Including People with Dementia in Research: An Analysis of Australian Ethical and Legal Rules and Recommendations for Reform

Research is crucial to advancing knowledge about dementia, yet the burden of the disease currently outpaces research activity. Research often excludes people with dementia and other cognitive impairments because researchers and ethics committees are concerned about issues related to capacity, consent, and substitute decision-making. In Australia, participation in research by people with cognitive impairment is governed by a national ethics statement and a patchwork of state and territorial laws that have widely varying rules. We contend that this legislative variation precludes a consistent approach to research governance and participation and hinders research that seeks to include people with impaired capacity. In this paper, we present key ethical principles, provide a comprehensive review of applicable legal rules in Australian states and territories, and highlight significant differences and ambiguities. Our analysis includes recommendations for reform to improve clarity and consistency in the law and reduce barriers that may exclude persons with dementia from participating in ethically approved research. Our recommendations seek to advance the national decision-making principles recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission, which emphasize the rights of all adults to make their own decisions and for those with impaired capacity to have access to appropriate supports to help them make decisions that affect their lives

Posttraumatic Growth in Students, Crime Survivors and Trauma Workers Exposed to Adversity

Generalised models of positive change following adversity do not fully account for differences in adjustment among populations who experience posttraumatic growth (PTG). The contributions of event intentionality, frequency of the adversity types, age at serious event, spirituality/religiousness, active coping, PTSD symptoms and social support were explored as predictors of PTG across three samples of university students (N = 101; Study 1), survivors of violent crime recruited from support services (N = 71; Study 2) and those working with survivors of adversity (N = 96; Study 3). The results of Study 1 revealed that age at serious event, active coping, PTSD symptoms and social support positively predicted PTG. Within Study 2, spirituality/religiousness, active coping and social support were the significant positive predictors of PTG. Finally in Study 3, spirituality/religiousness, active coping and social support were the significant positive predictors of PTG. Across all studies, event intentionality and frequency of adversity types did not determine PTG. These results indicate that while participants within each of the populations have the ability to experience PTG, different factors predicted whether PTG was observed. The findings offer greater insight into the multifarious nature of adjustment following adversity

The reversibility of sea level rise

During the last century, global climate has been warming, and projections indicate that such a warming is likely to continue over coming decades. Most of the extra heat is stored in the ocean, resulting in thermal expansion of seawater and global mean sea level rise. Previous studies have shown that after CO2 emissions cease or CO2 concentration is stabilized, global mean surface air temperature stabilizes or decreases slowly, but sea level continues to rise. Using idealized CO2 scenario simulations with a hierarchy of models including an AOGCM and a step-response model, the authors show how the evolution of thermal expansion can be interpreted in terms of the climate energy balance and the vertical profile of ocean warming. Whereas surface temperature depends on cumulative CO2 emissions, sea level rise due to thermal expansion depends on the time profile of emissions. Sea level rise is smaller for later emissions, implying that targets to limit sea level rise would need to refer to the rate of emissions, not only to the time integral. Thermal expansion is in principle reversible, but to halt or reverse it quickly requires the radiative forcing to be reduced substantially, which is possible on centennial time scales only by geoengineering. If it could be done, the results indicate that heat would leave the ocean more readily than it entered, but even if thermal expansion were returned to zero, the geographical pattern of sea level would be altered. Therefore, despite any aggressive CO2 mitigation, regional sea level change is inevitable

The tRNAscan-SE, snoscan and snoGPS web servers for the detection of tRNAs and snoRNAs

Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are two of the largest classes of non-protein-coding RNAs. Conventional gene finders that detect protein-coding genes do not find tRNA and snoRNA genes because they lack the codon structure and statistical signatures of protein-coding genes. Previously, we developed tRNAscan-SE, snoscan and snoGPS for the detection of tRNAs, methylation-guide snoRNAs and pseudouridylation-guide snoRNAs, respectively. tRNAscan-SE is routinely applied to completed genomes, resulting in the identification of thousands of tRNA genes. Snoscan has successfully detected methylation-guide snoRNAs in a variety of eukaryotes and archaea, and snoGPS has identified novel pseudouridylation-guide snoRNAs in yeast and mammals. Although these programs have been quite successful at RNA gene detection, their use has been limited by the need to install and configure the software packages on UNIX workstations. Here, we describe online implementations of these RNA detection tools that make these programs accessible to a wider range of research biologists. The tRNAscan-SE, snoscan and snoGPS servers are available at , and , respectively

