The impact of pre-diabetes diagnosis on behaviour change: an integrative literature review

Type 2 diabetes is a growing global problem that not only affects individuals but also has an impact upon the economic health of countries. The number of people developing type 2 diabetes can be reduced by up to by 80%; this can be achieved by targeting those who are ‘at risk’. This reduction can be achieved by appropriate lifestyle changes to diet and physical activity. It is not known what the impact of being informed of a diagnosis of pre-diabetes has on an individual’s motivation to make appropriate lifestyle changes. The aim of this study was to assess whether having the diagnosis of pre-diabetes encourages or empowers people to make appropriate lifestyle changes to prevent progression to a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Employing a systematic approach, an integrative literature review was undertaken using a standard retrieval and appraisal method. The studies demonstrated that pre-diabetes was found to be a challenging concept by patients and nurses alike. Lack of knowledge and support, along with patients’ perceived barriers, had an impact upon the various motivation and self-efficacy behaviours towards lifestyle changes. The integrative review found that more education and support are required to motivate lifestyle change in the person with pre-diabetes. This, however, does not need to be medicine led; use of peer and community based programmes could be not only cheaper, but also have the ability to provide potentially long-term support for people, and would provide continued reduced risk. Intervention needs to ensure that it is provided at an appropriate level to account for cultural, social and gender needs. Innovative approaches need to be considered to reduce the number of people who are diagnosed with pre-diabetes from progressing to type 2 diabetes and its associated potential complications

Interannual, seasonal, and diel variation in soil respiration relative to ecosystem respiration at a wetland to upland slope at Harvard Forest

Soil carbon dioxide efflux (soil respiration, SR) was measured with eight autochambers at two locations along a wetland to upland slope at Harvard Forest over a 4 year period, 2003–2007. SR was consistently higher in the upland plots than at the wetland margin during the late summer/early fall. Seasonal and diel hystereses with respect to soil temperatures were of sufficient magnitude to prevent quantification of the influence of soil moisture, although apparent short‐term responses of SR to precipitation occurred. Calculations of annual cumulative SR illustrated a decreasing trend in SR over the 5 year period, which were correlated with decreasing springtime mean soil temperatures. Spring soil temperatures decreased despite rising air temperatures over the same period, possibly as an effect of earlier leaf expansion and shading. The synchronous decrease in spring soil temperatures and SR during regional warming of air temperatures may represent a negative feedback on a warming climate by reducing CO2 production from soils. SR reached a maximum later in the year than total ecosystem respiration (ER) measured at a nearby eddy covariance flux tower, and the seasonality of their temperature response patterns were roughly opposite. SR, particularly in the upland, exceeded ER in the late summer/early fall in each year, suggesting that areas of lower efflux such as the wetland may be significant in the flux tower footprint or that long‐term bias in either estimate may create a mismatch. Annual estimates of ER decreased over the same period and were highly correlated with SR

Rock magnetic and geochemical evidence for authigenic magnetite formation via iron reduction in coal-bearing sediments offshore Shimokita Peninsula, Japan (IODP Site C0020)

Sediments recovered at Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Site C0020, in a fore‐arc basin offshore Shimokita Peninsula, Japan, include numerous coal beds (0.3–7 m thick) that are associated with a transition from a terrestrial to marine depositional environment. Within the primary coal‐bearing unit (∼2 km depth below seafloor) there are sharp increases in magnetic susceptibility in close proximity to the coal beds, superimposed on a background of consistently low magnetic susceptibility throughout the remainder of the recovered stratigraphic sequence. We investigate the source of the magnetic susceptibility variability and characterize the dominant magnetic assemblage throughout the entire cored record, using isothermal remanent magnetization (IRM), thermal demagnetization, anhysteretic remanent magnetization (ARM), iron speciation, and iron isotopes. Magnetic mineral assemblages in all samples are dominated by very low‐coercivity minerals with unblocking temperatures between 350 and 580°C that are interpreted to be magnetite. Samples with lower unblocking temperatures (300–400°C), higher ARM, higher‐frequency dependence, and isotopically heavy δ56Fe across a range of lithologies in the coal‐bearing unit (between 1925 and 1995 mbsf) indicate the presence of fine‐grained authigenic magnetite. We suggest that iron‐reducing bacteria facilitated the production of fine‐grained magnetite within the coal‐bearing unit during burial and interaction with pore waters. The coal/peat acted as a source of electron donors during burial, mediated by humic acids, to supply iron‐reducing bacteria in the surrounding siliciclastic sediments. These results indicate that coal‐bearing sediments may play an important role in iron cycling in subsiding peat environments and if buried deeply through time, within the subsequent deep biosphere

Biogeography of Caladenia (Orchidaceae), with special reference to the South-west Australian Floristic Region

