Addressing gender-based violence in the Latin American and Caribbean Region : A critical review of interventions

The authors present an overview of gender-based violence (GBV) in Latin America, with special emphasis on good practice interventions to prevent GBV or offer services to its survivors or perpetrators. Intimate partner violence and sexual coercion are the most common forms of GBV, and these are the types of GBV that they analyze. GBV has serious consequences for women's health and well-being, ranging from fatal outcomes, such as homicide, suicide, and AIDS-related deaths, to nonfatal outcomes, such as physical injuries, chronic pain syndrome, gastrointestinal disorders, complications during pregnancy, miscarriage, and low birth-weight of children. GBV also poses significant costs for the economies of developing countries, including lower worker productivity and incomes, and lower rates of accumulation of human and social capital. The authors examine good practice approaches in justice, health, education, and multisectoral approaches. In each sector, they identify good practices for: (1) law and policies; (2) institutional reforms; (3) community-level interventions; and (4) individual behavior change strategies.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Development,Gender and Social Development,Public Health Promotion,Children and Youth,Adolescent Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Youth and Governance,Gender and Social Development,Children and Youth

Preventing and responding to gender-based violence in middle and low-income countries : a global review and analysis

Worldwide, patterns of violence against women differ markedly from violence against men. For example, women are more likely than men to be sexually assaulted or killed by someone they know. The United Nations has defined violence against women as"gender-based"violence, to acknowledge that such violence is rooted in gender inequality and is often tolerated and condoned by laws, institutions, and community norms. Violence against women is not only a profound violation of human rights, but also a costly impediment to a country's national development. While gender-based violence occurs in many forms throughout the life cycle, this review focuses on two of the most common types-physical intimate partner violence and sexual violence by any perpetrator. Unfortunately, the knowledge base about effective initiatives to prevent and respond to gender-based violence is relatively limited. Few approaches have been rigorously evaluated, even in high-income countries. And such evaluations involve numerous methodological challenges. Nonetheless, the authors review what is known about more and less effective-or at least promising-approaches to prevent and respond to gender-based violence. They present definitions, recent statistics, health consequences, costs, and risk factors of gender-based violence. The authors analyze good practice initiatives in the justice, health, and education sectors, as well as multisectoral approaches. For each of these sectors, they examine initiatives that have addressed laws and policies, institutional reforms, community mobilization, and individual behavior change strategies. Finally, the authors identify priorities for future research and action, including funding research on the health and socioeconomic costs of violence against women, encouraging science-based program evaluations, disseminating evaluation results across countries, promoting investment in effective prevention and treatment initiatives, and encouraging public-private partnerships.

Prior knowledge and statistical models of learning

The research reported here describes the effects of prior knowledge on how people form categories and learn continuous mappings. Chapter 2 is a review of the past research on knowledge effects in the statistical and psychological literature. Chapter 3 presents simulations of a set of experiments carried out by Heit and Bott (2000) into how knowledge is selected in a category learning task. The model was shown to account for the results of Heit and Bott and generate several new predictions concerning blocking effects with the use of prior knowledge. However, empirical testing of these predictions failed to demonstrate these effects. Chapter 4 describes work testing Delosh, McDaniel and Busemeyer's (1997) model of function learning, the Extrapolation Associative Learning Model (EXAM). Experiments were carried out demonstrating that a model that assumes only linear extrapolation, such as EXAM, is inadequate as a generic model of function learning. An alternative model to EXAM is presented which is constructed of several components, each module applying different quantities of prior knowledge to the task. Chapter 5 presents experiments investigating the extent to which participants abstract and apply functions in transfer-tasks. The results demonstrate that models of function learning must be able to restrict their range of allowable solutions in psychologically plausible ways

Scaling the gas transfer velocity and hydraulic geometry in streams and small rivers

Scaling is an integral component of ecology and earth science. To date, the ability to determine the importance of air–water gas exchange across large spatial scales is hampered partly by our ability to scale the gas transfer velocity and stream hydraulics. Here we report on a metadata analysis of 563 direct gas tracer release experiments that examines scaling laws for the gas transfer velocity. We found that the gas transfer velocity scales with the product of stream slope and velocity, which is in alignment with theory on stream energy dissipation. In addition to providing equations that predict the gas transfer velocity based on stream hydraulics, we used our hydraulic data set to report a new set of hydraulic exponents and coefficients that allow the prediction of stream width, depth, and velocity based on discharge. Finally, we report a new table of gas Schmidt number dependencies to allow researchers to estimate a gas transfer velocity using our equation for many gasses of interest