Plant disease - early blight or target spot of potatoes

Early blight or target spot caused by the fungus Alternaria solani is a widespread disease of potatoes which in Western Australia is most prevalent in crops dug in autumn and early summer. The disease may attack both foliage and tubers, but the tuber rot phase of the disease has hitherto caused most concern to local growers because it causes obvious losses in storage. The less obvious but more serious effects of the foliage blight have generally been overlooked, chiefly because the disease usually develops late in the season when the crops are approaching maturity. However recent spray trials with new fungicides have clearly demonstrated that the destructiveness of the foliage attack has been greatly underestimated, for it may cause considerable reduction in yield

Further experiements on the control of early blight or target spot of potatoes

The effective control of Potato Early Blight or Target Spot by the use of Zineb fungicide (used in the proprietary form Dithane Z.78) has previously been reported in this Journal. It was shown in preliminary spray trials that the foliage blight caused by this disease is very destructive, and by the application of four Dithane sprays yields were increased in the order of 30 per cent., equivalent to approximately four tons per acre. Further experiments have now been conducted and the results indicate that even two applications of Dithane spray may, under conditions of severe blight attack, promote worthwhile higher yields

AdS/CFT and the Information Paradox

The information paradox in the quantum evolution of black holes is studied within the framework of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The unitarity of the CFT strongly suggests that all information about an initial state that forms a black hole is returned in the Hawking radiation. The CFT dynamics implies an information retention time of order the black hole lifetime. This fact determines many qualitative properties of the non-local effects that must show up in a semi-classical effective theory in the bulk. We argue that no violations of causality are apparent to local observers, but the semi-classical theory in the bulk duplicates degrees of freedom inside and outside the event horizon. Non-local quantum effects are required to eliminate this redundancy. This leads to a breakdown of the usual classical-quantum correspondence principle in Lorentzian black hole spacetimes.Comment: 16 pages, harvmac, reference added, minor correction

Consistently computing the K -> pi long distance weak transition

First we extract the long-distance (LD) weak matrix element from certain data and give compatible theoretical estimates. We also link this LD scale to the single-quark-line (SQL) transition scale and then test the latter SQL scale against the decuplet weak decay amplitude ratio. Finally, we study LD decay. All of these experimental and theoretical values are in good agreement. We deduce an average value from eleven experimental determinations compared to the theoretical SQL values average.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures minor change to the Conclusions and abstract sectio

Scene Coordinate Regression with Angle-Based Reprojection Loss for Camera Relocalization

Image-based camera relocalization is an important problem in computer vision and robotics. Recent works utilize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to regress for pixels in a query image their corresponding 3D world coordinates in the scene. The final pose is then solved via a RANSAC-based optimization scheme using the predicted coordinates. Usually, the CNN is trained with ground truth scene coordinates, but it has also been shown that the network can discover 3D scene geometry automatically by minimizing single-view reprojection loss. However, due to the deficiencies of the reprojection loss, the network needs to be carefully initialized. In this paper, we present a new angle-based reprojection loss, which resolves the issues of the original reprojection loss. With this new loss function, the network can be trained without careful initialization, and the system achieves more accurate results. The new loss also enables us to utilize available multi-view constraints, which further improve performance.Comment: ECCV 2018 Workshop (Geometry Meets Deep Learning

Data Fusion of Objects Using Techniques Such as Laser Scanning, Structured Light and Photogrammetry for Cultural Heritage Applications

In this paper we present a semi-automatic 2D-3D local registration pipeline capable of coloring 3D models obtained from 3D scanners by using uncalibrated images. The proposed pipeline exploits the Structure from Motion (SfM) technique in order to reconstruct a sparse representation of the 3D object and obtain the camera parameters from image feature matches. We then coarsely register the reconstructed 3D model to the scanned one through the Scale Iterative Closest Point (SICP) algorithm. SICP provides the global scale, rotation and translation parameters, using minimal manual user intervention. In the final processing stage, a local registration refinement algorithm optimizes the color projection of the aligned photos on the 3D object removing the blurring/ghosting artefacts introduced due to small inaccuracies during the registration. The proposed pipeline is capable of handling real world cases with a range of characteristics from objects with low level geometric features to complex ones