A randomized clinical trial comparing liberalized diets and therapeutic diets in long-term-care residents

The population of elderly people in the United States is predicted to increase in large numbers within the next few decades. Many of them will be admitted to long-term-care centers in the waning years of their lives. Health care professionals will need to be prepared for this influx of the elderly into these institutions and for their demands of improved quality of life in these centers. Unplanned weight loss has become one of the major predictors of mortality in long-term-care residents. The purpose of the study was to compare the use of liberalized diets with the traditional therapeutic diets long advocated in long-term-care facilities in the United States. The objectives were to conduct a randomized clinical trial with a treatment group (subjects who consumed liberalized diets) and a control group (subjects who continued with their usual therapeutic diets), and to compare outcomes between the two groups. The randomized clinical trial was conducted for 18 weeks from April to August 2009 at a long-term-care facility in rural North Mississippi. Twenty-two persons ranging in age from 54 to 100 years were approved by their physicians for participation in the trial. All of these persons participated and completed the trial. Eleven of the participants received their prescribed therapeutic diet and 11 participants received a liberalized diet for the length of the trial study. At the end of the study, there were no significant differences (p\u3e0.05) in mean body weights and laboratory values between the two groups. However, there was a trend of weight loss in the therapeutic diet group (mean weight loss of 2% (1.4 kg) during the 18-week trial), and although it was not significant (p\u3e0.05), this supports the growing belief of those who advocate liberalized geriatric diets to improve quality of life and prevent unintentional weight loss. Participants in the liberalized diet group did not experience weight loss and gained 0.5 kg by the end of the study

Online Communities of Practice in the Contact Center Environment: Factors that Influence Participation

Knowledge is a critical element of competitive advantage. More specifically, tribal knowledge developed by workers from on-the-job experiences is of significant value and is also one of the most difficult forms of knowledge to capture and leverage across the workforce. In an effort to capture, store, and share tribal knowledge, organizations have begun to adopt a concept of social learning known as communities of practice. However, low participation by community members in many organizations has resulted in mediocre results. This has been particularly evident in the contact center environment, which has its own unique culture and challenges. Without a solid knowledge and understanding of the motivators, enablers, and barriers of participation critical to the adoption of and participation in contact center communities of practice, organizations often struggle to achieve sufficient gains in competitive advantage and efficiencies to justify the investment in such an intervention. Five research objectives guide the research in this study to identify the specific motivators, enablers, and barriers to participation in communities of practice in the contact center environment. The objectives break out participation in terms of passive use of information provided by others and active contribution of knowledge to the community. Through an exploratory-sequential, mixed methods design, the research presented serves as a cross-sectional, non-experimental study of a finite population of nearly 9,000 customer service representatives in a large organization with contact centers across the United States. The first stage involved qualitative focus group interviews with a small sample of participants across the different lines of business supported by the centers and was followed by a quantitative survey in the second stage. The study revealed that contact centers have many factors of participation in common with other organizations studied previously. However, it also revealed some stark differences, especially in terms of enablers and barriers to participation. The type of work and the way in which time is managed in the contact center world represented key factors specific to the environment. In addition, the team structures and the infrastructure supporting a company-wide community of practice were also significant factors that drove participation either up or down. The study provides initial research into the specifics of the contact center environment. However, additional research with other organizations and industries is needed to further validate the findings of this study

Survivor Academe: Assessing Reflective Practice

Reflective practice is a goal for many academic professional development programs. What do faculty participants gain from a reflective practice program, and how much reflection do they actually practice? Using interviews and grounded theory, we identified three crucial needs being met by such a program at our university. In addition, we compared participants’ comments to the elements of reflection established by Dewey and Rodgers to determine the extent of their reflection. The results call for more assessment to better align the structures of reflective practice programs with participant needs as well as further research on the effects of reflective practice on the participants, their teaching, and their students

