Measurement of inpatient care for small and sick newborns

A spreadsheet containing results of a global survey to classify 18 newborn care interventions. The survey was aimed at individuals working in maternal and newborn health and completed by 262 respondents located in 61 countries. Linking to emergency obstetric care levels, respondents were asked to rank the level of care they thought appropriate for health systems in Low & Middle Income Countries (LMICs) to provide based upon the following categories: [1] “routine care at birth”, [2] “special care”, [3] “intensive care”, or [4] “not appropriate for any level”. Results are displayed with a tab for each intervention and show variation in respondent characteristics with chi-squared value

Providing information to relatives about expressed emotion and schizophrenia : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Studies have shown that long term psychoeducational programmes aimed at lowering the Expressed Emotion (EE) in family environments can improve communications between the family members and the client, reduce EE, and lower expectations. The present study aimed to enhance family members knowledge about schizophrenia and expressed emotion, as well as awareness of their current coping strategies by conducting a brief educational intervention designed to overcome methodological shortcomings of similar studies. It was hypothesised that providing information to families (excluding clients) about schizophrenia, expressed emotion and ways in which each member can help, would alter the views and attributions that relatives make about the causality of the client's behaviour compared to a randomly assigned wait-list control condition. These changes would then be reflected in reduced criticism, hostility, and emotional overinvolvement and increases in the amount of accurate information concerning schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia were recruited into a controlled trial of a brief educational intervention with family members. Relatives and clients were randomly allocated to one of two groups. a treatment group or a wait-list control group. They received a brief educational intervention designed to give clients and relatives individualised information about schizophrenia, expressed emotion, and how to manage individually in the home and in their relationships. Analyses of the results showed that relatives knowledge increased significantly after the education, and was maintained at the three month follow-up. The control condition reflected no changes in knowledge. Other results showed that relatives' and clients' EE ratings significantty decreased from pre- to post-test. All gains were maintained at the three month follow-up. At nine months after education only 1/19 clients had relapsed. The analyses suggested that although knowledge increased as a result of education, the decreases in EE were not due to education alone. The discussion considers these findings in some detail

School performance and reference group orientation to achievement : a pilot study : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education at Massey University

Page 137 is missing from original copy.The main purpose of the study was to test the thesis that a relationship exists between a pupil's performance at school and the orientation towards achievement obtaining from his 'reference group'. This concept was understood principally in terms of social psychology, although conceptual strands from sociology were woven into the theoretical considerations. The study examined the interrelationships of the main variables with socioeconomic status, ethnic origin, class s tream, pupil teacher affect and ses of proposed occupation. An (untestable) causal logic was implicit in the design, namely that a reference group orientation to achievement served as a mediator between the independent variables of (1) SES, Ethnic Origin, IQ, Class Stream and previous grades and (2) the dependent variables of Teacher-pupil affect, Pupil-teacher affect, SES of proposed occupation and present grades. The report contains a justification of the thesis, an account of the pilot study conducted with eighty four fourth form pupils from three streamed classes of a co-educational secondary school, the findings and a discussion of the implications of the study. The empirical phase called for the gathering of data by interview, questionnaire and a search of school records. As well it entailed the development of an index to measure reference group orientation to achievement. The subsequent statistical analysis relied principally on cross tabulation and step-wise multiple regression analysis. The results revealed that reference group orientation to achievement did not appear to mediate between independent and dependent variables but rather that it acted independently intervening to yield a higher correlation with present grades and SES of proposed occupation than any of the variables tested. Further, Reference Group Orientation to achievement emerged as a partial function of SES and ethnic origin, also correlating positively with a simple measure of pupil definition of the school situation and with pupil sociometricrejection

Consumer Culture and the 2011 'Riots'

This paper argues that in order to be properly comprehended, the 'riots' of August 2011 must be located in the context of an increasingly consumerist society. The suggestion is that the riots represented conformity to the underlying values of a consumerist society, if, momentarily, not its norms. To make this case, the riots are divided into three constituent 'moments'; the initial, the acquisitive and the nihilistic. Themes and ideas from the literature on consumer culture and crime are applied to the latter two.Consumer Culture, Consumerism, Riots

UIEGA and the rise and rise of gaming and gambling in the UK

The paper explores gaming and gambling cultures in the UK and US arguing that they are ripe for a renewed sociological and criminological attention

Time Series Data Mining Algorithms for Identifying Short RNA in Arabidopsis thaliana

The class of molecules called short RNAs (sRNAs) are known to play a key role in gene regulation. Th are typically sequences of nucleotides between 21-25 nucleotides in length. They are known to play a key role in gene regulation. The identification, clustering and classification of sRNA has recently become the focus of much research activity. The basic problem involves detecting regions of interest on the chromosome where the pattern of candidate matches is somehow unusual. Currently, there are no published algorithms for detecting regions of interest, and the unpublished methods that we are aware of involve bespoke rule based systems designed for a specific organism. Work in this very new field has understandably focused on the outcomes rather than the methods used to obtain the results. In this paper we propose two generic approaches that place the specific biological problem in the wider context of time series data mining problems. Both methods are based on treating the occurrences on a chromosome, or “hit count” data, as a time series, then running a sliding window along a chromosome and measuring unusualness. This formulation means we can treat finding unusual areas of candidate RNA activity as a variety of time series anomaly detection problem. The first set of approaches is model based. We specify a null hypothesis distribution for not being a sRNA, then estimate the p-values along the chromosome. The second approach is instance based. We identify some typical shapes from known sRNA, then use dynamic time warping and fourier trans-form based distance to measure how closely the candidate series matches. We demonstrate that these methods can find known sRNA on Arabidopsis thaliana chromosomes and illustrate the benefits of the added information provided by these algorithms

Metatranscriptomes from diverse microbial communities: assessment of data reduction techniques for rigorous annotation

Background Metatranscriptome sequence data can contain highly redundant sequences from diverse populations of microbes and so data reduction techniques are often applied before taxonomic and functional annotation. For metagenomic data, it has been observed that the variable coverage and presence of closely related organisms can lead to fragmented assemblies containing chimeric contigs that may reduce the accuracy of downstream analyses and some advocate the use of alternate data reduction techniques. However, it is unclear how such data reduction techniques impact the annotation of metatranscriptome data and thus affect the interpretation of the results. Results To investigate the effect of such techniques on the annotation of metatranscriptome data we assess two commonly employed methods: clustering and de-novo assembly. To do this, we also developed an approach to simulate 454 and Illumina metatranscriptome data sets with varying degrees of taxonomic diversity. For the Illumina simulations, we found that a two-step approach of assembly followed by clustering of contigs and unassembled sequences produced the most accurate reflection of the real protein domain content of the sample. For the 454 simulations, the combined annotation of contigs and unassembled reads produced the most accurate protein domain annotations. Conclusions Based on these data we recommend that assembly be attempted, and that unassembled reads be included in the final annotation for metatranscriptome data, even from highly diverse environments as the resulting annotations should lead to a more accurate reflection of the transcriptional behaviour of the microbial population under investigation