Vulnerability Disclosure: Best Practice Guidelines

It is vital to the commercial interests of providers of Internet of Things (IoT) products and solutions and to the security of their customers, that vulnerabilities are discovered and remediated as soon as possible. Third party security researchers are a valuable adjunct to a provider’s internal resources in addressing this goal. To ensure effective co-operation and maintain good relations with external security researchers, it is important for providers to define and communicate vulnerability disclosure processes that not only describe how they would like vulnerabilities to be reported confidentially to them, but also set expectations as to how they will process and act upon such reports. This process should include provision of feedback to the discovering researcher, and the public announcement of the security vulnerability, usually after the release of a software patch, hardware fix, or other remediation. The ETSI 303 645 standard [4], which lays down baseline security requirements for the consumer IoT, includes requirement 5.2, to “Implement a means to manage reports of vulnerabilities”. This states that “The manufacturer shall make a vulnerability disclosure policy publicly available.”, adding that “A vulnerability disclosure policy clearly specifies the process through which security researchers and others are able to report issues.” This document provides manufacturers, integrators, distributors, and retailers of IoT products and services with a set of guidelines for handling the disclosure of security vulnerabilities, based on best practice and international standards

Caveats in science-based news stories communicate caution without lowering interest

Science stories in the media are strongly linked to changes in health-related behavior. Science writers (including journalists, press officers, and researchers) must therefore frame their stories to communicate scientific caution without disrupting coherence and disengaging the reader. In this study we investigate whether caveats (“Further research is needed to validate the results”) satisfy this dual requirement. In four experiments participants read news reports with and without caveats. In Experiments 1 to 3, participants judged how cautious or confident researchers were, and how interesting or comprehensible they found the reports. News reports with caveats were judged as more cautious that those without, but levels of reader interest and comprehensibility were unaffected. In a fourth experiment, we created a mock newsroom and recruited journalism students to make judgments about which press releases should be published. Here, neither caveats nor the introduction of qualifying expressions in headlines had an effect on judgments of newsworthiness, consistent with Experiments 1 to 3. The reasons participants gave for rejecting a press release rarely referred to the caveat. Our results therefore suggest that science writers should include caveats in news reporting and that they can do so without fear of disengaging their readers or losing news uptak

Evaluating Four Inosine-Uridine Preferring Nucleoside Hydrolases in Bacillus Anthracis for Decontamination Strategies

Andrew Roser­ is a doctoral student in the School of Biological Sciences at Louisiana Tech University. Abigail Bass, Sophie Bott, Madison Brewton, Adam Broussard, Taylor Clement, Makenzie Cude, Hunter Currie, Claire Herke, Mary Hickman, Lauren James, Hailey Johnson, Madeline Lechtenberg, Sarah Murchison, Alex Plaisance, Wil Plants, Alex Sullivan, Sara Vandenberg, and Kaitlynn Willis are undergraduate students in the School of Biological Sciences at Louisiana Tech University. Rebecca Giorno is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Louisiana Tech University

Nursing Home Residents and Enterobacteriaceae Resistant to Third-Generation Cephalosporins

Limited data identify the risk factors for infection with Enterobacteriaceae resistant to third-generation cephalosporins among residents of long-term-care facilities. Using a nested case-control study design, nursing home residents with clinical isolates of Enterobacteriaceae resistant to third-generation cephalosporins were compared to residents with isolates of Enterobacteriaceae susceptible to third-generation cephalosporins. Data were collected on antimicrobial drug exposure 10 weeks before detection of the isolates, facility-level demographics, hygiene facilities, and staffing levels. Logistic regression models were built to adjust for confounding variables. Twenty-seven case-residents were identified and compared to 85 controls. Exposure to any cephalosporin (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 4.0, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.2 to13.6) and log percentage of residents using gastrostomy tubes within the nursing home (adjusted OR 3.9, 95% CI 1.3 to 12.0) were associated with having a clinical isolate resistant to third-generation cephalosporins

A risk assessment approach to improve the resilience of a seaport system using Bayesian networks

Over the years, many efforts have been focused on developing methods to design seaport systems, yet disruption still occur because of various human, technical and random natural events. Much of the available data to design these systems are highly uncertain and difficult to obtain due to the number of events with vague and imprecise parameters that need to be modelled. A systematic approach that handles both quantitative and qualitative data, as well as means of updating existing information when new knowledge becomes available is required. Resilience, which is the ability of complex systems to recover quickly after severe disruptions, has been recognised as an important characteristic of maritime operations. This paper presents a modelling approach that employs Bayesian belief networks to model various influencing variables in a seaport system. The use of Bayesian belief networks allows the influencing variables to be represented in a hierarchical structure for collaborative design and modelling of the system. Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is utilised to evaluate the relative influence of each influencing variable. It is envisaged that the proposed methodology could provide safety analysts with a flexible tool to implement strategies that would contribute to the resilience of maritime systems