The direction, complexity and pace of rural change in affluent, western societies can be conceptualized as a multifunctional transition, in which a variable mix of consumption and protection values ...has emerged, contesting the former dominance of production values, and leading to greater complexity and heterogeneity in rural occupance at all scales. This transition is propelled by three dominant driving forces, namely: agricultural overcapacity; the emergence of market-driven amenity values; and growing societal awareness of sustainability and preservation issues. Australia's generous supply of land and sparse investment in agriculture has facilitated local transitions towards enhanced consumption and protection values, enabling a clearer delineation of emerging differentiated modes of rural occupance than in more contested locales. In Australia seven distinctive modes of occupance can be identified, according to the relative precedence given to production, consumption or protection values. These modes are described as: productivist agricultural; rural amenity; small farm (or pluriactive); peri-metropolitan; marginalized agricultural; conservation; and indigenous. Within these seven modes, alternative trajectories are identified, indicating variability in the intensity and type of resource use. Articulation of the transition concept may provide synergy between discrete discourses in rural research.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures required to address it are cutting a swathe through people’s lives and the global economy. People with addictive disorders are particularly badly affected as a ...result of poverty, physical and mental health vulnerabilities and disruption of access to services. The pandemic may well increase the extent and severity of some addictive disorders. Current research is suffering from the termination of face-to-face data collection and other restrictions. There is an urgent need to coordinate efforts nationally and internationally to mitigate these problems and to find innovative ways of continuing to provide clinical and public health services to help people with addictive disorders.
Optimizing Assurance Murray, Sandra L; Holmes, John G; Collins, Nancy L
Psychological bulletin,
09/2006, Letnik:
132, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
A model of risk regulation is proposed to explain how people balance the goal of seeking closeness to a romantic partner against the opposing goal of minimizing the likelihood and pain of rejection. ...The central premise is that confidence in a partner's positive regard and caring allows people to risk seeking dependence and connectedness. The risk regulation system consists of 3 interconnected "if-then" contingency rules, 1 cognitive, 1 affective, and 1 behavioral. The authors describe how general perceptions of a partner's regard structure the sensitivity of these 3 "if-then" rules in risky relationship situations. The authors then describe the consequences of such situated "if-then" rules for relationship well-being and conclude by integrating other theoretical perspectives and outlining future research directions.
Background: Despite the acknowledged clinical importance of delirium, research evidence for measures to improve its management is sparse. A necessary first step to devising appropriate strategies is ...to understand how common it is and what its outcomes are in any particular setting. Objective: To determine the occurrence of delirium and its outcomes in medical in-patients, through a systematic review of the literature. Method: We searched electronic medical databases, the Consultation-Liaison Literature Database and reference lists and bibliographies for potentially relevant studies. Studies were selected, quality assessed and data extracted according to preset protocols. Results: Results for the occurrence of delirium in medical in-patients were available for 42 cohorts. Prevalence of delirium at admission ranged from 10 to 31%, incidence of new delirium per admission ranged from 3 to 29% and occurrence rate per admission varied between 11 and 42%. Results for outcomes were available for 19 study cohorts. Delirium was associated with increased mortality at discharge and at 12 months, increased length of hospital stay (LOS) and institutionalisation. A significant proportion of patients had persistent symptoms of delirium at discharge and at 6 and 12 months. Conclusion: Delirium is common in medical in-patients and has serious adverse effects on mortality, functional outcomes, LOS and institutionalisation. The development of appropriate strategies to improve its management should be a clinical and research priority. As delirium prevalent at hospital admission is a significant problem, research is also needed into preventative measures that could be applied in community settings.
The rapid increase of interest in, and use of, artificial intelligence (AI) in computer applications has raised a parallel concern about its ability (or lack thereof) to provide understandable, or ...explainable, output to users. This concern is especially legitimate in biomedical contexts, where patient safety is of paramount importance. This position paper brings together seven researchers working in the field with different roles and perspectives, to explore in depth the concept of explainable AI, or XAI, offering a functional definition and conceptual framework or model that can be used when considering XAI. This is followed by a series of desiderata for attaining explainability in AI, each of which touches upon a key domain in biomedicine.
•AI in Medicine becomes increasingly ubiquitous, with new concerns and questions:•How does an AI algorithm work — what is it doing?•Does an AI system work as well as an expert?•Does an AI system do what a user would do, were she in the same situation?•Why cannot the system tell a user how it arrived at a conclusion or made a decision?•Here, we deal with the need to address gaps in the explainability of AI in Medicine.
