Understanding Contextual Differences in Residential LTC Provision for Cross-National Research : Identifying Internationally Relevant CDEs

Long-term care (LTC) reflects a growing emphasis on person-centered care (PCC), with services oriented around individuals' needs and preferences. Addressing contextual and cultural differences across countries offers important insight into factors that facilitate or hinder application of PCC practices within and across countries. This article takes an international lens to consider country-specific contexts of LTC, describing preliminary steps to develop common data elements that capture contextual differences across LTC settings globally. Through an iterative series of online, telephone, and in-person sessions, we engaged in in-depth discussions with 11 colleague experts in residential LTC and coauthors from six countries (China and Hong Kong, England, Sweden, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States). Our discussions yielded rich narrative describing a vast range in types of LTC settings, leading to our development of a working definition of residential LTC. Scope of services, funding, ownership, and regulations varied greatly across countries and across different residential LTC settings within countries. Moving forward, we recommend expanding our activities to countries that reflect different stages of residential LTC development. Our goal is to contribute to a larger initiative underway by the WE-THRIVE consortium to establish a global research measurement infrastructure that advances PCC internationally.Peer reviewe

Automatic and Human-AI Interactive Text Generation

In this tutorial, we focus on text-to-text generation, a class of natural language generation (NLG) tasks, that takes a piece of text as input and then generates a revision that is improved according to some specific criteria (e.g., readability or linguistic styles), while largely retaining the original meaning and the length of the text. This includes many useful applications, such as text simplification, paraphrase generation, style transfer, etc. In contrast to text summarization and open-ended text completion (e.g., story), the text-to-text generation tasks we discuss in this tutorial are more constrained in terms of semantic consistency and targeted language styles. This level of control makes these tasks ideal testbeds for studying the ability of models to generate text that is both semantically adequate and stylistically appropriate. Moreover, these tasks are interesting from a technical standpoint, as they require complex combinations of lexical and syntactical transformations, stylistic control, and adherence to factual knowledge, -- all at once. With a special focus on text simplification and revision, this tutorial aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art natural language generation research from four major aspects -- Data, Models, Human-AI Collaboration, and Evaluation -- and to discuss and showcase a few significant and recent advances: (1) the use of non-retrogressive approaches; (2) the shift from fine-tuning to prompting with large language models; (3) the development of new learnable metric and fine-grained human evaluation framework; (4) a growing body of studies and datasets on non-English languages; (5) the rise of HCI+NLP+Accessibility interdisciplinary research to create real-world writing assistant systems.Comment: To appear at ACL 2024, Tutoria

Probing terahertz surface plasmon waves in graphene structures

Epitaxial graphene mesas and ribbons are investigated using terahertz (THz) nearfield microscopy to probe surface plasmon excitation and THz transmission properties on the sub-wavelength scale. The THz near-field images show variation of graphene properties on a scale smaller than the wavelength, and excitation of THz surface waves occurring at graphene edges, similar to that observed at metallic edges. The Fresnel reflection at the substrate SiC/air interface is also found to be altered by the presence of graphene ribbon arrays, leading to either reduced or enhanced transmission of the THz wave depending on the wave polarization and the ribbon width.Comment: accepted for publication in Applied Physics Lette

Improving readiness for recruitment through simulated trial activation: the Adjuvant Steroids in Adults with Pandemic influenza (ASAP) trial

Background: Research in public health emergencies requires trials to be set up in readiness for activation at short notice and in anticipation of limited timelines for patient recruitment. We conducted a simulated activation of a hibernating pandemic influenza clinical trial in order to test trial processes and to determine the value of such simulation in maintaining trial readiness. Methods: The simulation involved the Nottingham Clinical Trials Unit, one participating hospital, one manufacturing unit and the Investigational Medicinal Product (IMP) supplier. During the exercise, from 15 September 2015 to 2 December 2015, clinical staff at the participating site completed the trial training package, a volunteer acting as a patient was recruited to the study, ‘dummy’ IMP was prescribed and follow-up completed. Results: Successful activation of the hibernating trial with patient recruitment within 4 weeks of ‘arousal’ as planned was demonstrated. A need for greater resilience in anticipation of staff absenteeism was identified, particularly in relation to key trial procedures where the potential for delay is high. A specific issue relating to the IMP Stock Control System was highlighted as a potential source of error that could compromise the randomisation sequence. The simulation exercise was well received by site investigators and increased their confidence in being able to meet the likely demands of the trial when activated. The estimated cost of the exercise was £1995; 90% of this being staff costs. Conclusions: Simulated activation is useful as a means to test, and prepare for, the rapid activation of ‘hibernating’ research studies. Whether simulation exercises can also help reduce waste in complex clinical trial research deserves further exploration

Enhancing reflective learning experiences in museums through interactive installations

In this study we examine the effect that several technological affordances have upon the experiences of children while visiting a museum, focusing upon engagement, discussion and reflection. The museum is the Baba Nyonya Heritage Museum in Malacca, Malaysia. We created a number of public interactive installations designed to facilitate inter-cultural and inter-generational dialogues about cultural identity. The technology employed mixed and augmented reality techniques and gesture recognition to enable visitors to have a multisensory experience with the artefacts on display. Analysis of pre- to post-test knowledge based surveys showed significant learning gains as a result of interacting with the exhibits. Surveys of visitors’ attitudes showed that they felt they had benefitted from the physical interactivity. Qualitative analysis of observational and video data showed that the different interaction techniques provided both benefits and challenges for interaction, which we reflect upon in the paper

Rapid obtention of stable, bioluminescent tumor cell lines using a tCD2-luciferase chimeric construct

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Bioluminescent tumor cell lines are experimental tools of major importance for cancer investigation, especially imaging of tumors in xenografted animals. Stable expression of exogenous luciferase in tumor cells combined to systemic injection of luciferin provides an excellent signal/background ratio for external optical imaging. Therefore, there is a need to rationalize and speed up the production of luciferase-positive tumor cell lines representative of multiple tumor phenotypes. For this aim we have designed a fusion gene linking the luciferase 2 protein to the c-terminus of a truncated form of the rat CD2 protein (<it>tCD2-luc2</it>). To allow simultaneous assessment of the wild-type luciferase 2 in a context of tCD2 co-expression, we have made a bicistronic construct for concomitant but separate expression of these two proteins (<it>luc2-IRES-tCD2</it>). Both the mono- and bi-cistronic constructs were transduced in lymphoid and epithelial cells using lentiviral vectors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The tCD2-luc2 chimera behaves as a type I membrane protein with surface presentation of CD2 epitopes. One of these epitopes reacts with the OX34, a widely spread, high affinity monoclonal antibody. Stably transfected cells are sorted by flow cytometry on the basis of OX34 staining. <it>In vitro</it> and, moreover, in xenografted tumors, the tCD2-luc2 chimera retains a substantial and stable luciferase activity, although not as high as the wild-type luciferase expressed from the <it>luc2-IRES-tCD2</it> construct. Expression of the tCD2-luc2 chimera does not harm cell and tumor growth.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Lentiviral transduction of the chimeric <it>tCD2-luc2 </it>fusion gene allows selection of cell clones with stable luciferase expression in less than seven days without antibiotic selection. We believe that it will be helpful to increase the number of tumor cell lines available for <it>in vivo </it>imaging and assessment of novel therapeutic modalities. On a longer term, the tCD2-luc2 chimera has the potential to be expressed from multi-cassette vectors in combination with various inserts of interest.</p

Fabrication of a 3D Nanomagnetic Circuit with Multi-Layered Materials for Applications in Spintronics.

Three-dimensional (3D) spintronic devices are attracting significant research interest due to their potential for both fundamental studies and computing applications. However, their implementations face great challenges regarding not only the fabrication of 3D nanomagnets with high quality materials, but also their integration into 2D microelectronic circuits. In this study, we developed a new fabrication process to facilitate the efficient integration of both non-planar 3D geometries and high-quality multi-layered magnetic materials to prototype 3D spintronic devices, as a first step to investigate new physical effects in such systems. Specifically, we exploited 3D nanoprinting, physical vapour deposition and lithographic techniques to realise a 3D nanomagnetic circuit based on a nanobridge geometry, coated with high quality Ta/CoFeB/Ta layers. The successful establishment of this 3D circuit was verified through magnetotransport measurements in combination with micromagnetic simulations and finite element modelling. This fabrication process provides new capabilities for the realisation of a greater variety of 3D nanomagnetic circuits, which will facilitate the understanding and exploitation of 3D spintronic systems