Educating novice practitioners to detect elder financial abuse: A randomised controlled trial

© 2014 Harries et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background - Health and social care professionals are well positioned to identify and intervene in cases of elder financial abuse. An evidence-based educational intervention was developed to advance practitioners’ decision-making in this domain. The objective was to test the effectiveness of a decision-training educational intervention on novices’ ability to detect elder financial abuse. The research was funded by an E.S.R.C. grant reference RES-189-25-0334. Methods - A parallel-group, randomised controlled trial was conducted using a judgement analysis approach. Each participant used the World Wide Web to judge case sets at pre-test and post-test. The intervention group was provided with training after pre-test testing, whereas the control group were purely given instructions to continue with the task. 154 pre-registration health and social care practitioners were randomly allocated to intervention (n78) or control (n76). The intervention comprised of written and graphical descriptions of an expert consensus standard explaining how case information should be used to identify elder financial abuse. Participants’ ratings of certainty of abuse occurring (detection) were correlated with the experts’ ratings of the same cases at both stages of testing. Results - At pre-test, no differences were found between control and intervention on rating capacity. Comparison of mean scores for the control and intervention group at pre-test compared to immediate post-test, showed a statistically significant result. The intervention was shown to have had a positive moderate effect; at immediate post-test, the intervention group’s ratings had become more similar to those of the experts, whereas the control’s capacity did not improve. The results of this study indicate that the decision-training intervention had a positive effect on detection ability. Conclusions - This freely available, web-based decision-training aid is an effective evidence-based educational resource. Health and social care professionals can use the resource to enhance their ability to detect elder financial abuse. It has been embedded in a web resource at http://www.elderfinancialabuse.co.uk.ESR

Letters and records of the dissenting congregations: David Crosley, Cripplegate and Baptist Church life

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comInternational audienceThis chapter examines the status and function of letters in manuscript records of dissenting Churches of the post-Toleration years, concentrating on the correspondence of the Baptist Church of Cripplegate. The letters are placed in the context of controversies about Church government and discipline and the rhetoric used during the scandal caused by the excommunication of its Northern minister David Crosley for drinking, lying and adultery is assessed. In doing so, the chapter pays particular attention to the epistolary exchanges between metropolitan and provincial congregations and to what they reveal about conceptions of the Baptist ministry

Training Auto-encoder-based Optimizers for Terahertz Image Reconstruction

Terahertz (THz) sensing is a promising imaging technology for a wide variety of different applications. Extracting the interpretable and physically meaningful parameters for such applications, however, requires solving an inverse problem in which a model function determined by these parameters needs to be fitted to the measured data. Since the underlying optimization problem is nonconvex and very costly to solve, we propose learning the prediction of suitable parameters from the measured data directly. More precisely, we develop a model-based autoencoder in which the encoder network predicts suitable parameters and the decoder is fixed to a physically meaningful model function, such that we can train the encoding network in an unsupervised way. We illustrate numerically that the resulting network is more than 140 times faster than classical optimization techniques while making predictions with only slightly higher objective values. Using such predictions as starting points of local optimization techniques allows us to converge to better local minima about twice as fast as optimization without the network-based initialization.Comment: This is a pre-print of a conference paper published in German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) 201

Aerobic capacity, activity levels and daily energy expenditure in male and female adolescents of the kenyan nandi sub-group

The relative importance of genetic and socio-cultural influences contributing to the success of east Africans in endurance athletics remains unknown in part because the pre-training phenotype of this population remains incompletely assessed. Here cardiopulmonary fitness, physical activity levels, distance travelled to school and daily energy expenditure in 15 habitually active male (13.9±1.6 years) and 15 habitually active female (13.9±1.2) adolescents from a rural Nandi primary school are assessed. Aerobic capacity ([Formula: see text]) was evaluated during two maximal discontinuous incremental exercise tests; physical activity using accelerometry combined with a global positioning system; and energy expenditure using the doubly labelled water method. The [Formula: see text] of the male and female adolescents were 73.9±5.7 ml(.) kg(-1.) min(-1) and 61.5±6.3 ml(.) kg(-1.) min(-1), respectively. Total time spent in sedentary, light, moderate and vigorous physical activities per day was 406±63 min (50% of total monitored time), 244±56 min (30%), 75±18 min (9%) and 82±30 min (10%). Average total daily distance travelled to and from school was 7.5±3.0 km (0.8-13.4 km). Mean daily energy expenditure, activity-induced energy expenditure and physical activity level was 12.2±3.4 MJ(.) day(-1), 5.4±3.0 MJ(.) day(-1) and 2.2±0.6. 70.6% of the variation in [Formula: see text] was explained by sex (partial R(2) = 54.7%) and body mass index (partial R(2) = 15.9%). Energy expenditure and physical activity variables did not predict variation in [Formula: see text] once sex had been accounted for. The highly active and energy-demanding lifestyle of rural Kenyan adolescents may account for their exceptional aerobic fitness and collectively prime them for later training and athletic success

Expressing one’s feelings and listening to others increases emotional intelligence: a pilot study of Asian medical students