Food without sun: Price and life-saving potential

International audienceThe sun could be blocked by an asteroid impact, supervolcanic eruption, or nuclear winter caused by burning of cities during nuclear war. The primary problem in these scenarios is loss of food production. Previous work has shown that alternate foods not dependent on sunlight, such as bacteria grown on natural gas, calories extracted from killed leaves, and cellulose turned into sugar enzymatically, could feed everyone in these catastrophes and preparation for these foods would save lives highly cost-effectively. This study estimates the price of alternate foods during a catastrophe scenario with global trade and information sharing, but no migration, loans, aid or conflict. Without alternate foods, for a five year winter, only ~10% of the population would survive. The price of dry food would rise to ~$100/kg, and the expenditure on this food would be ~$100 trillion over five years. If alternate food were $8/kg, the surviving global population increases to ~70%, saving >4 billion lives. The probability of a loss of civilization and its impact on many future generations would be much lower in this scenario and the total expenditure on food would be halved. Preparation for alternate foods would be a good investment even for wealthy people who would survive without alternate foods. A non-governmental mechanism of coordinating the investments of these rich people may be possible. Identifying companies whose interests align with alternate food preparations may save lives at a negative cost

Modeling the Example Life-Cycle in an Online Classification Learner

Abstract. An online classification system maintained by a learner can be subject to latency and filtering of training examples which can impact on its classification accuracy especially under concept drift. A life-cycle model is developed to provide a framework for studying this problem. Meta data emerges from this model which it is proposed can enhance online learning systems. In particular, the definition of the time-stamp of an example, as currently used in the literature, is shown to be problematic and an alternative is proposed

Portal control of viral prohead expansion and DNA packaging

AbstractBacteriophage T4 terminase packages DNA in vitro into empty small or large proheads (esps or elps). In vivo maturation of esps yields the more stable and voluminous elps required to contain the 170 kb T4 genome. Functional proheads can be assembled containing portal–GFP fusion proteins. In the absence of terminase activity these accumulated in esps in vivo, whereas wild-type portals were found in elps. By nuclease protection assay dsDNAs of lengths 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 5, 11, 20, 40 or 170 kb were efficiently packaged into wild-type elps in vitro, but less so into esps and gp20–GFP elps; particularly with DNAs shorter than 11 kb. However, 0.1 kb substrates were equally efficiently packaged into all types of proheads as judged by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. These data suggest the portal controls the expansion of the major capsid protein lattice during prohead maturation, and that this expansion is necessary for DNA protection but not for packaging

DNA crunching by a viral packaging motor: Compression of a procapsid-portal stalled Y-DNA substrate

AbstractMany large double-stranded DNA viruses employ high force-generating ATP-driven molecular motors to package to high density their genomes into empty procapsids. Bacteriophage T4 DNA translocation is driven by a two-component motor consisting of the procapsid portal docked with a packaging terminase-ATPase. Fluorescence resonance energy transfer and fluorescence correlation spectroscopic (FRET-FCS) studies of a branched (Y-junction) DNA substrate with a procapsid-anchoring leader segment and a single dye molecule situated at the junction point reveal that the “Y-DNA” stalls in proximity to the procapsid portal fused to GFP. Comparable structure Y-DNA substrates containing energy transfer dye pairs in the Y-stem separated by 10 or 14 base pairs reveal that B-form DNA is locally compressed 22–24% by the linear force of the packaging motor. Torsional compression of duplex DNA is thus implicated in the mechanism of DNA translocation

Fast plants and gene x environment interactions for the Biology 202 laboratory

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability for a single genotype to produce multiple phenotypes in response to environmental variation. The phenotypic plasticity of a genotype is described by its norm of reaction, and norms of reaction for different genotypes might suggest that each is favored by a different environment. In this experiment, we established a fertility gradient and produced norms of reaction for a variety of measures of plant performance using two strains of Wisconsin Fast Plants (“Astro” and “Dwarf”). The Dwarf variety performed best at low fertility levels, while the Astro variety performed best at high fertility levels. Using these results, we predicted that if Dwarf and Astro varieties were allowed to compete, their relative success would correspond to the differences in their norms of reaction. This prediction seemed to be supported when competition involved one plant of each variety, but when two plants of each variety competed, Astro generally performed best across the fertility gradient. With further improvement, this system can provide an opportunity for students to generate and test predictions regarding phenotypic plasticity in introductory biology laboratories