Inspiring Change for Women's Rights and Dignity

A special one-day event organized by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights shed light on the challenges women face in exercising their fundamental rights to access water, sanitation, and hygiene without discrimination. This report summarizes the day's discussions, focused on WASH and women's rights through three case studies and a look at changing international development standards

Case Study of “Hot-Spot” Apartment Complexes in North Central Indianapolis

This case study focused on a defined apartment complex hot spot, which includes apartment complexes receiving Section 8 funding, in the north-central region of Indianapolis, Indiana. The study identified social, environmental, and management characteristics possibly associated with concentrated levels of crime at Section 8 apartment complexes. As previous studies have shown, crime is concentrated at a few apartment complexes with a number of common characteristics such as a large minority population and a large amount of litter at the complex. In addition, a perspective of the effectiveness of hot-spot policing was obtained from beat officers who are familiar with the neighborhood with the targeted apartment complexes. A community survey was utilized to assess the current perspective of the apartment complex residents toward current policing tactics as well as their perception of safety. It was hypothesized that law-abiding citizens will be supportive of current and future measures to reduce crime in their neighborhood. Apartment complex residents who fear for themselves and their loved ones were at least moderately supportive of hot-spot policing. The multiple methods utilized contribute to the existing literature and lead to promising directions to consider for additional hot-spot research

Evidence Based IM Injection Practice

Abstract This evidence-based study of literature investigated best IM injection practice. The review was based on evidence from 3 main sources, all found on the CINAHL database. The three studies were reviewed and assessed, and best practice was found to be recommended. The first article found that several healthcare workers use different methods and techniques when administering IM injections, this leads to incorrect administration or injections not evidence based. The second article found that in order administer IM injections effectively, 5mm penetration into the muscle is needed. Therefore, skin bunching is not recommended for the reasoning that it creates a greater skin to muscle distance, with the possibility of not reaching the muscle. The third research article examined decreasing pain whilst administering IM injections. The results found that skin traction and pressure, opposed to skin bunching or no traction at all, decreases pain when administering injections IM. With mass vaccine administration taking place around the world this very moment, it is an absolute necessity that IM injections are being performed correctly and in accordance with evidence-based practice. Needle size selection must be chosen based on the patients BMI. Skin traction, opposed to skin bunching is the proper way to administer IM injection to ensure the medication or vaccine reaches the muscle. Making IM injection as painless as possible is important to ensure adherence to the full completion of vaccine doses. Keywords: Vaccine, IM Administration, COVID, Evidence-based practic

Challenges of researching showering routines: From the individual to the socio-material

In the UK, water supplies are under pressure from climate, population and lifestyle change. Showering is the largest component of domestic water consumption. Young adults are high water-users at a transitional life-stage, when practices are dynamic, and habits shaped. This paper presents the methodology, early findings and reflections on challenges of working with different data types and scales, to explore real-world water-saving through a mixed-methods approach, focusing on showering patterns of first year university students in campus accommodation at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Combining household meter, logged water-fixture micro-component, personal-use questionnaire, user diary and stakeholder focus group data with the Scottish Government Individual-Social-Material model, typical showering demand reduction interventions were evaluated and insights into alternative interventions were generated. Results indicate Estates’ routine equipment maintenance and database management affect data quality and consistency. Despite these issues a profile of daily student water use was derived (equivalent to 114 L per person per day) but with high variability between different households (from 83 to 151 L per person per day). Average shower durations (self-reported 10–12 min) were higher than reported UK norms, although frequency was similar to the UK daily shower norm. Average measured shower volumes (51 L in one house) were not excessive, indicating shower fixtures provided a contribution to water saving

Investigation of Spillover Effect to Enhance Hydrogen Storage

Hydrogen is an attractive energy option because of its lowenvironmental impact, but a critical problem is its low energydensity, which makes it difficult to store. For example, the USDepartment of Energy (DOE) hydrogen plan for fuel cell poweredvehicles requires a gravimetric density of 6.5 wt%. There are severalexisting hydrogen storage methods, including compressed gas,liquefaction, metal hydrides, and physisorption, but at present, noneof these technologies comes close to achieving the targets set by theDOE. Although chemical storage methods have been claimed to be themost promising hydrogen storage technology, and activated carbons thebest adsorbent, as mentioned, chemical storage methods are still farfrom the desired targets. In order to try to bring these chemicalstorage methods closer to desired targets, research must be done tofind ways to maximize chemical storage potential using differentmaterials. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in thepotential of carbon materials. In order to try to move these hydrogenstorage goals further toward the goals of the DOE, numerousexperiments were done in altering the current materials to try tomaximize the hydrogen storage potential. Hydrogen Spillover, onemethod currently being considered, is where a metal catalystdissociates hydrogen molecules into atomic hydrogen, which thenmigrates down toward the carbon surface and is adsorbed onto thecarbon receptor. Experiments were done to compare the spillovereffects of multiple precious metals. Also, the use of basic highsurface area activated carbon (MSC-30) was compared to similaractivated carbons with Boron doping, with hopes of seeing anenhancement of that spillover effect. Unfortunately, no significantincreases on the current storage capacity via spillover of ~1.2wt%were achieved

Complex-based analysis of dysregulated cellular processes in cancer

Background: Differential expression analysis of (individual) genes is often used to study their roles in diseases. However, diseases such as cancer are a result of the combined effect of multiple genes. Gene products such as proteins seldom act in isolation, but instead constitute stable multi-protein complexes performing dedicated functions. Therefore, complexes aggregate the effect of individual genes (proteins) and can be used to gain a better understanding of cancer mechanisms. Here, we observe that complexes show considerable changes in their expression, in turn directed by the concerted action of transcription factors (TFs), across cancer conditions. We seek to gain novel insights into cancer mechanisms through a systematic analysis of complexes and their transcriptional regulation. Results: We integrated large-scale protein-interaction (PPI) and gene-expression datasets to identify complexes that exhibit significant changes in their expression across different conditions in cancer. We devised a log-linear model to relate these changes to the differential regulation of complexes by TFs. The application of our model on two case studies involving pancreatic and familial breast tumour conditions revealed: (i) complexes in core cellular processes, especially those responsible for maintaining genome stability and cell proliferation (e.g. DNA damage repair and cell cycle) show considerable changes in expression; (ii) these changes include decrease and countering increase for different sets of complexes indicative of compensatory mechanisms coming into play in tumours; and (iii) TFs work in cooperative and counteractive ways to regulate these mechanisms. Such aberrant complexes and their regulating TFs play vital roles in the initiation and progression of cancer.Comment: 22 pages, BMC Systems Biolog