Cigarette smoking and drug use among a nationally representative sample of HIV-positive individuals

Background and Objectives: Among HIV-positive populations, the prevalence of cigarette smoking remains disproportionately high and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Little is known about this topic among HIV-positive persons in the general population. Methods: Data came from the 2005 to 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) public use data files. Unadjusted and adjusted multinomial logistic regression analyses explored the associations between socio-demographic, drug and alcohol use, and drug and/or alcohol treatment characteristics with smoking status among HIV-positive individuals (n = 349). Results: More than 40% of the sample was current smokers. In adjusted analyses, females (aRRR = .11, 95% CI = .03–.41) and participants who had never been married (aRRR = .19, 95% CI = .05–.58), were more likely to be former smokers than never smokers. Females (aRRR = .37, 95% CI = .14–.96) and individuals older than age 35 (aRRR = .37, 95% CI = .16–.89) were less likely to be current smokers than never smokers. Conversely, previously married persons (aRRR = 5.72, 95% CI = 1.40–23.31), participants reporting binge drinking (aRRR = 5.96, 95% CI = 2.27–15.64), and lifetime drug or alcohol treatment (aRRR = 5.12, 95% CI = 2.09–12.55) were more likely to be current smokers than never smokers. Conclusions: Findings help confirm the high prevalence of smoking among HIV-positive persons suggesting the need for integrated substance use and smoking cessation treatment among HIV-positives. Scientific Significance: The present findings have implications for the development and implementation of targeted smoking cessation programs for HIV-positive smokers

STUDY: Socially Aware Temporally Causal Decoder Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are widely used to help people find items that are tailored to their interests. These interests are often influenced by social networks, making it important to use social network information effectively in recommender systems. This is especially true for demographic groups with interests that differ from the majority. This paper introduces STUDY, a Socially-aware Temporally caUsal Decoder recommender sYstem. STUDY introduces a new socially-aware recommender system architecture that is significantly more efficient to learn and train than existing methods. STUDY performs joint inference over socially connected groups in a single forward pass of a modified transformer decoder network. We demonstrate the benefits of STUDY in the recommendation of books for students who are dyslexic, or struggling readers. Dyslexic students often have difficulty engaging with reading material, making it critical to recommend books that are tailored to their interests. We worked with our non-profit partner Learning Ally to evaluate STUDY on a dataset of struggling readers. STUDY was able to generate recommendations that more accurately predicted student engagement, when compared with existing methods.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Tracking neonicotinoids following their use as cotton seed treatments

Neonicotinoids are a leading class of insecticides on the global market, accounting for nearly 25%. They are widely used in both agricultural and residential settings. Causing neuron failure by irreversibly binding to the insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, neonicotinoids offer broad spectrum efficacy against a variety of pests. However, because they are non-selective with regard to insect species, there has been some concern with neonicotinoid use over threats to pollinators such as honeybees, and potential indirect effects to migratory waterfowl as a result of invertebrate prey population depletion. In order to study occurrence and fate of neonicotinoids (thiamethoxam and imidacloprid), we analyzed cotton leaves on plants grown from neonicotinoid-treated seeds and corresponding soil samples between cotton rows. Neonicotinoid concentration data from cotton leaves appears to be consistent with the claim that seed treatments protect plants for 3–4 weeks; by 30 days post-planting, neonicotinoid concentrations fell, in general, to 200 ng/g or lower. This represents about a 10-fold decrease from plant concentrations at approximately 2 weeks post-planting. It was found that neonicotinoids used as seed treatments remained present in the soil for months post planting and could be available for runoff. To that end, 21 playa wetlands were sampled; 10 had at least one quantifiable neonicotinoid present, three of which were classified as grassland or rangeland playas, two were urban, and the remaining five were cropland playas. In several instances, neonicotinoid concentrations in playas exceeded EPA chronic benchmarks for aquatic invertebrates

Social-ecological Resilience of a Nuosu Community-linked Watershed, Southwest Sichuan, China

Farmers of the Nuosu Yi ethnic group in the Upper Baiwu watershed report reductions in the availability of local forest resources. A team of interdisciplinary scientists worked in partnership with this community to assess the type and extent of social-ecological change in the watershed and to identify key drivers of those changes. Here, we combine a framework for institutional analysis with resilience concepts to assess system dynamics and interactions among resource users, resources, and institutions over the past century. The current state of this system reflects a legacy of past responses to institutional disturbances initiated at the larger, national system scale. Beginning with the Communist Revolution in 1957 and continuing through the next two decades, centralized forest regulations imposed a mismatch between the scale of management and the scale of the ecological processes being managed. A newly implemented forest property rights policy is shifting greater control over the management of forest resources to individuals in rural communities. Collective forest users will be allowed to manage commodity forests for profit through the transfer of long-term leases to private contractors. Villagers are seeking guidance on how to develop sustainable and resilient forest management practices under the new policy, a responsibility returned to them after half a century and with less abundant and fewer natural resources, a larger and aggregated population, and greater influence from external forces. We assess the watershed’s current state in light of the past and identify future opportunities to strengthen local institutions for governance of forest resources

Assessing the clinical utility of cancer genomic and proteomic data across tumor types

Molecular profiling of tumors promises to advance the clinical management of cancer, but the benefits of integrating molecular data with traditional clinical variables have not been systematically studied. Here we retrospectively predict patient survival using diverse molecular data (somatic copy-number alteration, DNA methylation and mRNA, miRNA and protein expression) from 953 samples of four cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas project. We found that incorporating molecular data with clinical variables yielded statistically significantly improved predictions (FDR < 0.05) for three cancers but those quantitative gains were limited (2.2–23.9%). Additional analyses revealed little predictive power across tumor types except for one case. In clinically relevant genes, we identified 10,281 somatic alterations across 12 cancer types in 2,928 of 3,277 patients (89.4%), many of which would not be revealed in single-tumor analyses. Our study provides a starting point and resources, including an open-access model evaluation platform, for building reliable prognostic and therapeutic strategies that incorporate molecular data

Comparing the Effectiveness of Social Skill Development Interventions with Therapeutic Horseback Riding in Children with Autism: An Alternating Treatment Design

This study aims to examine and compare the effects of applied behavior analysis treatments in conjunction with therapeutic horseback riding (THR) and the improvement of social skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The research study compared the effectiveness of social behavior approaches during three conditions (THR, THR with token reinforcement, and THR with visual cues) using a single-subject research design to determine the “best treatment� for improving social skills among children with ASD (N=4). During the comparison phase, the researcher determined the frequency rate of receptive social skills and frequency of expressive social skills among each condition to determine the most effective approach in facilitating observed social skills. Results of this study indicated that while all three conditions increased social skills (receptive and expressive), the use of token reinforcement was the most effective in increasing the number of receptive and expressive communications. Practical implications and future research needs are provided for addressing social skill development with children with ASD

Analysis Strategies for Planned Missing Data in Health Sciences and Education Research

In health and educational research, planned-missing-data designs have been used to reduce the number of variables collected on participants, thus reducing respondent burden and the number of resources necessary for study. The purpose of this dissertation research is to develop and improve analysis strategies for planned-missing-data designs, with specific applications to partial mouth recording protocols in oral health studies and balanced incomplete block designs in large-scale educational survey assessments. For the oral-health examination, multidimensional item response theory models (MIRT) are investigated in addition to multiple imputation strategies from hierarchical normal models to recover information on periodontal disease status when data are collected on only half of the mouth. Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), complex MIRT models are investigated to improve the estimation of population ability characteristics as well as to explore the potential for other components of academic to be measured from the same data