The politics of open defecation: informality, body, and infrastructure in Mumbai

This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai's informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure and the sanitary/unsanitary city

Effect of exercise training on liver function in adults who are overweight or exhibit fatty liver disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis

ObjectiveExercise training has been shown to have beneficial effects on liver function in adults overweight or with fatty liver disease. To establish which exercise programme characteristics were likely to elicit optimal improvements.DesignSystematic review and meta-analysis of randomised, controlled trials.Data sourcesPubMed, CINAHL and Cochrane controlled trials registry searched (1966 to 2 October 2015).Eligibility criteria for selecting studiesExercise intervention, with or without dietary intervention, versus usual care in adults undertaking, exercise training, who were overweight, obese or exhibited fatty liver disease (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis).ResultsWe included 21 randomised controlled trials, totalling 1530 participants. Exercise intervention studies with total exercise programme workload &gt;10 000 kcal produced significant improvements in intrahepatic fat, −3.46% (95% CI −5.20% to −1.73%), p&lt;0.0001, I2=73%; effect size (standardised mean difference, SMD) −1.77 (−3.11 to −0.42), p=0.01, I2=77%. When data from only exercise studies were pooled, there was a reduction in fasting free fatty acids (FFAs) −74.15 µmol/L (95% CI −118.47 to −29.84), p=0.001, I2=67% with a large effect size (SMD) −0.94 (−1.36 to −0.52), p&lt;0.0001, I2=0%. When data from only exercise studies were pooled, there was a significant reduction in insulin MD −1.88 UL (95% CI −3.43 to −0.34), p=0.02, I2=31%. The liver enzymes, alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase, were not significantly altered with exercise.ConclusionsExercise training reduces intrahepatic fat and FFAs while increasing cardiorespiratory fitness. An aggregate exercise programme energy expenditure (&gt;10 000 kcal) may be required to promote reductions in intrahepatic fat.</jats:sec

Focused deterrence:a protocol for a realist multisite randomised controlled trial for evaluating a violence prevention intervention in the UK

Introduction: Focused deterrence (FD) is a frequently cited intervention for preventing violence, particularly against violent urban gangs. The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) believes it could be effective in the UK, based primarily on research conducted in the US. However, we contend that these studies have inadequate methodological designs, lack of rigorous testing, and small sample sizes. Therefore, the evidence supporting focused deterrence as an effective method, particularly outside the US, is inconclusive. The aim of the protocol is to better understand the potential effects of FD in the context of the UK, using a multisite evaluation experimental design to more closely investigate the evidence of its likely impact.Methods:  We planned a realist randomised controlled trial. The design is focused on a multisite trial consisting of two-arm randomised experiments in five locations. Each trial location will test their implementation of a core programme specified by the funder. The multisite nature will allow us to understand differential impacts between locations, improving the external validity of the results. Participants will be randomly selected from a wider pool of eligible individuals for the intervention. We estimate a sample size of approximately N = 1, 700 individuals is required. Based on this pooled sample size, a relative reduction of 26% would be detectable in 80% of trials. The trial is coupled with a formative process evaluation of delivery and fidelity. The formative evaluation will use a mixed methods design. The qualitative aspect will include semi-structured cross-sectional and longitudinal interviews with programme leads, programme delivery team, and programme participants, as well as observations of the meetings between the programme delivery team (i.e., community navigators/mentors) and programme participants. The quantitative data for the formative evaluation will be gathered by the sites themselves and consist of routine outcome performance monitoring using administrative data. Sampling for interviews and observations will vary, with the researchers aiming for a higher number of individuals included in the first round of cross-sectional interviews and retaining as many as possible for repeat interviews and observations.Discussion: This protocol outlines the process and impact evaluation methodology for the most extensive multisite evaluation of focused deterrence to date in the UK. Spanning five distinct sites with seven trials, the evaluation includes a cohort of 2, 000 individuals, marking it as the only multisite trial of focused deterrence. Employing an integrated realist evaluation framework, the study uses qualitative and quantitative research methods. The anticipated findings will offer pivotal insights for formulating future violence prevention policies in the UK. They are also expected to contribute significantly to the corpus of literature on violence prevention and intervention evaluation.Trial registration:  Protocol registration: ISRCTN: 11650008 4th June 2023. </p

