Alabama Veterans Rural Health Initiative: A Preliminary Evaluation of Unmet Health Care Needs

The Alabama Veterans Rural Health Initiative aims to better understand the health care needs, health status, and barriers to care for rural veterans. Following extensive community outreach, Veteran Community Outreach Health Workers assessed 203 veterans residing in rural counties of Alabama who either: 1) had never enrolled in VA health services, or 2) had not used those services in at least two years. While 71.4 percent of participants reported having utilized non-VHA primary care within the past year, 33.5 percent reported an inability or delay in obtaining needed health care for one or more services: primary care, specialty care, mental health care, addictions treatment, dental care, or prescription medication. The most commonly cited barrier was cost. Among all participants, 56 percent screened positive for at least one Axis I mental disorder. Rurally residing, non-VHA utilizing veterans appear to have fairly good access to primary care, but need dental care, prescription medication, and mental health care

Barriers to disseminating brief CBT for voices from a lived experience and clinician perspective

Access to psychological therapies continues to be poor for people experiencing psychosis. To address this problem, researchers are developing brief interventions that address the specific symptoms associated with psychosis, i.e., hearing voices. As part of the development work for a brief Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) intervention for voices we collected qualitative data from people who hear voices (study 1) and clinicians (study 2) on the potential barriers and facilitators to implementation and engagement. Thematic analysis of the responses from both groups revealed a number of anticipated barriers to implementation and engagement. Both groups believed the presenting problem (voices and psychosis symptoms) may impede engagement. Furthermore clinicians identified a lack of resources to be a barrier to implementation. The only facilitator to engagement was reported by people who hear voices who believed a compassionate, experienced and trustworthy therapist would promote engagement. The results are discussed in relation to how these barriers could be addressed in the context of a brief intervention using CBT techniques

Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and nonfatal suicide attempts, which occur far more frequently, are a major source of disability and social and economic burden. Both have substantial genetic etiology, which is partially shared and partially distinct from that of related psychiatric disorders. Methods We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 29,782 suicide attempt (SA) cases and 519,961 controls in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium (ISGC). The GWAS of SA was conditioned on psychiatric disorders using GWAS summary statistics via multitrait-based conditional and joint analysis, to remove genetic effects on SA mediated by psychiatric disorders. We investigated the shared and divergent genetic architectures of SA, psychiatric disorders, and other known risk factors. Results Two loci reached genome-wide significance for SA: the major histocompatibility complex and an intergenic locus on chromosome 7, the latter of which remained associated with SA after conditioning on psychiatric disorders and replicated in an independent cohort from the Million Veteran Program. This locus has been implicated in risk-taking behavior, smoking, and insomnia. SA showed strong genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders, particularly major depression, and also with smoking, pain, risk-taking behavior, sleep disturbances, lower educational attainment, reproductive traits, lower socioeconomic status, and poorer general health. After conditioning on psychiatric disorders, the genetic correlations between SA and psychiatric disorders decreased, whereas those with nonpsychiatric traits remained largely unchanged. Conclusions Our results identify a risk locus that contributes more strongly to SA than other phenotypes and suggest a shared underlying biology between SA and known risk factors that is not mediated by psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Contrasting state-of-the-art automated scoring of essays: analysis

This study compared the results from nine automated essay scoring engines on eight essay scoring prompts drawn from six states that annually administer high-stakes writing assessments. Student essays from each state were randomly divided into three sets: a training set (used for modeling the essay prompt responses and consisting of text and ratings from two human raters along with a final or resolved score), a second test set used for a blind test of the vendor-developed model (consisting of text responses only), and a validation set that was not employed in this study. The essays encompassed writing assessment items from three grade levels (7, 8, 10) and were evenly divided between source-based prompts (i.e., essay prompts developed on the basis of provided source material) or those drawn from traditional writing genre (i.e., narrative, descriptive, persuasive). The total sample size was N = 22,029. Six of the eight essays were transcribed from their original handwritten responses using two transcription vendors. Transcription accuracy rates were computed at 98.70% for 17,502 essays. The remaining essays were typed in by students during the actual assessment and provided in ASCII form. Seven of the eight essays were holistically scored and one employed score assignments for two traits. Scale ranges, rubrics, and scoring adjudications for the essay sets were quite variable. Results were presented on distributional properties of the data (mean and standard deviation) along with traditional measures used in automated essay scoring: exact agreement, exact+adjacent agreement, kappa, quadratic-weighted kappa, and the Pearson r. The results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items with equal performance for both source-based and traditional writing genre

Data Annex to the United Nations Truth Commission on the civil war in El Salvador from 1979--1991 (digitized text)

This dataset contains statistical information transcribed from the supplementary documentation of a United Nations (UN) report compiled by The Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (La Comision de la Verdad para El Salvador). It includes information about approximately 20,000 civilian/noncombatant victims of the civil war in El Salvador (from 1979 to 1991) taken from interviews of those who survived or knew/knew of those who were victims

UNT Trusted Digital Repository Self Audit

Appendix to the UNT Libraries: TRAC Conformance Document. This appendix describes the UNT Libraries' policy of making its cataloging and metadata records available as Public Domain resources

1 Up Close and Personal from Mars

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2003, ACM. Interdisciplinary design teams can rapidly improve user interfaces for autonomous robots that aim to achieve educational objectives by using informal techniques and nurturing a healthy collaborative environment. The PER project required collaboration among designers who are experts in robotic autonomy, intelligent systems, software, education, usability, user interface and interaction design, industrial design, and exhibit and communication design. In addition to being a really cool project, the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) case study demonstrates that nurturing a healthy interdisciplinary design environment is essential for designing complex systems with educational goals and critical business requirements. Keywords Robot autonomy, rover, user interface, spatial manipulation, affective design, empathetic design, interdisciplinary design, rapid design, user interface, iterative design. Industry/category Education, science education, robotics, spac