461 research outputs found
Migrant Labor, Development, and HIV in Botswana
At independence, Botswana was highly underdeveloped and reliant on external capital earned through migrant labor. This presented several challenges to development despite the discovery of diamonds shortly after independence. However, no challenge was greater than the HIV epidemic which came to infect one in four Batswana. This thesis discusses the historical factors which promoted the spread of the virus in the greater context of migrant labor and development within Botswana
The Mental Health Needs and Perspectives of Culturally Deaf Older Adults Living in Two Counties in Florida
The objective of this study was to develop an understanding of the perceptions and needs of Deaf older adults related to mental health services in their communities. There has been little research on this population and few studies have been published that explore mental health and the Deaf older adult population. A survey of two associations for the Deaf in Florida sampled attitudes of participants who were 55 years old or above and considered themselves to be culturally Deaf. Questions were developed to better understand the perspectives of Deaf older adults related to current availability of services, desire for services, and how services should be organized. The data suggested that culturally Deaf older adults were aware of available services and desired more services. Deaf older adults stated specific services they believed they needed, such as dementia resources and mental health services. Deaf older adults indicated a clear preference for services to be specific to their needs and separate from hearing older adults which has implications related to the development of programs and services for this population
Patient reported outcome measures of quality of end-of-life care: a systematic review
End-of-life (EoL) care is increasingly used as a generic term in preference to palliative care or terminal care, particularly with reference to individuals with chronic disease, who are resident in community and long-term care (LTC) settings. This review evaluates studies based on patient reported outcome measures (PROMS) of quality of EoL care across all health-care settings. From 1041 citations, 12 studies were extracted by searches conducted in EBSCO, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, Cochrane, Open Grey and Google Scholar databases. At present, the evidence base for EoL care is founded on cancer care. This review highlights the paucity of studies that evaluate quality of EoL care for patients with chronic disease outside the established cancer-acute care paradigm, particularly in LTC. This review highlights the absence of any PROMs for the estimated 60% of patients in LTC with cognitive impairment. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are critical to understanding how EoL care services and practices affect patients’ health and EoL experience. PROMs describe the quality of care from the patient's perspective and add balance to existing clinical or proxy-derived knowledge on the quality of care and services provided
UW-BHI at MEDIQA 2019: An Analysis of Representation Methods for Medical Natural Language Inference
Recent advances in distributed language modeling have led to large
performance increases on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks.
However, it is not well understood how these methods may be augmented by
knowledge-based approaches. This paper compares the performance and internal
representation of an Enhanced Sequential Inference Model (ESIM) between three
experimental conditions based on the representation method: Bidirectional
Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Embeddings of Semantic
Predications (ESP), or Cui2Vec. The methods were evaluated on the Medical
Natural Language Inference (MedNLI) subtask of the MEDIQA 2019 shared task.
This task relied heavily on semantic understanding and thus served as a
suitable evaluation set for the comparison of these representation methods
Genetic Normalization of Differentiating Aneuploid Human Embryos
Early embryogenesis involves a series of dynamic processes, many of which are currently not well described or understood. Aneuploidy and aneuploid mosaicism, a mixture of aneuploid and euploid cells within one embryo, in early embryonic development are principal causes of developmental failure.^1,2^ Here we show that human embryos demonstrate a significant rate of genetic correction of aneuploidy, or "genetic normalization" when cultured from the cleavage stage on day 3 (Cleavage) to the blastocyst stage on day 5 (Blastocyst) using routine in vitro fertilization (IVF) laboratory conditions. One hundred and twenty-six human Cleavage stage embryos were evaluated for clinically indicated preimplantation genetic screening (PGS). Sixty-four of these embryos were found to be aneuploid following Cleavage stage embryo biopsy and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) 23 chromosome molecular karyotype (microarray). Of these, 25 survived to the Blastocyst stage of development and repeat microarray evaluation was performed. The inner cell mass (ICM), containing cells destined to form the fetus, and the trophectoderm (TE), containing cells destined to form the placenta were evaluated. Sixteen of 25 embryos (64%) [95% CI: 44-80%] possessed diploid karyotypes in both the ICM and TE cell populations. An additional three Blastocyst stage embryos showed genetic correction of the TE but not the ICM and one Blastocyst stage embryo showed the reverse. Mosaicism (exceeding 5%), was not detected in any of the ICM and TE samples analyzed. Recognizing that genetic normalization may occur in developing human embryos has important implications for stem cell biology, preimplantation and developmental genetics, embryology, and reproductive medicine. 

1)Hassold, T. et al. A cytogenetic study of 1000 spontaneous abortions. Ann Hum Genet. 44, 151-78 (1980).
2)Menasha, J., Levy, B., Hirschhorn, K., & Kardon, N.B. Incidence and spectrum of chromosome abnormalities in spontaneous abortions: new insights from a 12-year study. Genet Med. 7, 251-63 (2005)
Correspondence with the U. S. Legislature, Smoot, and Sutherland
Papers involving a correspondence with the U.S. Legislature, Smoot, and Sutherland
The Light Curve of the Weakly-Accreting T Tauri Binary KH 15D from 2005-10: Insights into the Nature of its Protoplanetary Disk
Photometry of the unique pre-main sequence binary system KH 15D is presented,
spanning the years 2005-2010. This system has exhibited photometric variations
and eclipses over the last 50 years caused by a precessing circumbinary disk.
Advancement of the occulting edge across the binary orbit has continued and the
photospheres of both stars are now completely obscured at all times. The system
is now visible only by scattered light, and yet it continues to show a periodic
variation on the orbital cycle with an amplitude exceeding two magnitudes. This
variation, which depends only on the binary phase, has likely been present in
the data since at least 1995. It can, by itself, account for shoulders on the
light curve prior to ingress and following egress, obviating the need for
components of extant models such as a scattering halo around star A or forward
scattering from a fuzzy disk edge. A plausible source for the variable
scattering component is reflected light from the far side of a warped occulting
disk. We have detected color changes in V-I of several tenths of a magnitude to
both the blue and red that occur during times of minima. These may indicate the
presence of a third source of light (faint star) within the system, or a change
in the reflectance properties of the disk as the portion being illuminated
varies with the orbital motion of the stars. The data support a picture of the
circumbinary disk as a geometrically thin, optically thick layer of perhaps mm
or cm-sized particles that has been sculpted by the binary stars and possibly
other components into a decidedly nonplanar configuration. A simple (infinitely
sharp) knife-edge model does a good job of accounting for all of the recent
(2005-2010) occultation data.Comment: To appear in The Astronomical Journa
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