National Politics Forged Through International Competition

The Olympics, being arguably the largest stage for athletics in the world, invites much crosswise country competition and national pride. Politicians may use the monumental stage for recreation to craft their own politically charged statements about their country as a whole. For my project, I examine Mexico’s history of performance in the Olympics, then observe political statements and speeches from specifically three Mexican presidents during significant political, social, economic or Olympic performance years. These political statements are recorded in academic articles, political news articles, and some YouTube videos about Mexican Olympic performance. There are three significant years in which I examine: 1968, for the extensive sociopolitical issues regarding protests against the authoritarian Mexican government, 1992, with the NAFTA agreement and the unexpected poor Mexican showing at the Barcelona games, and 2020 (2021), where most recently the government had been criticized due to budget allocation away from sports. I expect to see Mexican presidents consistently use the Olympics as a way to give a falsified narrative about the political situation of the country, allowing their own governmental issues to overcast certain Olympic victories. This will give concrete evidence as to how any government official can use recreational achievement to cast a narrative in their favor regarding a country’s social, economic, or political health. Blurb: Benjamin Underwood is a college senior planning to graduate with two degrees. One in Economics with a minor in Applied Statistics, the other in Spanish with a certificate in Portuguese. Passionate about sports, travel, and recreation, he often spends his free time playing volleyball with friends, working out at the gym, or planning a variety of trips of places he wants to visit in his future. After graduation, he plans to work at an internship for management, statistics, and linguistic experience. He is currently in the interview process for a sports facility management internship in Walt Disney World

The Characteristics and Outcomes of People with Dementia in Inpatient Mental Health Care: A Review

Objectives: Inpatient mental health beds for people with dementia are a limited resource. Practitioners need an understanding of this population to provide high-quality care and design services. This review examines the characteristics, care, and outcomes of people with dementia admitted to inpatient mental health services. Methods: Systematic searches of key databases were undertaken up to November 2021. Findings were grouped into categories and then synthesized into a narrative review. Results: The review identified 36 international papers, the majority of which were retrospective audits. The literature describes significant psychiatric and medical comorbidity and significant risk of change in residence and death associated with admission. Conclusions: We found a limited literature describing the characteristics, care, and outcomes of people with dementia in inpatient mental health services. The lack of research is striking given the complexity and vulnerability of this client group. More research is needed to describe the needs of this group, current and best practice to optimize care. Clinical Implications: Professionals working in inpatient mental health services need to be aware of the evidence base available, consider how they evaluate patient outcomes, review their staffing and skills mix, and seek the views of patients and relatives in improving services

Characteristics, outcomes, facilitators and barriers for psychosocial interventions on inpatient mental health dementia wards: a systematic review

Background The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines state that psychosocial interventions should be the first line of treatment for people with dementia who are experiencing distress behaviours, such as agitation and depression. However, little is known about the characteristics and outcomes of psychosocial interventions or the facilitators and barriers to implementation on inpatient mental health dementia wards which provide care for people with dementia who are often experiencing high levels of distress. Methods A systematic search was conducted on MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, and Scopus in May 2023, following PRISMA guidelines. Reference and citation searches were conducted on included articles. Peer-reviewed literature of any study design, relating to psychosocial interventions in inpatient mental health dementia wards, was included. One author reviewed all articles, with a third of results reviewed independently by a second author. Data were extracted to a bespoke form and synthesised using a narrative review. The quality of included studies was appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Results Sixteen studies were included in the synthesis, which together included a total of 538 people with dementia. Study methods and quality varied. Psychosocial interventions delivered on wards included music therapy (five studies), multisensory interventions (four studies), multicomponent interventions (two studies), technology-based interventions (two studies), massage interventions (two studies) and physical exercise (one study). Reduction in distress and improvement in wellbeing was demonstrated inconsistently across studies. Delivering interventions in a caring and individualised way responding to patient need facilitated implementation. Lack of staff time and understanding of interventions, as well as high levels of staff turnover, were barriers to implementation. Conclusion This review highlights a striking lack of research and therefore evidence base for the use of psychosocial interventions to reduce distress in this vulnerable population, despite current healthcare guidelines. More research is needed to understand which psychosocial interventions can reduce distress and improve wellbeing on inpatien

Single-qubit unitary gates by graph scattering

We consider the effects of plane-wave states scattering off finite graphs, as an approach to implementing single-qubit unitary operations within the continuous-time quantum walk framework of universal quantum computation. Four semi-infinite tails are attached at arbitrary points of a given graph, representing the input and output registers of a single qubit. For a range of momentum eigenstates, we enumerate all of the graphs with up to $n=9$ vertices for which the scattering implements a single-qubit gate. As $n$ increases, the number of new unitary operations increases exponentially, and for $n>6$ the majority correspond to rotations about axes distributed roughly uniformly across the Bloch sphere. Rotations by both rational and irrational multiples of $\pi$ are found.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Predicting patients with dementia most at risk of needing psychiatric inpatient or enhanced community care using routinely collected clinical data: a retrospective multi-site cohort study

