A systematic review of primary prevention strategies for sexual violence perpetration

AbstractThis systematic review examined 140 outcome evaluations of primary prevention strategies for sexual violence perpetration. The review had two goals: 1) to describe and assess the breadth, quality, and evolution of evaluation research in this area; and 2) to summarize the best available research evidence for sexual violence prevention practitioners by categorizing programs with regard to their evidence of effectiveness on sexual violence behavioral outcomes in a rigorous evaluation. The majority of sexual violence prevention strategies in the evaluation literature are brief, psycho-educational programs focused on increasing knowledge or changing attitudes, none of which have shown evidence of effectiveness on sexually violent behavior using a rigorous evaluation design. Based on evaluation studies included in the current review, only three primary prevention strategies have demonstrated significant effects on sexually violent behavior in a rigorous outcome evaluation: Safe Dates (Foshee et al., 2004); Shifting Boundaries (building-level intervention only, Taylor, Stein, Woods, Mumford, & Forum, 2011); and funding associated with the 1994 U.S. Violence Against Women Act (VAWA; Boba & Lilley, 2009). The dearth of effective prevention strategies available to date may reflect a lack of fit between the design of many of the existing programs and the principles of effective prevention identified by Nation et al. (2003)

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Architecture that Empowers

The focus of this thesis is to understand how architecture can address the physical and psychological needs of spinal cord injury patients through design. Healing environments is a popular topic in other areas of healthcare architecture but among spinal cord injury centers it is not being discussed. The unique needs of these patients make it critical that architects contribute to these discussions. We as designers need to consider how to improve healing spaces. Architecture should be responsive; striving to adapt to the needs of patients who have spinal cord injuries (SCI) by empowering, protecting, and healing both psychologically and physically. The mental health of spinal cord injury patients is a prominent discussion in the medical realm, but from what I can see, no one is talking about the psychological impacts that these spaces are having on people. “Suicide was the leading cause of death for persons with complete paraplegia and the second leading cause of death for persons with incomplete paraplegia”. This suggests that spaces need to be designed in a way that helps these people feel connected to society and understand that they belong. Research shows that 50% of all spinal cord injuries are caused by car accidents and every 60 seconds there is a car accident in the US. Somewhere between 240,000 and 337,000 people in the US have a spinal cord injury and there are only 14 “model centers” in the US according to the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR). International Building Code (IBC) and Facility Guidelines Institute (FGI) have little to nothing to say about spinal cord injury centers, which means that facilities are being built that do not address the specific needs of these individuals and their unique circumstances

Anaphoric reference in clinical reports: Characteristics of an annotated corpus

MOTIVATION: Expressions that refer to a real-world entity already mentioned in a narrative are often considered anaphoric. For example, in the sentence "The pain comes and goes," the expression "the pain" is probably referring to a previous mention of pain. Interpretation of meaning involves resolving the anaphoric reference: deciding which expression in the text is the correct antecedent of the referring expression, also called an anaphor. We annotated a set of 180 clinical reports (surgical pathology, radiology, discharge summaries, and emergency department) from two institutions to indicate all anaphor-antecedent pairs.\ud \ud OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to describe the characteristics of the corpus in terms of the frequency of anaphoric relations, the syntactic and semantic nature of the members of the pairs, and the types of anaphoric relations that occur. Understanding how anaphoric reference is exhibited in clinical reports is critical to developing reference resolution algorithms and to identifying peculiarities of clinical text that may alter the features and methodologies that will be successful for automated anaphora resolution.\ud \ud RESULTS: We found that anaphoric reference is prevalent in all types of clinical reports, that annotations of noun phrases, semantic type, and section headings may be especially important for automated resolution of anaphoric reference, and that separate modules for reference resolution may be required for different report types, different institutions, and different types of anaphors. Accurate resolution will probably require extensive domain knowledge-especially for pathology and radiology reports with more part/whole and set/subset relations.\ud \ud CONCLUSION: We hope researchers will leverage the annotations in this corpus to develop automated algorithms and will add to the annotations to generate a more extensive corpus.\ud \u

Classifying Supporting, Refuting, or Uncertain Evidence for Pneumonia Case Review

We found substantial annotator variability in identifying supporting, refuting, or uncertain evidence for the diagnosis of pneumonia in clinical text. Future work will expand these methods to a larger case sample and incorporate a more formal linguistic analysis to identify specific lexical cues thereby extending existing taxonomies of uncertainty and improving automated NLP algorithms

Feasibility of using Clinical Element Models (CEM) to standardize phenotype variables in the database of genotypes and phenotypes (dbGaP).

The database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) contains various types of data generated from genome-wide association studies (GWAS). These data can be used to facilitate novel scientific discoveries and to reduce cost and time for exploratory research. However, idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies in phenotype variable names are a major barrier to reusing these data. We addressed these challenges in standardizing phenotype variables by formalizing their descriptions using Clinical Element Models (CEM). Designed to represent clinical data, CEMs were highly expressive and thus were able to represent a majority (77.5%) of the 215 phenotype variable descriptions. However, their high expressivity also made it difficult to directly apply them to research data such as phenotype variables in dbGaP. Our study suggested that simplification of the template models makes it more straightforward to formally represent the key semantics of phenotype variables

Additional file 2: of Knowledge Author: facilitating user-driven, domain content development to support clinical information extraction

Carotid Stenosis OWL file. (OWL 232 kb

Structure of the HeightMeasure CEM.

<p>(<b><a href="http://intermountainhealthcareorg/CEM/Pages/Detail.aspx?NCID=520862031&k=height" target="_blank">http://intermountainhealthcareorg/CEM/Pages/Detail.aspx?NCID=520862031&k=height</a></b>.) CEM represents height measurement with sufficient details through various attributes and qualifiers/modifiers.</p