Urban planning as an enabler of urban health: Challenges and good practice in England following the 2012 planning and public health reforms

© 2019 The Authors This article synthesises the challenges faced by the English (urban) spatial planning system to become an enabler of urban health and explores some keys features of the evidence base, policy tools and policy implementation issues that urban planners need to be aware of to become health enablers. It draws on good practice identified in an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar series involving over 500 academic researchers and practitioners between 2015 and 2017. A number of key recommendations emerged out of the project. First, planning and health agendas must align at the local level. Second, the evidence base of health priorities must be locally relevant. Third, robust tools can support the creation of frameworks for delivering health outcomes through planning. And finally, adequate resources are necessary to develop the capacity of key place-making stakeholders

Attachment, infidelity, and loneliness in college students involved in a romantic relationship: the role of relationship satisfaction, morbidity and prayer for partner

This study examined the mediating effects of relationship satisfaction, prayer for a partner, and morbidity in the relationship between attachment and loneliness, infidelity and loneliness, and psychological morbidity and loneliness, in college students involved in a romantic relationship. Participants were students in an introductory course on family development. This study examined only students (n = 345) who were involved in a romantic relationship. The average age of participants was 19.46 (SD = 1.92) and 25 % were males. Short-form UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS-8), (Hays and DiMatteo in J Pers Assess 51:69–81, doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa5101_6, 1987); Relationship Satisfaction Scale (Funk and Rogge in J Fam Psychol 21:572–583, doi:10.1037/0893-3200.21.4.572, 2007); Rotterdam Symptom Checklist (De Haes et al. in Measuring the quality of life of cancer patients with the Rotterdam Symptom Checklist (RSCL): a manual, Northern Centre for Healthcare Research, Groningen, 1996); Prayer for Partner Scale, (Fincham et al. in J Pers Soc Psychol 99:649–659, doi:10.1037/a0019628, 2010); Infidelity Scale, (Drigotas et al. in J Pers Soc Psychol 77:509–524, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.3.509, 1999); and the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale-short form (Wei et al. in J Couns Psychol 52(4):602–614, doi:10.1037/0022-0167.52.4.602, 2005). Results showed that relationship satisfaction mediated the relationship between avoidance attachment and loneliness and between infidelity and loneliness. Physical morbidity mediated the relationship between anxious attachment and psychological morbidity. Psychological morbidity mediated the relationship between anxious attachment and physical morbidity. The present results expand the literature on attachment by presenting evidence that anxious and avoidant partners experience loneliness differently. Implications for couple’s therapy are addressed. Future research should replicate these results with older samples and married couples.Acknowledgments This research was supported by Grant Number 90FE0022 from the United States Department of Health and Human Services awarded to the last author

Comprehensive Quality Assessment in Clinical Ethics.

Scholars and professional organizations in bioethics describe various approaches to quality assessment in clinical ethics. Although much of this work represents significant contributions to the literature, it is not clear that there is a robust and shared understanding of what constitutes quality in clinical ethics, what activities should be measured when tracking clinical ethics work, and what metrics should be used when measuring those activities. Further, even the most robust quality assessment efforts to date are idiosyncratic, in that they represent evaluation of single activities or domains of clinical ethics activities, or a range of activities at a single hospital or healthcare system. Countering this trend, iin this article we propose a framework for moving beyond our current ways of understanding clinical ethics quality, toward comprehensive quality assessment. We first describe a way to conceptualize quality assessment as a process of measuring disparate, isolated work activities; then, we describe quality assessment in terms of tracking interconnected work activities holistically, across different levels of assessment. We conclude by inviting future efforts in quality improvement to adopt a comprehensive approach to quality assessment into their improvement practices, and offer recommendations for how the field might move in this direction

Cigarette smoke induces DNA damage and alters base-excision repair and tau levels in the brain of neonatal mice.

The prenatal and perinatal periods of brain development are especially vulnerable to insults by environmental agents. Early life exposure to cigarette smoke (CS), which contains both genotoxicants and oxidants, is considered an important risk factor for both neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Yet, little is known regarding the underlying pathogenetic mechanisms. In the present study, neonatal Swiss ICR (CD-1) albino mice were exposed to various concentrations of CS for 4 weeks and the brain examined for lipid peroxides, DNA damage, base-excision repair (BER) enzymes, apoptosis, and levels of the microtubule protein tau. CS induced a dose-dependent increase in both malondialdehyde and various types of DNA damage, including single-strand breaks, double-strand breaks, and DNA-protein cross-links. However, the CS-induced DNA damage in the brain returned to basal levels 1 week after smoking cessation. CS also modulated the activity and distribution of the BER enzymes 8-oxoguanine-DNA-glycosylase (OGG1) and apyrimidinic/apurinic endonuclease (APE1) in several brain regions. Normal tau (i.e., three-repeat tau, 3R tau) and various pathological forms of tau were also measured in the brain of CS-exposed neonatal mice, but only 3R tau and tau phosphorylated at serine 199 were significantly elevated. The oxidative stress, genomic dysregulation, and alterations in tau metabolism caused by CS during a critical period of brain development could explain why CS is an important risk factor for both neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders appearing in later life

Engineering Education and the Development of Expertise

BACKGROUND: Although engineering education has evolved in ways that improve the readiness of graduates to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, national and international organizations continue to call for change. Future changes in engineering education should be guided by research on expertise and the learning processes that support its development. PURPOSE: The goals of this paper are: to relate key findings from studies of the development of expertise to engineering education, to summarize instructional practices that are consistent with these findings, to provide examples of learning experiences that are consistent with these instructional practices, and finally, to identify challenges to implementing such learning experiences in engineering programs. SCOPE/METHOD: The research synthesized for this article includes that on the development of expertise, students’ approaches to learning, students’ responses to instructional practices, and the role of motivation in learning. In addition, literature on the dominant teaching and learning practices in engineering education isused to frame some of the challenges to implementing alternative approaches to learning. CONCLUSION: Current understanding of expertise, and the learning processes that develop it, indicates that engineering education should encompass a set of learning experiences that allow students to construct deep conceptual knowledge, to develop the ability to apply key technical and professional skills fluently, and to engage in anumber of authentic engineering projects. Engineering curricula and teaching methods are often not well aligned with these goals. Curriculum-level instructional design processes should be used to design and implement changes that will improve alignment