Performing Environmentalisms John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, Sue Tuohy / John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, Sue Tuohy
09/2021
eBook
Performing Environmentalisms examines the existential
challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for
maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the
strategic use of ...traditional artistic expression--storytelling and
songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals--performed
during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and
ecological collapse. Highlighting alternative visions of what it
means to be human, the authors place performance at the center of
people's responses to the crises. Such expression reinforces the
agency of human beings as they work, independently and together, to
address ecological dilemmas. The essays add these people's critical
perspectives--gained through intimate struggle with life-altering
force--to the global dialogue surrounding humanity's response to
climate change, threats to biocultural diversity, and environmental
catastrophe.
Interdisciplinary in approach and wide-ranging in scope,
Performing Environmentalisms is an engaging look at the
merger of cultural expression and environmental action on the front
lines of today's global emergency.
Contributors: Aaron S. Allen, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Assefa
Tefera Dibaba, Rebecca Dirksen, Mary Hufford, John Holmes McDowell,
Mark Pedelty, Jennifer C. Post, Chie Sakakibara, Jeff Todd Titon,
Rory Turner, Lois Wilcken
Health-risk behaviours such as smoking, unhealthy nutrition, alcohol consumption, and physical inactivity (termed SNAP behaviours) are leading risk factors for multimorbidity and tend to cluster ...(i.e. occur in specific combinations within distinct subpopulations). However, little is known about how these clusters change with age in older adults, and whether and how cluster membership is associated with multimorbidity.
Repeated measures latent class analysis using data from Waves 4-8 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA; n = 4759) identified clusters of respondents with common patterns of SNAP behaviours over time. Disease status (from Wave 9) was used to assess disorders of eight body systems, multimorbidity, and complex multimorbidity. Multinomial and binomial logistic regressions were used to examine how clusters were associated with socio-demographic characteristics and disease status.
Seven clusters were identified: Low-risk (13.4%), Low-risk yet inactive (16.8%), Low-risk yet heavy drinkers (11.4%), Abstainer yet inactive (20.0%), Poor diet and inactive (12.9%), Inactive, heavy drinkers (14.5%), and High-risk smokers (10.9%). There was little evidence that these clusters changed with age. People in the clusters characterised by physical inactivity (in combination with other risky behaviours) had lower levels of education and wealth. People in the heavy drinking clusters were predominantly male. Compared to other clusters, people in the Low-risk and Low-risk yet heavy drinkers had a lower prevalence of all health conditions studied. In contrast, the Abstainer but inactive cluster comprised mostly women and had the highest prevalence of multimorbidity, complex multimorbidity, and endocrine disorders. High-risk smokers were most likely to have respiratory disorders.
Health-risk behaviours tend to be stable as people age and so ought to be addressed early. We identified seven clusters of older adults with distinct patterns of behaviour, socio-demographic characteristics and multimorbidity prevalence. Intervention developers could use this information to identify high-risk subpopulations and tailor interventions to their behaviour patterns and socio-demographic profiles.
Head movement must be stabilized to enable high-quality data collection from optical instrumentation such as eye trackers and ophthalmic imaging devices. Though critically important for imaging, head ...stabilization is often an afterthought in the design of advanced ophthalmic imaging systems, and experimental devices often adapt used and/or discarded equipment from clinical devices for this purpose. Alternatively, those seeking the most stable solution possible, including many users of adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy systems, utilize bite bars. Bite bars can provide excellent stability but are time consuming to fabricate, decreasing imaging efficiency, and uncomfortable for many patients, especially the elderly and/or those with prosthodontics such as dentures who may refuse participation in a study that requires one. No commercial vendors specifically offer head mount solutions for experimental ophthalmic imaging devices, resulting in nearly every custom device having a different solution for this commonly encountered problem. Parallelizing the head stabilization apparatus across different custom devices may improve standardization of experimental imaging systems for clinical trials and other multicenter investigations. Here we introduce a head mount design for ophthalmic imaging that is modular, adjustable, and customizable to the constraints of different experimental imaging configurations. The three points of head contact in our solution provide excellent stabilization across a range of head sizes and shapes from small children to adults, and the ease of adjustment afforded by our design minimizes the time to get participants stabilized and comfortable.
PDF