Caladenia contains 376 species and subspecies, of which almost all are endemic to temperate and southern semiarid Australia. Eleven species occur in New Zealand, 10 of which are endemic, and one species is widely distributed in eastern Australia and the western Pacific. Only three species occur in both south-western and south-eastern Australia. At subgeneric level, Drakonorchis is endemic to the South-west Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR), Stegostyla to eastern Australia and New Zealand, whereas three subgenera, Calonema, Phlebochilus and Elevatae occur on both sides of the Nullarbor Plain. Subgenus Caladenia is primarily eastern Australian but also extends to the western Pacific. The largest subgenera (Calonema and Phlebochilus) have radiated extensively, with Calonema exhibiting a greater concentration of species in more mesic parts of the SWAFR than Phlebochilus. Within the SWAFR, the major biogeographic division within Caladenia follows the 600-mm isohyet. Within rainfall zones, biogeographic districts for Caladenia correlate with a combination of underlying geology and surface soils. Areas of high endemism contain diverse edaphic environments. Climatic and edaphic requirements are likely to be key drivers of rarity in Caladenia, although these parameters may be acting in concert with mycorrhizal and pollinator specificity

Adaptive foveated single-pixel imaging with dynamic super-sampling

As an alternative to conventional multi-pixel cameras, single-pixel cameras enable images to be recorded using a single detector that measures the correlations between the scene and a set of patterns. However, to fully sample a scene in this way requires at least the same number of correlation measurements as there are pixels in the reconstructed image. Therefore single-pixel imaging systems typically exhibit low frame-rates. To mitigate this, a range of compressive sensing techniques have been developed which rely on a priori knowledge of the scene to reconstruct images from an under-sampled set of measurements. In this work we take a different approach and adopt a strategy inspired by the foveated vision systems found in the animal kingdom - a framework that exploits the spatio-temporal redundancy present in many dynamic scenes. In our single-pixel imaging system a high-resolution foveal region follows motion within the scene, but unlike a simple zoom, every frame delivers new spatial information from across the entire field-of-view. Using this approach we demonstrate a four-fold reduction in the time taken to record the detail of rapidly evolving features, whilst simultaneously accumulating detail of more slowly evolving regions over several consecutive frames. This tiered super-sampling technique enables the reconstruction of video streams in which both the resolution and the effective exposure-time spatially vary and adapt dynamically in response to the evolution of the scene. The methods described here can complement existing compressive sensing approaches and may be applied to enhance a variety of computational imagers that rely on sequential correlation measurements.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Coarse-grained meandering distributive fluvial system of the Basal Cedar mountain formation, U.S.A.

Funding Information: We thank the following for reviews of this manuscript: Associate Editor Tobi Payenberg, Matt Joeckel, two anonymous reviewers, and John Southard. This work was funded by the SAFARI group. We are deeply grateful to Joe Phillips, Sean Kelly, James Mullins, Ryan King, and Jostein Myking Kjærefjord for help in the field.Peer reviewedPostprin

Story and Illustration Reconstituted: Children's Literature in Canadian Reading Programs

This study addresses the differences between literature in children's trade books and the literature in commercial elementary language arts reading programs used in Canada. Although the nature of the literature included in language arts programs has received considerable scrutiny in the United States, there is no parallel body of research in the Canadian context. Using a textual content analysis, all the literature selections contained in the three most extensively used reading programs in Canada were where possible compared with the corresponding trade books. Numerous differences between trade book literature and the corresponding selections in the reading programs suggest that the two are not equivalent in the reading experiences they provide for children. The changes included alterations to format such as omissions, additions, substitutions, and reordering of text and illustrations. Many of the original selections reconstituted in the reading programs were impoverished by the changes. Further research is needed on how these changes alter children's reading experiences.Cette élude se penche sur les différences entre la littérature pour enfants dans les publications commerciales et celle que l'on retrouve dans les cours de langues et littérature pour les élèves de l'élémentaire au Canada. Alors qu'aux États-Unis, la nature de la littérature étudiée dans les cours de langue et littérature a fait l'objet d'examens détaillés, au Canada, aucune recherche comparable n'a été entreprise. En s'appuyant sur une analyse de contenu approfondie, nous avons, dans la mesure du possible, comparé toute la littérature étudiée au sein des trois programmes de lecture les plus populaires au Canada, aux textes correspondants dans les publications commerciales. Les nombreuses différences repérées entre les publications commerciales et les sélections correspondantes employées dans les programmes de lecture permettent de conclure que les deux ne fournissent pas élèves des expériences de lecture équivalentes. Parmi les écarts notons des changements de format tels des omissions, des ajouts, des substitutions et une réorganisation du texte et illustrations. Plusieurs des sélections originales qui avaient été reconstituées dans les programmes de lecture avaient été appauvries par les changements. Davantage d'études devraient porter sur la façon dont ces changements modifient l'expérience de lecture des enfants

Assessment Techniques Corresponding to Scientific Texts in Commercial Reading Programs: Do They Promote Scientific Literacy?

This research is part of a larger study of commercial reading programs used in Canada in grades 1-6. The specific purposes of the results reported here were to identify and quantify the assessment techniques suggested for the selections that contain scientific content, to show how the assessments differ by grade, to evaluate the nature and quality of the assessments, and to examine the extent to which the assessments help foster scientific literacy. It was found that the assessments occurred in six major forms and employed about a dozen assessment tools that engage students in nearly 20 tasks. Such variety is endorsed in both literacy and science education position statements. The assessments showed some weak trends by grade, but primarily left the purpose of the assessments to teachers’ judgment. The consequence is that teachers probably will choose the assessments for formative rather than summative evaluation, an approach also endorsed by literacy and science education policy statements. Hardly any of the assessments focused on the specificities of learning to read texts that are scientific such as interpreting descriptions of methods and research findings and thus had limited use in promoting this particular aspect of scientific literacy