Showing items 101 - 120 of 15500

Blockchain adaptation of remote patient monitoring with internet of medical things

- Godly, Cinthia, Balasubramanian, Venki, Jinila, Bevesh

Blood flow restriction exercise of the tibialis anterior in people with stroke : a preliminary study

- Kjeldsen, Simon, Næss-Schmidt, Erhard, Lee, Michael, de Oliveira, Camila, Nielsen, Jorgen, Stubbs, Peter

Boundary crossers : how providers facilitate ethnic minority families' access to dementia services

- Brijnath, Bianca, Gilbert, Andrew, Antoniades, Josefine, Croy, Samantha, Kent, Mike, Ellis, Katie, Browning, Colette, Goeman, Dianne, Adams, Jon

  • Authors: Brijnath, Bianca , Gilbert, Andrew , Antoniades, Josefine , Croy, Samantha , Kent, Mike , Ellis, Katie , Browning, Colette , Goeman, Dianne , Adams, Jon
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journals of Gerontology - Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences Vol. 77, no. 2 (2022), p. 396-406
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  • Description: Objectives: Providers who work closely with ethnic minority people with dementia and their families are pivotal in helping them access services. However, few studies have examined how these providers actually do this work. Using the concept of "boundary crossers,"this article investigates the strategies applied by these providers to facilitate access to dementia services for ethnic minority people with dementia and their families. Methods: Between 2017 and 2020, in-depth video-recorded interviews were conducted with 27 health, aged care, and community service providers working with ethnic minority people living with dementia across Australia. Interviews were conducted in one of seven languages and/or in English, then translated and transcribed verbatim into English. The data were analyzed thematically. Results: Family and community stigma associated with dementia and extra-familial care were significant barriers to families engaging with services. To overcome these barriers, participants worked at the boundaries of culture and dementia, community and systems, strategically using English and other vernaculars, clinical and cultural terminology, building trust and rapport, and assisting with service navigation to improve access. Concurrently, they were cognizant of familial boundaries and were careful to provide services that were culturally appropriate without supplanting the families' role. Discussion: In negotiating cultural, social, and professional boundaries, providers undertake multidimensional and complex work that involves education, advocacy, negotiation, navigation, creativity, and emotional engagement. This work is largely undervalued but offers a model of care that facilitates social and community development as well as service integration across health, aged care, and social services. © 2021 The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved.

Brief report : pregnancy, birth and infant feeding practices : a survey-based Investigation into risk factors for autism spectrum disorder

- Whitely, Aleesha, Shandley, Kerrie, Huynh, Minh, Brown, Christine, Austin, David, Bhowmik, Jahar

  • Authors: Whitely, Aleesha , Shandley, Kerrie , Huynh, Minh , Brown, Christine , Austin, David , Bhowmik, Jahar
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders Vol. 52, no. 11 (2022), p. 5072-5078
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  • Description: A succession of interconnected environmental factors is believed to contribute substantially to the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This exploratory study therefore aims to identify potential risk factors for ASD that are associated with pregnancy, birth and infant feeding. Demographic and health-related data on children aged 3–13 years (N = 4306) was collected through an online survey completed by biological mothers. A fitted logistic regression model identified advanced maternal age, prenatal bleeding, pre-eclampsia, perinatal pethidine usage, foetal distress before birth and male sex of child as associated with an increased risk of ASD, whereas longer gestational duration demonstrated a protective effect. These findings highlight potential risk factors and predictor interrelationships which may contribute to overall ASD risk. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Buffering the fear of COVID-19 : social connectedness mediates the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and psychological wellbeing

- Humphrey, Ashley, March, Evita, Lavender, Andrew, Miller, Kyle, Alvarenga, Marlies, Mesagno, Christopher

  • Authors: Humphrey, Ashley , March, Evita , Lavender, Andrew , Miller, Kyle , Alvarenga, Marlies , Mesagno, Christopher
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Behavioral Sciences Vol. 12, no. 3 (2022), p.
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  • Description: Social connections are crucial for an individual’s health, wellbeing, and overall effective functioning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one major preventative effort for reducing the spread of COVID-19 involved restricting people’s typical social interactions through physical distancing and isolation. The current cross-sectional study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, explored the relationship among fear of COVID-19, social connectedness, resilience, depressive symptomologies, and self-perceived stress. Participants (N = 174) completed an anonymous, online questionnaire, and results indicated that social connectedness mediated the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and psychological wellbeing. In contrast, the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and psychological wellbeing was not mediated by resilience. These findings highlight the important role that social connections and resilience play in buffering against negative psychological wellbeing outcomes, especially during a pandemic. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Can systemic myokine response to an acute exercise bout predict high and low responders to resistance training?

