Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
"BUT I'M JUST A LITTLE VOICE:" EXPLORING FACTORS THAT AFFECT RURAL WOMEN'S MEANING MAKING OF EMPOWERMENT AND HEALTH

Title of Document: “BUT I’M JUST A LITTLE VOICE:” EXPLORING FACTORS THAT AFFECT RURAL WOMEN’S MEANING MAKING OF EMPOWERMENT AND HEALTH Lucinda L. Austin, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Directed By: Associate Professor Linda Aldoory Department of Communication This research study explores how empowerment can be incorporated as an element of health communication campaigns to positively affect rural women’s everyday health activities. This study questions how rural women make meaning of empowerment and health, the factors that affect rural women’s empowerment, and how health communication campaigns may bolster individual and community empowerment. Building from multiple theoretical—including empowerment theory, the situational theory of publics, the theory of planned behavior, the social cognitive theory, and a socio-ecological perspective—this study explores empowerment as a critical link in health communication and public relations theory. Dimensions of individual empowerment such as self-efficacy and perceived behavioral control were explored in more depth, as were other factors that affected empowerment, including social support, religiosity, and involvement as a construct of the situational theory of publics. This study employed a qualitative research method to explore empowerment through these rural women’s lived experiences. Research was conducted through 41 qualitative, in-depth interviews with women residing in a small rural community; 15 of these women also participated in photovoice as a research method. Findings from this research demonstrate the importance of multi-level and multi-faceted socio-ecological approaches to health communication campaigns, involving communication at many levels such as the individual, organizational, and community levels. As findings from this research highlight, rural women’s notions of empowerment may be impacted by their community and social interactions, their religious involvement, and their experiences with personal and family health problems. Physical and structural factors in women’s lives also left them with feelings of powerlessness in certain health situations, suggesting the need for health communication campaigns to also address larger changes in structure and policy. Based upon the research findings and the prior literature, a model is proposed to aid in understanding of the factors that influence women’s feelings of empowerment. “BUT I’M JUST A LITTLE VOICE:” EXPLORING FACTORS THAT AFFECT RURAL WOMEN’S MEANING MAKING OF EMPOWERMENT AND HEALTH
Impaired Coronary and Renal Vascular Function in Spontaneously Type 2 Diabetic Leptin-Deficient Mice

Background Type 2 diabetes is associated with macro- and microvascular complications in man. Microvascular dysfunction affects both cardiac and renal function and is now recognized as a main driver of cardiovascular mortality and morbidity. However, progression of microvascular dysfunction in experimental models is often obscured by macrovascular pathology and consequently demanding to study. The obese type 2 diabetic leptin-deficient (ob/ob) mouse lacks macrovascular complications, i.e. occlusive atherosclerotic disease, and may therefore be a potential model for microvascular dysfunction. The present study aimed to test the hypothesis that these mice with an insulin resistant phenotype might display microvascular dysfunction in both coronary and renal vascular beds. Methods and Results In this study we used non-invasive Doppler ultrasound imaging to characterize microvascular dysfunction during the progression of diabetes in ob/ob mice. Impaired coronary flow velocity reserve was observed in the ob/ob mice at 16 and 21 weeks of age compared to lean controls. In addition, renal resistivity index as well as pulsatility index was higher in the ob/ob mice at 21 weeks compared to lean controls. Moreover, plasma L-arginine was lower in ob/ob mice, while asymmetric dimethylarginine was unaltered. Furthermore, a decrease in renal vascular density was observed in the ob/ob mice. Conclusion In parallel to previously described metabolic disturbances, the leptin-deficient ob/ob mice also display cardiac and renal microvascular dysfunction. This model may therefore be suitable for translational, mechanistic and interventional studies to improve the understanding of microvascular complications in type 2 diabetes.
A real-time continuous gesture recognition system for sign language

