Perceived Racial Expectations of Children

Racism is an ever-evolving aspect of our society. Although the overt racism of the past may be behind us, indirect discrimination still prevails today. The proposed study aims to reevaluate race in today’s youth so as to fill the gap of current, relevant research, especially in children. Racism can cause a host of detrimental mental and physical health effects ranging from cardiovascular disease in adults to ADHD in children. It is not only overt acts of racism that cause these effects, but ambiguous acts of racism as well. Therefore, my proposed study aims to identify prejudices in children through the use of a picture containing ambiguous scenes of children at play. Participants will identify if the scene is prosocial or conflict and identify if the child instigating the act is black or white. If prejudices in children can be identified, it can begin to make parents, students, and educators more aware of their underlying prejudices, as well as bring interest to discovering ways to prevent it

Perceived Racial Expectations of Children

This study concerns the presence of prejudice among children, especially concerning ambiguous everyday situations. Racism can be a source of a variety of health issues, and everyday acts of prejudice can be even more harmful that overt acts of racism. Therefore, this study aims to identify racial preferences among children, in the form of everyday ambiguous situations by having them identify what is occurring in a picture involving ambiguous interactions between white and black children on a playground. Identifying racism early in life could help combat the cumulative stress effects that racism has on the individual. By reducing this stress, one can in turn decrease the frequency of mental and physical health issues amongst adults. By bringing to light the prejudices that may still exist in schools today, students, parents, and educators may be made more aware of their actions and in turn may take steps to decrease prejudicial acts

In vitro-ex vivo model systems for nanosafety assessment

Engineered nanomaterials have unique and novel properties enabling wide-ranging new applications in nearly all fields of research. As these new properties have raised concerns about potential adverse effects for the environment and human health, extensive efforts are underway to define reliable, cost- and time-effective, as well as mechanistic-based testing strategies to replace the current method of animal testing, which is still the most prevalent model used for the risk assessment of chemicals. Current approaches for nanomaterials follow this line. The aim of this review is to explore and qualify the relevance of new in vitro and ex vivo models in (nano)material safety assessment, a crucial prerequisite for translation into applications

Anticipation of regulatory needs for nanotechnology-enabled health products

Development of nanotechnology-based applications in health sector offer innovative therapeutic and diagnostic opportunities to address medical needs. At the moment, no specific regulatory framework exists for nano-enabled health products and the current regulatory practise might require additional guidance in order to fully cover the particularities of such products. This white paper summarizes the major challenges associated with the regulation of the nano-enabled health products. Depending on their mode of action nano-enabled health products are regulated either as medicinal products or medical devices. However, due to the increased complexity of such products and their size-related properties the selection of the regulatory path can become challenging since the primary mode of action might be difficult to determine. Due to the fast progress in the field and the lack of robust datasets, only initial guidance on regulatory information needs is currently available and the question remains whether these identified requirements are sufficient for a reliable characterisation of nano-enabled products. In relation to the need for additional information on the quality, safety and efficacy standardised methods have to be available. However, many conventional methods might not be suitable or reliable for nanomaterial testing due to the interference of nanomaterial with assays components. New state-of-art methods, instruments, approaches or tools have not yet sufficiently proven their reliability and relevance for the given purpose. As patents are expiring generic versions of the innovator products will require access to the market. Since the physicochemical characteristics can be very complex and depend on the manufacturing process, pharmacokinetic assessment might not be sufficient and more guidance is needed on how the bioequivalence can be demonstrated. For the nano-enabled health products classified as medical devices, the European Definition on nanomaterials will apply, determining its further classification and regulatory requirements. Yet, the implementation of the definition and the necessity to determine the exposure to nanomaterials may pose additional challenges. The regulatory challenges highlighted in this white paper should guide the research projects and the involved communities willing to advance the regulatory science in the area of nanomedicine.JRC.F.2-Consumer Products Safet