- Bell, Leo, Wallen, M., Talpey, Scott, O'Brien, B.

  • Authors: Bell, Leo , Wallen, M. , Talpey, Scott , O'Brien, B.
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Medical Hypotheses Vol. 160, no. (2022), p.
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  • Description: Resistance training is performed to increase muscle strength and mass. Associated benefits relate to improvements in physical performance as well as reduced risk of mortality. However, the exercise response to resistance training is largely variable. This may be attributed to individual physiological phenotype and flawed methods of standardised training. Recent efforts have been made to identify biomarkers which delineate between high and low responders to resistance training. Myokines associated with exercise-induced muscle secretome are biomarkers that potentially differentiate between individuals that experience large or small increases in muscle mass. However, the repeatability of these biomarkers in response to standardised resistance training is understudied. Therefore, this research seeks to address the inter and intra-reliability of myokines associated with resistance exercise, and if they confidently predict high and low responders to individually standardised resistance training. Development of a screening tool which reliably identifies individual trainability can have potential implications for personalised exercise physiology. © 2022

Cancer incidence, mortality, years of life lost, years lived with disability, and disability-adjusted life years for 29 cancer groups from 2010 to 2019 a systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2019

- Kocarnik, Jonathan, Compton, Kelly, Dean, Fean, Fu, Weijia, Gaw, Brian, Harvey, James, Henrikson, Hannah, Lu, Dan, Pennini, Alyssa, Xu, Rixing, Ababneh, Emad, Abbasi-Kangevari, Mohsen, Abbastabar, Hedayat, Abd-Elsalam, Sherief, Abdoli, Amir, Abedi, Aidin, Abidi, Hassan, Abolhassani, Hassan, Adedeji, Isaac, Adnani, Qorinath, Advani, Shailesh, Afzal, Muhammad, Aghaali, Mohammad, Ahinkorah, Bright, Ahmad, Sajjad, Ahmad, Tauseef, Ahmadi, Ali, Ahmadi, Sepideh, Ahmed Rashid, Tarik, Rahman, Muhammad Aziz

