Health promotion in an Australian Aboriginal community: the Growing Strong Brains® toolkit

Aim: The aim of this paper is to describe the implementation and evaluation of the Growing Strong Brains® (GSB) toolkit in a remote Aboriginal community in Western Australia (WA) over a 2-year period, 2018–2019. Background: Ngala, a community service organisation in WA, developed the GSB toolkit in 2014, a culturally appropriate and interactive resource to build knowledge of early childhood development within Aboriginal communities. This was in response to evidence that a higher percentage of children in Aboriginal communities were developmentally vulnerable compared to the rest of the population. The GSB toolkit promotes awareness and understanding of early brain development pre-birth and in the early years of a child’s life. Methods: The project was underpinned by participatory action research (PAR). Reflective PAR review cycles (n = 5) monitored local community engagement, navigated challenges and utilised community strengths. Fifty-nine local service providers attended a 2-day formal training. Data were collected by using various methods throughout the project, including feedback following training, focus groups, surveys, one-on-one interviews using yarning techniques and reflective feedback from the Project Lead. Findings: Establishing local Aboriginal project staff was pivotal to the success of the project. When delivering services for and with Aboriginal people, it is essential that cultural competence, safety and decision-making is carried through from planning to implementation and evaluation, and involves genuine, respectful and authentic relationships. Sufficient time allocation directed towards building relationships with other service providers and local community members needs to be considered and built into future projects. The Growing Strong Brains® project is embedded within the local community, and anticipated implementation outcomes were achieved. The support of the local people and service providers was beyond expectation, enabling the building of local capacity, and the development of a common understanding of the key messages from the GSB toolkit to allow integration throughout all levels of the community. This project has been important to build on the strategies necessary to introduce, implement and evaluate the GSB toolkit in other remote Aboriginal communities

On the Reliability of Cross Correlation Function Lag Determinations in Active Galactic Nuclei

Many AGN exhibit a highly variable luminosity. Some AGN also show a pronounced time delay between variations seen in their optical continuum and in their emission lines. In effect, the emission lines are light echoes of the continuum. This light travel-time delay provides a characteristic radius of the region producing the emission lines. The cross correlation function (CCF) is the standard tool used to measure the time lag between the continuum and line variations. For the few well-sampled AGN, the lag ranges from 1-100 days, depending upon which line is used and the luminosity of the AGN. In the best sampled AGN, NGC 5548, the H_beta lag shows year-to-year changes, ranging from about 8.7 days to about 22.9 days over a span of 8 years. In this paper it is demonstrated that, in the context of AGN variability studies, the lag estimate using the CCF is biased too low and subject to a large variance. Thus the year-to-year changes of the measured lag in NGC 5548 do not necessarily imply changes in the AGN structure. The bias and large variance are consequences of finite duration sampling and the dominance of long timescale trends in the light curves, not due to noise or irregular sampling. Lag estimates can be substantially improved by removing low frequency power from the light curves prior to computing the CCF.Comment: To appear in the PASP, vol 111, 1999 Nov; 37 pages; 10 figure

Please mind the gap: students’ perspectives of the transition in academic skills between A-level and degree level geography

This paper explores first-year undergraduates’ perceptions of the transition from studying geography at pre-university level to studying for a degree. This move is the largest step students make in their education, and the debate about it in the UK has been reignited due to the government’s planned changes to A-level geography. However, missing from most of this debate is an appreciation of the way in which geography students themselves perceive their transition to university. This paper begins to rectify this absence. Using student insights, we show that their main concern is acquiring the higher level skills required for university learning

(G)hosting television: Ghostwatch and its medium

This article’s subject is Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992), a drama broadcast on Halloween night of 1992 which adopted the rhetoric of live non-fiction programming, and attracted controversy and ultimately censure from the Broadcasting Standards Council. In what follows, we argue that Ghostwatch must be understood as a televisually-specific artwork and artefact. We discuss the programme’s ludic relationship with some key features of television during what Ellis (2000) has termed its era of ‘availability’, principally liveness, mass simultaneous viewing, and the flow of the television super-text. We trace the programme’s television-specific historicity whilst acknowledging its allusions and debts to other media (most notably film and radio). We explore the sophisticated ways in which Ghostwatch’s visual grammar and vocabulary and deployment of ‘broadcast talk’ (Scannell 1991) variously ape, comment upon and subvert the rhetoric of factual programming, and the ends to which these strategies are put. We hope that these arguments collectively demonstrate the aesthetic and historical significance of Ghostwatch and identify its relationship to its medium and that medium’s history. We offer the programme as an historically-reflexive artefact, and as an exemplary instance of the work of art in television’s age of broadcasting, liveness and co-presence

Optimization of Fluconazole Dosing for the Prevention and Treatment of Invasive Candidiasis Based on the Pharmacokinetics of Fluconazole in Critically Ill Patients

