Characterizing tobacco control mass media campaigns in England

Aims To characterize publically funded tobacco control campaigns in England between 2004 and 2010 and to explore if they were in line with recommendations from the literature in terms of their content and intensity. International evidence suggests that campaigns which warn of the negative consequences of smoking and feature testimonials from real-life smokers are most effective, and that four exposures per head per month are required to reduce smoking prevalence. Design Characterization of tobacco control advertisements using a theoretically based framework designed to describe advertisement themes, informational and emotional content and style. Study of the intensity of advertising and exposure to different types of advertisement using data on population-level exposure to advertisements shown during the study period. Setting England. Measurements Television Ratings (TVRs), a standard measure of advertising exposure, were used to calculate exposure to each different campaign type. Findings A total of 89% of advertising was for smoking cessation; half of this advertising warned of the negative consequences of smoking, while half contained how-to-quit messages. Acted scenes featured in 72% of advertising, while only 17% featured real-life testimonials. Only 39% of months had at least four exposures to tobacco control campaigns per head. Conclusions A theory-driven approach enabled a systematic characterization of tobacco control advertisements in England. Between 2004 and 2010 only a small proportion of tobacco control advertisements utilized the most effective strategies—negative health effects messages and testimonials from real-life smokers. The intensity of campaigns was lower than international recommendations

Why the Humanities Are Necessary to Public Policy, and How

To ask what this issue of Maine Policy Review asks is to assume that the humanities are valuable and/or useful, both in general and in particular to public policy. So we should be asking not only how policy can help the humanities but how the humanities can help policy. Anna S. Bartel sees several answers and tries to map them by exploring intersections of humanities and public policy and by asking what public policy needs that the humanities can contribute. Four stages of policy can all benefit from humanistic education, programming, and dispositions: conceptualization, crafting, implementation, and evaluatio

Smooth Cartan triples and Lie twists over Hausdorff \'etale Lie groupoids

We characterise when a smooth structure on the unit space of a Hausdorff \'etale groupoid can be extended to a Lie-groupoid structure on the whole groupoid. We introduce Lie twists over Hausdorff Lie groupoids, building on Kumjian's notion of a twist over a topological groupoid. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions on a family of sections of a twist over a Lie groupoid under which the twist can be made into a Lie twist so that all the specified sections are smooth. We obtain conditions on a twist over an \'etale groupoid whose unit space is a smooth manifold and a family of sections of the twist that characterise when the pair can be made into a Lie twist for which the given sections are smooth. We use these results to describe conditions on a Cartan pair of C*-algebras and a family of normalisers of the subalgebra, under which Renault's Weyl twist for the pair can be made into a Lie twist for which the given normalisers correspond to smooth sections.Comment: 32 page

Metabolically exaggerated cardiac reactions to acute psychological stress: The effects of resting blood pressure status and possible underlying mechanisms

The study aimed to: confirm that acute stress elicits metabolically exaggerated increases in cardiac activity; test whether individuals with elevated resting blood pressure show more exaggerated cardiac reactions to stress than those who are clearly normotensive; and explore the underlying mechanisms. Cardiovascular activity and oxygen consumption were measured pre-, during, and post- mental stress, and during graded submaximal cycling exercise in 11 young men with moderately elevated resting blood pressure and 11 normotensives. Stress provoked increases in cardiac output that were much greater than would be expected from contemporary levels of oxygen consumption. Exaggerated cardiac reactions were larger in the relatively elevated blood pressure group. They also had greater reductions in total peripheral resistance, but not heart rate variability, implying that their more exaggerated cardiac reactions reflected greater β-adrenergic activation

Diversity Initiative Schemas: Students’ Cognitive Representations of Managing Diversity on College Campuses

Using schemas as a theoretical framework, this paper explores students’ cognitive representations of managing gender and racio-ethnic diversity initiatives on college and university campuses. Exploration of student schemas is necessary to inform higher education administrators of the existing expectations present among students since these expectations interplay with student responses and reactions to diversity management efforts. Using content analysis of students’ narratives, results concerning students’ cognitive representations are offered, and key managerial implications are shared for those in higher education leadership

