Exploration of Aerial Arts as an Occupation

Introduction: Aerial arts is a performance art with acrobatic and dance principles that includes a variety of apparatuses, such as silks, hammock, and lyra. Aerial arts has been transforming over the years; it was once a form of entertainment and is now utilized in occupational therapy interventions. Occupational science, the academic discipline of studying occupations, has emerged to inform occupational therapy practice. Understanding the occupation of aerial arts through an occupational science framework, Doing, Being, Becoming, and Belonging, and Model of Human Occupation offered an in-depth description of the occupation that can provide more knowledge on how to use occupations more therapeutically. Methods: A descriptive qualitative study that used semi-structured interviews (modified version of the Occupational Performance History Interview-II) with a photo-elicitation prompt and observations. Seven aerial students completed the semi-structured interviews. Data from the semi-structured interviews and observations were analyzed with Braun and Clarke (2006) thematic analysis guidelines and were deciphered into the constructs of Doing, Being, Becoming, and Belonging. Results: Nine themes were identified to describe the occupation. The multidimensional concepts provided insight of the general impacts of engaging in aerial arts and illustrated how value and meaning of the occupation has been shaped with the consideration of COVID-19. Conclusion: The research contributes to the body of knowledge of occupational science through the example of aerial arts. The discoveries provided foundational insights of aerial arts in a holistic approach that still merits further research, especially with the impacts of COVID-19, to enhance understanding of the occupation.https://soar.usa.edu/otdcapstonessummer2021/1013/thumbnail.jp

Assessment of mobilization strategies in the Philippines to address repeated public hesitancy on COVID-19 vaccine

The objective of this scoping review is to understand the extent and type of evidence in relation to the current mobilization strategies in the country to address repeated public hesitancy on COVID-19 vaccine

Comparative Analysis of Reddit Posts and ChatGPT-Generated Texts’ Linguistic Features: A Short Report on Artificial Intelligence’s Imitative Capabilities

In recent years, the unprecedented explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, has dramatically and drastically altered many human fields, posing queries about how generative AI can imitate human language. Given the newness of generative AI as a controversial phenomenon, there is an urgency to closely examine how its linguistic outputs could mimic human language produced in natural contexts. Hence, in this short report, we discuss the observed similarities and differences in the linguistic features of the subreddit r/Marriage spouse appreciatory posts and ChatGPT-4 outputs. These results were the offshoot of our genre analysis on these two linguistic data sets. Our analysis revealed that ChatGPT-4 generated texts contain impeccable grammar, while the Reddit appreciatory posts have grammatical discrepancies, such as errors in subject-verb agreement, improper punctuation marks, and erroneous capitalization; ChatGPT-4 generated texts have more complex syntactical structure; Reddit dataset utilized more internet jargon, slang, and profanities and seems to be unpredictable and arbitrary in terms of textual length; and ChatGPT-4 outputs appear to overuse emojis while underuse emoticons and tend to use these digital linguistic elements without regard to their proper contexts. In light of these results, we claim that AI-generated texts, although they can mimic human language, this is on a mere surface level, and a closer inspection could uncover distinct variations. We recommend that future studies use more comprehensive and different datasets and continuously employ comparative and contrastive linguistic analysis to further investigate AI’s imitative capabilities

Fitness trade-offs explain low levels of persister cells in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Microbial populations often contain a fraction of slow-growing persister cells that withstand antibiotics and other stress factors. Current theoretical models predict that persistence levels should reflect a stable state in which the survival advantage of persisters under adverse conditions is balanced with the direct growth cost impaired under favourable growth conditions, caused by the nonreplication of persister cells. Based on this direct growth cost alone, however, it remains challenging to explain the observed low levels of persistence (<1%) seen in the populations of many species. Here, we present data from the opportunistic human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa that can explain this discrepancy by revealing various previously unknown costs of persistence. In particular, we show that in the absence of antibiotic stress, increased persistence is traded off against a lengthened lag phase as well as a reduced survival ability during stationary phase. We argue that these pleiotropic costs contribute to the very low proportions of persister cells observed among natural P. aeruginosa isolates (3 × 10(-8) -3 × 10(-4)) and that they can explain why strains with higher proportions of persister cells lose out very quickly in competition assays under favourable growth conditions, despite a negligible difference in maximal growth rate. We discuss how incorporating these trade-offs could lead to models that can better explain the evolution of persistence in nature and facilitate the rational design of alternative therapeutic strategies for treating infectious diseases.published_online: 2015-03-17status: publishe