nurses Managing the Care of Newly Diagnosed Cancer Patients

Newly diagnosed cancer patients are inconsistently counseled about the infertility risks associated with oncologic treatments and the fertility preservation options currently available. Oncology nurses are placed in a unique position to introduce fertility topics with oncology patients; however, several barriers prevent counseling on this subject. The purpose of this paper is to determine the knowledge gaps, barriers, and facilitators of counseling newly diagnosed reproductive-aged cancer patients about fertility issues before cancer treatments among oncology nurses. An anonymous web-based, cross-sectional survey was accessed from August 2018-November 2018 and completed by oncology nurses employed in the medical oncology and infusion centers of a large multicenter cancer institution. The survey consisted of five elements: study consent, demographic information and general fertility questions, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2013 clinical practice guideline questions, a validated knowledge tool to assess general fertility knowledge, and a validated oncology fertility preservation survey to determine barriers and facilitators to counseling patients about fertility issues. Thirty-eight participants completed the survey in its entirety, and the collected data were reviewed and analyzed. The majority of participants were full-time, Caucasian oncology nurses with an oncology experience of 1-5 years or 6-10 years. All of the participants were female. The majority of oncology nurses reported that they were unfamiliar with the clinical guidelines related to fertility preservation and oncology patients. The average baseline knowledge score using the validated knowledge tool was 7.1 (out of 13 questions). The higher domain scores in self-awareness, confidence, and external barriers from the fertility preservation survey indicated that self-perceived barriers and self-related preparedness hindered oncology nurse counseling on fertility topics. The findings suggest that oncology nurses would benefit from comprehensive training about fertility issues that impact oncology patients to adequately and confidently counsel these patients on this topic. Presenting these topics to patients who are interested in future fertility and those that are physiologically stable enough to pursue fertility preservation options will allow them the opportunity to make informed decisions about their future fertility and quality of life before possible sterilizing treatments

The role of UK local authorities in promoting the bus

Government has proposed a number of policy measures. In particular, the 1998 White Paper indicated that “the bus industry will make an important and cost-effective contribution to tackling congestion and pollution at the local level”. Since the privatization of the bus industry during the 1980s, Local Government – the primary agents of delivering transport policy objectives in the UK – have had relatively little control over the provision of bus services in their localities, particularly outside London. One option however that can be used to achieve this policy objective, is to promote the use of buses among the general public. So far though, very little evidence exists to show the extent to which Local Authorities in the UK have actively promoted city bus services as part of an integrated solution to reducing traffic related congestion in urban areas. This paper seeks to redress this. The empirical evidence gained in this study suggests that only a few UK Local Authorities have actively promoted city bus services and that there are problems in establishing cohesive promotional objectives, budget setting, measurement activity, understanding of the promotional mix, and the benefits derived from promoting the city bus services

Introducing Preservice Teachers to Family-Centered Practices: A Scoping Review

Parental involvement in P-12 education could lead to social and academic success for students; however, parents often experience barriers to their involvement. Different or additional barriers exist for parents of children with a disability. School staff can positively influence parents to become involved in their children’s education. Family-centered practices, common in early intervention under special education law (Part C of IDEIA), may foster parent involvement in P-12 schools. In this scoping literature review, we examined 17 studies of teacher preparation programs (TPPs) in higher education in the US who have implemented programs to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to collaborate with parents/families. Studies varied by analytic method, participants, purposes, format, and measures. We present a synthesis of the included articles and discuss recommendations for teacher preparation programs

Gender inference: can chatGPT outperform common commercial tools?

An increasing number of studies use gender information to understand phenomena such as gender bias, inequity in access and participation, or the impact of the Covid pandemic response. Unfortunately, most datasets do not include self-reported gender information, making it necessary for researchers to infer gender from other information, such as names or names and country information. An important limitation of these tools is that they fail to appropriately capture the fact that gender exists on a non-binary scale, however, it remains important to evaluate and compare how well these tools perform in a variety of contexts. In this paper, we compare the performance of a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT with three commercially available list-based and machine learning-based gender inference tools (Namsor, Gender-API, and genderize.io) on a unique dataset. Specifically, we use a large Olympic athlete dataset and report how variations in the input (e.g., first name and first and last name, with and without country information) impact the accuracy of their predictions. We report results for the full set, as well as for the subsets: medal versus non-medal winners, athletes from the largest English-speaking countries, and athletes from East Asia. On these sets, we find that Namsor is the best traditional commercially available tool. However, ChatGPT performs at least as well as Namsor and often outperforms it, especially for the female sample when country and/or last name information is available. All tools perform better on medalists versus non-medalists and on names from English-speaking countries. Although not designed for this purpose, ChatGPT may be a cost-effective tool for gender prediction. In the future, it might even be possible for ChatGPT or other large scale language models to better identify self-reported gender rather than report gender on a binary scale.Comment: 14 pages, 8 table