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Solutions trial : solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) in 10–17-year-olds presenting at police custody : a randomised controlled trial
Get PDFBackground: Within England, children and young people (CYP) who come into police custody are referred to Liaison and Diversion (L&D) teams. L&D teams have responsibility for liaising with healthcare and other support services while working to divert CYP away from the criminal justice system but have traditionally not provided targeted psychological interventions to CYP. Considering evidence that Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) leads to a reduction in internalising and externalising behaviour problems in CYP, the aim of this randomised controlled trial (RCT) was to determine whether there is a difference between services as usual (SAU) plus SFBT offered by trained therapists working within a L&D team, and SAU alone, in reducing offending behaviours in 10–17-year-olds presenting at police custody. Methods: Design: two-arm individually RCT with internal pilot and process evaluation. Participants: N = approximately 448 CYP aged 10–17 years presenting at one of three police custody suites in the area served by Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust (LSCFT) who are referred to the L&D team. Participants will be recruited and allocated to intervention:control on a 1:1 basis. Interviews will be performed with 30–40 CYP in the intervention arm, 15 CYP in the control arm, up to 20 parents/guardians across both arms, up to 15 practitioners, and up to 10 site staff responsible for screening CYP for the trial. Intervention and control: Those allocated to the intervention will be offered SAU plus SFBT, and control participants will receive SAU only. Primary outcome: CYP frequency of offending behaviours assessed through the Self-Report Delinquency Measure (SRDM) at 12 months post-randomisation. Secondary outcomes: criminal offence data (national police database); emotional and behavioural difficulties (self-report and parent/guardian reported); gang affiliation (self-report). Process evaluation: evaluation of acceptability and experiences of the CYP, parents/guardians, site staff and practitioners; fidelity of SFBT delivery. Discussion: This two-arm individually RCT will evaluate the effectiveness of SFBT in reducing offending behaviours in CYP presenting at police custody suites within the area served by LSCFT. Our process evaluation will assess the fidelity of delivery of SFBT, the factors affecting implementation, the acceptability of SFBT in CYP aged 10–17 years and recruitment and reach. We will also examine systems and structures for future delivery, therefore assessing overall scalability. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov ISRCTN14195235. Registered on June 16, 2023
Spatial voting with incomplete voter information
No full textWhen selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of represented voters) of the selected committee. Previous work has studied the impact on utilitarian welfare and coverage when requiring the committee to satisfy minimal requirements such as justified representation or weak proportionality. In this paper, we consider the impact of imposing much more demanding proportionality axioms. We identify a class of voting rules that achieve strong guarantees on utilitarian welfare and coverage when combined with appropriate completions. This class is defined via a weakening of priceability and contains prominent rules such as the Method of Equal Shares. We show that committees selected by these rules (i) can be completed to achieve optimal coverage and (ii) can be completed to achieve an asymptotically optimal approximation to the utilitarian welfare if they additionally satisfy EJR+. Answering an open question of Elkind et al. (2022), we use the Greedy Justified Candidate Rule to obtain the best possible utilitarian guarantee subject to proportionality. We also consider completion methods suggested in the participatory budgeting literature and other objectives besides welfare and coverage
SurvInt : A simple tool to obtain precise parametric survival extrapolations
Get PDFEconomic evaluation of emerging health technologies is mandated by agencies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to ensure their cost is proportional to their benefit. To avoid bias, NICE stipulate that the benefit of a treatment is assessed across the lifetime of the patient population, which can be many decades. Unfortunately, follow-up from a clinical trial will not usually cover the required period and the observed follow-up will require extrapolation. For survival data this is often done by selecting a preferred model from a set of candidate parametric models. This approach is limited in that the choice of model is restricted to those originally fitted. What if none of the models are consistent with clinical prediction or external data
The GAPS programme at TNG : XLIX. TOI-5398, the youngest compact multi-planet system composed of an inner sub-Neptune and an outer warm Saturn
Get PDFContext. Short-period giant planets (P ≲ 10 days, Mp >0.1 MJ) are frequently found to be solitary compared to other classes of exo-planets. Small inner companions to giant planets with P ≲ 15 days are known only in five compact systems: WASP-47, Kepler-730, WASP-132, TOI-1130, and TOI-2000. Here, we report the confirmation of TOI-5398, the youngest known compact multi-planet system composed of a hot sub-Neptune (TOI-5398 c, Pc = 4.77271 days) orbiting interior to a short-period Saturn (TOI-5398 b, Pb = 10.590547 days) planet, both transiting around a 650 ± 150 Myr G-type star.