  • Authors: Kocarnik, Jonathan , Compton, Kelly , Dean, Fean , Fu, Weijia , Gaw, Brian , Harvey, James , Henrikson, Hannah , Lu, Dan , Pennini, Alyssa , Xu, Rixing , Ababneh, Emad , Abbasi-Kangevari, Mohsen , Abbastabar, Hedayat , Abd-Elsalam, Sherief , Abdoli, Amir , Abedi, Aidin , Abidi, Hassan , Abolhassani, Hassan , Adedeji, Isaac , Adnani, Qorinath , Advani, Shailesh , Afzal, Muhammad , Aghaali, Mohammad , Ahinkorah, Bright , Ahmad, Sajjad , Ahmad, Tauseef , Ahmadi, Ali , Ahmadi, Sepideh , Ahmed Rashid, Tarik , Rahman, Muhammad Aziz
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: JAMA Oncology Vol. 8, no. 3 (2022), p. 420-444
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  • Description: IMPORTANCE The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2019 (GBD 2019) provided systematic estimates of incidence, morbidity, and mortality to inform local and international efforts toward reducing cancer burden. OBJECTIVE To estimate cancer burden and trends globally for 204 countries and territories and by Sociodemographic Index (SDI) quintiles from 2010 to 2019. EVIDENCE REVIEW The GBD 2019 estimation methods were used to describe cancer incidence, mortality, years lived with disability, years of life lost, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in 2019 and over the past decade. Estimates are also provided by quintiles of the SDI, a composite measure of educational attainment, income per capita, and total fertility rate for those younger than 25 years. Estimates include 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs). FINDINGS In 2019, there were an estimated 23.6 million (95% UI, 22.2-24.9 million) new cancer cases (17.2 million when excluding nonmelanoma skin cancer) and 10.0 million (95% UI, 9.36-10.6 million) cancer deaths globally, with an estimated 250 million (235-264 million) DALYs due to cancer. Since 2010, these represented a 26.3% (95% UI, 20.3%-32.3%) increase in new cases, a 20.9% (95% UI, 14.2%-27.6%) increase in deaths, and a 16.0% (95% UI, 9.3%-22.8%) increase in DALYs. Among 22 groups of diseases and injuries in the GBD 2019 study, cancer was second only to cardiovascular diseases for the number of deaths, years of life lost, and DALYs globally in 2019. Cancer burden differed across SDI quintiles. The proportion of years lived with disability that contributed to DALYs increased with SDI, ranging from 1.4% (1.1%-1.8%) in the low SDI quintile to 5.7% (4.2%-7.1%) in the high SDI quintile. While the high SDI quintile had the highest number of new cases in 2019, the middle SDI quintile had the highest number of cancer deaths and DALYs. From 2010 to 2019, the largest percentage increase in the numbers of cases and deaths occurred in the low and low-middle SDI quintiles. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE The results of this systematic analysis suggest that the global burden of cancer is substantial and growing, with burden differing by SDI. These results provide comprehensive and comparable estimates that can potentially inform efforts toward equitable cancer control around the world. © 2022 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 30 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Muhammad Aziz Rahman" is provided in this record**

Characterising soil physical properties of selected temperate highland peat swamps on sandstone in the Sydney basin bioregion

- Shaygan, Mandana, Baumgartl, Thomas, McIntyre, Neil

  • Authors: Shaygan, Mandana , Baumgartl, Thomas , McIntyre, Neil
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies Vol. 40, no. (2022), p.
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  • Description: Study region: Sydney Basin, New South Wales, Australia. Study focus: Some of Temperate Highland Peat Swamps on Sandstone of Sydney Basin overlie existing underground mining areas, which may impact the hydrological fluxes into and out of the swamps. Understanding and predicting these potential impacts and their consequences for swamps’ vegetation requires knowledge of the relevant physical properties of the soil, however such knowledge is almost completely absent from the literature. This study addresses this gap, and provides new insight into the degree and nature of variability between swamp sites, and between groups of swamps, the soil properties controlling these variabilities and the classification of these swamps in the context of peatland. Soil samples were collected up to a depth of 750 mm from ten sites in Upper Nepean and Newnes Plateau swamps. Samples were analysed for organic matter, bulk density, texture, saturated hydraulic conductivity and water retention characteristics. New hydrological insights: Not only the organic matter, but also bulk density and sand content control soil physical properties of the swamps. Soil properties vary between swamps; however, the variabilities were not large relative to those found in peatlands globally. These THPSS of the Sydney Basin cannot be classified as peatland and so their soil parameters cannot be estimated through the generalisation of peatland soil physical properties. It is concluded that the insights into soil properties provide new scope for developing hydrological models to assist in hydrological and ecological impacts analysis of the swamps. © 2022 The Authors

Characterization of legacy landfills with electrical resistivity tomography; a comparative study

- Guinea, Ander, Bicknell, J., Cox, Nicole, Swan, Haydn, Simmons, N.

  • Authors: Guinea, Ander , Bicknell, J. , Cox, Nicole , Swan, Haydn , Simmons, N.
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Applied Geophysics Vol. 203, no. (2022), p.
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  • Description: Historic landfills that were constructed to standards that would not meet current regulations represent environmental and human-health risks. The adequate characterization of legacy landfills is paramount to manage the risks they pose effectively. In this study, the non-invasive geophysical technique of electrical resistivity tomography has been used to characterize two sites that have been identified as posing risks to the local environment. The sites are significantly different in the type of waste present, moisture content, type of bedrock and shape and distribution of the waste; although they have in common that neither site is lined. The results of the resistivity imaging have allowed defining the boundaries of the landfill and the depth of the waste. Different types of waste and their distribution have been identified. Additionally, a relationship between the resistivity distribution and the release of residual gas from the landfill has been described; where the presence of saturated clay in the waste prevents the release of said gasses. This is be associated with locations with higher resistivity and lower clay content. That relationship is not observed when the clay is dry. When interpreting the results, the heterogeneous nature of the waste can lead to misinterpretations due to resistivity overlap between the bedrock and the waste materials. Therefore, comparison of the resistivity models with direct information like borehole logs can significantly improve the reliability of the interpretations. However, the resistivity survey should predate the installation of bores to identify the most suitable locations for them. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