BACKGROUND. Dementia is a common and progressive condition whose prevalence is grow-ing worldwide. It is challenging for healthcare systems to provide continuity in clinical ser-vices for all patients from diagnosis to death. AIMS. To test whether patients who are most likely to need enhanced support later in the disease course can be identified at the point of diagnosis, thus allowing the targeted intervention. METHOD. We used clinical information collected routinely in de-identified electronic patient records from two United Kingdom NHS Trusts to identify at diagnosis which patients were at increased risk of needing enhanced care (psychiatric inpatient or intensive (crisis) community care). RESULTS. We examined the records of a total of 27,313 patients with dementia. A minority (16% in Cambridgeshire and 2.4% in London) needed enhanced care. Patients who needed enhanced care differed from those who did not in age, cognitive test scores, and Health of the Nation Outcome Scale scores. Logistic regression discriminated risk with an area under the receiver operating char-acteristic curve (AUROC) of up to 0.78 after 1 year and 0.74 after 4 years. We were able to confirm the validity of the approach in two Trusts which differed widely in the populations they serve. CONCLUSIONS. It is possible to identify, at the time of diagnosis of dementia, pa-tients most likely to need enhanced care later in the disease course. This permits the devel-opment of targeted clinical interventions for this high-risk group

Huntington's Disease: Mechanisms of Pathogenesis and Therapeutic Strategies.

Huntington's disease is a late-onset neurodegenerative disease caused by a CAG trinucleotide repeat in the gene encoding the huntingtin protein. Despite its well-defined genetic origin, the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the disease are unclear and complex. Here, we review some of the currently known functions of the wild-type huntingtin protein and discuss the deleterious effects that arise from the expansion of the CAG repeats, which are translated into an abnormally long polyglutamine tract. Finally, we outline some of the therapeutic strategies that are currently being pursued to slow down the disease

Temperature controls production but hydrology regulates export of dissolved organic carbon at the catchment scale

Lateral carbon flux through river networks is an important and poorly understood component of the global carbon budget. This work investigates how temperature and hydrology control the production and export of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory in Pennsylvania, USA. Using field measurements of daily stream discharge, evapotranspiration, and stream DOC concentration, we calibrated the catchment-scale biogeochemical reactive transport model BioRT-Flux-PIHM (Biogeochemical Reactive Transport-Flux-Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model, BFP), which met the satisfactory standard of a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) value greater than 0.5. We used the calibrated model to estimate and compare the daily DOC production rates (Rp; the sum of the local DOC production rates in individual grid cells) and export rate (Re; the product of the concentration and discharge at the stream outlet, or load). Results showed that daily Rp varied by less than an order of magnitude, primarily depending on seasonal temperature. In contrast, daily Re varied by more than 3 orders of magnitude and was strongly associated with variation in discharge and hydrological connectivity. In summer, high temperature and evapotranspiration dried and disconnected hillslopes from the stream, driving Rp to its maximum but Re to its minimum. During this period, the stream only exported DOC from the organic-poor groundwater and from organic-rich soil water in the swales bordering the stream. The DOC produced accumulated in hillslopes and was later flushed out during the wet and cold period (winter and spring) when Re peaked as the stream reconnected with uphill and Rp reached its minimum. The model reproduced the observed concentration-discharge (C-Q) relationship characterized by an unusual flushing-dilution pattern with maximum concentrations at intermediate discharge, indicating three end-members of source waters. A sensitivity analysis indicated that this nonlinearity was caused by shifts in the relative contribution of different source waters to the stream under different flow conditions. At low discharge, stream water reflected the chemistry of organic-poor groundwater; at intermediate discharge, stream water was dominated by the organic-rich soil water from swales; at high discharge, the stream reflected uphill soil water with an intermediate DOC concentration. This pattern persisted regardless of the DOC production rate as long as the contribution of deeper groundwater flow remained low (\u3c18 % of the streamflow). When groundwater flow increased above 18 %, comparable amounts of groundwater and swale soil water mixed in the stream and masked the high DOC concentration from swales. In that case, the C-Q patterns switched to a flushing-only pattern with increasing DOC concentration at high discharge. These results depict a conceptual model that the catchment serves as a producer and storage reservoir for DOC under hot and dry conditions and transitions into a DOC exporter under wet and cold conditions. This study also illustrates how different controls on DOC production and export - temperature and hydrological flow paths, respectively - can create temporal asynchrony at the catchment scale. Future warming and increasing hydrological extremes could accentuate this asynchrony, with DOC production occurring primarily during dry periods and lateral export of DOC dominating in major storm event

The indirect relationship between sleep and cognition in the PREVENT Cohort: Identifying targets for intervention

Introduction As the global population ages, the economic, societal, and personal burdens associated with worsening cognition and dementia onset are growing. It is therefore becoming ever more critical to understand the factors associated with cognitive decline. One such factor is sleep. Adequate sleep has been shown to maintain cognitive function and protect against the onset of chronic disease, whereas sleep deprivation has been linked to cognitive impairment and the onset of depression and dementia. Objectives Here, we aim to identify and explore mechanistic links between several sleep parameters, depressive symptoms and cognition in a cohort of middle-aged adults. Methods We investigated data from the PREVENT dementia programme via structural equation modelling to illustrate links between predictor variables, moderator variables, and two cognitive constructs (i.e., Executive Function and Memory). Results Our model demonstrated that sleep quality, and total hours of sleep were related to participants’ depressive symptoms, and that, participant apathy was related to higher scores on the Epworth Sleepiness and Lausanne NoSAS Scales. Subsequently, depressive symptoms, but not sleep or apathy ratings, were associated with Executive Function. Conclusions We provide evidence for an indirect relationship between sleep and cognition mediated by depressive symptoms in a middle-aged population. Our results provide a base from which cognition, dementia onset, and potential points of intervention, may be better understood