A large vocabulary sign language interpreter is presented with real-time continuous gesture recognition of sign language using a data glove. Sign language, which is usually known as a set of natural language with formal semantic definitions and syntactic rules, is a large set of hand gestures that are daily used to communicate with the hearing impaired. The most critical problem, end-point detection in a stream of gesture input is first solved and then statistical analysis is done according to four parameters in a gesture: posture, position, orientation, and motion. The authors have implemented a prototype system with a lexicon of 250 vocabularies and collected 196 training sentences in Taiwanese Sign Language (TWL). This system uses hidden Markov models (HMMs) for 51 fundamental postures, 6 orientations, and 8 motion primitives. In a signer-dependent way, a sentence of gestures based on these vocabularies can be continuously recognized in real-time and the average recognition rate is 80.4%,.
Brain reserve and cognitive reserve protect against cognitive decline over 4.5 years in MS

Objective: Based on the theories of brain reserve and cognitive reserve, we investigated whether larger maximal lifetime brain growth (MLBG) and/or greater lifetime intellectual enrichment protect against cognitive decline over time. Methods: Forty patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) underwent baseline and 4.5-year follow-up evaluations of cognitive efficiency (Symbol Digit Modalities Test, Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task) and memory (Selective Reminding Test, Spatial Recall Test). Baseline and follow-up MRIs quantified disease progression: percentage brain volume change (cerebral atrophy), percentage change in T2 lesion volume. MLBG (brain reserve) was estimated with intracranial volume; intellectual enrichment (cognitive reserve) was estimated with vocabulary. We performed repeated-measures analyses of covariance to investigate whether larger MLBG and/or greater intellectual enrichment moderate/attenuate cognitive decline over time, controlling for disease progression. Results: Patients with MS declined in cognitive efficiency and memory (p < 0.001). MLBG moderated decline in cognitive efficiency (p = 0.031, ηp2 = 0.122), with larger MLBG protecting against decline. MLBG did not moderate memory decline (p = 0.234, ηp2 = 0.039). Intellectual enrichment moderated decline in cognitive efficiency (p = 0.031, ηp2 = 0.126) and memory (p = 0.037, ηp2 = 0.115), with greater intellectual enrichment protecting against decline. MS disease progression was more negatively associated with change in cognitive efficiency and memory among patients with lower vs higher MLBG and intellectual enrichment. Conclusion: We provide longitudinal support for theories of brain reserve and cognitive reserve in MS. Larger MLBG protects against decline in cognitive efficiency, and greater intellectual enrichment protects against decline in cognitive efficiency and memory. Consideration of these protective factors should improve prediction of future cognitive decline in patients with MS.
Impact of Indo-Pacific Feedback Interactions on ENSO Dynamics Diagnosed Using Ensemble Climate Simulations

AbstractThe impact of Indo-Pacific climate feedback on the dynamics of El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is investigated using an ensemble set of Indian Ocean decoupling experiments (DCPL), utilizing a millennial integration of a coupled climate model. It is found that eliminating air–sea interactions over the Indian Ocean results in various degrees of ENSO amplification across DCPL simulations, with a shift in the underlying dynamics toward a more prominent thermocline mode. The DCPL experiments reveal that the net effect of the Indian Ocean in the control runs (CTRL) is a damping of ENSO. The extent of this damping appears to be negatively correlated to the coherence between ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD). This type of relationship can arise from the long-lasting ENSO events that the model simulates, such that developing ENSO often coincides with Indian Ocean basin-wide mode (IOBM) anomalies during non-IOD years. As demonstrated via AGCM experiments, the IOBM enhances western Pacific wind anom.
Paraphrase-Supervised Models of Compositionality