CHIEF : clustering With higher-order motifs in big networks

- Xia, Feng, Yu, Shuo, Liu, Chengfei, Li, Jianxin, Lee, Ivan

  • Authors: Xia, Feng , Yu, Shuo , Liu, Chengfei , Li, Jianxin , Lee, Ivan
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering Vol. 9, no. 3 (2022), p. 990-1005
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  • Description: Clustering network vertices is an enabler of various applications such as social computing and Internet of Things. However, challenges arise for clustering when networks increase in scale. This paper proposes CHIEF (Clustering with HIgher-ordEr motiFs), a solution which consists of two motif clustering techniques: standard acceleration CHIEF-ST and approximate acceleration CHIEF-AP. Both algorithms firstly find the maximal $k$-edge-connected subgraphs within the target networks to lower the network scale by optimizing the network structure with maximal $k$-edge-connected subgraphs, and then use heterogeneous four-node motifs clustering in higher-order dense networks. For CHIEF-ST, we illustrate that all target motifs will be kept after this procedure when the minimum node degree of the target motif is equal or greater than $k$. For CHIEF-AP, we prove that the eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix and the Laplacian matrix are relatively stable after this step. CHIEF offers an improved efficiency of motif clustering for big networks, and it verifies higher-order motif significance. Experiments on real and synthetic networks demonstrate that the proposed solutions outperform baseline approaches in large network analysis, and higher-order motifs outperform traditional triangle motifs in clustering. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Clustering-based real-time anomaly detection—a breakthrough in big data technologies

- Habeeb, Riyaz, Nasaruddin, Fariza, Gani, Abdullah, Amanullah, Mohamed, Hashem, Ibrahim, Ahmed, Ejaz, Imran, Muhammad

  • Authors: Habeeb, Riyaz , Nasaruddin, Fariza , Gani, Abdullah , Amanullah, Mohamed , Hashem, Ibrahim , Ahmed, Ejaz , Imran, Muhammad
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies Vol. 33, no. 8 (2022), p.
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  • Description: Off late, the ever increasing usage of a connected Internet-of-Things devices has consequently augmented the volume of real-time network data with high velocity. At the same time, threats on networks become inevitable; hence, identifying anomalies in real time network data has become crucial. To date, most of the existing anomaly detection approaches focus mainly on machine learning techniques for batch processing. Meanwhile, detection approaches which focus on the real-time analytics somehow deficient in its detection accuracy while consuming higher memory and longer execution time. As such, this paper proposes a novel framework which focuses on real-time anomaly detection based on big data technologies. In addition, this paper has also developed streaming sliding window local outlier factor coreset clustering algorithms (SSWLOFCC), which was then implemented into the framework. The proposed framework that comprises BroIDS, Flume, Kafka, Spark streaming, SparkMLlib, Matplot and HBase was evaluated to substantiate its efficacy, particularly in terms of accuracy, memory consumption, and execution time. The evaluation is done by performing critical comparative analysis using existing approaches, such as K-means, hierarchical density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (HDBSCAN), isolation forest, spectral clustering and agglomerative clustering. Moreover, Adjusted Rand Index and memory profiler package were used for the evaluation of the proposed framework against the existing approaches. The outcome of the evaluation has substantially proven the efficacy of the proposed framework with a much higher accuracy rate of 96.51% when compared to other algorithms. Besides, the proposed framework also outperformed the existing algorithms in terms of lesser memory consumption and execution time. Ultimately the proposed solution enable analysts to precisely track and detect anomalies in real time. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Collaborative filtering with network representation learning for citation recommendation