Aims. As part of the Global Architecture of Planetary Systems (GAPS) Young Object project, we confirmed and characterised this compact system, measuring the radius and mass of both planets, thus constraining their bulk composition.
Methods. Using multi-dimensional Gaussian processes, we simultaneously modelled stellar activity and planetary signals from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Sector 48 light curve and our High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS-N) radial velocity (RV) time series. We confirmed the planetary nature of both planets, TOI-5398 b and TOI-5398 c, and obtained a precise estimation of their stellar parameters.
Results. Through the use of astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic observations, our findings indicate that TOI-5398 is a young, active G dwarf star (650 ± 150 Myr) with a rotational period of Prot = 7.34 days. The transit photometry and RV measurements enabled us to measure both the radius and mass of planets b, Rb = 10.30 ± 0.40 R⊕, Mb = 58.7 ± 5.7 M⊕, and c, Rc = 3.52 ± 0.19 R⊕, Mc = 11.8 ± 4.8 M⊕. TESS observed TOI-5398 during sector 48 and no further observations are planned in the current Extended Mission, making our ground-based light curves crucial for improvement of the ephemeris. With a transmission spectroscopy metric (TSM) value of around 300, TOI-5398 b is the most amenable warm giant (10 < P < 100 days) for JWST atmospheric characterisation
Exploring varying color spaces through representative forgery learning to improve deepfake detection
No full textIn the digital age, the rise of deepfake technology has brought unprecedented challenges to multimedia content authentication. The existing deepfake detection methods generally perform well in known settings. However, generalization and robustness are still challenging tasks. Observing that most conventional methods adopt the RGB color space, we introduce a novel deepfake detection approach by utilizing multiple color spaces to enhance the identification of deepfakes. Overall, our proposed detection framework comprises two primary stages, i.e., representative forgery learning through multi-color space reasoning and the color spaces-based forgery detection network (FDN). The representative forgery learning task is realized in succession through the manipulation cue boosting network (MCBN), color space transformations, and the forgery highlighting network (FHN). MCBN improves the feature representation, alternate color spaces provide distinctive advantages over traditional RGB color space, while FHN plays an auxiliary role, where it not only mines the texture inconsistency but also points out high-level semantic forgery clues, aiding in the robustness ability of FDN to discern subtle alterations in digital imagery accurately. Through rigorous evaluation on the benchmark datasets, including the FaceForensics++, DFDC, and CelebDF datasets, our proposed approach exhibits promising results in identifying forged multimedia content across varying color representations, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods
Antibiotic skeletal diversification via differential enoylreductase recruitment and module iteration in trans -acyltransferase polyketide synthases
Get PDFMicroorganisms are remarkable chemists capable of assembling complex molecular architectures that penetrate cells and bind biomolecular targets with exquisite selectivity. Consequently, microbial natural products have wide-ranging applications in medicine and agriculture. How the “blind watchmaker” of evolution creates skeletal diversity is a key question in natural products research. Comparative analysis of biosynthetic pathways to structurally related metabolites is an insightful approach to addressing this. Here, we report comparative biosynthetic investigations of gladiolin, a polyketide antibiotic from Burkholderia gladioli with promising activity against multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and etnangien, a structurally related antibiotic produced by Sorangium cellulosum. Although these metabolites have very similar macrolide cores, their C21 side chains differ significantly in both length and degree of saturation. Surprisingly, the trans-acyltransferase polyketide synthases (PKSs) that assemble these antibiotics are almost identical, raising intriguing questions about mechanisms underlying structural diversification in this important class of biosynthetic assembly line. In vitro reconstitution of key biosynthetic transformations using simplified substrate analogues, combined with gene deletion and complementation experiments, enabled us to elucidate the origin of all the structural differences in the C21 side chains of gladiolin and etnangien. The more saturated gladiolin side chain arises from a cis-acting enoylreductase (ER) domain in module 1 and in trans recruitment of a standalone ER to module 5 of the PKS. Remarkably, module 5 of the gladiolin PKS is intrinsically iterative in the absence of the standalone ER, accounting for the longer side chain in etnangien. These findings have important implications for biosynthetic engineering approaches to the creation of novel polyketide skeletons
Unveiling the potential of Daldinia eschscholtzii MFLUCC 19-0629 through bioactivity and bioinformatics studies for enhanced sustainable agriculture production
