The soft X-ray excess AGN RE J2248-511

We model the spectral energy distribution of the ultrasoft broad-line AGN RE J2248-511 with Comptonised accretion disc models. These are able to reproduce the steep optical and ultrasoft X-ray slopes, and the derived black hole mass is consistent with independent mass estimates. This AGN displays properties of both broad and narrow line Seyfert 1 galaxies, but we conclude that it is intrinsically a `normal' Seyfert 1 viewed at high inclination angle.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. MG10 Proceeding

An Investigation of Unstructured Play in Nature and its Effect on Children’s Self-Efficacy

ABSTRACT AN INVESTIGATION OF UNSTRUCTURED PLAY IN NATURE AND ITS EFFECT ON CHILDREN’S SELF-EFFICACY Paul Starling Dr. Lani Nelson-Zlupko Much attention is being given to childhood physical and mental well-being as it relates to outdoor play in nature. This is particularly relevant as today’s children are spending much less time outdoors, and even less time in unstructured play compared to indoor time or highly regulated supervised activity. Recent research indicates that outdoor unstructured play may be essential to core mastery in children: it has been linked to improvements in cognitive, behavioral, and even physical functioning. This study investigated whether unstructured play in nature had an effect on children’s self-efficacy. An original, mixed methods, empirical study was conducted which enlisted 21 subjects, (n=11 male) and (n=10 female) ages 8-12. These subjects took part in unstructured play in nature within a 3-week period of time while attending a summer camp. Subjects played anywhere from 2-5 days in 45-minute play sessions. Subjects completed the modified widely used Self-Efficacy Scale (SES) and the Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale (ESES) at pre and post conditions in order to explore whether or not exposure to unstructured outdoor play in nature contributes to increases in perceived self-efficacy. Quantitative results indicated no difference at post-test but when frequency of exposure to the experimental condition was factored in a lowering of self-efficacy as measured by the modified SES surfaced. Statistics also revealed that the exposure to the experimental condition alone was not significant enough to account for the decrease in self-efficacy scores. Qualitative field notes taken throughout the study indicated the contrary: there were indeed multiple instances of self-efficacy development

The Role of ctDNA in Gastric Cancer.

Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) has potential applications in gastric cancer (GC) with respect to screening, the detection of minimal residual disease (MRD) following curative surgery, and in the advanced disease setting for treatment decision making and therapeutic monitoring. It can provide a less invasive and convenient method to capture the tumoural genomic landscape compared to tissue-based next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS). In addition, ctDNA can potentially overcome the challenges of tumour heterogeneity seen with tissue-based NGS. Although the evidence for ctDNA in GC is evolving, its potential utility is far reaching and may shape the management of this disease in the future. This article will review the current and future applications of ctDNA in GC

VCBART: Bayesian trees for varying coefficients

Many studies have reported associations between later-life cognition and socioeconomic position in childhood, young adulthood, and mid-life. However, the vast majority of these studies are unable to quantify how these associations vary over time and with respect to several demographic factors. Varying coefficient (VC) models, which treat the covariate effects in a linear model as nonparametric functions of additional effect modifiers, offer an appealing way to overcome these limitations. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art VC modeling methods require computationally prohibitive parameter tuning or make restrictive assumptions about the functional form of the covariate effects. In response, we propose VCBART, which estimates the covariate effects in a VC model using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. With simple default hyperparameter settings, VCBART outperforms existing methods in terms of covariate effect estimation and prediction. Using VCBART, we predict the cognitive trajectories of 4,167 subjects from the Health and Retirement Study using multiple measures of socioeconomic position and physical health. We find that socioeconomic position in childhood and young adulthood have small effects that do not vary with age. In contrast, the effects of measures of mid-life physical health tend to vary with respect to age, race, and marital status. An R package implementing VC-BART is available at https://github.com/skdeshpande91/VCBAR

Demand for Self-Managed Online Telemedicine Abortion in the United States During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic.

For many in the United States, abortion care is already difficult to access,1 and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created yet more potential barriers—including infection risk at clinics and state policies limiting in-clinic services. The severity of these state policies varies, but, in the most extreme case, Texas effectively suspended all abortions for approximately 4 weeks.2 As a result, people may increasingly be seeking self-managed abortion outside the formal health care system. Using data from Aid Access, the sole online abortion telemedicine service in the United States, we assessed whether demand for self-managed medication abortion increased as in-clinic access became more challenging

Multiwavelength XMM-Newton observations of the Laor et al. sample of PG quasars

We present XMM-Newton/EPIC spectra for the Laor et al. sample of Palomar Green quasars. We find that a power-law provides a reasonable fit to the 2-5 keV region of the spectra. Excess soft X-ray emission below 2 keV is present for all objects, with the exception of those known to contain a warm absorber. A single power-law is, however, a poor fit to the 0.3-10.0 keV spectrum and instead we find that a simple model, consisting of a broken power-law (plus an iron line), provides a reasonable fit in most cases. The equivalent width of the emission line is constrained in just twelve objects but with low (<2 sigma) significance in most cases. For the sources whose spectra are well-fit by the broken power-law model, we find that various optical and X-ray line and continuum parameters are well-correlated; in particular, the power-law photon index is well-correlated with the FWHM of the Hbeta line and the photon indices of the low and high energy components of the broken power-law are well-correlated with each other. These results suggest that the 0.3-10 keV X-ray emission shares a common (presumably non-thermal) origin, as opposed to suggestions that the soft excess is directly produced by thermal disc emission or via an additional spectral component. We present XMM-Newton/OM data which we combine with the X-ray spectra so as to produce broad-band spectral energy distributions, free from uncertainties due to long-term variability in non-simultaneous data. Fitting these optical-UV spectra with a Comptonized disc model indicates that the soft X-ray excess is independent of the accretion disc, confirming our interpretation of the tight correlation between the hard and soft X-ray spectra.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA