Transgender Awareness Within State Hospitals: Addressing Gaps in Training

Individuals in the transgender ( trans ) community continue to face stigmatization, discrimination, and violence in the United States (Benson 2013; Bradford, Reisner, Honnold, & Xavier, 2013; Lombardi, Wilchins, Priesing & Malouf, 2001; Shipherd, Green, & Abramovitz; 2010). They remain underserved in many domains, including housing, healthcare, and employment (Bradford et al. 2013). This paper focus on the needs for trans-specific training within the U.S. state hospital system. Although many institutions, including state hospitals, are implementing diversity initiatives to increase the sensitivity of their employees to a broad range of identity statuses, transgender affirmative trainings are often non existent or inadequate; trans-specific issues may fall under the broad umbrella of LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual, and transgender) awareness, and conflation of sexual identity and gender identity is prominent (Corliss, Shankle, & Moyer, 2007). This paper supports the development and implementation of transgender-specific training to foster discussion, create more supportive environments, and lay the foundation for a culture of inclusion within U.S. state hospitals. Part I examines the unique needs of and challenges facing members of the transgender community. Part II addresses specific needs and gaps in current state hospital training. An index outlining common terminology follows the manuscript. Finally, the accompanying Appendix includes a proposed training manual that could be adapted by state hospitals as a supplement to current training protocols. It is intended for general use within the hospital, and would be appropriate for staff from all specialties. The manual provides basic information related to serving members of the trans community, and is intended as an introductory guide or refresher for mental health practitioners across a wide variety of domains

The impact of long-term dietary pattern of fecal donor on in vitro fecal fermentation properties of inulin

Although the composition of the gut microbiota is of interest, the functionality, or metabolic activity, of the gut microbiota is of equal importance: the gut microbiota can produce either harmful metabolites associated with human disease or beneficial metabolites that protect against disease. The purposes of this study were to determine the associations between dietary intake variables and fecal short and branched chain fatty acid (S/BCFA) concentrations; to determine the associations between dietary intake variables and inulin degradation, short and branched chain fatty acid (S/BCFA) production, and ammonia production during in vitro fecal fermentation of a highly fermentable substrate (inulin); and finally to compare results from the fermentation of inulin with those obtained in a previous report using a poorly fermentable substrate (whole wheat; Yang and Rose, Nutr. Res., 2014, 34, 749–759). Stool samples from eighteen individuals that had completed one-year dietary records were used in an in vitro fecal fermentation system with long-chain inulin as substrate. Few dietary intake variables were correlated with fecal S/BCFA concentrations; however, intakes of several plant-based foods, especially whole grain, dry beans, and certain vegetables that provided dietary fiber, plant protein, and B vitamins, were associated with acetate, propionate, butyrate, and total SCFA production during inulin fermentation. In contrast, intake of dairy and processed meats that provided cholesterol and little fiber, were associated with ammonia and BCFA production. Comparing results between inulin and whole wheat fermentations, significant correlations were only found for butyrate and BCFA, suggesting that regardless of the type of carbohydrate provided to the microbiota, long-term diet may have a pronounced effect on the propensity of the gut microbiota toward either beneficial metabolism (butyrate production) or detrimental metabolism (BCFA production). These results may help in the development of new dietary strategies to improve gut microbiota functionality to promote human health

A RESTful API for exchanging Materials Data in the AFLOWLIB.org consortium

The continued advancement of science depends on shared and reproducible data. In the field of computational materials science and rational materials design this entails the construction of large open databases of materials properties. To this end, an Application Program Interface (API) following REST principles is introduced for the AFLOWLIB.org materials data repositories consortium. AUIDs (Aflowlib Unique IDentifier) and AURLs (Aflowlib Uniform Resource locator) are assigned to the database resources according to a well-defined protocol described herein, which enables the client to access, through appropriate queries, the desired data for post-processing. This introduces a new level of openness into the AFLOWLIB repository, allowing the community to construct high-level work-flows and tools exploiting its rich data set of calculated structural, thermodynamic, and electronic properties. Furthermore, federating these tools would open the door to collaborative investigation of the data by an unprecedented extended community of users to accelerate the advancement of computational materials design and development.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Mercury pollution in the lake sediments and catchment soils of anthropogenically-disturbed sites across England

Sediment cores and soil samples were taken from nine lakes and their catchments across England with varying degrees of direct human disturbance. Mercury (Hg) analysis demonstrated a range of impacts, many from local sources, resulting from differing historical and contemporary site usage and management. Lakes located in industrially important areas showed clear evidence for early Hg pollution with concentrations in sediments reaching 400–1600 ng g−1 prior to the mid-19th century. Control of inputs resulting from local management practices and a greater than 90% reduction in UK Hg emissions since 1970 were reflected by reduced Hg pollution in some lakes. However, having been a sink for Hg deposition for centuries, polluted catchment soils are now the major Hg source for most lakes and consequently recovery from reduced Hg deposition is being delayed