Compositional vector space models of meaning promise new solutions to stubborn language understanding problems. This paper makes two contributions toward this end: (i) it uses automatically-extracted paraphrase examples as a source of supervision for training compositional models, replacing previous work which relied on manual annotations used for the same purpose, and (ii) develops a context-aware model for scoring phrasal compositionality. Experimental results indicate that these multiple sources of information can be used to learn partial semantic supervision that matches previous techniques in intrinsic evaluation tasks. Our approaches are also evaluated for their impact on a machine translation system where we show improvements in translation quality, demonstrating that compositionality in interpretation correlates with compositionality in translation.
Different Acute and Chronic Effects of Acipimox Treatment on Glucose and Lipid Metabolism in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes

To study whether therapeutic reduction of non‐esterified fatty acids (NEFA) can be used to improve glucose metabolism, we administered the antilipolytic agent, acipimox, 250 mg four times daily for 4 weeks in eight obese Type 2 diabetic patients. Glucose and NEFA metabolism were assessed before and after treatment with a two‐step euglycaemic hyperinsulinaemic clamp (0.25 and 1 ***mU kg−1 min−1 insulin) combined with infusions of [3–3H] glucose and [1–14C] palmitate. Three days of acipimox treatment reduced 24‐h serum NEFA levels by 10%, but the difference disappeared after 4 weeks of treatment mainly due to a two‐fold rise in morning NEFA concentrations (p < 0.01). After 3 days of acipimox treatment, fasting and 24‐h plasma glucose and serum triglyceride concentrations were significantly reduced (p < 0.05), but no longer after 4 weeks of treatment. Despite the rebound rise in NEFA, acute administration of acipimox still inhibited both oxidative and non‐oxidative NEFA metabolism in the basal state (p < 0.01 – 0.001) and during insulin infusion (p < 0.05 – 0.001). Inhibition of NEFA metabolism was associated with increased insulin‐stimulated glucose uptake (from 3.56 ± 0.28 to 5.14 ± 0.67 μmol kg−1 min−1, p < 0.05), mainly due to stimulation of non‐oxidative glucose disposal (from 1.74 ± 0.23 to 3.03 ± 0.53 μmol kg−1 min−1, p < 0.05). In conclusion, acipimox administered acutely inhibits NEFA appearance (lipolysis), which is associated with improved glucose uptake. However, after 4 weeks of treatment, the beneficial effects on NEFA and glucose metabolism are outweighed by a marked rebound rise in fasting NEFA concentrations. The results emphasize the problems using acipimox as a means to improve glucose tolerance in patients with Type 2 diabetes.
Novel Hybrid Approach to Content Recommendation Based on Predicted Profiles

The present phenomenon of technology convergence is blurring away the frontiers between the Internet and the TV, operating a shift on the way TV is consumed. TV viewers have now access to a huge selection of TV programming as well as online contents, either previously broadcasted or natively produced for the Internet. This reality creates new necessities whilst opening new opportunities for the creation of services capable of filtering this information and presenting the user with the most relevant content. This article describes an innovative hybrid strategy for delivering recommendations of TV content to individual users. It was developed specifically for the TV entertainment services of hotels, but it can be applied to any multimedia consumption service. Without requiring users to explicitly rate the programs they have watched, it is still able to recommend similar programs to similar users. It adopts an improved Pearson correlation method to establish similarities between different users, comparing profiles that have been automatically generated based on the user viewing history. It builds a predicted user profile, which is then used within a content-based approach to generate recommendations.
Mutant TDP-43 and FUS Cause Age-Dependent Paralysis and Neurodegeneration in C. elegans

Mutations in the DNA/RNA binding proteins TDP-43 and FUS are associated with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration. Intracellular accumulations of wild type TDP-43 and FUS are observed in a growing number of late-onset diseases suggesting that TDP-43 and FUS proteinopathies may contribute to multiple neurodegenerative diseases. To better understand the mechanisms of TDP-43 and FUS toxicity we have created transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans strains that express full-length, untagged human TDP-43 and FUS in the worm's GABAergic motor neurons. Transgenic worms expressing mutant TDP-43 and FUS display adult-onset, age-dependent loss of motility, progressive paralysis and neuronal degeneration that is distinct from wild type alleles. Additionally, mutant TDP-43 and FUS proteins are highly insoluble while wild type proteins remain soluble suggesting that protein misfolding may contribute to toxicity. Populations of mutant TDP-43 and FUS transgenics grown on solid media become paralyzed over 7 to 12 days. We have developed a liquid culture assay where the paralysis phenotype evolves over several hours. We introduce C. elegans transgenics for mutant TDP-43 and FUS motor neuron toxicity that may be used for rapid genetic and pharmacological suppressor screening.
Using performance data to identify preferred hospitals.

OBJECTIVE To explore the implications of current approaches used by health plans and purchasers to identify preferred hospitals for tiered networks using cost and quality information. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING 2002 secondary data from WebMD Quality Services on hospital quality and costs in five markets (Boston, Miami, Phoenix, Seattle, and Syracuse). STUDY DESIGN We compared four alternative tiering strategies that combine information on quality and cost to designate "preferred" (defined as ranking in the top quartile) hospitals. Within each market we identified the sets of hospitals designated preferred according to each strategy and examined the overlap in these sets across strategies. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Compared with identifying preferred hospitals based on quality scores only, we found little overlap with the sets of hospitals that would be preferred based on cost scores only, cost scores after applying minimal quality standards, and an equally weighted quality and cost measure. The last two approaches, commonly used and intuitively appealing strategies to identify high-value hospitals, led to substantially different results. CONCLUSIONS The lack of agreement among alternative strategies to combine cost and quality data for ranking hospitals suggests the need for clear prioritization by payers and the application of more rigorous methods to identify high-value hospitals.
Modeling, Analysis, and Neural Network Control of an EV Electrical Differential

This paper presents system modeling, analysis, and simulation of an electric vehicle (EV) with two independent rear wheel drives. The traction control system is designed to guarantee the EV dynamics and stability when there are no differential gears. Using two in-wheel electric motors makes it possible to have torque and speed control in each wheel. This control level improves EV stability and safety. The proposed traction control system uses the vehicle speed, which is different from wheel speed characterized by a slip in the driving mode, as an input. In this case, a generalized neural network algorithm is proposed to estimate the vehicle speed. The analysis and simulations lead to the conclusion that the proposed system is feasible. Simulation results on a test vehicle propelled by two 37-kW induction motors showed that the proposed control approach operates satisfactorily.
The association of glutathione S-transferase GSTT1 and GSTM1 gene polymorphism with pseudoexfoliative glaucoma in a Pakistani population

Purpose The aim of the present study was to investigate the association of glutathione S-transferase GSTT1 and GSTM1 genotypes with pseudoexfoliative glaucoma (PEXG) in a group of Pakistani patients. Methods Multiplex polymerase chain reaction was used to study the GSTT1 and GSTM1 polymorphisms in 165 PEXG patients and 162 unaffected controls. Results In the current study we describe a significant gender-specific association of GSTT1 and GSTM1 null genotypes with PEXG. The three null genotype combinations (i.e., T1M0, T0M1, and T0M0) were found at significantly higher frequencies in the PEXG patients as compared to the controls (χ2=21.82, p<0.001). This association was specifically related to the female patients (χ2=35.63, p<0.001); no such association was seen in the male patients (χ2=2.28, p>0.05). Conclusions The results suggest that there is a significant involvement of the GSTT1 and GSTM1 polymorphisms in female Pakistani patients having PEXG, which suggests a possible gender-specific impairment of detoxification in this group.
The Patient Perspective

