Development of a tailored, telehealth intervention to address chronic pain and heavy drinking among people with HIV infection: integrating perspectives of patients in HIV care.

BACKGROUND: Chronic pain and heavy drinking commonly co-occur and can infuence the course of HIV. There have been no interventions designed to address both of these conditions among people living with HIV (PLWH), and none that have used telehealth methods. The purpose of this study was to better understand pain symptoms, patterns of alcohol use, treatment experiences, and technology use among PLWH in order to tailor a telehealth intervention that addresses these conditions SUBJECTS: Ten participants with moderate or greater chronic pain and heavy drinking were recruited from a cohort of patients engaged in HIV-care (Boston Alcohol Research Collaborative on HIV/AIDS Cohort) and from an integrated HIV/primary care clinic at a large urban hospital. METHODS: One-on-one interviews were conducted with participants to understand experiences and treatment of HIV, chronic pain, and alcohol use. Participants’ perceptions of the infuence of alcohol on HIV and chronic pain were explored as was motivation to change drinking. Technology use and treatment preferences were examined in the fnal section of the interview. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and uploaded into NVivo® v12 software for analysis. A codebook was developed based on interviews followed by thematic analysis in which specifc meanings were assigned to codes. RESULTS: A number of themes were identifed that had implications for intervention tailoring including: resilience in coping with HIV; autonomy in health care decision-making; coping with pain, stress, and emotion; understanding treatment rationale; depression and social withdrawal; motives to drink and refrain from drinking; technology use and capacity; and preference for intervention structure and style. Ratings of intervention components indicated that participants viewed each of the proposed intervention content areas as “helpful” to “very helpful”. Videoconferencing was viewed as an acceptable modality for intervention delivery CONCLUSIONS: Results helped specify treatment targets and provided information about how to enhance intervention delivery. The interviews supported the view that videoconferencing is an acceptable telehealth method of addressing chronic pain and heavy drinking among PLWH.UH2 AA026192 - NIAAA NIH HHSPublished versio

Copula Based Multistate Hazard Model: An Inferential Methodology for Innocence Project

Abstract Since 1992, the Innocence Projects (IP) have helped over 270 wrongly convicted persons prove their innocence and gain freedom. Despite the important successes of the IP's these exonerations may be a miniscule sample of the number of wrongly convicted persons who languish in prison. Statistical research on possible identifiers of likely 'exonerable' cases does not exist: current work is merely descriptive and non-inferential. We demonstrate an inferential methodology designed for the Innocence Projects: a multi-state hazard model with an augmentation via the parametric copula. Our approach is designed to exploit records that are readily available to exoneration workers. This approach offers a coherent, statistical framework for identification of significant and important factors on data that are readily available to the IP'

Digits: Two Reports on New Units of Scholarly Publication

The Digits team (Matt Burton, Matthew J. Lavin, Jessica Otis, and Scott B. Weingart) convened around the question of how we might share, preserve, and legitimize scholarship freed from the affordances of print. For the A.W. Mellon-funded Digits Planning Grant (2016-2018), the PIs had three goals: - Investigate the use of software containers for research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. - Assess the infrastructural needs of digital humanists around publishing and preserving web-centric scholarship. - Gather a team of experts to guide the above activities and plan how they might inform a beneficial intervention into the scholarly ecosystem. Through our investigation into the scholarly uses of containers, we discovered that the technical infrastructure needed to connect containers with digital publications is underdeveloped. We see potential for container technologies to facilitate existing digital scholarly publications and afford new forms of computational scholarship, but this process would first require a series of infrastructural bridges. The digital scholarship needs assessment we conducted, as well as our advisory board meetings, made it clear that a targeted technological intervention alone would not be enough to welcome web-first publications into the scholarly ecosystem; in-tandem cultural and institutional changes are also necessary

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one another in our field of study, early modern Britain (c. 1500-1700), has no global, unified resource to which to turn. Manually building such a network is infeasible, since it would need to represent thousands of nodes and tens of millions of potential edges just to include the relations among the most prominent persons of the period. Our Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project takes up recent statistical techniques and digital tools to reconstruct and visualize the early modern social network. We describe in this paper the natural language processing tools and statistical graph learning techniques that we used to extract names and infer relations from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. We then explain the steps taken to test inferred relations against the knowledge of experts in order to improve the accuracy of the learning techniques. Our argument here is twofold: first, that the results of this process, a global visualization of Britain’s early modern social network, will be useful to scholars and students of the period; second, that the pipeline we have developed can, with local modifications, be reused by other scholars to generate networks for other historical or contemporary societies from biographical documents

Towards Interoperable Network Ontologies for the Digital Humanities

Scholars have long been interested in networks. Networks of scholarly exchange, trade, kinship, and patronage are some of the many such longstanding subjects of study. Recent and ongoing digital humanities projects are now considering networks with fresh approaches and increasingly complex datasets. At the heart of these digital projects are ‘network ontologies’ — functional data models for distilling the complicated, messy connections between historical people, objects, and places. Although scholars creating network ontologies necessarily focus on different types of content, if these networks are to form a coherent body of scholarship in the future, we must work towards the creation of interoperable ontological structures, rather than yet another set of competing standards. Here we examine the methodological considerations behind designing such interoperable ontologies, focusing primarily on the example of Early Modern historical networks. We argue that it would be infeasible to adopt a single ontological standard for all possible digital humanities projects; flexibility is essential to accommodate all subjects and objects of humanistic enquiry, from the micro-level to the longue-durée. However, we believe it possible to establish shared practices to structure these network ontologies on an ongoing basis in order to ensure their long-term interoperability

Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games

Why do we play games—with and upon each other as well as ourselves? When are winners also losers, and vice-versa? How and to what end do we stretch the spaces of play? What happens when players go ‘out of bounds,’ or when games go ‘too far’? Moreover, what happens when we push the parameters of inquiry: when we play with traditional narratives of ludic culture, when we re-write the rules? An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular ‘plaything’ is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor

MTSS1/Src family kinase Dysregulation Underlies Multiple Inherited Ataxias

The genetically heterogeneous spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs) are caused by Purkinje neuron dysfunction and degeneration, but their underlying pathological mechanisms remain elusive. The Src family of nonreceptor tyrosine kinases (SFK) are essential for nervous system homeostasis and are increasingly implicated in degenerative disease. Here we reveal that the SFK suppressor Missing-in-metastasis (MTSS1) is an ataxia locus that links multiple SCAs. MTSS1 loss results in increased SFK activity, reduced Purkinje neuron arborization, and low basal firing rates, followed by cell death. Surprisingly, mouse models for SCA1, SCA2, and SCA5 show elevated SFK activity, with SCA1 and SCA2 displaying dramatically reduced MTSS1 protein levels through reduced gene expression and protein translation, respectively. Treatment of each SCA model with a clinically approved Src inhibitor corrects Purkinje neuron basal firing and delays ataxia progression in MTSS1 mutants. Our results identify a common SCA therapeutic target and demonstrate a key role for MTSS1/SFK in Purkinje neuron survival and ataxia progression