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Do Mission Statements Support Digital Preservation? An Examination of Mission Statements and Digital Preservation Among the Museums of the Division of Arkansas Heritage
No full textThis paper seeks to explore if museum mission statements support the inclusion of digital preservation. The research was conducted with the museums of the Division of Arkansas Heritage, a division of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism. Data was collected via an anonymous survey using Microsoft Forms, open-ended interviews, and analysis of the mission statements of Delta Cultural Center, Historic Arkansas Museum, Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, Old State House Museum, the Division of Arkansas Heritage, and Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism. Overall, the researcher concluded that at face value, the text of mission statements does not support or include digital preservation. However, if following the assumption that digital preservation is a subset of preservation, mission statements support digital preservation via this relationship. Nonetheless, more research is needed to determine the extent of the relationship between mission statements and digital preservation and if the assumption that digital preservation is a subset of preservation holds true to the majority of the museum field
EXAMINING CAREGIVING-RELATED EFFECTS ON CAREGIVERS OF PATIENTS WITH PANCREATIC AND PERIAMPULLARY CANCER AFTER PANCREATECTOMY
No full textProblem Statement: Patients with pancreatic and periampullary cancer may experience significant reduction in their quality of life and often rely on family and unpaid caregivers for assistance after surgery. However, little is known about who these caregivers are, what assistance they provide and struggle with, and what their experiences are like. As a result, little is known about how to better support them. This research aims to report on the profile of caregivers caring for patients with pancreatic and periampullary cancers post-pancreatectomy, assess the frequency and difficulty associated with specific assistances they provide as well as caregiving-related effects, and the quality of communication between caregivers and care providers.
Methods: This study prospectively enrolled caregivers across 3 institutions accompanying patients with pancreatic and periampullary cancer during their 1-month post-pancreatectomy clinic visit. A questionnaire using elements of the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC) and the Caregiver Perceptions About Communication with Clinical Team Members (CAPACITY) instrument was administered to caregivers. Caregiver responses were linked to patient health status and outcomes from their electronic medical record.
Results: Manuscript 1 reports on the characteristics of caregivers, as well as the frequency and difficulty of specific assistance they provide. Additionally, responses from open-ended questions were qualitatively analyzed to determine the most stressful time for the caregiver during the patient’s treatment, and what information or service would have been most helpful to the caregiver. Manuscript 2 identifies caregivers who work for pay as a vulnerable subgroup of caregivers and compared caregiving-related effects they may experience versus caregivers who did not work for pay. Specifically, the endpoints examined included physical and emotional wellbeing, financial stability, and work productivity. Finally, manuscript 3 examines the quality of communication between caregivers and care providers, and its association with patient- and caregiver-related outcomes.
Conclusion: Caregivers of patients with pancreatic and periampullary cancer post-pancreatectomy expend significant amount of effort in providing care for their loved ones. Our study reports on caregiver characteristics, the assistances they provide, and their experiences. Additionally, our study highlights the critical need for family and medical leave policies to better support unpaid caregivers, and the potential for interventions that can improve communication between caregivers and care providers to improve both patient- and caregiver-related outcomes alike
A CULTURALLY INFORMED INTERVENTION TO REDUCE STRESS AND PROMOTE WELL-BEING IN RESERVATION BASED HEAD START TEACHERS: A MIXED METHODS STUDY
No full textBackground: Workplace stress is associated with poor mental health and well-being for Head Start teachers. Reservation based Native American Head Start teachers may experience unique risk and protective factors for stress that are important to understand to develop workplace interventions that improve psychological outcomes for teachers and ultimately their students.
Objectives: Explore stressors and coping mechanisms with Fort Peck Reservation Head Start teachers using findings to inform the adaptation and implementation of a culturally informed workplace stress reduction intervention.
Design and Methods: Exploratory mixed methods embedded within community-based participatory research utilized the eight-step ADAPT-ITT methodology to guide intervention adaptation and implementation: 1. assessment; 2. decision; 3. adaptation; 4. production; 5. topical experts; 6. integration; 7. training; and 8. testing. Twenty-seven Head Start teachers, ancillary staff, and parents of students participated in focus groups (n=9) and individual interviews (n=18) to explore stress, health coping mechanisms and interest in a culturally appropriate intervention to reduce stress (step 1). Qualitative findings informed the adaptation of an existing culturally based intervention, the Little Holy One program, to a five-session workplace intervention (steps 2-5). The adapted intervention was tested in a single arm study with a sample of 18 teachers (steps 7 & 8). Practical outcomes were evaluated using baseline and post-intervention surveys measuring stress, depression, tribal identity, resilience, and communal mastery. The Feasibility/Appropriateness/Acceptability measure along with two post-intervention focus groups elicited information on intervention feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness.
