Assessing Attitudes toward Nicotine Replacement Therapy for Adolescent Smoking Cessation

The objective was to ascertain attitudes toward nicotine replacement therapy for adolescent tobacco cessation. The authors created a 17-item survey consisting of demographics, quantitative, and qualitative items which was distributed to middle and high school students in North Central Florida. The authors assessed associations and conducted discriminant analyses to compare results by age. One-hundred ninety-eight students completed the survey (57.6% female, 61.6% white). When asked to select the best way to help teens stop using tobacco, combination of methods was most frequently selected (31.6%), followed by “Cold Turkey” (19.5%), e-cigarettes (16.8%), NRT (14.7%), Counseling (10.5%), and Alternative Therapies (6.8%). Qualitative data from students revealed misconceptions toward tobacco use, but an overall awareness that tobacco is a harmful. High school students were more likely than middle school students to agree that nicotine is harmful and e-cigarettes or chewing tobacco are less harmful than traditional cigarettes. Discriminant analyses were inconclusive. These data highlight misconceptions regarding tobacco use and nicotine that might play a role in attitudes toward NRT for adolescent tobacco cessation. Whereas high school students might be more likely to agree nicotine is harmful, their decreased perception of harm of alternative tobacco products such as e-cigarettes or chewing tobacco could be problematic. Further research in this area remains a priority

SMARTER Teamwork: System for Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for Teamwork

The rapid adoption of Team-Maker and the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME), tools for team formation and peer evaluation, make it possible to extend their success to have a significant impact on the development of team skills in higher education. The web-based systems are used by over 700 faculty at over 200 institutions internationally. This paper and its accompanying poster will describe strategies for broadening the scope of those tools into a complete system for the management of teamwork in undergraduate education. The System for the Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation of Teamwork (SMARTER Teamwork) has three specific goals: 1) to equip students to work in teams by providing them with training and feedback, 2) to equip faculty to manage student teams by providing them with information and tools to facilitate best practices, and 3) to equip researchers to understand teams by broadening the system’s capabilities to collect additional types of data so that a wider range of research questions can be studied through a secure researcher interface. The three goals of the project support each other in hierarchical fashion: research informs faculty practice, faculty determine the students’ experience, which, if well managed based on research findings, equips students to work in teams. Our strategies for achieving these goals are based on a well-accepted training model that has five elements: information, demonstration, practice, feedback, and remediation. Different outcomes are expected for each group of people. For the students, both individual outcomes, such as student learning, and team outcomes, such as the development of shared mental models, are expected. For the faculty, individual outcomes such as faculty learning and faculty satisfaction are expected. The outcomes for researchers will be community outcomes, that is, benefits for stakeholders outside the research team, such as generating new knowledge for teaming theory and disseminating best practices. Measuring these outcomes is the basis for the project’s evaluation plan

Distinguishing sequences for partially specified FSMs

Distinguishing Sequences (DSs) are used inmany Finite State Machine (FSM) based test techniques. Although Partially Specified FSMs (PSFSMs) generalise FSMs, the computational complexity of constructing Adaptive and Preset DSs (ADSs/PDSs) for PSFSMs has not been addressed. This paper shows that it is possible to check the existence of an ADS in polynomial time but the corresponding problem for PDSs is PSPACE-complete. We also report on the results of experiments with benchmarks and over 8 * 106 PSFSMs. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

Isoforms of U1-70k control subunit dynamics in the human spliceosomal U1 snRNP

Most human protein-encoding genes contain multiple exons that are spliced together, frequently in alternative arrangements, by the spliceosome. It is established that U1 snRNP is an essential component of the spliceosome, in human consisting of RNA and ten proteins, several of which are post- translationally modified and exist as multiple isoforms. Unresolved and challenging to investigate are the effects of these post translational modifications on the dynamics, interactions and stability of the particle. Using mass spectrometry we investigate the composition and dynamics of the native human U1 snRNP and compare native and recombinant complexes to isolate the effects of various subunits and isoforms on the overall stability. Our data reveal differential incorporation of four protein isoforms and dynamic interactions of subunits U1-A, U1-C and Sm-B/B’. Results also show that unstructured post- ranslationally modified C-terminal tails are responsible for the dynamics of Sm-B/B’ and U1-C and that their interactions with the Sm core are controlled by binding to different U1-70k isoforms and their phosphorylation status in vivo. These results therefore provide the important functional link between proteomics and structure as well as insight into the dynamic quaternary structure of the native U1 snRNP important for its function.This work was funded by: BBSRC (OVM), BBSRC and EPSRC (HH and NM), EU Prospects (HH), European Science Foundation (NM), the Royal Society (CVR), and fellowship from JSPS and HFSP (YM and DAPK respectively)

SMARTER Teamwork: System for Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for Teamwork

SMARTER Teamwork: System for Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation for TeamworkThe rapid adoption of Team-Maker and the Comprehensive Assessment of Team MemberEffectiveness (CATME) tools for team formation and peer evaluation make it possible to extendtheir success to have a significant impact on the development of team skills in higher education.The web-based systems have been used by more than 110,000 students of more than 2400faculty at more than 500 institutions internationally—the figure below shows the growth of theuser base. 2400 The system has had 113,373 unique student users. 2200 Fitted curves are third order. 2000 1800 Faculty and staff 1600 1400 1200 Number of 1000 users 800 Institutions 600 400 Aug Oct. 2005 2012 200 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Years since software was releasedThis paper and its accompanying poster will describe strategies for broadening the scope of thosetools into a complete system for the management of teamwork in undergraduate education. TheSystem for the Management, Assessment, Research, Training, Education, and Remediation ofTeamwork (SMARTER Teamwork) has three specific goals: 1) to equip students to work inteams by providing them with training and feedback, 2) to equip faculty to manage student teamsby providing them with information and tools to facilitate best practices, and 3) to equipresearchers to understand teams by broadening the system’s capabilities to collect additionaltypes of data so that a wider range of research questions can be studied through a secureresearcher interface. The three goals of the project support each other in hierarchical fashion:research informs faculty practice, faculty determine the students’ experience, which, if wellmanaged based on research findings, equips students to work in teams. Our strategies forachieving these goals are based on a well-accepted training model that has five elements:information, demonstration, practice, feedback, and remediation.The paper that will be submitted and the poster presented at the conference will focus on newfeatures of the system, the development of training materials, and the deployment of a partnerwebsite that shares information about the SMARTER tools for teamwork and provides basicinformation about teamwork and team management