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A qualitative evaluation of ETHICA-4P, a toolkit for ethical clinical decision-making and overcoming cultural barriers in psychotherapy in the United Kingdom
Get PDFEthnic minority service users in the UK face persistent disparities in access to and outcomes of mental health care. While the need for culturally adapted treatment is increasingly acknowledged, implementation remains limited. This study qualitatively evaluates ETHICA-4P—an Ethics Toolkit for Harnessing Integrity in Complex Arenas through Place, People, Principles, and Precedents—which aims to support ethical decision-making and address cultural barriers in psychotherapy. Findings suggest that ETHICA-4P is a useful tool for reflecting on ethical challenges in individual clinical work. Its impact could be enhanced by clarifying how it can be applied across multiple levels, including clinical supervision, training, team collaboration, and service design. The toolkit offers timely potential for helping practitioners and service managers deliver more culturally responsive care and aligns with efforts to reduce racialized health inequalities in the UK
Assessing risks in online information sharing
Get PDFThe volume of personal information, accessible online about individuals is unprecedented. Such information may be pieced together by others, to create a more detailed picture of a person, exposing them to potential harms, such as employment loss, unwanted attention, fraud, and more. In this context, relevance is contextual, situational and dependent, based on the risk it poses to the subject. In this paper, we explore this risk-based notion of relevance with the following questions in mind: How well can individuals identify and judge risks associated with online personal information? And, to what extent does this change individuals’ awareness of their own information-sharing practices?In a user study, 243 participants were tasked with browsing fabricated online profiles to identify potential “risky” posts in one of two scenarios regarding either Identity Theft or Reputational Damage. On average, 72.2% of participants identified at least one risky post. However, only 23.7% identified dependent posts that taken together substantially increased the risk of identity theft or reputational damage. Further, participants reported greater awareness of potential risks that could arise from their own, and/or their friends’ information sharing practices. Our findings suggest that when relevance is dependent on combining separate pieces of information to reveal risk, participants struggle to identify these cumulative revelations. Moreover, our study highlights that when participants perform tasks that feature personal information, it can lead to positive and negative experiences; changing their perceptions and increasing awareness about their own information behaviours while also raising concerns around their routine online practices
Weighted 2D-kernel density estimations provide a new probabilistic measure for epigenetic age
Get PDFEpigenetic aging signatures provide insights into human aging, but traditional clocks rely on linear regression of DNA methylation levels, assuming linear trajectories. This study explores a non-parametric approach using 2D-kernel density estimation to determine epigenetic age. Our weighted model achieves similar predictive accuracy as conventional clocks and provides a variation score reflecting the inherent variability of age-related epigenetic changes within samples. This score is significantly increased in various diseases and associated with mortality risk in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921. Thus, weighted 2D-kernel density estimation facilitates accurate epigenetic age predictions and offers an additional variable for biological age estimation
Scoped effects, scoped operations, and parameterized algebraic theories
Get PDFNotions of computation can be modeled by monads. Algebraic effects offer a characterization of monads in terms of algebraic operations and equational axioms, where operations are basic programming features, such as reading or updating the state, and axioms specify observably equivalent expressions. However, many useful programming features depend on additional mechanisms such as delimited scopes or dynamically allocated resources. Such mechanisms can be supported via extensions to algebraic effects including scoped effects and parameterized algebraic theories. We present a fresh perspective on scoped effects by translation into a variation of parameterized algebraic theories. The translation enables a new approach to equational reasoning for scoped effects and gives rise to an alternative characterization of monads in terms of generators and equations involving both scoped and algebraic operations. We demonstrate the power of our approach by way of equational characterizations of several known models of scoped effects
LLM4DV:Using large language models for hardware test stimuli generation
Get PDFHardware design verification (DV) is a process that checks the functional equivalence of a hardware design against its specifications, improving hardware reliability and robustness. A key task in the DV process is the test stimuli generation,which creates a set of conditions or inputs for testing. These test conditions are often complex and specific to the given hardware design, requiring substantial human engineering effort to optimize. We seek a solution of automated and efficient testing for arbitrary hardware designs that takes advantage of large language models (LLMs). LLMs have already shown promising results for improving hardware design automation, but remain under-explored for hardware DV. In this paper, we propose an open-source benchmarking framework named LLM4DV that efficiently orchestrates LLMs for automated hardware test stimuli generation. Our analysis evaluates six different LLMs involving six prompting improvements over eight hardware designs and provides insight for future work on LLMs development for efficient automated DV
Adaptive CHERI compartmentalization for heterogeneous accelerators
Get PDFHardware accelerators offer high performance and energy efficiency for specific tasks compared to general-purpose processors. However, current hardware accelerator designs focus primarily on performance, overlooking security. This poses significant security risks due to potential memory safety violations that can affect the entire hardware system. Existing methods either rely on Input-Output Memory Management Units (IOMMUs) for memory isolation between memory pages, leading to vulnerabilities in intra-page memory accesses, or modify an accelerator architecture for specialized memory protection, which requires significant effort and cannot scale across multiple diverse applications.In this paper, we propose a general method for fine-grained memory protection in heterogeneous systems without modifying accelerator architectures. We extend the Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) from CPUs to an adaptive hardware interface named CapChecker. The CapChecker imports capabilities from the CPU and guards memory accesses at the pointer level from CHERI-unaware accelerators as if they were CHERI-aware natively. Over a set of benchmarks on hardware accelerators in a heterogeneous system, our approach achieves fine-grained memory protection, with a 1.4% performance overhead compared to CHERI-unaware accelerators on averag
