The Impact of Health-Related Quality of Life on Retention in Drug Treatment Courts [English and Spanish versions]

A Spanish translation of this publication is available to download under Additional Files. This Research in the Works describes Ekaterina Pivovarova’s new study The Impact of Health-Related Quality of Life on Retention in Drug Treatment Courts. Past research has focused on Drug Treatment Court dropouts as a function of participant characteristics (e.g., age, criminal history) or treatment program features (e.g., frequency of DTC hearings). Identifying individuals most likely to dropout and helping them to remain in treatment programs is critical to decreasing substance use in this population. This study proposes to shift the focus to health-related Quality of Life (QOL) and its impact on DTC dropout

Central IRBs: Enhanced Protections for Research Participants [English and Spanish versions]

A Spanish translation of this publication is available for download under Additional Files below. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) play a critical role in research, and assure safety and fairness to participants enrolled in research studies. Multisite studies are often reviewed by multiple IRBs (an IRB review at each site participating in the study), which can slow down study approval, result in duplication of effort, and occasionally produce contradictory decisions by different IRBs. To address these problems, the federal government has promoted the use of single IRBs (referred to as Central IRBs or CIRBs), where a single IRB is responsible for the review of all sites where the research study is conducted. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently announced that beginning in 2017 all research conducted at multiple sites must be reviewed by a CIRB. This CIRB process is new and requires careful study to understand its pitfalls and benefits. As such, UMass Medical School and Columbia University received a (NIH) grant to study how different institutions conduct reviews of research involving multiple sites

Single IRBs in Multisite Trials: Questions Posed by the New NIH Policy

Of all the issues raised by the NIH single-IRB policy, the relationship between the single IRB and the participating sites is possibly the most complex. There are 3 critical aspects that academic institutions, researchers, and policy makers will have to resolve before implementation of the new policy: (1) the relationship between the single IRB and the local institutions, including the local IRBs; (2) the collection and incorporation of local knowledge in the single-IRB review; and (3) the relationship between the single IRB and local researchers. These issues involve fundamental legal, ethical, institutional, and policy tensions that will profoundly shape the costs and effectiveness of future multisite research involving human research participants

ParaPhraser: Russian paraphrase corpus and shared task

The paper describes the results of the First Russian Paraphrase Detection Shared Task held in St.-Petersburg, Russia, in October 2016. Research in the area of paraphrase extraction, detection and generation has been successfully developing for a long time while there has been only a recent surge of interest towards the problem in the Russian community of computational linguistics. We try to overcome this gap by introducing the project ParaPhraser.ru dedicated to the collection of Russian paraphrase corpus and organizing a Paraphrase Detection Shared Task, which uses the corpus as the training data. The participants of the task applied a wide variety of techniques to the problem of paraphrase detection, from rule-based approaches to deep learning, and results of the task reflect the following tendencies: the best scores are obtained by the strategy of using traditional classifiers combined with fine-grained linguistic features, however, complex neural networks, shallow methods and purely technical methods also demonstrate competitive results.Peer reviewe

Strategies for Reducing Adverse Outcomes for Criminal Justice-Involved Populations

In the United States, we spend $81 billion taxpayer dollars annually on the costs of incarceration according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but including other costs may increase that estimate to$181 billion. Data from Worcester suggest that the cost of incarcerating individuals in the Piedmont neighborhood of Worcester eclipse the entire annual budget of the Division of Public Health in Worcester. With a hard line on petty crime, lack of substance use disorder treatment in jail and prison, concentrated policing and racial profiling in low income communities of color and poor reentry support services, mass incarceration is destined to continue. The opioid crisis in Massachusetts has affirmed that individuals with a history of incarceration and opioid use disorder are at greatest risk for nonfatal and fatal overdose. Furthermore, homelessness and serious mental illness increase that risk dramatically. In turn, the Governor and Secretary of Health and Human Services in concert with the Massachusetts Medicaid Program, the Department of Public Health and the Trial courts have undertaken a multi-pronged strategy to mitigate those risks. This panel will present three interventions to improve those outcomes. Three panelists will describe and present findings on three studies completed and in process to reduce the health risks for justice-involved persons in Massachusetts. Dr. Ferguson will describe an implementation science study of four correctional systems which embarked on medication assisted therapies for opioid use disorder which has helped to inform current mixed methods research to study a pilot of medication assisted treatment in seven Massachusetts jails; Dr. Pivovarova will describe her study of health status for individuals participating in Drug Court, a diversionary program that mandates substance use disorder treatment in the community for individuals arrested for drug related offenses; and Ms. Dupuis will describe the MassHealth funded Behavioral Health Justice Involved project to provide returning citizens with navigators to assist them in linking to community-based treatment and to address social determinants of health such as housing and employment. During the presentations, attendees will be asked to formulate questions or reflections for discussion. These will be collected and prioritized by the moderator of the session for further discussion