The Conversion of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records

In 2001, after the final court-ordered record release, the Electronic Records (ER) section of the Archives and Library Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) assumed responsibility for the electronic version of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission records.\u27 In addition to basic maintenance and preservation responsibilities, ER was assigned the task of converting the proprietary inhouse system to make it web accessible. This was a watershed project representing both closure and new beginnings. Not only would the web-enabled electronic version mark the final stage in access with the promise of global availability via the Internet but it was also the first time ER would be able to test its migration strategies and open source philosophy

Respiratory virus coinfection and superinfection exclusion

Influenza A virus (IAV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are responsible for two of the deadliest pandemics in modern history, and the emergence of pandemic respiratory viruses remains constant threat to human life. The emergence of novel pandemic viruses is driven by genetic exchange between existing viruses during coinfection of cells. Coinfection of cells can be controlled by superinfection exclusion (SIE), a mechanism by which a previously infected cell becomes resistant to secondary viral infection after a period of time. SIE is known to be induced following IAV infection but its mechanism is unknown, while SIE has not yet been observed for any coronavirus, including SARS-CoV-2. In this thesis, I use isogenic reporter viruses to study SIE, defining the kinetics of onset for IAV and presenting the first evidence for SIE for SARS-CoV-2. I demonstrate that in both cases SIE onset does not occur immediately, but that infected cells shift from a permissive to exclusionary state within 6 hours of primary infection. I used this system to investigate the mechanism for IAV SIE, showing that it is unlikely to be driven by direct competition between the viruses, or by the cellular interferon response. I then modelled the foci of infection observed within infected hosts in vitro using plaque assays. For both viruses, I also show how SIE at the level of individual cells affects the ability of virus populations to coinfect cells during localised viral spread. I found that viruses within one plaque could coinfect freely, as all new infections were of cells that had not yet established SIE. In contrast, viruses spreading towards each other from separate plaques could only establish minimal regions of overlap before SIE blocked further coinfection. For IAV, these interactions were then also observed in the lungs of infected mice. The results suggests that the kinetics of SIE onset separate a spreading infection into discrete regions, within which interactions between virus populations can occur freely, and between which they are blocked. These findings are likely to apply other viruses that induce SIE. Finally, I investigated the potential for coinfection between IAV and SARS-CoV-2. I found no evidence of SIE, but instead found evidence of viral interference mediated by type-1 interferon. Understanding the mechanisms and dynamics of SIE could help us understand coinfection and the generation of novel pandemic viruses, and potentially aid in predicting when new pandemics will arise

Deriving a mutation index of carcinogenicity using protein structure and protein interfaces

With the advent of Next Generation Sequencing the identification of mutations in the genomes of healthy and diseased tissues has become commonplace. While much progress has been made to elucidate the aetiology of disease processes in cancer, the contributions to disease that many individual mutations make remain to be characterised and their downstream consequences on cancer phenotypes remain to be understood. Missense mutations commonly occur in cancers and their consequences remain challenging to predict. However, this knowledge is becoming more vital, for both assessing disease progression and for stratifying drug treatment regimes. Coupled with structural data, comprehensive genomic databases of mutations such as the 1000 Genomes project and COSMIC give an opportunity to investigate general principles of how cancer mutations disrupt proteins and their interactions at the molecular and network level. We describe a comprehensive comparison of cancer and neutral missense mutations; by combining features derived from structural and interface properties we have developed a carcinogenicity predictor, InCa (Index of Carcinogenicity). Upon comparison with other methods, we observe that InCa can predict mutations that might not be detected by other methods. We also discuss general limitations shared by all predictors that attempt to predict driver mutations and discuss how this could impact high-throughput predictions. A web interface to a server implementation is publicly available at http://inca.icr.ac.uk/