A Narrative Inquiry On Public Middle School Teachers Experiences With Demoralization

Teachers may become demoralized when they feel they are unable to access the moral rewards of teaching. Some moral rewards of teaching include building relationships with students, adjusting methods of instruction that impacts individual student growth, and completing a creative and engaging lesson plan. The purpose of this qualitative narrative inquiry was to explore the experiences of public middle school teachers with demoralization in the context of their teaching environments. Six participants who self-identified as demoralized completed semi-structured interviews over Zoom. These interviews were then restoried into narratives, then manually coded into themes. The themes that were developed included time and resources as a valuable commodity, the consequences of the nomadic life of a modern middle school teacher, and balancing policy, administration, community, and student needs. The participants in this study were looking for relatedness from their administrators with communication and trust. They felt they needed more time to be competent in their craft, and they struggled to find autonomy in their teaching practice. Recommendations for further action include all teachers starting in a new school district regardless of experience being given a mentor, new teachers receiving access to district specific information, and that teachers’ contracts be negotiated for more than one year. Administration should also consider allowing teachers to have autonomy to teach in a style that works best to them

Hospital volume allocation: integrating decision maker and patient perspectives

Planning problems in healthcare systems have received greater attention in the last decade, especially because of the concerns recently raised about the scattering of surgical interventions among a wide number of different facilities that can undermine the quality of the outcome due to the volume-outcome association. In this paper, an approach to plan the amount of surgical interventions that a facility has to perform to assure a low adjusted mortality rate is proposed. The approach explicitly takes into account the existing interaction among patients’ choices and decision makers’ planning decisions. The first objective of the proposed approach is to find a solution able to reach quality in health outcomes and patients’ adherence. The second objective is to investigate the difference among solutions that are identified as optimal by either only one of the actors’ perspective, i.e., decision makers and patients, or by considering both the perspectives simultaneously. Following these objectives, the proposed approach is applied to a case study on Italian colon cancer interventions performed in 2014. Results confirm a variation in the hospital planned volumes when considering patients’ behaviour together with the policy maker plan, especially due to personal preferences and lack of information about hospital quality

Exact solution for the dynamical decoupling of a qubit with telegraph noise

We study the dissipative dynamics of a qubit that is afflicted by classical random telegraph noise and it is subject to dynamical decoupling. We derive exact formulas for the qubit dynamics at arbitrary working points in the limit of infinitely strong control pulses (bang-bang control) and we investigate in great detail the efficiency of the dynamical decoupling techniques both for Gaussian and non-Gaussian (slow) noise at qubit pure dephasing and at optimal point. We demonstrate that control sequences can be successfully implemented as diagnostic tools to infer spectral proprieties of a few fluctuators interacting with the qubit. The analysis is extended in order to include the effect of noise in the pulses and we give upper bounds on the noise levels that can be tolerated in the pulses while still achieving efficient dynamical decoupling performance

Reduction in intracellular HCV RNA and virus protein expression in human hepatoma cells following treatment with 2′-O-methyl-modified anti-core deoxyribozyme

AbstractHCV RNA is gaining greater consideration as a principal target for newer HCV antivirals because its destruction has the potential of eliminating the virus. These newer antivirals include deoxyribozymes (Dz), which are small single-stranded DNA molecules that cleave homologous RNA targets. Using a liver cell model containing functional genomic-length HCV-1b RNA we tested whether 2′-O-methyl-modified Dz, designed to recognize a highly-conserved RNA sequence located within the core-E1 coding region, could recognize and cleave its target sequence in the structural context of a functional HCV RNA molecule. Dz858-4-OMe contains four 2′-O-methyl nucleotide derivatives consecutively located on the distal ends of its two annealing arms. Intracellular HCV RNA, core protein and HCV antigen expression were reduced by 63%, 87% and 84%, respectively, when HCV RNA was challenged 6 h post-transfection with Dz858-4-OMe. The observed reduction of intracellular HCV RNA and protein by Dz858-4-OMe suggests that it may constitute an attractive HCV antiviral

A distributed approach for parameter estimation in Systems Biology models

Due to the lack of experimental measurements, biological variability and experimental errors, the value of many parameters of the systems biology Mathematical models is yet unknown or uncertain. A possible computational solution is the parameter estimation, that is the identification of the parameter values that determine the best model fitting respect to experimental data. We have developed an environment to distribute each run of the parameter estimation algorithm on a different computational resource. The key feature of the implementation is a relational database that allows the user to swap the candidate solutions among the working nodes during the computations. The comparison of the distributed implementation with the parallel one showed that the presented approach enables a faster and better parameter estimation of systems biology models

Genetic Features of Metachronous Esophageal Cancer Developed in Hodgkin's Lymphoma or Breast Cancer Long-Term Survivors: An Exploratory Study.