Findings: All 18 teachers completed the full intervention. T-tests and Hedges g analyzed the surveys to measure effect size. Intervention effect demonstrated a decrease in depression and increase in tribal identity and resilience. However, there was a small positive effect on stress, meaning that teachers perceived higher stress post intervention. In focus groups teachers described how the sessions improved their psychological well-being. Intervention feasibility, acceptability and appropriateness was supported.
Conclusions: A culturally informed intervention holds promise in reducing depression, strengthening resilience and tribal identity among reservation-based Head Start teachers. Implementation outcomes show that intervention scale-out is feasible and adds to evidence of the importance of adapting interventions to the cultural context of the target population
"Our Quarrel Is of Old": Classical Reception in Modern Hebrew Literature
No full textSince the beginnings of Modern Hebrew literature in the late nineteenth century, Hebrew writers integrated classical culture as a non-Jewish sub-system within Hebrew culture in order to tackle different topics of interest, from issues of literary aesthetics to problems of public and national relevance. In contrast to previous studies organized around the “Hellenism and Hebraism” dichotomy, I contend that, alongside “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” Roman culture and Zionism too need to be included into the picture of the reception of classical culture in Modern Hebrew literature.
The different relationships of ancient Jewish culture with Greek culture and with Roman culture respectively, as well as the relationship of Hebrew culture with modern European cultures, shaped the Hebrew reception of the two classical cultures in different ways. Each culture supplies distinctly different ideological and aesthetical repertoires from which the Hebrew writers can choose what to borrow, often in contrast with or in a supplementary manner with Jewish and Zionist culture.
Zionism, as a form of Jewish nationalism, constitutes a necessary background against which one should read instances of classical reception throughout the history of Modern Hebrew literature. While Zionism inherited the religious opposition with the classical world from Jewish tradition, it restructured it into an ethno-national one. As a result, Hebrew borrowings of classical culture occur according to or against Zionist evaluation of Greek and Roman cultures as foreign, competing, or adversarial cultures, and according to the writer’s own positioning within Zionist culture. As such, classical reception in Hebrew culture is intensely political in nature. Consequently, 1948, the year of the foundation of the State of Israel, constitutes a symbolic watershed moment for classical reception too, as it marks a shift in the political status of the Jewish people, which, according to Zionist thought, had been dispersed from its ancestral land by the Romans. Indeed, after 1948, Hebrew writers reconsidered the positioning of Greco-Roman culture vis-à-vis Hebrew culture, opening the avenue for a broader, less binary reception of classical culture
GENOMIC SURVEILLANCE OF PREDOMINANT SARS-CoV-2 RECOMBINANTS AND ASSOCIATED CLINICAL OUTCOMES
No full textIntroduction
SARS-CoV-2 recombinant genomes were reported since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier recombinants did not reportedly circulate at a large scale or persist for a long time, in contrast to the XBB lineages that were first reported late in 2022 and are currently predominant. This study characterized SARS-CoV-2 recombinants characterized at the Johns Hopkins Health Systems (JHHS) since the beginning of the pandemic.
Methods
Between March 2020 and January 2023, a total of 56,598 samples were positive for SARS-CoV-2, of which 29,746 were whole genome sequenced, and 119 were high quality recombinant genomes. All 119 samples were characterized on VAT (Vero E6-ACE2-TMPRSS2) and VT (Vero E6-TMPRSS2) cell lines for the presence of infectious virus and compared for relative viral loads and clinical outcomes of infected patients.
Results
Recombinant genomes were divided into three groups based on the frequency of detection; group A (XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.5.1 (n= 43)), group B (XBB.1 and XBB.1.9 (n= 43)), and group C, which includes all other detected recombinant lineages at JHHS (XAF, XAV, XB, XBB, XBB.2, XBB.3, XBB.3.2, XBB.4, XBB.6.1, XBE, XBP, XQ, XW, XZ (n=33)). Viral recovery was higher in VAT as compared to the VT cell lines in all groups (59.6% vs 46.1%), with group A showing a significantly higher recovery on both cell lines when compared to groups B and C. Group A had the highest average relative viral load (average cycle threshold value 18.3 vs 22.4 and 22.9). COVID-19 related hospital admissions were less in individuals infected with group A recombinants as compared to other groups (4.65% vs 18.60% and 9.09%).
