2,459 research outputs found
The Potential for Student Performance Prediction in Small Cohorts with Minimal Available Attributes
The measurement of student performance during their progress through university study provides academic leadership with critical information on each student’s likelihood of success. Academics have traditionally used their interactions with individual students through class activities and interim assessments to identify those “at risk” of failure/withdrawal. However, modern university environments, offering easy on-line availability of course material, may see reduced lecture/tutorial attendance, making such identification more challenging. Modern data mining and machine learning techniques provide increasingly accurate predictions of student examination assessment marks, although these approaches have focussed upon large student populations and wide ranges of data attributes per student. However, many university modules comprise relatively small student cohorts, with institutional protocols limiting the student attributes available for analysis. It appears that very little research attention has been devoted to this area of analysis and prediction. We describe an experiment conducted on a final-year university module student cohort of 23, where individual student data are limited to lecture/tutorial attendance, virtual learning environment accesses and intermediate assessments. We found potential for predicting individual student interim and final assessment marks in small student cohorts with very limited attributes and that these predictions could be useful to support module leaders in identifying students potentially “at risk.”.Peer reviewe
Ketogenic diet improves behaviors in a maternal immune activation model of autism spectrum disorder
Prenatal factors influence autism spectrum disorder (ASD) incidence in children and can increase ASD symptoms in offspring of animal models. These may include maternal immune activation (MIA) due to viral or bacterial infection during the first trimesters. Unfortunately, regardless of ASD etiology, existing drugs are poorly effective against core symptoms. For nearly a century a ketogenic diet (KD) has been used to treat seizures, and recent insights into mechanisms of ASD and a growing recognition that immune/inflammatory conditions exacerbate ASD risk has increased interest in KD as a treatment for ASD. Here we studied the effects of KD on core ASD symptoms in offspring exposed to MIA. To produce MIA, pregnant C57Bl/6 mice were injected with the viral mimic polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid; after weaning offspring were fed KD or control diet for three weeks. Consistent with an ASD phenotype of a higher incidence in males, control diet-fed MIA male offspring were not social and exhibited high levels of repetitive self-directed behaviors; female offspring were unaffected. However, KD feeding partially or completely reversed all MIA-induced behavioral abnormalities in males; it had no effect on behavior in females. KD-induced metabolic changes of reduced blood glucose and elevated blood ketones were quantified in offspring of both sexes. Prior work from our laboratory and others demonstrate KDs improve relevant behaviors in several ASD models, and here we demonstrate clear benefits of KD in the MIA model of ASD. Together these studies suggest a broad utility for metabolic therapy in improving core ASD symptoms, and support further research to develop and apply ketogenic and/or metabolic strategies in patients with ASD
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Correction: The Relationship between Therapeutic Alliance and Service User Satisfaction in Mental Health Inpatient Wards and Crisis House Alternatives: A Cross-Sectional Study
Neutral Evolution as Diffusion in phenotype space: reproduction with mutation but without selection
The process of `Evolutionary Diffusion', i.e. reproduction with local
mutation but without selection in a biological population, resembles standard
Diffusion in many ways. However, Evolutionary Diffusion allows the formation of
local peaks with a characteristic width that undergo drift, even in the
infinite population limit. We analytically calculate the mean peak width and
the effective random walk step size, and obtain the distribution of the peak
width which has a power law tail. We find that independent local mutations act
as a diffusion of interacting particles with increased stepsize.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Paper now representative of published articl
Mental Health and Psychosocial Functioning in Recently Separated U.S. Women Veterans: Trajectories and Bi-Directional Relationships
Prior research on the relationship between veterans’ mental health and psychosocial functioning has primarily relied on male samples. Here, we investigated prospective longitudinal relationships between mental health and psychosocial functioning in 554 female Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who were surveyed three times between two- and seven-years following separation from service. Mixed effects modeling revealed that increasing depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity predicted declines in work functioning. Increasing PTSD severity predicted declining parental functioning and worsening depression predicted a decline in relationship functioning. In turn, decreased work and intimate relationship functioning predicted increased PTSD and depression symptom severity suggesting bi-directional effects between mental health and psychosocial functioning. An examination of the effect of deployment stressors on psychosocial functioning revealed that deployment sexual harassment was the strongest predictor of decreased psychosocial functioning across all domains. Evidence for the reciprocal nature of relationships between mental health and psychosocial functioning underscore the need for treatment targeted at PTSD and depression, as well as work and relationship functioning to improve outcomes for women veterans
