Into the Light: Using Technology to Develop a Mother/Family Centered Peer Support Network [English and Spanish versions]

This paper highlights the work of Postpartum Progress Inc., to engage with large online communities of women experiencing a perinatal mental health issue, in order to explore the efficacy of peer support as a treatment modality. Into the Light is a Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Pipeline to Proposal project that will bring together diverse stakeholders and patients to build collaborative partnerships. Project goals include developing patient engagement, recruitment and dissemination strategies that reflect the needs of this patient population. Increasing patient access to easily understood information about treatment options when making health care decisions and improving patient-centered research strategies are also aims of the project. A Spanish translation of this publication is available to download under Additional Files

Mothers, Mental Health and Opioids: Engaging with Researchers @research4moms.com

Co-occurring mental illness and opioid misuse is a significant and rising public health issue for mothers in the US. In recent years, opioid misuse during pregnancy has increased a great deal.1 Only a small subset of mothers will seek and receive help for themselves and their children.2, 3 When it is sought, treatment is not necessarily targeted or tailored to meet the needs of mothers and families.1 We are bringing mothers and researchers together to promote a shared understanding of mothers’ experiences and needs, and to inform research that is relevant, meaningful and effective, with the goal of improving mental health/opioid misuse treatment and outcomes for mothers and children

17 ways to say yes:Toward nuanced tone of voice in AAC and speech technology

People with complex communication needs who use speech-generating devices have very little expressive control over their tone of voice. Despite its importance in human interaction, the issue of tone of voice remains all but absent from AAC research and development however. In this paper, we describe three interdisciplinary projects, past, present and future: The critical design collection Six Speaking Chairs has provoked deeper discussion and inspired a social model of tone of voice; the speculative concept Speech Hedge illustrates challenges and opportunities in designing more expressive user interfaces; the pilot project Tonetable could enable participatory research and seed a research network around tone of voice. We speculate that more radical interactions might expand frontiers of AAC and disrupt speech technology as a whole

Taxonomic surrogacy in biodiversity assessments, and the meaning of Linnaean ranks

Copyright © 2006 The Natural History MuseumThe majority of biodiversity assessments use species as the base unit. Recently, a series of studies have suggested replacing numbers of species with higher ranked taxa (genera, families, etc.); a method known as taxonomic surrogacy that has an important potential to save time and resources in assesments of biological diversity. We examine the relationships between taxa and ranks, and suggest that species/higher taxon exchanges are founded on misconceptions about the properties of Linnaean classification. Rank allocations in current classifications constitute a heterogeneous mixture of various historical and contemporary views. Even if all taxa were monophyletic, those referred to the same rank would simply denote separate clades without further equivalence. We conclude that they are no more comparable than any other, non-nested taxa, such as, for example, the genus Rattus and the phylum Arthropoda, and that taxonomic surrogacy lacks justification. These problems are also illustrated with data of polychaetous annelid worms from a broad-scale study of benthic biodiversity and species distributions in the Irish Sea. A recent consensus phylogeny for polychaetes is used to provide three different family-level classifications of polychaetes. We use families as a surrogate for species, and present Shannon–Wiener diversity indices for the different sites and the three different classifications, showing how the diversity measures rely on subjective rank allocations.Y. Bertrand, F. Pleijel and G. W. Rous

