FROM AVOIDANCE TO HEALING: THE PORTRAYAL OF DEATH IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN\u27S LITERATURE

This thesis examines the portrayal of death in children\u27s literature from three different perspectives. Firstly, it explores how authors approached the topic during the Victorian era when death was an everyday reality due to rampant diseases. Secondly, it analyzes how authors depict death in different ways, including involuntary death, the pursuit of the sublime, and the nature of life cycle. Thirdly, it explores how authors address children\u27s psychological states when dealing with death, including reducing pre-death pain, using poetic expression, promoting healing from grief, and associating memory loss with death. Finally, the author creates a children\u27s book that confronts the author\u27s own fear of death and the loss of loved ones.In conclusion, this thesis highlights the evolution of the portrayal of death in children\u27s literature, from avoiding the topic altogether to acknowledging it as an inevitable reality. The contemporary approach focuses on alleviating children\u27s fear of death and guiding them through the grieving process with healing words and images, emphasizing love, resilience, and memory

HEART FAILURE PATIENT SELF-CARE DECISION MAKING PRIOR TO REHOSPITALIZATION

Background Rehospitalizations among patients with heart failure (HF) are common and costly. Current hospitalization prediction models for HF do not consistently or strongly predict rehospitalization. Purpose To examine and explore HF patient self-care decision making prior to rehospitalization. Building on Riegel’s HF naturalistic decision making model, we examined the role of HF self-care on two outcomes: (1) 30 day rehospitalization status and (2) decision delay. Method The study used a cross-sectional, convergent mixed methods design [QUAN+QUAL] with a quantitative survey and qualitative in-depth interviews. Quota sampling (for quantitative survey) and purposive sampling (for qualitative interviews) were used to recruit participants who had been rehospitalized within and beyond 30 days of their last hospitalization. Inclusion criteria were HF patients who: had a diagnosis of HF and past hospitalization for HF, spoke English, and were cognitively intact. Logistic regressions, content analysis and data matrices were used to analyze the quantitative and qualitative data. Results There were 127 participants in the quantitative sample and fifteen for the qualitative sample. Approximately 60% of participants were rehospitalized beyond 30 days of their last hospitalization. Survey participants were predominantly male (65%), unemployed (79%), older (mean 58.14 ±13.59), and insured (97%). The odds of being rehospitalized within 30 days was two times higher among those with high depressive symptoms (OR= 2.31, 95% CI: 1.00 - 5.31). The odds of decision delay was five times higher among those with high depressive symptoms (OR= 5.33, 95% CI: 2.14 - 13.28) and decreased by 80% among those reporting shortness of breath (OR= 0.20, 95% CI: 0.08 - 0.49). HF self-care decision making (reactive vs proactive) was different by 30 day rehospitalization status and by manifestation of acute vs. chronic symptoms. Participants with decision delay reported a sense of devastation and uncertainty about their future with HF. Conclusions A patient centered approach is needed to assist HF patients in identifying and self-managing symptoms other than shortness of breath. There is a critical need for clinicians to carefully assess and address depressive symptoms among HF patients

Chinese Ph.D. students' perception of predatory journals

The aim of this study is to investigate Chinese Ph.D. students' attitudes towards predatory journals. An online questionnaire was distributed and 332 respondents from various disciplines and institutions shared their opinions. The result showed that the majority of respondents (n=271; 81.32%) never heard about predatory journals. Among those who knew what predatory journals are (n=61, 18.68%), thought that predatory journals had bad reputation, low quality and poor peer-review process. They agreed that such journals charge high APC but published quickly. The results also indicated that the awareness of predatory journals was influenced by respondents' gender, research experience and publishing experience. Male respondents knew more about predatory journals than female respondents. Respondents who had rich research and publishing experiences were more likely to identify predatory journals. Regarding further publishing intention, 124 respondents (37.35%) said they might try predatory journals to achieve assessing requirements, and 208(62.65%) respondents refused

Should We Care How Long to Publish? Investigating the Correlation between Publishing Delay and Journal Impact Factor

This poster presents a research that examines the correlation between publishing delay and impact factor of academic journals.Data of 9,028 articles in 91 library and information sciences (LIS) and biology journals were collected from WoS Journal Citation Report (JCR 2016), and then analyzed and compared. The data analysis shows that LIS journals have greater publishing delay than biology journals. The study result shows that there is no correlation between publishing delay and journal impact factor, although, a small negative correlation for biology journals and a small positive correlation for information science journals can be seen

