Masculinity, Social Connectedness, and Mental Health: Men's Diverse Patterns of Practice.

Men's mental health has remained undertheorized, particularly in terms of the gendered nature of men's social relations. While the importance of social connections and strong supportive networks for improving mental health and well-being is well documented, we know little about men's social support networks or how men go about seeking or mobilizing social support. An in-depth understanding of the gendered nature of men's social connections and the ways in which the interplay between masculinity and men's social connections can impact men's mental health is needed. Fifteen life history interviews were undertaken with men in the community. A theoretical framework of gender relations was used to analyze the men's interviews. The findings provide rich insights into men's diverse patterns of practice in regards to seeking or mobilizing social support. While some men differentiated between their social connections with men and women, others experienced difficulties in mobilizing support from existing connections. Some men maintained a desire to be independent, rejecting the need for social support, whereas others established support networks from which they could actively seek support. Overall, the findings suggest that patterns of social connectedness among men are diverse, challenging the social science literature that frames all men's social relationships as being largely instrumental, and men as less able and less interested than women in building emotional and supportive relationships with others. The implications of these findings for promoting men's social connectedness and mental health are discussed

CoRRPUS: Codex-Leveraged Structured Representations for Neurosymbolic Story Understanding

Story generation and understanding -- as with all NLG/NLU tasks -- has seen a surge in neurosymbolic work. Researchers have recognized that, while large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, they can be augmented with symbolic means to be even better and to make up for any flaws that the neural networks might have. However, symbolic methods are extremely costly in terms of the amount of time and expertise needed to create them. In this work, we capitalize on state-of-the-art Code-LLMs, such as Codex, to bootstrap the use of symbolic methods for tracking the state of stories and aiding in story understanding. We show that our CoRRPUS system and abstracted prompting procedures can beat current state-of-the-art structured LLM techniques on pre-existing story understanding tasks (bAbI task 2 and Re^3) with minimal hand engineering. We hope that this work can help highlight the importance of symbolic representations and specialized prompting for LLMs as these models require some guidance for performing reasoning tasks properly.Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 202

Response to Kamath et al 'A syncretic approach can yield dividends'

We welcome the response from Kamath et al. and their insight into the issues and culture within medicine in India, and their thoughts about how to address these issues. We also agree that a drama-based approach is not sufficient on its own to deal with entrenched power issues which affect students adversely. As we have indicated, we believe “a multipronged approach is needed to generate systemic change.” These authors similarly advocate that student mistreatment be dealt with “in a comprehensive manner” including a ‘grievance redressal system’ and other measures to withhold accreditation where there are issues of abuse of power. Nevertheless, we note that Kamath et al. have responded positively to our approach—as a part of that mix—and it would be of great interest to see whether drama-based workshops could support medical students developing embodied acting skills in their institution and whether they may have similar transformative effects. We’d like to refer the authors to an excellent Medical Humanities paper we referenced that outlined drama-based activities in medical education in India: Gupta S, Singh S. Confluence: understanding medical humanities through street theatre. Medical Humanities. 2011;37(2):127-128. Despite the above article, the authors note that medical education in India has not embraced the medical humanities. We would draw a distinction within the medical humanities between activities which are primarily studious (reading literature, studying medical history) and workshops that are based on participative and embodied activity. Our experience has indicated the effectiveness of drama-based workshops in addressing both the cognitive and emotive aspects of harmful practices and we believe that it is the embodied nature of acting skills workshops that is transformative

Consultancy on project management and monitoring systems

Project number related to IDRC support could not be determine

Riverine nitrogen source and yield in urban systems

Although human reshaping of the nitrogen (N) cycle is well established, contributions of individual N sources to riverine and coastal eutrophication are less certain. Urban N fluxes are potentially substantial, particularly from sewer overflows. Results from four longitudinal surveys in rivers in and around the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were used to characterize N chemistry and isotopic composition and were compared with LOADEST-model-derived total N (TN) flux budgets from three urban areas along the Ohio River (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Louisville, Kentucky). Triple nitrate isotopes reveal that riverine nitrate in the Pittsburgh region is dominated by wastewater inputs despite high atmospheric deposition rates. Our budget estimates demonstrate that the magnitude of urban N yields is comparable to yields reported for agricultural watersheds and that these high urban N yields cannot consist of permitted, point-source discharges alone. Our results reveal that nonpoint sources in urban systems represent an important but overlooked source of TN to overall riverine budgets

