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

A Potential Role for the Interaction of Wolbachia Surface Proteins with the Brugia malayi Glycolytic Enzymes and Cytoskeleton in Maintenance of Endosymbiosis

The human filarial parasite Brugia malayi harbors an endosymbiotic bacterium of the genus Wolbachia. The Wolbachia represent an attractive target for the control of filarial induced disease as elimination of the bacteria affects molting, reproduction and survival of the worms. The molecular basis for the symbiotic relationship between Wolbachia and their filarial hosts has yet to be elucidated. To identify proteins involved in this process, we focused on the Wolbachia surface proteins (WSPs), which are known to be involved in bacteria-host interactions in other bacterial systems. Two WSP-like proteins (wBm0152 and wBm0432) were localized to various host tissues of the B. malayi female adult worms and are present in the excretory/secretory products of the worms. We provide evidence that both of these proteins bind specifically to B. malayi crude protein extracts and to individual filarial proteins to create functional complexes. The wBm0432 interacts with several key enzymes involved in the host glycolytic pathway, including aldolase and enolase. The wBm0152 interacts with the host cytoskeletal proteins actin and tubulin. We also show these interactions in vitro and have verified that wBm0432 and B. malayi aldolase, as well as wBm0152 and B. malayi actin, co-localize to the vacuole surrounding Wolbachia. We propose that both WSP protein complexes interact with each other via the aldolase-actin link and/or via the possible interaction between the host's enolase and the cytoskeleton, and play a role in Wolbachia distribution during worm growth and embryogenesis. © 2013 Melnikow et al

Alcohol Use, Abuse, and Dependency in Shanghai

The use of alcohol for social and ceremonial occasions was recorded in Chinese history as early as 1760 B.C. during the Yin Dynasty (Ci-Hai Encyclopedia, 1979:936). The cultural tradition of ancient China placed alcoholic beverages at the center of social occasions, which presumably was the origin of the adage: Without wine, there is no li (or etiquette). Thus, the use of alcoholic beverages has always been accompanied by the concept of propriety and the discharging of one\u27s role obligations m social functions, rather than that of personal indulgence

Microfluidic Device for Continuous Magnetophoretic Separation of Red Blood Cells

This paper presents a microfluidic device for magnetophoretic separation red blood cells from blood under contionous flow. The separation method consist of continous flow of a blood sample (diluted in PBS) through a microfluidic channel which presents on the bottom "dots" of feromagnetic layer. By appling a magnetic field perpendicular on the flowing direction, the feromagnetic "dots" generates a gradient of magnetic field which amplifies the magnetic force. As a result, the red blood cells are captured on the bottom of the microfluidic channel while the rest of the blood is collected at the outlet. Experimental results show that an average of 95 % of red blood cells are trapped in the deviceComment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/16838

Dimension-Grouped Mixed Membership Models for Multivariate Categorical Data

Mixed Membership Models (MMMs) are a popular family of latent structure models for complex multivariate data. Instead of forcing each subject to belong to a single cluster, MMMs incorporate a vector of subject-specific weights characterizing partial membership across clusters. With this flexibility come challenges in uniquely identifying, estimating, and interpreting the parameters. In this article, we propose a new class of Dimension-Grouped MMMs (Gro-M$^3$s) for multivariate categorical data, which improve parsimony and interpretability. In Gro-M$^3$s, observed variables are partitioned into groups such that the latent membership is constant for variables within a group but can differ across groups. Traditional latent class models are obtained when all variables are in one group, while traditional MMMs are obtained when each variable is in its own group. The new model corresponds to a novel decomposition of probability tensors. Theoretically, we derive transparent identifiability conditions for both the unknown grouping structure and model parameters in general settings. Methodologically, we propose a Bayesian approach for Dirichlet Gro-M$^3$s to inferring the variable grouping structure and estimating model parameters. Simulation results demonstrate good computational performance and empirically confirm the identifiability results. We illustrate the new methodology through applications to a functional disability survey dataset and a personality test dataset

Modification of properties of reinforced concrete through nanoalumina electrokinetic treatment

An attempt was made to drift nanoalumina particles into concrete pores through electrokinetic treatment. An external electric current (current density = 3 A/m2) was applied for 3 and 15 days in reinforced concrete blocks toward steel reinforcement and microstructural characterizations (i.e. morphology observation and porosity analysis) were performed on concrete fragments of different depth from exposure surface. The morphology observation evidenced transport of nanoalumina from the exposure surface even reaching the rebar-concrete interface (up to 25–30 mm, in 15 days treatment). The porosity analysis of treated samples revealed that reduction of porosity of rebar interface was more pronounced as compared to the exposure surface and the treatment for 15 days was more beneficial for porosity refinement than treatment for 3 days. Effects of the electrokinetic NA treatment on strength of rebar-concrete interface were evaluated through pull-out test. The results showed that by increasing current density, bond strength of rebar-concrete interface increased

Correction: A novel enantioselective synthesis of 6H-dibenzopyran derivatives by combined palladium/norbornene and cinchona alkaloid catalysis

Correction for 'A novel enantioselective synthesis of 6H-dibenzopyran derivatives by combined palladium/norbornene and cinchona alkaloid catalysis' by Di Xu et al., Org. Biomol. Chem., 2015, DOI: 10.1039/c4ob02551b

ViTASD: Robust Vision Transformer Baselines for Autism Spectrum Disorder Facial Diagnosis

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder with very high prevalence around the world. Research progress in the field of ASD facial analysis in pediatric patients has been hindered due to a lack of well-established baselines. In this paper, we propose the use of the Vision Transformer (ViT) for the computational analysis of pediatric ASD. The presented model, known as ViTASD, distills knowledge from large facial expression datasets and offers model structure transferability. Specifically, ViTASD employs a vanilla ViT to extract features from patients' face images and adopts a lightweight decoder with a Gaussian Process layer to enhance the robustness for ASD analysis. Extensive experiments conducted on standard ASD facial analysis benchmarks show that our method outperforms all of the representative approaches in ASD facial analysis, while the ViTASD-L achieves a new state-of-the-art. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/IrohXu/ViTASD.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted by the ICASSP 202

Inventions in the Area of Nanomaterials and Nanotechnologies. Part II

Introduction. Advanced technologies impress people’s imagination demonstrating the latest achievements (materials, methods, systems, technologies, devices etc.) that dramatically change the world. This, first of all, concerns nanotechnological inventions designed by scientists, engineers and specialists from different countries. Main part. The article provides an abstract overview of inventions of scientists, engineers and specialists from different countries: Germany, Russia, USA, et al. The results of the creative activity of scientists, engineers and specialists, including inventions in the field of nanotechnology and nanomaterials allow, when introduced to industry, achieving a significant effect in construction, housing and communal services, and related sectors of the economy. For example, the task resolved by the invention «A composition on the basis of oxide nanostructures to provide surface with superhydrophobic properties», means to design a new method of obtaining materials with superhydrophobic properties which possess improved performance and functional characteristics which can be applied in various areas: power engineering, electronics, machine-building, construction, ship-building, aviation, aerospace and food industries. The feature of the invention is that the surfaces demonstrate superhydrophobic properties and, as a result of that, their applying allows protecting metal structures, such as power lines, frame structures, roofs, from ice formation and dirtying. The technical result is possible due to the use of composition on the basis of oxide nanostructures to provide surface with superhydrophobic properties. The composition contains tetraethoxysilane and tetraisopropyl titanate as structure-forming agents, hexamethyldisilazane as hydrophobic element, isopropyl alcohol as dissolvent, non-spheric nanocrystal titanium dioxide with particle size from 10 to 50 nm as a grow accelerator of anisotropic structures to provide specified roughness of the surface. The specialist can be also interested in the following inventions in the area of nanotechnologies: a composite heat-conducting material on the basis of nanoliquid, a nanocomposite material on the basis of potassium titanate, a method of obtaining of nanodispersed powders, hybrid supercondenser on the basis of nanosized nickel hydroxide, etc. Conclusion. One of the most challenging tasks the economy of every country faces is to increase industrial competitiveness through technological upgrade. From the side of the state and companies the principal object to control in this process are the people and enterprises dealing with introduction of inventions and new technologie