Background Development of novel therapeutic drugs and regimens for cancer treatment has led to improvements in patient long-term survival. This success has, however, been accompanied by the increased occurrence of second primary cancers. Indeed, patients who received regional radiotherapy for Hodgkin's Lymphoma (HL) or breast cancer may develop, many years later, a solid metachronous tumor in the irradiated field. Despite extensive epidemiological studies, little information is available on the genetic changes involved in the pathogenesis of these solid therapy-related neoplasms. Methods Using microsatellite markers located in 7 chromosomal regions frequently deleted in sporadic esophageal cancer, we investigated loss of heterozygosity (LOH) and microsatellite instability (MSI) in 46 paired (normal and tumor) samples. Twenty samples were of esophageal carcinoma developed in HL or breast cancer long-term survivors: 14 squamous cell carcinomas (ESCC) and 6 adenocarcinomas (EADC), while 26 samples, used as control, were of sporadic esophageal cancer (15 ESCC and 11 EADC). Results We found that, though the overall LOH frequency at the studied chromosomal regions was similar among metachronous and sporadic tumors, the latter exhibited a statistically different higher LOH frequency at 17q21.31 (p = 0.018). By stratifying for tumor histotype we observed that LOH at 3p24.1, 5q11.2 and 9p21.3 were more frequent in ESCC than in EADC suggesting a different role of the genetic determinants located nearby these regions in the development of the two esophageal cancer histotypes. Conclusions Altogether, our results strengthen the genetic diversity among ESCC and EADC whether they occurred spontaneously or after therapeutic treatments. The presence of histotype-specific alterations in esophageal carcinoma arisen in HL or breast cancer long-term survivors suggests that their transformation process, though the putative different etiological origin, may retrace sporadic ESCC and EADC carcinogenesis

Understanding stochastic perturbation theory: toy models and statistical analysis

The numerical stochastic perturbation method based on Parisi-Wu quantisationis applied to a suite of simple models to test its validity at high orders.Large deviations from normal distribution for the basic estimators aresystematically found in all cases (``Pepe effect''). As a consequence oneshould be very careful in estimating statistical errors. We present someresults obtained on Weingarten's ``pathological'' model where reliable resultscan be obtained by an application of the bootstrap method. We also present someevidence that in the far less trivial application to Lattice Gauge Theory asimilar problem should not arise at moderately high loops (up toO(\alpha^{10}))

EFEITO ADJUVANTE DO CLORETO DE DIMETILDIOCTADECILAMÔNIO EM PREPARAÇÕES DE TOXÓIDE TETÂNICO

Foram formuladas duas vacinas contendo a mesma concentração de toxina, com o intuito de se avaliar a habilidade do adjuvante cloreto de demetiloctadecilamônio (DDA cloreto) em potencializar a resposta imune em cobaias imunizada com o toxóide tetânico. A vacina A foi adsorvida com hidróxido de alumínio e a vacina B cmpreendia a associação do hidróxido de alumínio e DDA cloreto. Os títulos de antitoxina no soro dos cobaios imunizados foram quantificados por soroneutralização em camundongos frente a uma dose contendo 1 Lp/10 (limite paralítico) de toxina tetânica. A inclusão do DDA cloreto em vacinas constituídas por toxóide tetânico adsorvido com hidróxido de alumínio promoveu maior ativação das respostas imunes humoral e celular de cobaios, quando comparada à resposta imune dos animais que receberam o antígeno adsorvido apenas com o hidróxido de alumínio. Os animais recebedores da vacina B apresentaram títulos de anticorpos neutralizantes 2,66 vezes maiores que os que recebedores a vacina A, demonstrando a potencialização da resposta imune humoral promovida pelo DDA cloreto. A resposta imune celular, avaliada pela reação de hipersensibilidade cutânea tardia, foi 17,8 maior no grupo B. Esses resultados demonstram que o DDA cloreto é um potente ativador da resposta imune humoral e celular de cobaios imunizados com o toxóide tetânico. Adjuvant effect of dimethyl dioctadecyl ammonium chloride in tetanic toxoid preparations Abstract Two vaccines were formulated with the same concentration of antigen and different adjuvants to assess the performance of dimethyl dioctadecyl ammonium chloride (DDA chloride) in boosting the immune response in guinea pigs immunized with tetanic toxoid. Vaccine A was adsorbed with aluminum hydroxide and vaccine B contained an association of aluminum hydroxide and DDA chloride. The antitoxin titres in the immunized guinea pig sera were assessed serum neutralization in mice using a toxin containing one Lp/10 dose (paralytic limit). The inclusion of DDA chloride in vaccines made up of tetanic toxoid adsorbed with aluminum hydroxide causes a greater activation of the humoral and cell immune response in guinea pigs when compared with the animals which received the antigen adsorbed only with aluminum hydroxide. The animals which received vaccine B had 2.66 times more neutralizing antibodies than those which received vaccine A, showing the boosting of the humoral immune response caused by DDA chloride. The animals from group B also had a strong immune cell response by the delayed type hypersensitivity reaction, which was 17.8 times higher than group A. These results show that DDA chloride is a potent activator of the humoral and cell immune response in guinea pigs immunized with tetanic toxoid