Efikasnost proizvodnje mesa zeca uz pomoć savremene tehnologije na privatnoj farmi

It is proposed to grow rabbits in the modern production technology with the use of the developed technology of using recycled materials in the construction of cages for keeping rabbits. It is also proposed to use interbreed crossing of New Zealand White breed and Flanders, and also breeds Californian and Flanders breed.Predlaže se uzgoj zečeva u savremenoj proizvodnoj tehnologiji uz korišćenje razvijene tehnologije upotrebe recikliranih materijala u izgradnji kaveza za držanje zečeva. Takođe se predlaže korišćenje meleza novozelandske bele rase i flandrijske rase zečeva, kao i meleza kalifornijske i flandrijske rasa

Local Knowledge and Single IRBs for Multisite Studies: Challenges and Solutions

New federal policies require single IRB review for multisite studies, but many questions remain about how these IRBs will use local knowledge. The findings from our study, the first to examine how single IRBs perceive needs for local knowledge, reveal several challenges. Study respondents identified four potentially relevant types of local knowledge: about culture and linguistics, about geography and socioeconomics, about the researchers, and about the institutions. Such knowledge can potentially be obtained through local sites, but single IRBs may be unaware of potentially relevant local information, and lack of informal relationships may impede single IRBs’ reviews and interactions with researchers. While a recent, commonly used, standardized single‐IRB form asks three basic questions about local information, our findings suggest potential needs for additional information and, thus, have important implications for practice, policy, and research

The efficiency of the production of rabbit meat with the help of modern technology in the personal subsidary farm

It is proposed to grow rabbits in the modern production technology with the use of the developed technology of using recycled materials in the construction of cages for keeping rabbits. It is also proposed to use interbreed crossing of New Zealand White breed and Flanders, and also breeds Californian and Flanders breed

Development and validation of the Malingering Assessment of Psychopathology (MAP)

Clinicians and researchers have long recognized the importance of malingering assessment in forensic evaluations. The use of psychological tests has aided in the detection of symptom feigning, but the ultimate decision about malingering remains unstructured and based on clinical judgment. This study sought to implement a Structure Professional Judgment approach to decision making about malingering. An instrument, the Malingering Assessment of Psychopathology (MAP), was developed from research on correlates of malingering and expert recommendations. The MAP is comprised of 20 clinician-rated items across three subscales of Historical/Demographic (HD), Clinical Presentation (CP), and Psychological Testing (PT). To examine the MAP, clinicians from leading forensic organizations were asked to complete a questionnaire about a recent forensic evaluation. The respondents were randomly assigned to describe a case of an honest or malingering defendant. In total, 182 clinicians were included in the final analysis. The reliability of the MAP was examined using item-total correlations and Cronbach\u27s Coeffiecient Alpha. Most items had moderate item-total correlations. The Coefficient Alpha for the Total Score and two subscales exceeded .70. Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the MAP failed to support a 3-factor or a higher-order structure. An Exploratory Factor Analysis indicated that a 5-factor model may be a better fit for the data. The content and concurrent validity of the MAP were examined. Clinicians reported that most of the items on the MAP were at least of moderate importance when assessing for malingering of psychopathology. All three subscales and the Total Score discriminated well between honest and malingering defendants as measured by mean differences, logistic regression, and ROC analyses. A revised version of the MAP, which removed the least reliable and valid items, did not significantly the findings. In summary, the MAP appears to be a relatively reliable and valid instrument in assessing malingering of psychopathology. However, these findings are strongly tempered by the limitations of the study design. The ultimate question of whether the MAP improved clinical decision making could not be investigated. Preliminary findings on this instrument suggest that future research should address inter-rater reliability and the ability of the MAP to improve on unaided clinical judgment

Validation of VIP-V with Psychiatric Patients

Abstract not availabl