Arts, secular ritual, and health:Combining (micro)sociology and the social cure to link the arts to health through interaction ritual
Get PDFDespite the early roots of arts and health as grounded within rituals and interest in ”community”– a term that is deeply laden with a history of rituals - the role of ”ritual” in modern arts and health is largely untheorized. Yet, ”secularized” rituals can teach us about contemporary life, beliefs, and practices, playing a role in our understanding of how and why the arts connect to health and wellbeing. In this article, I draw on published literature and insights from my experiences in the field of arts and health to make the case that incorporating “ritual” as a concept within arts and health research serves to expand existing thinking in social psychology. Specifically, I link Interaction Ritual Chain (IRC) theory and the social cure approach (a social identity approach to health) to theorize that arts activities may enable the construction of group identities through participation in interaction rituals, whereby ritual outcomes across chains of interactions may be considered as expressions of health and wellbeing. The article makes an original contribution to social psychology by connecting IRC theory to a social identity approach to health, laying a new theoretical foundation for researchers working in arts and health
Impact of the rollout of the national social prescribing link worker programme on population outcomes:evidence from a repeated cross-sectional survey
Get PDFBackground: Social prescribing link workers have been rolled out nationally through the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme. Link workers connect people to advice and support to address the non-medical and social issues affecting their health and well-being. Aim: To determine whether the rollout of social prescribing link workers through primary care networks improved population outcomes. Design and Setting: 4,132,676 respondents from repeated cross-sections of the General Practice Patient Survey (2018 to 2023) combined with administrative workforce data.Method: We used logistic regression models to relate the number of full-time equivalent social prescribing link workers per 50,000 patients to five population outcomes.Results: An additional full-time equivalent link worker per 50,000 patients was associated with higher probabilities of respondents with long-term conditions having confidence in managing long-term condition(s) (Odds Ratio (OR)=1.006; 95% confidence interval (CI)= 1.001 to 1.010) and having enough support from local services (OR=1.005; 95%CI=1.001 to 1.008). For all respondents, the same size increase in link workers was associated with a higher probability of having a good experience at their general practice (OR=1.015; 95%CI=1.004 to 1.027). For respondents with mental health needs, this increase in link workers was associated with a higher probability of having their mental health needs understood (OR=1.012; 95%CI=1.003 to 1.021). Conclusions: The rollout of link workers was associated with small improvements in patient experience and slightly better outcomes for population groups specifically targeted for social prescribing. Future work is required to determine whether the scheme is financially sustainable and to ensure it does not widen existing health inequalities.Keywords: Social Prescribing, Population Outcomes, Primary CareHow this fits in: The 2019 NHS Long-Term Plan stimulated a rapid expansion of social prescribing link workers. We find this was associated with improved outcomes for individuals specifically targeted for social prescribing and had spillovers through improving overall patient experience with general practice. Employment of social prescribing link workers has had the intended outcomes specified in the NHS Long-Term Plan. Future work is required to determine whether the scheme is financially sustainable for social prescribing as a whole and to ensure it does not widen existing health inequalities.Summary sentence: The national rollout of social prescribing link workers was associated with improvements in patient experience and targeted population outcomes.<br/
Best interests decision-making in the Chinese adult guardianship regime through a P-centric lens
Get PDFThis article explores how best interests decisions are made on behalf of adults with impaired capacity in China through the lens of P-centricity, or the extent to which P is kept at the centre of the decision-making process. A two-part review, comprising a textual analysis of relevant legislative provisions and a cross-sectional review of 550 recent Chinese judgments on Article 35 of the Civil Code, is conducted. While an intention to move towards P-centricity was found at the legislative level, it is argued that the ideals of P-centricity have not been implemented on the ground by the courts, as demonstrated by the lack of P’s participation and P’s perspective in the vast majority of the cases, as well as the lack of a systematic, consistent approach either to how judges approached best interests decision-making generally, or when and how they ascertained P’s wishes in this process. Given the benefits of placing P at the centre of the decision-making process, recommendations relating to the development of judicial guidance and the training of judges are put forward
Violence against teachers and the entanglement of schools in violent conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Get PDFViolence against teachers in conflict-affected regions has devastating consequences on their well-being and work, yet there is limited research on its drivers. In this article, we carry out a mixed-methods analysis of the causes of violence against teachers in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), leveraging a longitudinal survey of 932 teachers in 55 schools and 211 qualitative interviews. We find that 43.3 percent of teachers in the study schools have experienced a direct violent attack in their lifetime. We identify three levels at which a range of interrelated causes of violence operate: first, the entanglement of schools in violent political economies and the interferences by armed actors in school governance; second, the social position of teachers, whereby specific facets of teachers’ identity, status, and role can expose them to violence; and, third, the escalation of school-level disputes, which can spill out of schools and lead to violence
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