The efficacy of fluconazole is related to the area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC) over the MIC of the microorganism. Physiological changes in critically ill patients may affect the exposure of fluconazole, and therefore dosing adjustments might be needed. The aim of this study was to evaluate variability in fluconazole drug concentration in intensive care unit (ICU) patients and to develop a pharmacokinetic model to support personalized fluconazole dosing. A prospective observational pharmacokinetic study was performed in critically ill patients receiving fluconazole either as prophylaxis or as treatment. The association between fluconazole exposure and patient variables was studied. Pharmacokinetic modeling was performed with a nonparametric adaptive grid (NPAG) algorithm using R package Pmetrics. Data from 33 patients were available for pharmacokinetic analysis. Patients on dialysis and solid organ transplant patients had a significantly lower exposure to fluconazole. The population was best described with a one-compartment model, where the mean volume of distribution was 51.52 liters (standard deviation [SD], 19.81) and the mean clearance was 0.767 liters/h (SD, 0.46). Creatinine clearance was tested as a potential covariate in the model, but was not included in the final population model. A significant positive correlation was found between the fluconazole exposure (AUC) and the trough concentration (C-min). Substantial variability in fluconazole plasma concentrations in critically ill adults was observed, where the majority of patients were underexposed. Fluconazole C-min therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM)-guided dosing can be used to optimize therapy in critically ill patients

Reply to Van Daele et al., "Fluconazole Underexposure in Critically Ill Patients:a Matter of Using the Right Targets?"

We thank Van Daele et al (1) for their interest in our study investigating the pharmacokinetics in critically ill patients with aim to optimize fluconazole dosing for the prevention and treatment of invasive candida infections (2).…

An assertion language for constraint logic programs

In an advanced program development environment, such as that discussed in the introduction of this book, several tools may coexist which handle both the program and information on the program in different ways. Also, these tools may interact among themselves and with the user. Thus, the different tools and the user need some way to communicate. It is our design principie that such communication be performed in terms of assertions. Assertions are syntactic objects which allow expressing properties of programs. Several assertion languages have been used in the past in different contexts, mainly related to program debugging. In this chapter we propose a general language of assertions which is used in different tools for validation and debugging of constraint logic programs in the context of the DiSCiPl project. The assertion language proposed is parametric w.r.t. the particular constraint domain and properties of interest being used in each different tool. The language proposed is quite general in that it poses few restrictions on the kind of properties which may be expressed. We believe the assertion language we propose is of practical relevance and appropriate for the different uses required in the tools considered

A cardinal role for cathepsin D in co-ordinating the host-mediated apoptosis of macrophages and killing of pneumococci

The bactericidal function of macrophages against pneumococci is enhanced by their apoptotic demise, which is controlled by the anti-apoptotic protein Mcl-1. Here, we show that lysosomal membrane permeabilization (LMP) and cytosolic translocation of activated cathepsin D occur prior to activation of a mitochondrial pathway of macrophage apoptosis. Pharmacological inhibition or knockout of cathepsin D during pneumococcal infection blocked macrophage apoptosis. As a result of cathepsin D activation, Mcl-1 interacted with its ubiquitin ligase Mule and expression declined. Inhibition of cathepsin D had no effect on early bacterial killing but inhibited the late phase of apoptosis-associated killing of pneumococci in vitro. Mice bearing a cathepsin D-/- hematopoietic system demonstrated reduced macrophage apoptosis in vivo, with decreased clearance of pneumococci and enhanced recruitment of neutrophils to control pulmonary infection. These findings establish an unexpected role for a cathepsin D-mediated lysosomal pathway of apoptosis in pulmonary host defense and underscore the importance of apoptosis-associated microbial killing to macrophage function

Translating model simulators to analysis models

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78743-3_6Proceedings of 11th International Conference, FASE 2008, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2008, Budapest, Hungary, March 29-April 6, 2008.We present a novel approach for the automatic generation of model-to-model transformations given a description of the operational semantics of the source language by means of graph transformation rules. The approach is geared to the generation of transformations from Domain-Specific Visual Languages (DSVLs) into semantic domains with an explicit notion of transition, like for example Petri nets. The generated transformation is expressed in the form of operational triple graph grammar rules that transform the static information (initial model) and the dynamics (source rules and their execution control structure). We illustrate these techniques with a DSVL in the domain of production systems, for which we generate a transformation into Petri nets.Work sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, project MOSAIC (TSI2005-08225-C07-06

The revitalised Fonofale as a research paradigm: A perspective on Pacific sexuality and reproduction research

Research into Pacific peoples’ sexuality and reproduction is often complex and conflicts with social tapu. Historically, Pacific sexuality and reproduction research had been approached using a deficits-based lens with minimal congruence of Pacific cultural values. We offer a revitalised Fonofale model (Pulotu-Endemann, 1995) as a research paradigm that centres tapu in all considerations and decisions surrounding the research. This revitalised model offers a strengths-based approach that can promote valuable collection of, and meaningful engagement with data. We offer a case study which utilised this research paradigm as an overarching strategy. Te Tīpani Project was a mixed methods investigation into eighty-two Pacific tertiary students’ understandings of sexuality and reproduction. Pacific research methods and methodologies, including the Kakala model and Talanoa method supported the integration of the paradigm into components of the study. We encourage researchers to utilise this strategy to fulfil their research obligations, as facilitators and guardians (mana tiaki) of the research environment. Pacific research methods, methodologies and epistemologies hold an important place in the field of sensitive Pacific well-being research by enabling cultural consideration and responsiveness