Comparative planning in practice: identifying the cultural and behavioral barriers to learning from international sustainability solutions

This dissertation is composed of three separate but related papers that address if and how practicing planners can identify the cultural and behavioral barriers to learning from international sustainability solutions. Chapter 2 starts by acknowledging that analytical frameworks examining the international flow of concepts, practices, and techniques ("traveling ideas" or "international best practices") most often call for the slow and critical examination of these ideas prior to local adaptation. However, in fast-paced working environments where planners are challenged to urgently address environmental and social issues, this paper uncovers how these analytical frameworks are actually interpreted in practice. Building on existing comparative planning literature, semi-structured interviews with public sector planners from both the City of Chicago and the City of Stockholm were conducted in order to 1) explore the extent to which planners from each city utilize international best practices in relation to sustainability; and 2) when these best practices are used, understand the planners' evaluation process in determining if the practice could or should be adapted for their city’s use. The insights and reflections garnered from this study were used to identify potential factors that influence successful translation of sustainability solutions across contexts. Chapter 3 puts the findings from Chapter 2 in a specific context by aiming to uncover the key behavioral barriers to translating Singapore's high reclaimed water public acceptance rate and successful conservation strategies to different contexts. A national mail survey (n=218) utilizing the Theory of Planned Behavior framework (Ajzen, 1991) was conducted. The survey indicates that 74 percent of Singaporeans generally approve of NEWater. A positive attitude toward NEWater was the most significant variable in predicting respondent’s general approval. Furthermore, of the 7 specific water behaviors the Singaporean Public Utilities Board is trying to encourage, we found that fixing water leaks promptly (80.8%) and monitoring water bills (80.3%) are the most widely adopted, while washing dishes under a filled sink (11.7%) was the least adopted. Path analysis of the data showed that engagement in water conservation behaviors was most influenced by an individual's perceived social norms. Building off of Chapter 3, where we discuss the behavioral barriers to Singapore's integrated water management plan, Chapter 4 explores the cultural barriers to translating Singapore's successful water conservation strategies. Fieldwork in the form of interviews and participant observation was conducted over a period of 9 months in Singapore. This qualitative data was analyzed using Hofstede's dimensions of national culture framework. We find that Singapore's national culture has played a significant role in the overall success of their water planning and management strategies. Differences in specific national cultural dimensions such as power distance and individualism could act as barriers to successfully translating Singapore's success to different countries. We propose simple, straightforward recommendations for identifying and addressing these cultural barriers. Chapter 5 is a general discussion on the entire dissertation with a review of the work, methods and significant findings along with their policy and other implications. I conclude the piece with an exploration of future work

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Modulation of respiration pattern variability and its relation to anxiety symptoms in remitted recurrent depression

BackgroundDepression is related to default mode network (DMN) connectivity and higher respiration pattern variability (RPV). In addition, DMN connectivity and RPV are interrelated and predict a poorer clinical course of depression. The association of RPV and depression might further be boosted by anxiety levels. Aim of the present study was to investigate whether a mindfulness-based training in emotionally challenged remitted depressed participants (rMDD) leads to reduced DMN connectivity and lower RPV, and if RPV interacts with anxiety levels.MethodsTo challenge participants, sad mood was induced with keywords of personal negative life events in 49 rMDD during fMRI before and after a 4-week mindfulness-based attention training (MBAT) or progressive muscle relaxation. Respiration was measured by means of a built-in respiration belt.ResultsAfter both trainings, rMDD showed no significant changes in DMN connectivity. However, MBAT was effective in reducing the RPV which was related to lower anxiety levels especially in high anxious individuals.ConclusionsRPV can be influenced by training which may hint to an underlying biological pathway of training effects. Importantly, these effects seem to be associated with anxiety levels. Therefore, respiration focused training might be an important tool assisting the treatment of depression and anxiety.publishe

Genome-wide association study identifies five new schizophrenia loci

We examined the role of common genetic variation in schizophrenia in a genome-wide association study of substantial size: a stage 1 discovery sample of 21,856 individuals of European ancestry and a stage 2 replication sample of 29,839 independent subjects. The combined stage 1 and 2 analysis yielded genome-wide significant associations with schizophrenia for seven loci, five of which are new (1p21.3, 2q32.3, 8p23.2, 8q21.3 and 10q24.32-q24.33) and two of which have been previously implicated (6p21.32-p22.1 and 18q21.2). The strongest new finding (P = 1.6 × 10(-11)) was with rs1625579 within an intron of a putative primary transcript for MIR137 (microRNA 137), a known regulator of neuronal development. Four other schizophrenia loci achieving genome-wide significance contain predicted targets of MIR137, suggesting MIR137-mediated dysregulation as a previously unknown etiologic mechanism in schizophrenia. In a joint analysis with a bipolar disorder sample (16,374 affected individuals and 14,044 controls), three loci reached genome-wide significance: CACNA1C (rs4765905, P = 7.0 × 10(-9)), ANK3 (rs10994359, P = 2.5 × 10(-8)) and the ITIH3-ITIH4 region (rs2239547, P = 7.8 × 10(-9))