Patient and public attitudes to and awareness of clinical practice guidelines : a systematic review with thematic and narrative syntheses

Article Accepted Date: 15 July 2014 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Acknowledgements The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 258583 (DECIDE project). The Health Services Research Unit, Aberdeen University, is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health Directorates. The authors accept full responsibility for this paper and the views expressed in it are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chief Scientist Office. NS receives funding through a Knowledge Translation Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. No funding bodies had a role in the manuscript. We would like to thank Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the University of Dundee for support, including access to literature. We would also like to thank Lorna Thompson (Healthcare Improvement Scotland), for her help with the protocol for this review.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

BarraCUDA - a fast short read sequence aligner using graphics processing units

Abstract Background With the maturation of next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) technologies, the throughput of DNA sequencing reads has soared to over 600 gigabases from a single instrument run. General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), extracts the computing power from hundreds of parallel stream processors within graphics processing cores and provides a cost-effective and energy efficient alternative to traditional high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. In this article, we describe the implementation of BarraCUDA, a GPGPU sequence alignment software that is based on BWA, to accelerate the alignment of sequencing reads generated by these instruments to a reference DNA sequence. Findings Using the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software development environment, we ported the most computational-intensive alignment component of BWA to GPU to take advantage of the massive parallelism. As a result, BarraCUDA offers a magnitude of performance boost in alignment throughput when compared to a CPU core while delivering the same level of alignment fidelity. The software is also capable of supporting multiple CUDA devices in parallel to further accelerate the alignment throughput. Conclusions BarraCUDA is designed to take advantage of the parallelism of GPU to accelerate the alignment of millions of sequencing reads generated by NGS instruments. By doing this, we could, at least in part streamline the current bioinformatics pipeline such that the wider scientific community could benefit from the sequencing technology. BarraCUDA is currently available from http://seqbarracuda.sf.netRIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

The maintenance of urban circulation: An operational logic of infrastructural control

This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with “smart” technologies. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Centre (COR), the paper argues that new understandings of the city are being developed, representing a new mode of urban infrastructure based on the partial and selective rebundling of splintered networks and fragmented urban space. The COR operates through a “un-black boxing” of urban infrastructures, where the extension of control room logics to the totality of the city points to their fragility and the continuous effort involved in their operational accomplishment. It also functions through a collapse in relations of control—of the everyday and the emergency—, which, enabled by the incorporation of the public in operational control, further raise public awareness of urban infrastructures. These characteristics point to a specific form of urban governmentality based on the operationalisation of infrastructural flows and the development of novel ways of seeing and engaging with the city

Control of human adenovirus type 5 gene expression by cellular Daxx/ATRX chromatin-associated complexes

Death domain–associated protein (Daxx) cooperates with X-linked α-thalassaemia retardation syndrome protein (ATRX), a putative member of the sucrose non-fermentable 2 family of ATP-dependent chromatin-remodelling proteins, acting as the core ATPase subunit in this complex, whereas Daxx is the targeting factor, leading to histone deacetylase recruitment, H3.3 deposition and transcriptional repression of cellular promoters. Despite recent findings on the fundamental importance of chromatin modification in host-cell gene regulation, it remains unclear whether adenovirus type 5 (Ad5) transcription is regulated by cellular chromatin remodelling to allow efficient virus gene expression. Here, we focus on the repressive role of the Daxx/ATRX complex during Ad5 replication, which depends on intact protein–protein interaction, as negative regulation could be relieved with a Daxx mutant that is unable to interact with ATRX. To ensure efficient viral replication, Ad5 E1B-55K protein inhibits Daxx and targets ATRX for proteasomal degradation in cooperation with early region 4 open reading frame protein 6 and cellular components of a cullin-dependent E3-ubiquitin ligase. Our studies illustrate the importance and diversity of viral factors antagonizing Daxx/ATRX-mediated repression of viral gene expression and shed new light on the modulation of cellular chromatin remodelling factors by Ad5. We show for the first time that cellular Daxx/ATRX chromatin remodelling complexes play essential roles in Ad gene expression and illustrate the importance of early viral proteins to counteract cellular chromatin remodelling