- Wang, Wei, Tang, Tao, Xia, Feng, Gong, Zhiguo, Chen, Zhikui, Liu, Huan

  • Authors: Wang, Wei , Tang, Tao , Xia, Feng , Gong, Zhiguo , Chen, Zhikui , Liu, Huan
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: IEEE Transactions on Big Data Vol. 8, no. 5 (2022), p. 1233-1246
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  • Description: Citation recommendation plays an important role in the context of scholarly big data, where finding relevant papers has become more difficult because of information overload. Applying traditional collaborative filtering (CF) to citation recommendation is challenging due to the cold start problem and the lack of paper ratings. To address these challenges, in this article, we propose a collaborative filtering with network representation learning framework for citation recommendation, namely CNCRec, which is a hybrid user-based CF considering both paper content and network topology. It aims at recommending citations in heterogeneous academic information networks. CNCRec creates the paper rating matrix based on attributed citation network representation learning, where the attributes are topics extracted from the paper text information. Meanwhile, the learned representations of attributed collaboration network is utilized to improve the selection of nearest neighbors. By harnessing the power of network representation learning, CNCRec is able to make full use of the whole citation network topology compared with previous context-aware network-based models. Extensive experiments on both DBLP and APS datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall, and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank). Moreover, CNCRec can better solve the data sparsity problem compared with other CF-based baselines. © 2015 IEEE.

Communication-a-fast and accurate numerical technique for impedance spectroscopy of microstructures

- Swaminathan, Narasimhan, Natarajan, Sundararajan, Ooi, Ean Tat

  • Authors: Swaminathan, Narasimhan , Natarajan, Sundararajan , Ooi, Ean Tat
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of the Electrochemical Society Vol. 169, no. 2 (2022), p.
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  • Description: The polygonal finite element method (PFEM) is proposed as a fast and accurate technique to simulate the impedance spectroscopy (IS) of polycrystalline materials. While conventional finite element method (FEM) requires explicit meshing of the grains and grain boundaries, in PFEM each region can be treated as an element. We demonstrate that the number of degrees of freedom in PFEM can be lower by a factor of 30 when compared to FEM, thus speeding up simulations by a factor of 3.5. A simple example demonstrates the use of PFEM to generate IS on samples with various grain boundary widths. © 2022 The Author(s).

Community expectations and anticipated outcomes for crisis support services—Lifeline Australia

- Ma, Jennifer, Batterham, Philip, Kõlves, Kairi, Woodward, Alan, Bradford, Sally, Klein, Britt, Titov, Nickolai, Mazzer, Kelly, O’Riordan, Megan, Rickwood, Debra

  • Authors: Ma, Jennifer , Batterham, Philip , Kõlves, Kairi , Woodward, Alan , Bradford, Sally , Klein, Britt , Titov, Nickolai , Mazzer, Kelly , O’Riordan, Megan , Rickwood, Debra
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Health and Social Care in the Community Vol. 30, no. 5 (2022), p. 1775-1788
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  • Description: Crisis lines provide a critical first line of mental wellbeing support for community members in distress. Given the increasing referral to such services, there is a need to understand what the expectations of the community are around the role of such services in our public health responses. A computer assisted telephone interview was undertaken between 28th October and 30th November 2019. The aim was to explore expectations and anticipated outcomes of Lifeline Australia's crisis support services from a nationally representative community sample (N = 1,300). Analysis was undertaken to determine if demographic variables (age, gender, indigenous status, country of birth, culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) status, sexual orientation, household composition, region and State/territory) and past service use affected community expectations. Results showed that a majority of respondents expected Lifeline to listen and provide support, recommend other services, and provide information. Help-seekers were expected to feel heard and listened to, receive safety advice or support to stay safe, and feel more hopeful. Lifeline was expected to prioritise people feeling suicidal, in immediate personal crisis, and experiencing domestic violence. Findings reveal that community members hold expectations for Lifeline Australia to serve as a suicide prevention and general crisis support service, which are congruent with the service's aims. There was little variation in community expectations of crisis support services based on demographic factors and past service use. The results show that the community has extensive and diverse expectations for this national crisis service to meet both short and longer-term needs for all vulnerable members of the community—entailing a very substantial public health service responsibility. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Competencies and training of health professionals engaged in health coaching : a systematic review