Introduction: Patient perspectives on chaperone use during examinations, especially in surgical subspecialties, are understudied. We aimed to identify specific patient cohorts that desire the presence of chaperones and compare patient and surgeon perspectives, all in an effort to improve quality of care. Methods andMaterials:We prospectively administered a 15-question survey to all patients visiting 2 plastic surgery outpatient clinics between January 2015 and April 2016. Data on demographics, types of procedures (cosmetic or reconstructive), area of examination (sensitive or nonsensitive), views on chaperone use, type of chaperone, and instances of inappropriate behavior by surgeons were collected. Univariate analysis was performed after stratifying patients on their individual desire to have a chaperone. Subsequently, multivariate regression models were constructed to identify individual patient cohorts independently more likely to require a chaperone. Results:A total of 398 participants were surveyed. Therewere 58.3% female and 41.7% male respondents; of whom 41.8% were 55 years or older and 8.1% were younger than 24 years. Ninety percent of all patients were receiving care for a reconstructive procedure. Most (77%) were being examined over a nonsensitive area. Overall, 82.1% preferred not to have a chaperone present during examinations. Most (72.6%) felt the sex of the examining physician was inconsequential to their need for a chaperone.Most (54.8%) preferred either a family member or a friend to be the chaperone.Only 1.8% (n = 7) experienced inappropriate behavior, of whom 77% (n = 5) noted the absence of a chaperone while being examined. On multivariate analysis, younger patients and examination over a sensitive area were independently associated with a higher odd of requiring a chaperone (odds ratios, 3.4 [95% confidence interval, 1.3–8.9; P = 0.016] and 3.9 [95% confidence interval, 1.9–6.7; P < 0.001], respectively). Conclusions: Most patients did not want a chaperone during examinations. Younger patients and those having a sensitive area examined were independently more likely to desire a chaperone. Patients preferred having their family member or friend as their chaperone. Given the major differences in perceptions, plastic surgeons should consider selectively using chaperones rather than the carte blanche use of chaperones with every patient.
Flourishing, languishing and moderate mental health: Prevalence and change in mental health during recovery from drug and alcohol problems

Abstract The aim was to explore the utility of Keyes’ concept of mental health in a substance addiction context. Mental health is considered the presence of emotional wellbeing in conjunction with high levels of social and psychological functioning. Using Keyes' measure, the frequency of languishing and flourishing is compared between clients who became abstinent and those continuing to use substances following treatment. It was hypothesised that there would be a significant interaction between substance use and levels of mental health over time. Participants were 794 individuals (79.5% male) attending residential substance abuse treatment provided by The Australian Salvation Army. The current sample was drawn from a larger longitudinal study evaluating routine client outcomes. At entry to treatment there were higher rates of languishing compared to population estimates, yet greater rates of flourishing at all time points compared to community normative data. There was a significant interaction between continuous mental health and substance use status. Mental health was rated significantly higher by individuals who were abstinent than those who had used substances at 3-month post-discharge follow-up. The comorbidity of mental illness and substance misuse has previously been investigated, but this is the first study to investigate the prevalence of mental health. While participants who remained abstinent achieved the highest levels of flourishing, at follow-up there were lower rates of languishing than found in a general community sample. Additionally, results suggested that improved mental health was a consequence of reduced severity of alcohol and other drug abuse, and followed reductions in cravings.
Risk and Returns to Education Over Time

We model education as an investment in human capital that, like other investments, is appropriately evaluated in a framework that accounts for risk as well as return. In contrast to dominant wage-premia approach to calculating the returns to education, but which implicitly ignores risk, we evaluate the returns by treating the value of human capital as the price of a non-tradable risky asset. We do so using a lifecycle framework that incorporates risk preferences and earnings risk, as well as a progressive income tax and social insurance system. Our baseline estimate is that a college degree provides a $440K dollar increase in annual certainty-equivalent consumption. Although significantly smaller than traditional estimates of the value of education, these returns are still large enough to offset both the direct and indirect cost of college education for a large range of plausible preference parameters. Importantly, however, we find that accounting for risk reverses the finding from the education wage-premia literature regarding the trends in the returns to education. In particular, we find that the risk-adjusted gains from college completion actually decreased rather than increased in the recent period. Overall, our results show the importance of earnings risks in assessing the value of education.