Conclusions
The XBB.1.5 recombinants was the most prevalent recombinant lineage at JHHS and showed more viral recovery on cell culture, higher relative viral load, but fewer COVID-19-related admissions
HOME AND AWAY: GLOBAL SKILL PARTNERSHIP AS EDUCATION-LABOR MOBILITY MODEL FOR THE NEW ERA?
No full textIt is now well accepted that there are substantial welfare gains from labor mobility for sending and receiving countries. However, host countries face strong political opposition to increased migration, which has led them to turn to policies that bring in labor but not migrants–temporary migrants that help fill labor shortages. This requires labor with skills and training congruent with jobs and work culture of receiving countries leading to calls for Global Skill Partnership (GSP), which introduces “home” and “away” tracks whereby trainees are absorbed by source and destination labor markets, respectively.
Applying econometrics, field research and online interviews, survey-based statistical analysis, data science, and literature review, my dissertation estimates the effects of two GSPs that seek to address labor needs of high-income countries while providing jobs to labor in lower-income countries: Pilot Project Addressing Labour Shortages through Innovative Labour Migration (PALIM)–between Morocco and Belgium, which trains digital workers in the former; and Australia Pacific Training Coalition (APTC), which trains workers from the latter for various sectors (e.g., construction, tourism).
Although PALIM was unable to place trainees in Belgium due in part to COVID-19, it met its other goal on domestic employment in Morocco. Participation in PALIM is associated with 30% increase in job search. It is mainly functioning for domestic employment thus far whose outcome and financial cost–and APTC’s financial cost–are consistent with those of trainings targeted only at domestic labor markets. COVID-19 made it less clear whether PALIM’s outcome was due to areas for improvement in the project design or other factors. Nevertheless, training in Morocco is more efficient than in high-income countries. While APTC achieved domestic employment in the Pacific, it is early days to evaluate whether it met its labor mobility goal given its recent prioritization as part of economic recovery from COVID-19.
My comparative analysis of PALIM and APTC reveals that success factors in designing GSPs include: a) direct involvement of key stakeholders; b) capacity development of public labor market intermediaries or of regulatory bodies to ensure private recruiters operate ethically; c) co-investments; d) multi-faceted strategy against brain drain; and e) integration
Multiphoton and Structural Control of 6 Pi Photocyclization in ortho-terphenyls
No full textMultiphoton excitation and manipulation of reactant structure promises opportunities for opening new photochemical reaction pathways and controlling photoproduct distributions. In the first part of this dissertation, we demonstrate photonic control of the 6π photocyclization of ortho-terphenyl (OTP), a model system with a similar structure to diarylethenes, to make 4a,4b-dihydrotripheneylene (DHT). Using Pump-Repump-Probe spectroscopy we show that 1+1’ excitation to a high-lying reactant electronic state generates a metastable species characterized by a red absorption feature that accompanies a repump-induced depletion in the one-photon trans-dihydro product (trans-DHT); signatures of the new photoproduct are clearer for a structural analog of the reactant that is sterically inhibited against one-photon cyclization. Quantum-chemical computations support assignment of this species to cis-DHT, which is accessible photochemically along a disrotatory coordinate from high-lying electronic states reached by 1+1’ excitation. We use time-resolved spectroscopy to track photochemical dynamics producing cis-DHT. In total, we demonstrate that selective multiphoton excitation opens a new photoreaction channel in these photocyclizing reactants by taking advantage of state-dependent correlations between reactant and product electronic states.
In the second part of this dissertation, we examine the impact of specific structural perturbations on the one and two-photon induced dynamics in ortho-terphenyl. Through the addition of substituent groups on pendant rings of OTP, we demonstrate improved branching efficiency for cyclization over nonreactive deactivation. Using both pump-probe and pump-repump-probe transient absorption spectroscopy, we show that nonreactive deactivation rates are largely unaffected by structural modifications, whereas those associated with cyclization to form trans-DHT decrease with increasing substituent size/mass. Based on these observations, we conclude that these deactivation channels require different scales of nuclear reorganization in low-lying electronic excited states. We have previously shown that two-photon excitation of OTP generates cis-DHT. Here we find that the cis-DHT photoproduct yield generated by a 1+1’ excitation of the reactant is impacted by dynamics in the low-lying excited-states of OTP that exhibit sensitivities to structural modification. Ultrafast spectral dynamics observed by PRP and TAS occur on significantly different timescales, indicating that these methods have different sensitivities for probing dynamics on low-lying potential energy surfaces
TUTORING AND VISION: EXAMINING TWO INTERVENTIONS TO IMPROVE SECONDARY STUDENT LITERACY
No full textLiteracy, one of the most foundational skills supporting learning progress, grows in importance as students enter adolescence, with secondary school courses and materials increasing in complexity. However, literacy skills are informed by many factors that predate student arrival in the middle school classroom, including disparities in access to quality instruction and socioeconomic factors including physical environments, psychosocial health, and physical health. These multidimensional determinants of learning require interventions targeting different factors in order to move the needle of student learning.
