Finding positive health in “fortalezas” and “comunidad”: A case study of Latinos/X in Sonoma Valley

Background: Psychological literature and needs-assessment reports emphasize that Latinos/X in Sonoma Valley continue to be impacted by the detrimental effects of the 2017 Northern California wildfires (Domínguez & Yeh, 2018), current immigration enforcement practices, higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, persistent barriers to health care access, and obstacles to proportionate leadership representation compared to White American families. To cope with these disparities and navigate life adversities, Sonoma Valley Latinos/X often rely on “fortalezas” [strengths] and community, political, spiritual, cultural, and physical assets. These assets, which often include meaningful interactions with family, friends, neighbors, folk healers, faith-based organizations, and community members, must be incorporated when health care, community, and social service initiatives are designed and implemented. Method: Our community-engaged research team (CERT) used asset-based community development (ABCD) as a conceptual framework (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) (Wallerstein & Duran, 2003) as a methodological approach to explore the assets and “fortalezas” [strengths] that have enabled Latinos/X to overcome adverse experiences i n Sonoma Valley. Five focus groups and 29 in-depth interviews were conducted because these methods are well-suited for Latino/X relational styles of “platicando” [small talk] (Delgado-Romero, Singh, & De Los Santos, 2018) . Participants were 18 years or older, lived or worked i n Sonoma Valley, and self-identified as Latino/X. Our sample included Latino/X parents, grandparents, artists, folk healers, health and social service providers, community leaders, students, and school personnel. Specific locations where interviews took place include the Hanna Institute, Nuestra Voz, La Luz Center, Center for Well-Being, Boys and Girls Clubs of Sonoma Valley, the Family Resource Center in El Verano, the Sonoma Valley Community Health Center, participants’ houses, and the broader Sonoma Valley community. Our research prioritized depth of relational engagement rather than sample size (Bowden, Caine, Yohani, 2017). We discontinued data collection once our research objectives were achieved and data saturation was accomplished. For data analysis, we used quasi-statistics to quantify the frequency of asset endorsement; open, axial, and selective coding to identify and categorize the assets; and GIS software for the creation of our two asset maps. Findings: Findings indicate that Latinos/X are marginally positioned within Sonoma Valley society. Latinos/X have coped with and adapted to adverse conditions and disparities using and relying on a variety of informal networks and formal sources of support. Their decision to rely on one source of support over another is often based on (a) the extent to which they can afford the services or support required; (b) their particular needs, goals, or objectives at the time the help i s needed; (c) their preference for support resources that honor “respeto” [respect], “personalismo” [a preference for close personal attention i n relationships], and stable and welcoming intimate relationships with others; (d) the accessibility associated with pursuing these support services (e.g., geographic and transportation limitations); and (e) the extent to which culturally relevant and Spanish-speaking support can be found. Dissemination: All data i n this study i s co-owned with the Sonoma Valley community. With the help of our community partners, this report was disseminated in Sonoma Valley during community meetings and forums, offering residents the opportunity to provide feedback, debate preliminary results, and assess whether their voices were captured accurately. Once the community expressed that the findings were representative of the Latino/X experience in Sonoma Valley, we finalized recommendations to assist community members, government officials, and health care and social service providers in designing culturally informed social, health, and/or community programs

Analyzing children's expectations from robotic companions in educational settings

The use of robots as educational partners has been extensively explored, but less is known about the required characteristics these robots should have to meet children's expectations. Thus the purpose of this study is to analyze children's assumptions regarding morphology, functionality, and body features, among others, that robots should have to interact with them. To do so, we analyzed 142 drawings from 9 to 10 years old children and their answers to a survey provided after interacting with different robotic platforms. The main results convey on a gender-less robot with anthropomorphic (but machine-like) characteristics

Encontrando los beneficios de la comunidad y sus fortalezas a la salud positiva: Un estudio de caso con Latinos/X