<p>Background: There has been considerable interest in Emotional Intelligence (EI) in undergraduate medical education, with respect to student selection and admissions, health and well-being and academic performance. EI is a significant component of the physician-patient relationship. The emotional well-being of the physician is, therefore, a significant component in patient care. The aim is to examine the measurement of TEIQue-SF in Asian medical students and to explore how the practice of listening to the feelings of others and expressing one’s own feelings influences an individual’s EI, set in the context of the emotional well-being of a medical practitioner.</p> <p>Methods: A group of 183 international undergraduate medical students attended a half-day workshop (WS) about mental-health and well-being. They completed a self-reported measure of EI on three occasions, pre- and post-workshop, and a 1-year follow-up.</p> <p>Result: The reliability of TEIQue-SF was high and the reliabilities of its four factors were acceptable. There were strong correlations between the TEIQue-SF and personality traits. A paired t-test indicated significant positive changes after the WS for all students (n=181, p= .014), male students (n=78, p= .015) and non-Japanese students (n=112, p= .007), but a repeated measures analysis showed that one year post-workshop there were significant positive changes for all students (n=55, p= .034), female students (n=31, p= .007), especially Japanese female students (n=13, p= .023). Moreover, 80% of the students reported that they were more attentive listeners, and 60% agreed that they were more confident in dealing with emotional issues, both within themselves and in others, as a result of the workshop.</p> <p>Conclusion: This study found the measurement of TEIQue-SF is appropriate and reliable to use for Asian medical students. The mental health workshop was helpful to develop medical students’ EI but showed different results for gender and nationality. The immediate impact on the emotional awareness of individuals was particularly significant for male students and the non-Japanese group. The impact over the long term was notable for the significant increase in EI for females and Japanese. Japanese female students were more conscious about emotionality. Emotion-driven communication exercises might strongly influence the development of students’ EI over a year.</p&gt

Effect of the Implantable Atrial Defibrillator on the Natural History of Atrial Fibrillation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75480/1/j.1540-8167.1999.tb00296.x.pd

An assessment of the integration between corporate social responsibility practices and management systems in Brazil aiming at sustainability in enterprises

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is associated with the idea that every organization should integrate environmental, economic and social issues as part of their organizational philosophy. In companies with a higher degree of development in terms of CSR, sustainable practices are integrated into management systems. When focusing on Latin America, this integration may be at its first steps, but there is a vacuum in the literature in this field. Based on this reality, this paper aims to evaluate the integration between CSR practices and management systems in companies in Brazil based on experts’ perceptions. Employing a conceptual model covering how stakeholder demands are incorporated in organizational practices using a continuous improvement approach, we performed a survey with experts in the area. Results revealed opportunities for improvements in all CSR practices evaluated, most of which were considered by the experts to have been implemented only superficially. In a comparative analysis, two practices stood out in relation to the others: reporting of CSR results to stakeholders and evaluation of the performance of CSR activities using pre-established indicators. Practices associated with planning of CSR activities are the most superficially implemented, adversely affecting CSR performance. The authors believe that the findings of this study could be useful for business managers and academics as guidance towards improved CSR efforts

The influence of context and process when implementing e-health

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Real-Time PyMOL Visualization for Rosetta and PyRosetta

Computational structure prediction and design of proteins and protein-protein complexes have long been inaccessible to those not directly involved in the field. A key missing component has been the ability to visualize the progress of calculations to better understand them. Rosetta is one simulation suite that would benefit from a robust real-time visualization solution. Several tools exist for the sole purpose of visualizing biomolecules; one of the most popular tools, PyMOL (Schrödinger), is a powerful, highly extensible, user friendly, and attractive package. Integrating Rosetta and PyMOL directly has many technical and logistical obstacles inhibiting usage. To circumvent these issues, we developed a novel solution based on transmitting biomolecular structure and energy information via UDP sockets. Rosetta and PyMOL run as separate processes, thereby avoiding many technical obstacles while visualizing information on-demand in real-time. When Rosetta detects changes in the structure of a protein, new coordinates are sent over a UDP network socket to a PyMOL instance running a UDP socket listener. PyMOL then interprets and displays the molecule. This implementation also allows remote execution of Rosetta. When combined with PyRosetta, this visualization solution provides an interactive environment for protein structure prediction and design

The NIH-NIAID Schistosomiasis Resource Center

A bench scientist studying schistosomiasis must make a large commitment to maintain the parasite's life cycle, which necessarily involves a mammalian (definitive) host and the appropriate species of snail (intermediate host). This is often a difficult and expensive commitment to make, especially in the face of ever-tightening funds for tropical disease research. In addition to funding concerns, investigators usually face additional problems in the allocation of sufficient lab space to this effort (especially for snail rearing) and the limited availability of personnel experienced with life cycle upkeep. These problems can be especially daunting for the new investigator entering the field. Over 40 years ago, the National Institutes of Health–National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH-NIAID) had the foresight to establish a resource from which investigators could obtain various schistosome life stages without having to expend the effort and funds necessary to maintain the entire life cycle on their own. This centralized resource translated into cost savings to both NIH-NIAID and to principal investigators by freeing up personnel costs on grants and allowing investigators to divert more funds to targeted research goals. Many investigators, especially those new to the field of tropical medicine, are only vaguely, if at all, aware of the scope of materials and support provided by this resource. This review is intended to help remedy that situation. Following a short history of the contract, we will give a brief description of the schistosome species provided, provide an estimate of the impact the resource has had on the research community, and describe some new additions and potential benefits the resource center might have for the ever-changing research interests of investigators