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The effectiveness and design of informed choice tools for people with severe mental illness: a systematic review
Get PDFBackground: People with severe mental illness (SMI) report difficulty in making health-related decisions. Informed choice tools are designed to guide individuals through a decision-making process.
Aims: To determine the effectiveness of these tools for people with SMI and to identify what methods and processes may contribute to effectiveness.
Method: A systematic electronic search was conducted for studies published between 1996 and January 2018. The search was updated in March 2020. Studies of any design reporting the development or evaluation of any informed choice tool for people with SMI were considered. A structured, narrative synthesis was conducted.
Results: Ten articles describing four tools were identified. Tools were designed to assist with decision making around bipolar treatment, smoking cessation and disclosure of mental illness in employment situations. Positive changes in decisional conflict, stage of change, knowledge and self-efficacy were reported for two tools, though insufficient data exists for definitive conclusions of effectiveness.
Feedback from service users and attention to readability appeared key.
Conclusions: The evidence base for informed choice tools for people with SMI is limited. Such tools should be developed in stages and include the views of people with SMI at each phase; readability should be considered, and a theoretical framework should be used to facilitate process evaluation
COVID-19: Vicarious traumatisation and resilience in Mental Health Psychology Practitioners
Get PDFAlmost no nation has been spared as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has swept around the world. As the pandemic has upended much of society, frontline health care workers have shouldered much of the burden. Among other professionals, Mental Health Psychology Practitioners contribute significantly to fighting off the negative psychological effects of COVID-19, including distress, anxiety, and depression – provided they themselves can demonstrate resilience. This qualitative study investigated how Mental Health Psychology Practitioners experience the pandemic and the mechanisms they employ to demonstrate resilience
Molecular characterization of methicillin-resistant and -susceptible Staphylococcus aureus recovered from hospital personnel
Get PDFIntroduction
Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of the major causes of hospital acquired infections. Over the past two decades MRSA has become ‘epidemic’ in many hospitals worldwide. However, little is known about the genetic background of S. aureus recovered from hospital personnel in China.
Aim
The aim of this study was to determine the genetic diversity of MRSA and methicillin susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) recovered from hospital personnel in Tianjin, North China.
Methodology
Three hundred and sixty-eight hand or nasal swabs were collected from 276 hospital personnel in four tertiary hospitals in Tianjin, North China between November 2017 and March 2019. In total, 535 gram-positive bacteria were isolated, of which 59 were identified as S. aureus. Staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) typing, multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) and spa typing were performed to determine molecular characteristics of S. aureus.
Results
Thirty-one out of 276 (11%) hospital personnel were S. aureus carriers, whereas 11/276 (4%) carried MRSA. Fifty out of 59 (85%) of S. aureus isolates were resistant or intermediate resistant to erythromycin. The dominant genotypes of MRSA recovered from hospital personnel were ST398-t034-SCCmecIV/V, and ST630-t084/t2196, whereas major genotypes of MSSA included ST15-t078/t084/t346/t796/t8862/ t8945/t11653 and ST398-t189/t034/ t078/t084/t14014.
Conclusion
Although, the predominant genotypes of MRSA recovered from hospital personnel in this study were different from those main genotypes that have previously been reported to cause infections in Tianjin and in other geographic areas of China, the MRSA ST398-t034 genotype has previously been reported to be associated with livestock globally. The dominant MSSA genotypes recovered from hospital personnel were consistent with those previously reported MSSA genotypes recovered from the clinic. The diversity of S. aureus genotypes warrantee further surveillance and genomic studies to better understand the relatedness of these bacteria with those recovered from patients and community
People and their walking environments: An exploratory study of meanings, place and times
Get PDFSeen as the most sustainable transport mode, people’s walking has been well investigated in relation to its environmental correlates and benefits to physical and mental well-being in current transportation and public health literature. Much of this research has considered that environmental features determine people’s responses, behaviors and level of satisfaction. Nonetheless, more scholars begin to argue that people’s responses to environments could be highly complex, depending on personal background, past experiences and emotional interpretation of the place. The meanings that people attach to their walking practices may differ by personal, social and cultural contexts, which consequently influence how they perceive and experience their walking environments. The transferability of westernized understandings of walking to other developing cities, thus, is questionable, and will need to be examined empirically. This study focuses on a rapidly developing Chinese city, and explores how pedestrians in Shenzhen respond to the walking environment through their articulation of walking practices. Through analyzing life stories of twenty local residents, three interrelated themes emerged to highlight the significance of meanings attached to walking, engagements with timescapes and attachment to place, illustrating how these themes were entangled with walking experiences. Insights from this study will enable future studies to reconceptualise the relationship between pedestrians and their environments as a more dynamic process which should take into consideration the temporalities of the walking environment and pedestrians’ bodily and emotional capacities
Recruitment practices of academic librarians in the U.K.
Get PDFThe vast number of academic institutions in the U.K and the pre-requisite of a library in each of them calls for employment of a huge workforce. The process is systematic, time bound and free of any bias due to the nature and type of the sub processes involved. This paper seeks to enumerate and explain the procedure of recruitment in academic libraries in the U.K right from the advertisement to the selection and induction stage. It is envisaged that this paper will help applicants as well as employers both from the U.K and other countries to understand the process and compare it with their own
Synth sonics as stylistic signifiers in sample-based hip-hop: synthetic aesthetics from ‘old-school’ to trap
No full textThe literature on synthesisers ranges from textbooks on usage and historiography to scholarly analysis of their technological development under musicological and sociotechnical perspectives. Most of these approaches, in one form or another, acknowledge the impact of synthesisers on musical culture, either by celebrating their role in powering avant-garde epochs of sonic experimentation, or by mapping the relationship between respective manufacturing trends and stylistic divergences. The availability of affordable, portable and approachable synthesiser designs has been identified as a key catalyst in their crossover from academic to popular spheres, while a number of authors have dealt with the transition from analogue to digital technologies, and their effect on the stylisation of performance and production approaches. Furthermore, popular music styles such as Disco, New wave and the many forms of electronic dance music (EDM) have been linked to the use—and abuse—of particular types of synthesiser, and authors have noted the effect of subculture aesthetics on industry trends and technological development. Trade journals and music technology magazines celebrate popular synthesiser designs as pivotal to the practices and sonic aesthetics of particular artists or genres, while it has been demonstrated that—at given periods in time—a reverse dynamic can characterise the priorities of press and manufacturers on one side, and users and consumers on the other. Particular manifestations of synthesiser technology receive special attention in the literature, highlighting their unique relationship to specific musical styles (e.g. the Roland TR-808 and Hip-Hop) or a notable sonic footprint on the work of celebrated artists (such as the vocoder in works by Beastie Boys, Daft Punk, Herbie Hancock or Dr. Dre). A distinction is often made between drum machines with synthesising capability and those that primarily promote a sampling methodology; this area becomes the subject of focused examination in this paper, as it is pertinent to the sampled—synthetic polarities that formed within Hip-Hop, and the spectrum of meanings and production approaches these convey
Failure of play on asset disposals and share buybacks: application of game theory in the international hotel market
Get PDFThe principal purpose of this study has been to investigate the impact of an asset disposal strategy, often coupled with share repurchase programs, by international hotel companies on financial performance, earnings stability and share values. Utilising ratio analysis, stock returns and risk-adjusted measures, the study analyses the differences in performance, stability and market valuations between asset light and more capital intensive hotel companies. The findings of the study indicate negligible differences in most accounting measures of earnings growth and stability between asset light hotel companies and traditional hotel companies with significant holdings of owned or leased property. Drawing on game theory, we conclude that international hotel companies dispose of their assets in an effort to manipulate financial markets and make their stocks more attractive to investors and traders. Notwithstanding the absence of significant differentiation in accounting measures of performance fundamentals, market based measures show that hotel groups failed in the aim of manipulating financial markets. This study recommends avoiding playing this game as dual asset light/share repurchase strategy generated superior risk-weighted returns to that of more capital intensive traditional hotel companies across the period of the study
Major-minor long short-term memory for word-level language model
Get PDFLanguage model plays an important role in natural language processing (NLP) systems like machine translation, speech recognition, learning token embeddings, natural language generation and text classification. Recently, the multi-layer Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models have been demonstrated to achieve promising performance on word-level language modeling. For each LSTM layer, larger hidden size usually means more diverse semantic features, which enables the language model to perform better. However, we have observed that when a certain LSTM layer reaches a sufficiently large scale, the promotion of overall effect will slow down as its hidden size increases. In this paper, we analyze that an important factor leading to this phenomenon is the high correlation between the newly extended hidden states and original hidden states, which hinders diverse feature expression of the LSTM. As a result, when the scale is large enough, simply lengthening the LSTM hidden states will cost tremendous extra parameters but has little effect. We propose a simple yet effective improvement on each LSTM layer consisting of a large-scale Major LSTM and a smallscale Minor LSTM to break the high correlation between the two parts of hidden states, which we call Major-Minor LSTMs (MMLSTMs). In experiments, we demonstrate the language model with MMLSTMs surpasses the existing state-of-the-art model on Penn Treebank (PTB) and WikiText-2 (WT2) datasets, and outperforms the baseline by 3.3 points in perplexity on WikiText-103 dataset without increasing model parameter counts
Ordinary user experiences at work: a study of greenhouse growers
Get PDFWe investigate professional greenhouse growers’ user experience (UX) when using climate-management systems in their daily work. We build on the literature on UX, in particular UX at work, and extend it to ordinary UX at work. In a ten-day diary study, we collected data with a general UX instrument (AttrakDiff), a domain-specific instrument, and interviews. We find that AttrakDiff is valid at work; its three-factor structure of pragmatic quality, hedonic identification quality, and hedonic stimulation quality is recognizable in the growers’ responses. In this paper, UX at work is understood as interactions among technology, tasks, structure, and actors. Our data support the recent proposal for the ordinariness of UX at work. We find that during continued use UX at work is middle-of-the-scale, remains largely constant over time, and varies little across use situations. For example, the largest slope of the four AttrakDiff constructs when regressed over the ten days was as small as 0.04. The findings contrast existing assumptions and findings in UX research, which is mainly about extraordinary and positive experiences. In this way, the present study contributes to UX research by calling attention to the mundane, unremarkable, and ordinary user experiences at work
Guest editorial: data fusion, integration and advances of non-destructive testing methods in civil and environmental engineering
Get PDFUse of non-destructive testing (NDT) methods has tremendously increased over the last decades in a wide range of civil and environmental engineering applications. Research on stand-alone use of electric, electromagnetic, optical and acoustic NDT techniques has rapidly progressed and potentials of these methods have been comprehensively explored and evaluated, making the majority of techniques established in many areas of endeavour. Research focus areas have been mostly on developing new theories, the advancement of hardware and software components, and on introducing novel surveying protocols, data processing and interpretation methods. Accordingly, the standard of quality and accuracy of data has reached very high levels with available technology.
Parallel to this, the integration between sensing technologies, in terms of collecting and modelling multi-source, multi-scale and multi-temporal data, has become a very challenging task in research. This concept is in fact being acknowledged as a fundamental area of research development that could highly contribute towards the enhancement of the capabilities of existing NDT methods in new and non-conventional scenarios. This trend is motivated by the need to provide more effective solutions for the investigation of complex scenarios. At the same time, a balance among project costs and time requirements on one hand, and resource management-related constraints due to the involvement of multiple methods, equipment and interdisciplinary expertise in the other, must be maintained