- Singh, Harjit, Kennedy, Gerard, Stupans, Ieva

  • Authors: Singh, Harjit , Kennedy, Gerard , Stupans, Ieva
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Chronic Illness Vol. 18, no. 1 (2022), p. 58-85
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  • Description: Objective: A systematic review was undertaken in order to evaluate the competencies of primary healthcare professionals who are engaged with health coaching patients with chronic health conditions. Methods: The databases CINHAL, EMBASE, PubMed, PsychINFO and SCOPUS were searched to identify peer reviewed papers referring to competencies of health professionals engaged in health coaching. Results: Nine key competencies that health professionals met and which resulted in successful patient outcomes from health coaching were identified. Comparisons of the core health coaching competencies to the competencies for coaches established by the International Coaching Federation and European Mentoring and Coaching Council showed considerable overlap. However, the comparison also reiterated the need for competencies specific to health coaches to be made explicit. Discussion: Health coaching has been shown to improve the health outcomes in patients with chronic health conditions. As such, there is a need to build an evidenced-based competency framework specific to health coaches. At present, the lack of a competency framework on which to base health coach training could significantly impact the outcomes of patients receiving health coaching. Practical implications include improving regulation and quality of health coaching, and more importantly, the health outcomes of patients receiving the service. © The Author(s) 2020.

Compressibility behavior of soft-rigid granular mixtures bound with polyurethane binder

- Raeesi, Ramin, Soltani, Armin, Disfani, Mahdi

  • Authors: Raeesi, Ramin , Soltani, Armin , Disfani, Mahdi
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: International Journal of Geomechanics Vol. 22, no. 1 (2022), p.
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  • Description: Mixtures of recycled tires and granular material have been used for a variety of applications in geotechnical engineering over the years. The characteristics and mechanical properties of sand-rubber mixtures as unbound soft-rigid mixtures have been extensively studied over the years. Research on bound soft-rigid mixtures, however, has been mainly focused on using a brittle binding agent, for example, Portland cement. A very limited number of studies over the last years have examined the behavior of soft-rigid mixtures bound with a nonbrittle binder. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the deformation mechanism of the soft-rigid mixtures bound with a polyurethane binder. Sixteen one-dimensional compression tests were conducted on bound and unbound samples to study the impact of the binding agent on the behavior of the soft-rigid mixture. In addition, computed tomography scan images of samples were used to visualize the deformation mechanism. A multiphased behavior, as opposed to single-phased behavior for unbound mixtures, was observed and each phase was explained in detail. The observed multiphased behavior is divided into up to four phases, that is, initial compression, normal compression, bond degradation, and secondary compression, with boundaries defined based on constrained modulus curve. © 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Computing curriculum time and input for incidentally learning academic vocabulary

- Green, Clarence

  • Authors: Green, Clarence
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Language Learning & Technology Vol. 26, no. 1 (2022), p. 1-21
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  • Description: This paper computes estimates of the potential for Extensive Reading (ER) and Extensive Viewing (EV) to support the academic and discipline-specific vocabulary needs of students. While research into ER/EV for general vocabulary is well-established, only recently has academic vocabulary begun to be researched. Given curriculum time constraints, information on which academic vocabulary items might be learnable incidentally is useful, and this study provides teachers with information on which specific academic vocabulary items from multiple academic wordlists have a reasonable chance of being learned incidentally. It operationalizes ER/EV through corpora representing general fiction, television programs, and movies. It estimates the pedagogical time it would take to meet target vocabulary at different possible thresholds for incidental learning (6, 12, 20 times) with estimates for each computed for multiple possible reading rates (100, 260, 350 wpm) and viewing rates (80, 140, 200 wpm). Results report individual curriculum time/input estimates for over 2000 academic vocabulary targets across multiple subjects. Findings indicate ER/EV are pedagogies that could substantially support academic vocabulary development. A tool is released for teachers to compute personalized estimates using the reading rates of their students.

Confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling of the factor structure of the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE)

- Gomez, Rapson, Brown, Taylor, Watson, Shaun, Stavropoulos, Vasileios

  • Authors: Gomez, Rapson , Brown, Taylor , Watson, Shaun , Stavropoulos, Vasileios
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: PLoS ONE Vol. 17, no. 2 February (2022), p.
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  • Description: The Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) is a multiple dimensional measure of cognitive empathy [comprising primary factors for perspective taking (PT), online simulation (OS)], and affective empathy [comprising primary factors for emotion contagion (EC), proximal responsivity (PRO), and peripheral responsivity (PER)]. This study used independent clusters confirmatory factor analysis (ICM-CFA) and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) to examine the scale’s factor structure. A general community sample of 203 (men = 43, women = 160) between 17 and 63 years completed the QCAE. Although both the five-factor oblique and second order factor models showed good model fit, and clarity in the pattern of factor loadings, in the second-order factor model, none of the primary factors loaded significantly on their respective secondary factors, thereby favoring the five-factor oblique model. The factors in this model were supported in terms of external validity. Despite this, the factor for PRO in this model showed low reliability for meaning interpretation. A revised four-factor oblique model without the PRO factor showed good fit, clarity in the pattern of factor loadings, and reliability and validity for the factors in this model, thereby suggesting this to be the best model to represent ratings on the QCAE. Copyright: © 2022 Gomez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Conical averagedness and convergence analysis of fixed point algorithms

- Bartz, Sedi, Dao, Minh, Phan, Hung

  • Authors: Bartz, Sedi , Dao, Minh , Phan, Hung
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Global Optimization Vol. 82, no. 2 (2022), p. 351-373
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  • Description: We study a conical extension of averaged nonexpansive operators and the role it plays in convergence analysis of fixed point algorithms. Various properties of conically averaged operators are systematically investigated, in particular, the stability under relaxations, convex combinations and compositions. We derive conical averagedness properties of resolvents of generalized monotone operators. These properties are then utilized in order to analyze the convergence of the proximal point algorithm, the forward–backward algorithm, and the adaptive Douglas–Rachford algorithm. Our study unifies, improves and casts new light on recent studies of these topics. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Contextual factors influencing patients' experiences of acute deterioration and medical emergency team (MET) encounter : a grounded theory study

- Chung, Catherine, McKenna, Lisa, Cooper, Simon

  • Authors: Chung, Catherine , McKenna, Lisa , Cooper, Simon
  • Date: 2022
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Advanced Nursing Vol. 78, no. 12 (2022), p. 4062-4070
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  • Description: Aim: This paper explores the personal, social and structural factors that influence patients' experiences of acute deterioration and medical emergency team (MET) encounter. Background: Patient experience is recognized as a means of assessing healthcare delivery with a positive experience being linked to high-quality healthcare, improved patient safety and reduced length of stay. The experience of acute deterioration is unique, extensive and complex. However, little is known about this experience from the patient's perspective. Design: Constructivist grounded theory, informed by Kathy Charmaz, was used to explore the personal, social and structural factors that influence patients' experiences of acute deterioration and MET encounter. Methods: Using a semi-structured interview guide, in-depth individual interviews were conducted with 27 patients from three healthcare services in Victoria, Australia. Data were collected over a 12-month period from 2018 to 2019. Interview data were analysed using grounded theory processes. Findings: Contextual factors exert a powerful influence on patients' experiences of acute deterioration and MET encounter. The most significant factors identified include patients' expectations and illness perception, relationship with healthcare professionals during MET call and past experiences of acute illness. The expectations and perceptions patients had about their disease can condition their overall experience. Healthcare professional–patient interactions can significantly impact quality of care, patient experience and recovery. Patients' experiences of illness and healthcare can impact a person's future health-seeking behaviour and health status. Conclusion: Patients' actions and processes about their experiences of acute deterioration and MET encounter are the result of the complex interface of contextual factors. Impact: The findings from this study have highlighted the need for revised protocols for screening and management of patients who experience acute deterioration. © 2022 The Authors. Journal of Advanced Nursing published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.