Antecedents of retweeting in a (political) marketing context

Word of mouth disseminates across Twitter by means of retweeting; however the antecedents of retweeting have not received much attention. This study uses the CHAID decision tree predictive method (Kass, 1980) with readily available Twitter data, and manually coded sentiment and content data, to identify why some tweets are more likely to be retweeted than others in a (political) marketing context. The analysis includes four CHAID models: (i) using message structure variables only, (ii) source variables only, (iii) message content and sentiment variables only and (iv) a combined model using source, message structure, message content and sentiment variables. The aggregated predictive model correctly classified retweeting behavior with a 76.7% success rate. Retweeting tends to occur when the originator has a high number of Twitter followers and the sentiment of the tweet is negative, contradicting previous research (East, Hammond, & Wright, 2007; Wu, 2013) but concurring with others (Hennig-Thurau, Wiertz, & Feldhaus, 2014). Additionally, particular types of tweet content are associated with high levels of retweeting, in particular those tweets including fear appeals or expressing support for others, whilst others are associated with very low levels of retweeting, such as those mentioning the sender’s personal life. Managerial implications and research directions are presented. The study makes a methodological contribution by illustrating how CHAID predictive modelling can be used for Twitter data analysis and a theoretical contribution by providing insights into why retweeting occurs in a (political) marketing context

Emergence of comparable covalency in isostructural cerium(IV)- and uranium(IV)-carbon multiple bonds

We report comparable levels of covalency in cerium- and uranium-carbon multiple bonds in the isostructural carbene complexes [M(BIPMTMS)(ODipp)2] [M = Ce (1), U (2), Th (3); BIPMTMS = C(PPh2NSiMe3)2; Dipp = C6H3-2,6-Pri2] whereas for M = Th the M=C bond interaction is much more ionic. On the basis of single crystal X-ray diffraction, NMR, IR, EPR, and XANES spectroscopies, and SQUID magnetometry complexes 1-3 are confirmed formally as bona fide metal(IV) complexes. In order to avoid the deficiencies of orbital-based theoretical analysis approaches we probed the bonding of 1-3 via analysis of RASSCF- and CASSCF-derived densities that explicitly treats the orbital energy near-degeneracy and overlap contributions to covalency. For these complexes similar levels of covalency are found for cerium(IV) and uranium(IV), whereas thorium(IV) is found to be more ionic, and this trend is independently found in all computational methods employed. The computationally determined trends in covalency of Ce ~ U > Th are also reproduced in experimental exchange reactions of 1-3 with MCI4 salts where 1 and 2 do not exchange with ThCl4, but 3 does exchange with MCl4 (M = Ce, U) and 1 and 2 react with UCl4 and CeCl4, respectively, to establish equilibria. This study therefore provides complementary theoretical and experimental evidence that contrasts to the accepted description that generally lanthanide-ligand bonding in non-zero oxidation state complexes is overwhelmingly ionic but that of uranium is more covalent

Insights on uranium uptake mechanisms by ion exchange resins with chelating functionalities: Chelation vs. anion exchange

X-ray absorption fine structure analysis has been successfully used to determine the coordination environment and therefore uptake mechanism towards the uranyl cation for a selection of commercially available ion exchange resins in non-saline and saline conditions ([Cl−] = 22.7 g L−1, 0.64 M) similar to those found in sea water. The resins tested were Purolite S985, S910 and S957, Dowex M4195, Ps-EDA, Ps-DETA and Ps-PEHA, which contain polyamine, amidoxime, mixed sulfonic/phosphonic acid, bispicolylamine, ethylenediamine, diethylenetriamine and pentaethylenehexamine functional groups, respectively. Purolite S910 and S957 were both found to extract the uranyl cation through a chelation mechanism. The uranium coordination environment on uranyl loaded Purolite S910 was found to be either tetra- or hexa-coordinate in the equatorial plane, with a 2:1 ratio of amidoxime:uranium in the fit suggesting either monodentate or η2 coordination by two amidoxime groups. The uranium environment for uranyl loaded Purolite S957 was found to be tetra-coordinate in the equatorial plane, with both sulfonic and phosphonic acid groups being involved in sorption. The presence of chloride in the loading solution had no effect on the uranyl coordination environment observed on any of the resins. In contrast, Dowex M4195, Purolite S985, Ps-EDA, Ps-DETA and Ps-PEHA exhibited an anion exchange mechanism for uranyl uptake as the corresponding extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) data best fit a [UO2(SO4)3]4− structure