Antecedentes: La literatura psicológica y los informes que evalúan las necesidades de la comunidad, enfatizan que los Latinos/X en el Valle de Sonoma continúan siendo afectados por los efectos perjudiciales de los incendios forestales del norte de California de 2017 (Domínguez y Yeh, 2018), las prácticas actuales de aplicación de la ley de inmigración, tasas más altas de pobreza, menor nivel educativo, barreras persistentes para el acceso a la atención médica y obstáculos para una representación de liderazgo proporcional en comparación con las familias Blancas Americanas. Para hacer frente a estas disparidades y navegar por las adversidades de la vida, los Latinos/X del Valle de Sonoma a menudo confían en las fortalezas y en los activos comunitarios, políticos, espirituales, culturales y físicos. Estos activos, que a menudo incluyen interacciones significativas con familiares, amigos, vecinos, curanderos, organizaciones religiosas y miembros de la comunidad, deben incorporarse cuando se diseñan e implementan iniciativas de servicios sociales, comunitarios y de atención médica. Método: Nuestro equipo de investigación comprometido con la comunidad (CERT) utilizó el desarrollo comunitario basado en activos (ABCD) como marco conceptual (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) y la investigación participativa basada en la comunidad (CBPR) (Wallerstein & Duran, 2003) como un enfoque metodológico para explorar los activos y las fortalezas que han permitido a los Latinos/X superar las experiencias adversas en el Valle de Sonoma. Se llevaron a cabo cinco grupos de enfoque y 29 entrevistas individuales porque estos métodos son muy adecuados para los estilos relacionales de platica (pequeña charla) entre los Latinos/X (Delgado-Romero, Singh y De Los Santos, 2018). Los participantes tenían 18 años o más, vivían o trabajaban en el Valle de Sonoma y se autoidentifican como Latinos/X. Nuestra muestra incluyó padres Latinos/X, abuelos, artistas, curanderos, proveedores de servicios sociales y de salud, líderes comunitarios, estudiantes y personal escolar. Los lugares específicos donde se realizaron las entrevistas incluyen el Instituto Hanna, Nuestra Voz, el Centro La Luz, el Centro para el Bienestar, Boys and Girls Clubs del Valle de Sonoma, el Centro de Recursos Familiares en El Verano, el Centro de Salud Comunitario del Valle de Sonoma, las casas de los participantes y otros espacios en la comunidad. Nuestra investigación priorizó la profundidad del compromiso relacional en lugar del tamaño de la muestra (Bowden, Caine, Yohani, 2017). Suspendimos la recopilación de datos una vez que se lograron nuestros objetivos de investigación y se logró la saturación de datos. Para el análisis de datos, utilizamos cuasi-estadísticas para cuantificar la frecuencia de uso de los activos; codificación abierta, axial y selectiva; y software GIS para la creación de nuestros dos mapas de activos. Hallazgos: Los resultados indican que los Latinos/X están marginalmente posicionados dentro de la sociedad del Valle de Sonoma. Los Latinos/X se han enfrentado y se han adaptado a condiciones y disparidades adversas utilizando y confiando en una variedad de redes y fuentes de apoyo formales e informales. Su decisión de depender de una fuente de apoyo sobre otra a menudo se basa en: (a) la medida en que pueden pagar los servicios o el apoyo necesarios; (b) sus necesidades, metas u objetivos particulares en el momento en que se necesita la ayuda; (c) su preferencia por recursos de apoyo que honren el respeto, el personalismo [una preferencia por una atención personal cercana en las relaciones] y las relaciones cercanas estables y acogedoras con los demás; (d) la accesibilidad asociada con la búsqueda de estos servicios de soporte (por ejemplo, limitaciones geográficas y de transporte); y (e) la medida en que se puede encontrar apoyo culturalmente relevante y de habla hispana. Difusión: Todos los datos de este estudio son de propiedad conjunta con la comunidad del Valle de Sonoma. Con la ayuda de nuestros socios en la comunidad, este informe fue difundido en el Valle de Sonoma durante las reuniones y foros de la comunidad, ofreciendo a los residentes la oportunidad de proporcionar comentarios, debatir los resultados preliminares y evaluar si sus voces fueron capturadas con precisión. Una vez que la comunidad expresó que los hallazgos son representativos de la experiencia Latina/X en el Valle de Sonoma, establecimos las recomendaciones para ayudar a los miembros de la comunidad, los funcionarios del gobierno y los proveedores de servicios sociales y de salud a diseñar programas sociales, de salud, y/o comunitarios culturalmente informados

Long term measurement of the 222Rn concentration in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory

We report the results of 6 years (2013–2018) of measurements of 222Rn air concentration, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure and temperature in the halls A, B and C of the Canfranc Underground Laboratory (LSC). We have calculated all the Pearson correlation coefficients among these parameters and we have found a positive correlation between the 222Rn concentration and the relative humidity. Both correlated variables show a seasonal periodicity. The joint analysis of laboratory data and 4 years (2015– 2018) of the meteorological variables outside the laboratory shows the correlation between the 222Rn concentration and the outside temperature. The collected information stresses the relevance of designing good Rn-mitigation strategies in current and future experiments at LSC; in particular, we have checked for two years (2017–2018) the good performance of the mitigation procedure of the ANAIS-112 experiment. Finally, we have monitored (2019–2021) for 2 years of live time, the radon-free air provided by the radon abatement system installed in the laboratory.This research was funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 under Grant PID2019-104374GB-I00; by MINECO-FEDER under Grants FPA2017-83133-P, and FPA2014-55986-P; by MICINN-FEDER under Grants FPA2011-23749; by CONSOLIDER-Ingenio 2010 Programme under Grants MultiDark CSD2009-00064 and CPAN CSD2007-00042; by the University of Zaragoza under Grant UZ2017-CIE-09; by the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET), the Gobierno de Aragón (Group in Nuclear and Astroparticle Physics, ARAID Foundation and I. Coarasa predoctoral grant), the European Social Fund and by the LSC consortium

Characterization of invasive and colonizing isolates of Streptococcus agalactiae in East African adults