For Joan:Some letters with reverence, an honorary degree, and a dialogical tribute

In 2012, I co‐taught, with Anne‐Charlott Callerstig, a master's course module at Linköping University in Swedenentitled ‘Intersectional Gender, and Institutional and Organizational Work’. Towards the end of the course I was emailed by Donald Van Houten asking for contributions to a text to be presented at a reception on International Women's Day, 8 March 2012, at the University of Oregon, honouring Joan Acker and her remarkable career. The reception was part of the Lorwin Lecture Series on ‘Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ and the Wayne Morse Center symposium on ‘Gender Equity and Capitalism’. To honour Joan and her legacy, I was asked to send a personal statement testifying to Joan's impact on her life and work, to be collected together in a small book. We were using some of Joan's writing as key texts on the module, so it seemed appropriate to do something collectively, and accordingly I asked the students to write short ‘letters’ to Joan. I sent off our letters, which we called ‘Some Letters Written with Reverence’; I trust Joan received them and liked them. Therefore, here in this writing for Joan there are three parts. In the first, the ‘letters’ are reproduced; the next is the edited proposal I wrote for Joan to be awarded an honorary doctorate at Hanken School of Economics, the Swedish‐language business school in Helsinki, Finland; she received the honour in 2011; and for the last part, I add an additional personal tribute and reflection from the vantage point of now, today

Office-based optical coherence tomographic imaging of human vocal cords

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an evolving noninvasive imaging modality and has been used to image the larynx during surgical endoscopy. The design of an OCT sampling device capable of capturing images of the human larynx during a typical office based laryngoscopy examination is discussed. Both patient’s and physician\u27s movements were addressed. In vivo OCT imaging of the human larynx is demonstrated. Though the long focal length limits the lateral resolution of the image, the basement membrane can still be readily distinguished. Office-based OCT has the potential to guide surgical biopsies, direct therapy, and monitor disease. This is a promising imaging modality to study the larynx

Androgen Signaling in the Placenta

The placenta is a multifunctional, transitory organ that mediates transport of nutrients and waste, gas exchange, and endocrine signaling. In fact, placental secretion of hormones is critical for maintenance of pregnancy, as well as growth and development of healthy offspring. In this chapter, the role of androgens in placental development and function is highlighted. First, a brief summary will be provided on the different mammalian placental types followed by an overview of placental steroidogenesis. Next, the chapter will focus on genomic and non-genomic androgen signaling pathways. Finally, an overview will be provided on the current status of androgen signaling in the placenta during normal and abnormal pregnancies

Therapeutic vaccination following early antiretroviral therapy elicits highly functional T cell responses against conserved HIV-1 regions

'Kick and kill' cure strategies aim to induce HIV protein expression in latently infected cells (kick), and thus trigger their elimination by cytolytic T cells (kill). In the Research in Viral Eradication of HIV Reservoirs trial (NCT02336074), people diagnosed with primary HIV infection received immediate antiretroviral therapy (ART) and were randomised 24 weeks later to either a latency-reversing agent, vorinostat, together with ChAdV63.HIVconsv and MVA.HIVconsv vaccines, or ART alone. This intervention conferred no reduction in HIV-1 reservoir size over ART alone, despite boosting virus-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. The effects of the intervention were examined at the cellular level in the two trial arms using unbiased computational analysis of polyfunctional scores. This showed that the frequency and polyfunctionality of virus-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cell populations were significantly increased over 12 weeks post-vaccination, compared to the ART-only arm. HIV-specific IL-2-secreting CD8+ T cells also expanded significantly in the intervention arm and were correlated with antiviral activity against heterologous HIV in vitro. Therapeutic vaccination during ART commenced in primary infection can induce functional T cell responses that are phenotypically similar to those of HIV controllers. Analytical therapy interruption may help determine their ability to control HIV in vivo