DeepPredict : A zone preference prediction system for online lodging platforms

Publisher Copyright: © The author(s) 2021.Online lodging platforms have become more and more popular around the world. To make a booking in these platforms, a user usually needs to select a city first, then browses among all the prospective options. To improve the user experience, understanding the zone preferences of a user's booking behavior will be helpful. In this work, we aim to predict the zone preferences of users when booking accommodations for the next travel. We have two main challenges: (1) The previous works about next information of Points Of Interest (Pals) recommendation are mainly focused on users' historical records in the same city, while in practice, the historical records of a user in the same city would be very sparse. (2) Since each city has its own specific geographical entities, it is hard to extract the structured geographical features of accommodation in different cities. Towards the difficulties, we propose DeepPredict, a zone preference prediction system. To tackle the first challenge, DeepPredict involves users' historical records in all the cities and uses a deep learning based method to process them. For the second challenge, DeepPredict uses HERE places API to get the information of pals nearby, and processes the information with a unified way to get it. Also, the description of each accommodation might include some useful information, thus we use Sent2Vec, a sentence embedding algorithm, to get the embedding of accommodation description. Using a real-world dataset collected from Airbnb, DeepPredict can predict the zone preferences of users' next bookings with a remarkable performance. DeepPredict outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by 60% in macro Fl-score.Peer reviewe

Measuring the declared SDK versions and their consistency with API calls in android apps

Android has been the most popular smartphone system, with multiple platform versions (e.g., KITKAT and Lollipop) active in the market. To manage the application's compatibility with one or more platform versions, Android allows apps to declare the supported platform SDK versions in their manifest files. In this paper, we make a first effort to study this modern software mechanism. Our objective is to measure the current practice of the declared SDK versions (which we term as DSDK versions afterwards) in real apps, and the consistency between the DSDK versions and their app API calls. To this end, we perform a three-dimensional analysis. First, we parse Android documents to obtain a mapping between each API and their corresponding platform versions. We then analyze the DSDK-API consistency for over 24K apps, among which we pre-exclude 1.3K apps that provide different app binaries for different Android versions through Google Play analysis. Besides shedding light on the current DSDK practice, our study quantitatively measures the two side effects of inappropriate DSDK versions: (i) around 1.8K apps have API calls that do not exist in some declared SDK versions, which causes runtime crash bugs on those platform versions; (ii) over 400 apps, due to claiming the outdated targeted DSDK versions, are potentially exploitable by remote code execution. These results indicate the importance and difficulty of declaring correct DSDK, and our work can help developers fulfill this goal.Comment: This paper has been accepted by WASA 2017 (http://wasa-conference.org/WASA2017/). It is originally a course project paper done by the first three authors in April 201

Daily Burdens of Recipients and Family Caregivers after Lung Transplant

Lung transplant recipients are prescribed a complex medical regimen that is thought to be-burdensome and to interfere with daily activities of recipients and family caregivers. Yet empirical studies describing the activities that lung transplant recipients and their family caregivers perform on a typical day and the emotions associated with performing these activities are lacking

The prognostic value of deep earlobe creases in patients with acute ischemic stroke

Background and purposeData on earlobe crease (ELC) among patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) are limited. Here, we determined the frequency and characteristics of ELC and the prognostic effect of ELC among AIS patients.MethodsA total of 936 patients with acute AIS were enrolled during the period between December 2018 and December 2019. The patients were divided into those without and with ELC, unilateral and bilateral ELC, and shallow and deep ELC, according to the photographs taken of the bilateral ears. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the effect of ELC, bilateral ELC, and deep ELC on poor functional outcomes at 90 days (a modified Rankin Scale score ≥2) in AIS patients.ResultsAmong the 936 AIS patients, there were 746 (79.7%) patients with ELC. Among patients with ELC, there were 156 (20.9%) patients with unilateral ELC and 590 (79.1%) with bilateral ELC and 476 (63.8%) patients with shallow ELC and 270 (36.2%) with deep ELC. After adjusting for age, sex, baseline NIHSS score, and other potential covariates, patients with deep ELC were associated with a 1.87-fold [odds ratio (OR) 1.87; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.13–3.09] and 1.63-fold (OR 1.63; 95%CI, 1.14–2.34) increase in the risk of poor functional outcome at 90 days in comparison with those without ELC or shallow ELC.ConclusionELC was a common phenomenon, and eight out of ten AIS patients had ELC. Most patients had bilateral ELC, and more than one-third had deep ELC. Deep ELC was independently associated with an increased risk of poor functional outcome at 90 days