Ninety-five colonizing isolates and 74 invasive isolates of Streptococcus agalactiae from Kenyan adults were characterized by using capsular serotyping and multilocus sequence typing. Twenty-two sequence types clustering into five clonal complexes were found. Data support the view that S. agalactiae isolates belonging to a limited number of clonal complexes are invasive in adults worldwide

You made him be alive: Children’s perceptions of animacy in a humanoid robot

Social robots are becoming more sophisticated; in many cases they offer complex, autonomous interactions, responsive behaviors, and biomimetic appearances. These features may have significant impact on how people perceive and engage with robots; young children may be particularly influenced due to their developing ideas of agency. Young children are considered to hold naive beliefs of animacy and a tendency to mis-categorise moving objects as being alive but, with development, children can demonstrate a biological understanding of animacy. We experimentally explore the impact of children’s age and a humanoid’s movement on children’s perceptions of its animacy. Our humanoid’s behavior varied in apparent autonomy, from motionless, to manually operated, to covertly operated. Across conditions, younger children rated the robot as being significantly more person-like than older children did. We further found an interaction effect: younger children classified the robot as significantly more machine-like if they observed direct operation in contrast observing the motionless or apparently autonomous robot. Our findings replicate field results, supporting the modal model of the developmental trajectory for children’s understanding of animacy. We outline a program of research to both deepen the theoretical understanding of children’s animacy beliefs and develop robotic characters appropriate across key stages of child development

Towards a synthetic tutor assistant: The EASEL project and its architecture

Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor posits specific challenges: affective social behavior, proper modelling of the learner’s progress, discrimination of the learner’s utterances, expressions and mental states, which, in turn, require an integrated architecture combining perception, cognition and action. In this paper we present an attempt to improve the current state of robots in the educational domain by introducing the EASEL EU project. Specifically, we introduce the EASEL’s unified robot architecture, an innovative Synthetic Tutor Assistant (STA) whose goal is to interactively guide learners in a science-based learning paradigm, allowing us to achieve such rich multimodal interactions

De novo design of potent and resilient hACE2 decoys to neutralize SARS-CoV-2

We developed a de novo protein design strategy to swiftly engineer decoys for neutralizing pathogens that exploit extracellular host proteins to infect the cell. Our pipeline allowed the design, validation, and optimization of de novo hACE2 decoys to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. The best decoy, CTC-445.2, binds with low nanomolar affinity and high specificity to the RBD of the spike protein. Cryo-EM shows that the design is accurate and can simultaneously bind to all three RBDs of a single spike protein. Because the decoy replicates the spike protein target interface in hACE2, it is intrinsically resilient to viral mutational escape. A bivalent decoy, CTC-445.2d, shows ~10-fold improvement in binding. CTC-445.2d potently neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 infection of cells in vitro and a single intranasal prophylactic dose of decoy protected Syrian hamsters from a subsequent lethal SARS-CoV-2 challenge

Global, Regional, and National Levels and Trends in Burden of Oral Conditions from 1990 to 2017: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease 2017 Study

Government and nongovernmental organizations need national and global estimates on the descriptive epidemiology of common oral conditions for policy planning and evaluation. The aim of this component of the Global Burden of Disease study was to produce estimates on prevalence, incidence, and years lived with disability for oral conditions from 1990 to 2017 by sex, age, and countries. In addition, this study reports the global socioeconomic pattern in burden of oral conditions by the standard World Bank classification of economies as well as the Global Burden of Disease Socio-demographic Index. The findings show that oral conditions remain a substantial population health challenge. Globally, there were 3.5 billion cases (95% uncertainty interval [95% UI], 3.2 to 3.7 billion) of oral conditions, of which 2.3 billion (95% UI, 2.1 to 2.5 billion) had untreated caries in permanent teeth, 796 million (95% UI, 671 to 930 million) had severe periodontitis, 532 million (95% UI, 443 to 622 million) had untreated caries in deciduous teeth, 267 million (95% UI, 235 to 300 million) had total tooth loss, and 139 million (95% UI, 133 to 146 million) had other oral conditions in 2017. Several patterns emerged when the World Bank's classification of economies and the Socio-demographic Index were used as indicators of economic development. In general, more economically developed countries have the lowest burden of untreated dental caries and severe periodontitis and the highest burden of total tooth loss. The findings offer an opportunity for policy makers to identify successful oral health strategies and strengthen them; introduce and monitor different approaches where oral diseases are increasing; plan integration of oral health in the agenda for prevention of noncommunicable diseases; and estimate the cost of providing universal coverage for dental care

Economía y finanzas sociales: avances en la investigación

Esta obra colectiva propone un cambio de paradigma en la investigación científica, financiera y económica, cuyo centro de atención es reducir las desigualdades sociales y económicas, mejorar la sostenibilidad ambiental y la creación eficiente de valor económico. Desde un punto de vista crítico y mediante diversos enfoques teóricos, metodológicos y disciplinares, los autores analizan el esquema financiero predominante en las economías de mercado, al tiempo que abordan temas como la inclusión financiera, la banca ética o las experiencias e intervenciones en y sobre la economía social.ITESO, A.C