Trace element measurements within London and across the UK with particular emphasis on mercury

The aim of this project is to provide additional contemporary metals (especially mercury) data to that currently available and to place this in a temporal context on both a short time scale (annual variability in deposition values) and, using lake sediments, decadal scales within London and still longer scales (centuries) at the selected sites across the UK

Palaeolimnological assessment of trace element inputs to lakes in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region, Alberta, Canada

Undisturbed lake sediment records provide a robust natural archive of conditions within waterbodies. They have been used successfully over a number of decades to determine temporal trends of surface water acidification and to follow the effects of eutrophication. However, lake sediments also provide an archive of changes occurring within lake catchments and of atmospheric pollutants deposited onto lake and catchment surfaces. In August 2006, parallel lake sediment cores were collected from 22 lakes in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region of Alberta by UCL staff as part of the RAMP regional lakes survey. Twelve of these lakes were selected for study covering a range of locations from around the Fort McMurray area to sites in the Caribou Mountains and the Canadian Shield. The main aim of this initial study was to assess the evidence for lake acidification in the region, but analysis also revealed changes in nutrient input and, at one site, mercury (Hg) analysis showed an indication of industrial contamination. This work was reported in Curtis et al. (2010). The analysis undertaken in this initial project was focussed on single radiometrically dated sediment cores (hereafter the ‘A’ cores) from each of the 12 selected lakes. The parallel cores from each lake (the ‘B’ cores) were stored dark, at 4ºC, following their transfer to UCL and hence were available for further analysis. Both sediment cores (A and B) from the remaining 10 lakes remain unstudied. The aim of this current project was to use the stored ‘B’ sediment cores to assess temporal trends and rates of change in trace element input to a subset of the lakes cored in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region of Alberta and compare these with the sediment records of two reference lakes in the Caribou Mountains. This interim report contains details of progress on this work up to end March 2012 and a summary of remaining work under this contract. As a consequence this report focusses on data collected so far. Only limited interpretation is provided and will be undertaken fully when the dataset is complete. A final report will be produced upon completion of the study

Increased gene copy number of DEFA1/DEFA3 worsens sepsis by inducing endothelial pyroptosis.

Sepsis claims an estimated 30 million episodes and 6 million deaths per year, and treatment options are rather limited. Human neutrophil peptides 1-3 (HNP1-3) are the most abundant neutrophil granule proteins but their neutrophil content varies because of unusually extensive gene copy number polymorphism. A genetic association study found that increased copy number of the HNP-encoding gene DEFA1/DEFA3 is a risk factor for organ dysfunction during sepsis development. However, direct experimental evidence demonstrating that these risk alleles are pathogenic for sepsis is lacking because the genes are present only in some primates and humans. Here, we generate DEFA1/DEFA3 transgenic mice with neutrophil-specific expression of the peptides. We show that mice with high copy number of DEFA1/DEFA3 genes have more severe sepsis-related vital organ damage and mortality than mice with low copy number of DEFA1/DEFA3 or wild-type mice, resulting from more severe endothelial barrier dysfunction and endothelial cell pyroptosis after sepsis challenge. Mechanistically, HNP-1 induces endothelial cell pyroptosis via P2X7 receptor-mediating canonical caspase-1 activation in a NLRP3 inflammasome-dependent manner. Based on these findings, we engineered a monoclonal antibody against HNP-1 to block the interaction with P2X7 and found that the blocking antibody protected mice carrying high copy number of DEFA1/DEFA3 from lethal sepsis. We thus demonstrate that DEFA1/DEFA3 copy number variation strongly modulates sepsis development in vivo and explore a paradigm for the precision treatment of sepsis tailored by individual genetic information

Managing Online Trolling: From Deviant to Social and Political Trolls

Trolling behaviors are extremely diverse, varying \ by context, tactics, motivations, and impact. \ Definitions, perceptions of, and reactions to online \ trolling behaviors vary. Since not all trolling is equal \ or deviant, managing these behaviors requires context \ sensitive strategies. This paper describes appropriate \ responses to various acts of trolling in context, based \ on perceptions of college students in North America. In \ addition to strategies for dealing with deviant trolling, \ this paper illustrates the complexity of dealing with \ socially and politically motivated trolling

Tail universalities in rank distributions as an algebraic problem: the beta-like function

Although power laws of the Zipf type have been used by many workers to fit rank distributions in different fields like in economy, geophysics, genetics, soft-matter, networks etc., these fits usually fail at the tails. Some distributions have been proposed to solve the problem, but unfortunately they do not fit at the same time both ending tails. We show that many different data in rank laws, like in granular materials, codons, author impact in scientific journal, etc. are very well fitted by a beta-like function. Then we propose that such universality is due to the fact that a system made from many subsystems or choices, imply stretched exponential frequency-rank functions which qualitatively and quantitatively can be fitted with the proposed beta-like function distribution in the limit of many random variables. We prove this by transforming the problem into an algebraic one: finding the rank of successive products of a given set of numbers