Book Review of On Becoming a Woman Leader: Learning From the Experiences of University Presidents & Women at the Top: What Women University and College Presidents Say About Effective Leadership

Readers who enjoy learning about women who are successful leaders in higher education have two more books to add to their libraries. The authors of these two books had similar motivations for their research and subse- quent publications. Their research methodologies were similar in that both works are based on qualitative studies of women college and university presidents. The analysis and synthesis ofthe information gleaned from the studies, and the presentation of that information, differ in ways that make for interesting comparisons. The subtitles of each book provide clues as to the motivations behind the research. Madsen wants us to learn from the experiences ofthe women she interviewed; Wolverton, Bower and Hyle rely on the women in their study to speak to us in first person about leadership. Madsen is motivated to tell us what experiences make for successful women presidents. Wolverton, et al. want to let the women in their study tell us what makes for an effective leader

Book Review of On Becoming a Woman Leader: Learning From the Experiences of University Presidents & Women at the Top: What Women University and College Presidents Say About Effective Leadership

Readers who enjoy learning about women who are successful leaders in higher education have two more books to add to their libraries. The authors of these two books had similar motivations for their research and subse- quent publications. Their research methodologies were similar in that both works are based on qualitative studies of women college and university presidents. The analysis and synthesis ofthe information gleaned from the studies, and the presentation of that information, differ in ways that make for interesting comparisons. The subtitles of each book provide clues as to the motivations behind the research. Madsen wants us to learn from the experiences ofthe women she interviewed; Wolverton, Bower and Hyle rely on the women in their study to speak to us in first person about leadership. Madsen is motivated to tell us what experiences make for successful women presidents. Wolverton, et al. want to let the women in their study tell us what makes for an effective leader

Review of Through The Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli

Review of Through The Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, Boston, MA. 2007. Harvard Business School Press, 308 pages. Through the Labyrinth refutes the two-decade old metaphor of the\u27 glass ceiling,\u27 deeming it to be a simplistic explanation of the barriers that prevent women from attaining leadership positions. The authors argue that women\u27s paths toward advancement are indirect and littered with barriers at various stages in their careers, rather than being hindered by a fixed barrier. To them, a more appropriate metaphor is the labyrinth with its elaborate and confusing twists and turns. The labyrinth conveys the idea of a complex j ourney that entails challenges and offers a goal worth striving for. Passage through a labyrinth is not simple or direct, but requires persistence, awareness of one\u27s progress, and a careful analysis of the puzzles that lie ahead .... Because all labyrinths have a viable route to their center, it is understood that goals are attainable (p. x). Eagly and Carli wrote the book to help readers understand leadership and what it will take to achieve equality of leadership by men and women. Their primary audience is women who aspire to leadership positions. Both authors are acknowledged scholars in the study of gender and leadership. In this book, they function in multiple roles-as thoughtful academics, as advocates for women\u27s leadership, and as advisors for women who are on the challenging path to leadership. Dr. Alice H. Eagly is a social psychologist, professor and department chair of psychology at Northwestern University, and a faculty fellow in Northwestern\u27s Institute for Policy Research. She is a prolific researcher in the study of gender, attitudes, prejudice, cultural stereotypes, and leadership. Dr. Linda L. Carli is an associ .. ate professor in the psychology department at Wellesley College. Her research is centered on the effects of gender on women\u27s leadership; group interaction, communication, and influence; and reactions to adversity

Multimodal Indoor Localisation in Parkinson's Disease for Detecting Medication Use: Observational Pilot Study in a Free-Living Setting

Publisher PD

Impact of sex and gender on COVID-19 outcomes in Europe

Emerging evidence from China suggests that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is deadlier forinfected men than women with a 2.8% fatality rate being reported in Chinese men versus 1.7% in women. Further,sex-disaggregated data for COVID-19 in several European countries show a similar number of cases between thesexes, but more severe outcomes in aged men. Case fatality is highest in men with pre-existing cardiovascularconditions. The mechanisms accounting for the reduced case fatality rate in women are currently unclear but mayoffer potential to develop novel risk stratification tools and therapeutic options for women and men.Peer Reviewe

Imaging of crystalline and amorphous surface regions using time-of-flight secondary-ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS): application to pharmaceutical materials

The structure of a material, in particular the extremes of crystalline and amorphous forms, significantly impacts material performance in numerous sectors such as semiconductors, energy storage, and pharmaceutical products, which are investigated in this paper. To characterize the spatial distribution for crystalline−amorphous forms at the uppermost molecular surface layer, we performed time-of-flight secondary-ion mass spectroscopy (ToF-SIMS) measurements for quench-cooled amorphous and recrystallized samples of the drugs indomethacin, felodipine, and acetaminophen. Polarized light microscopy was used to localize crystallinity induced in the samples under controlled conditions. Principal component analysis was used to identify the subtle changes in the ToF-SIMS spectra indicative of the amorphous and crystalline forms for each drug. The indicators of amorphous and crystalline surfaces were common in type across the three drugs, and could be explained in general terms of crystal packing and intermolecular bonding, leading to intramolecular chain scission in the formation of secondary ions. Less intramolecular scission occurred in the amorphous form, resulting in a greater intensity of molecular and dimer secondary ions. To test the generality of amorphous−crystalline differentiation using ToF-SIMS, a different recrystallization method was investigated where acetaminophen single crystals were recrystallized from supersaturated solutions. The findings indicated that the ability to assign the crystalline/amorphous state of the sample using ToF-SIMS was insensitive to the recrystallization method. This demonstrates ToF-SIMS capabilities of detecting and mapping ordered crystalline and disordered amorphous molecular materials forms at micron spatial resolution in the uppermost surface of a material