Information pathways into prison mental health care
Police and court liaison and diversion services provide important specialist mental health input along critical stages of the criminal justice pathway. Effective sharing of information between the services and relevant justice agencies is essential. However, various problems exist with the flow of information between agencies and services across the criminal justice pathway. This service evaluation explored how clinically relevant information is transferred, by drawing on the perspectives of prison healthcare staff in a large urban UK male prison. A qualitative service evaluation was conducted using semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 11 prison staff. The main themes included: gaps in the transfer of essential information, (particularly concerning risk and offending information); information gathering to fill these gaps; the importance of professional relationships, information sharing between agencies; and information solutions. Improving information transfer across the criminal justice pathway could prevent treatment delays and ensure more timely mental healthcare in prison
Scaling of Self-Avoiding Walks in High Dimensions
We examine self-avoiding walks in dimensions 4 to 8 using high-precision
Monte-Carlo simulations up to length N=16384, providing the first such results
in dimensions on which we concentrate our analysis. We analyse the
scaling behaviour of the partition function and the statistics of
nearest-neighbour contacts, as well as the average geometric size of the walks,
and compare our results to -expansions and to excellent rigorous bounds
that exist. In particular, we obtain precise values for the connective
constants, , , ,
and give a revised estimate of . All of
these are by at least one order of magnitude more accurate than those
previously given (from other approaches in and all approaches in ).
Our results are consistent with most theoretical predictions, though in
we find clear evidence of anomalous -corrections for the scaling of
the geometric size of the walks, which we understand as a non-analytic
correction to scaling of the general form (not present in pure
Gaussian random walks).Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure
Kinetic growth walks on complex networks
Kinetically grown self-avoiding walks on various types of generalized random
networks have been studied. Networks with short- and long-tailed degree
distributions were considered (, degree or connectivity), including
scale-free networks with . The long-range behaviour of
self-avoiding walks on random networks is found to be determined by finite-size
effects. The mean self-intersection length of non-reversal random walks, ,
scales as a power of the system size $N$: $ \sim N^{\beta}$, with an
exponent $\beta = 0.5$ for short-tailed degree distributions and $\beta < 0.5$
for scale-free networks with $\gamma < 3$. The mean attrition length of kinetic
growth walks, , scales as , with an exponent
which depends on the lowest degree in the network. Results of
approximate probabilistic calculations are supported by those derived from
simulations of various kinds of networks. The efficiency of kinetic growth
walks to explore networks is largely reduced by inhomogeneity in the degree
distribution, as happens for scale-free networks.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
Localism: a planning panacea?
© 2019 Liverpool University Press. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2019.31It has been observed that there is a 'global trend' towards devolution of power from national governments to regional and local authorities, and planning is one of the activities often devolved. In England, the UK government has since 2011 gone further and, it claims, devolved planning powers to the community level. The introduction of a new form of statutory planning - neighbourhood planning - was heralded by the UK government as an embodiment of their commitment to 'localism', representing a shift from top-down to bottom-up control in the English planning system. This Policy and Practice explores some of the tensions inherent in localism as exemplified through the practical implementation of neighbourhood planning.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Random walk on the range of random walk
We study the random walk X on the range of a simple random walk on ℤ d in dimensions d≥4. When d≥5 we establish quenched and annealed scaling limits for the process X, which show that the intersections of the original simple random walk path are essentially unimportant. For d=4 our results are less precise, but we are able to show that any scaling limit for X will require logarithmic corrections to the polynomial scaling factors seen in higher dimensions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when d=4 similar logarithmic corrections are necessary in describing the asymptotic behavior of the return probability of X to the origin
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