Given the importance of program evaluation for continuous improvement of evidence-based interventions, this dissertation examines the impact of two different interventions intended to improve student reading. In the first two sets of research questions, this dissertation explores the impact of a reading tutoring program on middle school student reading achievement, as well as the reading self-efficacy perceptions of striving readers after participation in the program. While the impact on reading achievement was inconclusive, students in the program reported strong reading self-efficacy perceptions, comparable to average readers. In the final set of research questions, the impact of a school-based vision program providing eyeglasses to students is considered, exploring the impact on eyeglasses use and the relationship between treatment, eyeglasses use, and reading achievement. While no significant impact on eyeglasses use was found, evidence of the impact of eyeglasses use on reading achievement was noted in an exploratory analysis.
This dissertation points to the importance of program evaluation of real-world interventions, allowing for continuous improvement to better ensure effective and replicable support for student reading skills
NAVIGATING THE IMPACTS OF ADOLESCENT STUDENTS’ TRAUMA: TRAUMA-INFORMED PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR SECONDARY EDUCATORS
No full textExposure to childhood trauma is a common issue in society. Although trauma may adversely impact an individual’s development, health, and well-being, educators are often not provided with opportunities to learn about trauma, its impacts, or classroom strategies for meeting students’ needs after experiencing trauma. Despite educators’ desire to serve their students, many are not confident in their abilities to meet such students’ needs. The needs assessment revealed that secondary educators in a Mid-Atlantic school district would benefit from improving their trauma-informed knowledge and self-efficacy for meeting the needs of students who have experienced trauma. Educators varied in their experiences and confidence levels in effectively applying trauma-informed strategies to support their students in need. Based on these findings, a two-phase trauma-informed professional learning intervention was designed and implemented with middle school teachers during the 2021 to 2022 school year. Trauma-informed professional learning sessions and action-research-based professional learning communities aimed to improve participants’ trauma-informed knowledge, self-efficacy for meeting the needs of students who have experienced trauma, and the implementation of trauma-informed classroom practices. Thirty-six middle school teachers engaged in the intervention over 8 months. A convergent parallel mixed-methods study evaluated the process and outcomes of the intervention, showing growth in participants’ trauma-informed knowledge and self-efficacy. Participants provided feedback on what elements of the professional learning experience impacted their learning and implementation of trauma-informed practices. Study limitations, implications for practice, and ideas for future research are discussed
Improving Simulation Task Training: A Novel Interactive Resource and 3D Printing Provide Customizable Solutions for Increasing Fidelity and Lowering Costs
No full textAbscess incision and drainage (I & D) is a common procedure used for treating skin abscesses. This procedure can relieve pain and accelerate healing of an abscess; however, if performed inadequately, infection can spread. Medical simulation devices, called task trainers, permit learners to manually practice the skills and steps of a procedure. Abscess incision and drainage task trainers function as a bridge between book learning and practicing on a real patient.
Abscess task trainers are expensive; commercial trainers range from 150 per single-use device. Furthermore, they are available only in limited skin tone options. Limited exposure to skin tone and body mass diversity restricts adequate healthcare training. Simulation centers also may encounter supply chain issues when ordering abscess incision and drainage task trainers. To prevent this, a simulation center must order the trainers months in advance, however, some commercial trainers have a short shelf life. Instructions for several do-it-yourself alternatives exist, but the resulting task trainers are low fidelity and can be complicated to create.
To address these limitations, we developed a new method of abscess task trainer creation, including the design of a 3D printed base. The abscess task trainers created for this project are lower cost compared to commercial alternatives, and allow customizable fidelity, such as variety of skin tones, body mass, and the ability to add inflammation.
To help simulation center facilitators navigate this customizability, we designed a novel interactive resource to allow users to select different options for the components of the abscess task trainer: the base, skin, color, drainage, and details. Based on the choices selected, a user receives customized instructions for abscess task trainer creation. Ultimately, the goal of this project was improved abscess incision and drainage training through cost reduction, increased fidelity, and greater diversity options, which results in better patient healthcare