Get PDFEndophytic fungi constitute a rich source of secondary metabolites that can be manipulated to produce desirable novel analogs for combating current agricultural challenges for crop production, especially controlling plant disease. The endophytic fungus Daldinia eschscholtzii MFLUCC 19-0629, was newly isolated from tropical ancient plants, Oncosperma sp., and displays a broad-spectrum of antifungal and antibacterial activities against several plant pathogens including Ralstonia solanacearum, Fusarium oxysporum, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, Colletotrichum acutatum, Stagonosporopsis cucurbitacearum, Corynespora cassiicola and Stemphylium spp. A high-quality genome sequence was obtained using Oxford nanopore technology, the accuracy and length of reads resulting in no need for Illumina or other sequencing techniques, for D. eschscholtzii MFLUCC 19-0629, resulting in a genome size of 37.56 Mb assembled over 11 contigs of significant size, likely to be at the chromosomal level. Bioinformatics analysis revealed that this strain is biosynthetically talented encoding 67 predicted biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Only eight of the 67 BGCs matched or demonstrated high similarity to previously characterized BGCs linked to the production of known secondary metabolites. The high number of predicted unknown BGCs makes this strain a promising source of novel natural products. The discovery that D. eschscholtzii MFLUCC 19-0629 has a broad spectrum of antimicrobial activity against seven major plant pathogenic microorganisms relevant to crop production and its complete genome sequence carries immense importance in the advancement of novel microbial biocontrol agents (MBCAs). This also unveils the prospect of uncovering new compounds that could be utilized for sustainable agriculture and pharmaceutical purposes
The challenge to understand the zoo of particle transport regimes during resonant wave-particle interactions for given survey-mode wave spectra
Get PDFQuasilinear theories have been shown to well describe a range of transport phenomena in magnetospheric, space, astrophysical and laboratory plasma “weak turbulence” scenarios. It is well known that the resonant diffusion quasilinear theory for the case of a uniform background field may formally describe particle dynamics when the electromagnetic wave amplitude and growth rates are sufficiently “small”, and the bandwidth is sufficiently “large”. However, it is important to note that for a given wave spectrum that would be expected to give rise to quasilinear transport, the quasilinear theory may indeed apply for given range of resonant pitch-angles and energies, but may not apply for some smaller, or larger, values of resonant pitch-angle and energy. That is to say that the applicability of the quasilinear theory can be pitch-angle dependent, even in the case of a uniform background magnetic field. If indeed the quasilinear theory does apply, the motion of particles with different pitch-angles are still characterised by different timescales. Using a high-performance test-particle code, we present a detailed analysis of the applicability of quasilinear theory to a range of different wave spectra that would otherwise “appear quasilinear” if presented by e.g., satellite survey-mode data. We present these analyses as a function of wave amplitude, wave coherence and resonant particle velocities (energies and pitch-angles), and contextualise the results using theory of resonant overlap and small amplitude criteria. In doing so, we identify and classify five different transport regimes that are a function of particle pitch-angle. The results in our paper demonstrate that there can be a significant variety of particle responses (as a function of pitch-angle) for very similar looking survey-mode electromagnetic wave products, even if they appear to satisfy all appropriate quasilinear criteria. In recent years there have been a sequence of very interesting and important results in this domain, and we argue in favour of continuing efforts on: (i) the development of new transport theories to understand the importance of these, and other, diverse electron responses; (ii) which are informed by statistical analyses of the relationship between burst- and survey-mode spacecraft data
Evaluation of behavioral variance/covariance explained by the neuroimaging data through a pattern‐based regression
Get PDFNeuroimaging data have been widely used to understand the neural bases of human behaviors. However, most studies were either based on a few predefined regions of interest or only able to reveal limited vital regions, hence not providing an overarching description of the relationship between neuroimaging and behaviors. Here, we proposed a voxel‐based pattern regression that not only could investigate the overall brain‐associated variance (BAV) for a given behavioral measure but could also evaluate the shared neural bases between different behaviors across multiple neuroimaging data. The proposed method demonstrated consistently high reliability and accuracy through comprehensive simulations. We further implemented this approach on real data of adolescents (IMAGEN project, n = 2089) and adults (HCP project, n = 808) to investigate brain‐based variances of multiple behavioral measures, for instance, cognitive behaviors, substance use, and psychiatric disorders. Notably, intelligence‐related scores showed similar high BAVs with the gray matter volume across both datasets. Further, our approach allows us to reveal the latent brain‐based correlation across multiple behavioral measures, which are challenging to obtain otherwise. For instance, we observed a shared brain architecture underlying depression and externalizing problems in adolescents, while the symptom comorbidity may only emerge later in adults. Overall, our approach will provide an important statistical tool for understanding human behaviors using neuroimaging data