Real-time traffic event detection using Twitter data

Incident detection is an important component of intelligent transport systems and plays a key role in urban traffic management and provision of traveller information services. Due to its importance, a wide number of researchers have developed different algorithms for real-time incident detection. However, the main limitation of existing techniques is that they do not work well in conditions where random factors could influence traffic flows. Twitter is a valuable source of information as its users post events as they happen or shortly after. Therefore, Twitter data have been used to predict a wide variety of real-time outcomes. This paper aims to present a methodology for a real-time traffic event detection using Twitter. Tweets are obtained through the Twitter streaming application programming interface in real time with a geolocation filter. Then, the author used natural language processing techniques to process the tweets before they are fed into a text classification algorithm that identifies if it is traffic related or not. The authors implemented their methodology in the West Midlands region in the UK and obtained an overall accuracy of 92·86%

Versailles project on advanced materials and standards (VAMAS) interlaboratory study on measuring the number concentration of colloidal gold nanoparticles

We describe the outcome of a large international interlaboratory study of the measurement of particle number concentration of colloidal nanoparticles, project 10 of the technical working area 34, "Nanoparticle Populations" of the Versailles Project on Advanced Materials and Standards (VAMAS). A total of 50 laboratories delivered results for the number concentration of 30 nm gold colloidal nanoparticles measured using particle tracking analysis (PTA), single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (spICP-MS), ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) light spectroscopy, centrifugal liquid sedimentation (CLS) and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). The study provides quantitative data to evaluate the repeatability of these methods and their reproducibility in the measurement of number concentration of model nanoparticle systems following a common measurement protocol. We find that the population-averaging methods of SAXS, CLS and UV-Vis have high measurement repeatability and reproducibility, with between-labs variability of 2.6%, 11% and 1.4% respectively. However, results may be significantly biased for reasons including inaccurate material properties whose values are used to compute the number concentration. Particle-counting method results are less reproducibile than population-averaging methods, with measured between-labs variability of 68% and 46% for PTA and spICP-MS respectively. This study provides the stakeholder community with important comparative data to underpin measurement reproducibility and method validation for number concentration of nanoparticles

Versailles project on advanced materials and standards (VAMAS) interlaboratory study on measuring the number concentration of colloidal gold nanoparticles

We describe the outcome of a large international interlaboratory study of the measurement of particle number concentration of colloidal nanoparticles, project 10 of the technical working area 34, "Nanoparticle Populations" of the Versailles Project on Advanced Materials and Standards (VAMAS). A total of 50 laboratories delivered results for the number concentration of 30 nm gold colloidal nanoparticles measured using particle tracking analysis (PTA), single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (spICP-MS), ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) light spectroscopy, centrifugal liquid sedimentation (CLS) and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). The study provides quantitative data to evaluate the repeatability of these methods and their reproducibility in the measurement of number concentration of model nanoparticle systems following a common measurement protocol. We find that the population-averaging methods of SAXS, CLS and UV-Vis have high measurement repeatability and reproducibility, with between-labs variability of 2.6%, 11% and 1.4% respectively. However, results may be significantly biased for reasons including inaccurate material properties whose values are used to compute the number concentration. Particle-counting method results are less reproducibile than population-averaging methods, with measured between-labs variability of 68% and 46% for PTA and spICP-MS respectively. This study provides the stakeholder community with important comparative data to underpin measurement reproducibility and method validation for number concentration of nanoparticles

Versailles project on advanced materials and standards (VAMAS) interlaboratory study on measuring the number concentration of colloidal gold nanoparticles

We describe the outcome of a large international interlaboratory study of the measurement of particle number concentration of colloidal nanoparticles, project 10 of the technical working area 34, "Nanoparticle Populations" of the Versailles Project on Advanced Materials and Standards (VAMAS). A total of 50 laboratories delivered results for the number concentration of 30 nm gold colloidal nanoparticles measured using particle tracking analysis (PTA), single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (spICP-MS), ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) light spectroscopy, centrifugal liquid sedimentation (CLS) and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). The study provides quantitative data to evaluate the repeatability of these methods and their reproducibility in the measurement of number concentration of model nanoparticle systems following a common measurement protocol. We find that the population-averaging methods of SAXS, CLS and UV-Vis have high measurement repeatability and reproducibility, with between-labs variability of 2.6%, 11% and 1.4% respectively. However, results may be significantly biased for reasons including inaccurate material properties whose values are used to compute the number concentration. Particle-counting method results are less reproducibile than population-averaging methods, with measured between-labs variability of 68% and 46% for PTA and spICP-MS respectively. This study provides the stakeholder community with important comparative data to underpin measurement reproducibility and method validation for number concentration of nanoparticles