The Glutaredoxin GLRX-21 Functions to Prevent Selenium-Induced Oxidative Stress in Caenorhabditis elegans

Selenium is an essential micronutrient that functions as an antioxidant. Yet, at higher concentrations, selenium is pro-oxidant and toxic. In extreme cases, exposures to excess selenium can lead to death or selenosis, a syndrome characterized by teeth, hair and nail loss, and nervous system alterations. Recent interest in selenium as an anti- tumorigenic agent has reemphasized the need to understand the mechanisms underlying the cellular consequences of increased selenium exposure. We show here, that in the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, selenium has a concentration range in which it functions as an antioxidant, but beyond this range it exhibits a dose- and time-dependent lethality. Oxidation-induced fluorescence emitted by the dye, carboxy-H2DCFDA, indicative of reactive oxygen species formation was significantly higher in animals after a brief exposure to 5mM sodium selenite. Longer-term exposures lead to a progressive selenium-induced motility impairment that could be partially prevented by coincident exposure to the cellular antioxidant–reduced glutathione. The C elegans glrx-21 gene belongs to the family of glutaredoxins (glutathione-dependent oxidoreductases) and the glrx-21(tm2921) allele is a null mutation that renders animals hypersensitive for the selenium-induced motility impairment, but not lethality. In addition, the lethality of animals with the tm2921 mutation exposed to selenium was unaffected by the addition of reduced glutathione, suggesting that GLRX-21 is required for glutathione to moderate this selenium-induced lethality. Our findings provide the first description of selenium-induced toxicity in C elegans and support its use as a model for elucidating the mechanisms of selenium toxicity

Multimodal Classification of Parkinson's Disease in Home Environments with Resiliency to Missing Modalities

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative condition that affects a patient’s everyday life. Authors have proposed that a machine learning and sensor-based approach that continuously monitors patients in naturalistic settings can provide constant evaluation of PD and objectively analyse its progression. In this paper, we make progress toward such PD evaluation by presenting a multimodal deep learning approach for discriminating between people with PD and without PD. Specifically, our proposed architecture, named MCPD-Net, uses two data modalities, acquired from vision and accelerometer sensors in a home environment to train variational autoencoder (VAE) models. These are modality-specific VAEs that predict effective representations of human movements to be fused and given to a classification module. During our end-to-end training, we minimise the difference between the latent spaces corresponding to the two data modalities. This makes our method capable of dealing with missing modalities during inference. We show that our proposed multimodal method outperforms unimodal and other multimodal approaches by an average increase in F1-score of 0.25 and 0.09, respectively, on a data set with real patients. We also show that our method still outperforms other approaches by an average increase in F1-score of 0.17 when a modality is missing during inference, demonstrating the benefit of training on multiple modalities

An automatic gait analysis pipeline for wearable sensors: a pilot study in Parkinson’s disease

The use of wearable sensors allows continuous recordings of physical activity from participants in free-living or at-home clinical studies. The large amount of data collected demands automatic analysis pipelines to extract gait parameters that can be used as clinical endpoints. We introduce a deep learning-based automatic pipeline for wearables that processes tri-axial accelerometry data and extracts gait events—bout segmentation, initial contact (IC), and final contact (FC)—from a single sensor located at either the lower back (near L5), shin or wrist. The gait events detected are posteriorly used for gait parameter estimation, such as step time, length, and symmetry. We report results from a leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation on a pilot study dataset of five participants clinically diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and six healthy controls (HC). Participants wore sensors at three body locations and walked on a pressure-sensing walkway to obtain reference gait data. Mean absolute errors (MAE) for the IC events ranged from 22.82 to 33.09 milliseconds (msecs) for the lower back sensor while for the shin and wrist sensors, MAE ranges were 28.56–64.66 and 40.19–72.50 msecs, respectively. For the FC-event detection, MAE ranges were 29.06–48.42, 40.19–72.70 and 36.06–60.18 msecs for the lumbar, wrist and shin sensors, respectively. Intraclass correlation coefficients, ICC(2,k), between the estimated parameters and the reference data resulted in good-to-excellent agreement (ICC ≥ 0.84) for the lumbar and shin sensors, excluding the double support time (ICC = 0.37 lumbar and 0.38 shin) and swing time (ICC = 0.55 lumbar and 0.59 shin). The wrist sensor also showed good agreements, but the ICCs were lower overall than for the other two sensors. Our proposed analysis pipeline has the potential to extract up to 100 gait-related parameters, and we expect our contribution will further support developments in the fields of wearable sensors, digital health, and remote monitoring in clinical trials