Contextual factors influencing knowledge sharing and application in the care and support for people with intellectual disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, support workers and health professionals caring for and supporting people with intellectual disabilities (ID) required new knowledge on, for example, treatment and infection prevention. ID care organizations had to quickly share up-to-date knowledge and encourage its application. This study explored the contextual factors influencing knowledge sharing and application in the care and support for people with ID, contrasted their relevance prior to and during the pandemic, and compared the relevance of these factors according to support workers and health professionals. In 2021, 160 Dutch professionals working with people with ID completed an online survey, with 69 being support workers and 91 being health professionals. For most of the participants, the contextual factors known to be relevant for knowledge sharing and application prior to the pandemic (e.g., the leadership of professionals, user-friendliness of interventions) also helped them to process knowledge during the pandemic. These factors were rated equally or as being even more important (e.g., “Practice leadership of management” and “Office arrangements and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems”). Moreover, support workers and health professionals rated factors such as the available capacity of employees and office arrangements and ICT systems differently. The findings provide initial evidence that during a health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, both the role and importance of contextual factors influencing knowledge sharing and application in the care and support for people with ID partially differ from prior to the pandemic

Incoming professionals’ perspectives on the application of new knowledge in care organisations for people with intellectual disabilities:A concept mapping study

ObjectivesWithin care organisations for people with intellectual disabilities, numerous strategies are employed to stimulate the application of new knowledge, and professionals play a key role in this process. Consequently, gaining insight into professionals’ perspectives on how to encourage the application of new knowledge is vital, especially in the case of incoming professionals. They have a stronger need for new knowledge due to having acquired only a limited knowledge base about intellectual disabilities in their education. Therefore, this study focused on the incoming professionals’ perspectives on factors stimulating application of new knowledge within the care and support for people with intellectual disabilities.MethodsA concept mapping study was conducted with incoming support staff, psychologists, and intellectual disabilities physicians. Data collection included brainstorming, pile sorting and rating to create three concept maps, which were interpreted by experts.ResultsOverall, the participants generated 234 statements. Incoming support staff primarily expressed their preference for experiential and work-based learning and described their role as being knowledge receivers. Incoming psychologists and physicians expressed their ownership of knowledge in requesting opportunities to develop themselves.ConclusionTo enhance incoming professionals’ application of new knowledge, care organisations for people with intellectual disabilities can encourage professionals in manifold ways, ranging from providing (in)formal learning opportunities and accessible sites to creating a learning culture

Histological Assessment Of The Lobster (Homarus Americanus) In The 100 Lobsters Project

The emergence of epizootic shell disease in the American lobster (Homarus americanus) has been devastating to the industry in the coastal waters of southern New England. A comprehensive assessment of the disease syndrome, known as the 100 Lobsters Project, was initiated to examine health and physiological parameters among laboratories involved in the research on lobster shell disease. A histological study of the 100 lobsters was undertaken as part of that assessment. Tissues from 90 lobsters from Rhode Island and 19 lobsters from Maine were examined as a general health assessment of the 100 lobsters. Approximately half the lobsters from Rhode Island were selected because they had frank epizootic shell disease, whereas none of the lobsters from Maine exhibited the syndrome. In addition to epizootic shell disease, the histological findings revealed 3 other idiopathic syndromes-necrotizing hepatopancreatitis, idiopathic blindness, and nonspecific granulomas-in higher prevalences in lobsters from Rhode Island compared with those from Maine. Necrotizing hepatopancreatitis, a newly described disease syndrome in lobsters, was observed in 15% of the lobsters from Rhode Island. Idiopathic blindness was present in 54% of the lobsters from Rhode Island, and 16% of the animals from Maine. This is the first report of the syndrome in lobsters from Maine. None of the idiopathic syndromes was associated with epizootic shell disease. The detection of multiple disease syndromes such as epizootic shell disease, necrotizing hepatopancreatitis, and idiopathic blindness may be indicative of exposure to environmental stressors in Narragansett Bay, RI

Curracurrong: a stream processing system for distributed environments

Advances in technology have given rise to applications that are deployed on wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the cloud, and the Internet of things. There are many emerging applications, some of which include sensor-based monitoring, web traffic processing, and network monitoring. These applications collect large amount of data as an unbounded sequence of events and process them to generate a new sequences of events. Such applications need an adequate programming model that can process large amount of data with minimal latency; for this purpose, stream programming, among other paradigms, is ideal. However, stream programming needs to be adapted to meet the challenges inherent in running it in distributed environments. These challenges include the need for modern domain specific language (DSL), the placement of computations in the network to minimise energy costs, and timeliness in real-time applications. To overcome these challenges we developed a stream programming model that achieves easy-to-use programming interface, energy-efficient actor placement, and timeliness. This thesis presents Curracurrong, a stream data processing system for distributed environments. In Curracurrong, a query is represented as a stream graph of stream operators and communication channels. Curracurrong provides an extensible stream operator library and adapts to a wide range of applications. It uses an energy-efficient placement algorithm that optimises communication and computation. We extend the placement problem to support dynamically changing networks, and develop a dynamic program with polynomially bounded runtime to solve the placement problem. In many stream-based applications, real-time data processing is essential. We propose an approach that measures time delays in stream query processing; this model measures the total computational time from input to output of a query, i.e., end-to-end delay

The 100 Lobsters Project: A Cooperative Demonstration Project For Health Assessments Of Lobsters From Rhode Island

The emergence of epizootic shell disease in the American lobster (Homarus americanus) has been devastating to the fishing industry in southern New England. In response, research was initiated to understand the roles of the environment, pathogens, and pollutants in the ecology and etiology of the disease. A comprehensive project was initiated in which tissues and hemolymph from 100 lobsters were collected from an endemic area of disease, Narragansett Bay, RI. The project has moved forward with the purpose of compiling, synthesizing, and propagating the findings from the 100 Lobsters Project. The resulting tissue bank and Web-based data repository and instructional tools serve as a nascent demonstration project to both the scientific community working on this disease as well as to members of the lobster industry

Efficient k-NN search on vertically decomposed data

Applications like multimedia retrieval require efficient support for similarity search on large data collections. Yet, nearest neighbor search is a difficult problem in high dimensional spaces, rendering efficient applications hard to realize: index structures degrade rapidly with increasing dimensionality, while sequential search is not an attractive solution for repositories with millions of objects. This paper approaches the problem from a different angle. A solution is sought in an unconventional storage scheme, that opens up a new range of techniques for processing k-NN queries, especially suited for high dimensional spaces. The suggested (physical) database design accommodates well a novel variant of branch-and-bound search, t