The driving visual field and a history of motor vehicle collision involvement in older drivers: A population-based examination

Purpose We designed a visual field test focused on the field utilized while driving to examine associations between field impairment and motor vehicle collision involvement in 2,000 drivers ≥70 years old. Methods The "driving visual field test" involved measuring light sensitivity for 20 targets in each eye, extending 15° superiorly, 30° inferiorly, 60° temporally and 30° nasally. The target locations were selected on the basis that they fell within the field region utilized when viewing through the windshield of a vehicle or viewing the dashboard while driving. Monocular fields were combined into a binocular field based on the more sensitive point from each eye. Severe impairment in the overall field or a region was defined as average sensitivity in the lowest quartile of sensitivity. At-fault collision involvement for five years prior to enrollment was obtained from state records. Poisson regression was used to calculate crude and adjusted rate ratios examining the association between field impairment and at-fault collision involvement. Results Drivers with severe binocular field impairment in the overall driving visual field had a 40% increased rate of at-fault collision involvement (RR 1.40, 95%CI 1.07-1.83). Impairment in the lower and left fields was associated with elevated collision rates (RR 1.40 95%CI 1.07-1.82 and RR 1.49, 95%CI 1.15-1.92, respectively), whereas impairment in the upper and right field regions was not. Conclusions Results suggest that older drivers with severe impairment in the lower or left region of the driving visual field are more likely to have a history of at-fault collision involvement.

Understanding Uncertainties in Non-Linear Population Trajectories: A Bayesian Semi-Parametric Hierarchical Approach to Large-Scale Surveys of Coral Cover

Recently, attempts to improve decision making in species management have focussed on uncertainties associated with modelling temporal fluctuations in populations. Reducing model uncertainty is challenging; while larger samples improve estimation of species trajectories and reduce statistical errors, they typically amplify variability in observed trajectories. In particular, traditional modelling approaches aimed at estimating population trajectories usually do not account well for nonlinearities and uncertainties associated with multi-scale observations characteristic of large spatio-temporal surveys. We present a Bayesian semi-parametric hierarchical model for simultaneously quantifying uncertainties associated with model structure and parameters, and scale-specific variability over time. We estimate uncertainty across a four-tiered spatial hierarchy of coral cover from the Great Barrier Reef. Coral variability is well described; however, our results show that, in the absence of additional model specifications, conclusions regarding coral trajectories become highly uncertain when considering multiple reefs, suggesting that management should focus more at the scale of individual reefs. The approach presented facilitates the description and estimation of population trajectories and associated uncertainties when variability cannot be attributed to specific causes and origins. We argue that our model can unlock value contained in large-scale datasets, provide guidance for understanding sources of uncertainty, and support better informed decision making

Feeding a baby (FAB) study. Reducing childhood obesity : influencing parental infant feeding practices

Background National and international rates of obesity are escalating, and programs to modify established eating habits are having limited success. Almost one in four 2-4 year old Australian children are overweight or obese. Interventions to prevent obesity in early childhood are on the rise. However, recruitment and retention issues and outcomes to date suggests a gap in meeting participant needs. Parents need both the knowledge and skills to establish behaviours that enable children to develop healthy food preferences and eating habits early. AIM To develop intervention recommendations to reduce childhood obesity by improving the infant feeding practices of parents, focusing on the transition from a milk diet to family foods.

FluMum : a prospective cohort study of mother-infant pairs assessing the effectiveness of maternal influenza vaccination in prevention of influenza in early infancy

INTRODUCTION Influenza vaccination in pregnancy is recommended for all women in Australia, particularly those who will be in their second or third trimester during the influenza season. However, there has been no systematic monitoring of influenza vaccine uptake among pregnant women in Australia. Evidence is emerging of benefit to the infant with respect to preventing influenza infection in the first 6 months of life. The FluMum study aims to systematically monitor influenza vaccine uptake during pregnancy in Australia and determine the effectiveness of maternal vaccination in preventing laboratory-confirmed influenza in their offspring up to 6 months of age. METHODS AND ANALYSIS A prospective cohort study of 10 106 mother-infant pairs recruited between 38 weeks gestation and 55 days postdelivery in six Australian capital cities. Detailed maternal and infant information is collected at enrolment, including influenza illness and vaccination history with a follow-up data collection time point at infant age 6 months. The primary outcome is laboratory-confirmed influenza in the infant. Case ascertainment occurs through searches of Australian notifiable diseases data sets once the infant turns 6 months of age (with parental consent). The primary analysis involves calculating vaccine effectiveness against laboratory-confirmed influenza by comparing the incidence of influenza in infants of vaccinated mothers to the incidence in infants of unvaccinated mothers. Secondary analyses include annual and pooled estimates of the proportion of mothers vaccinated during pregnancy, the effectiveness of maternal vaccination in preventing hospitalisation for acute respiratory illness and modelling to assess the determinants of vaccination. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION The study was approved by all institutional Human Research Ethics Committees responsible for participating sites. Study findings will be published in peer review journals and presented at national and international conferences. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER The study is registered with the Australia and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) number: 12612000175875.

Setting measureable goals with young people : qualitative feedback from the Goal Attainment Scale in youth mental health

Introduction Measuring occupational performance is an essential part of clinical practice; however, there is little research on service user perceptions of measures. The aim of this investigation was to explore the acceptability and utility of one occupational performance outcome measure, Goal Attainment Scaling, with young people (12–25 years old) seeking psychological help. Method Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten young people seeking help from a youth mental health clinic. Interviews were audio taped and a field diary kept. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using content analysis. Results were verified by member checking. Results All participants were able to engage in using Goal Attainment Scaling to set goals for therapy, and reported the process to be useful. The participants identified the physical location and ownership of the scale was important to help motivate them to work on their goals. Conclusion Young help-seekers see Goal Attainment Scaling as an acceptable tool to facilitate the establishment of functional goals. Young service users were particularly keen to maintain control over the physical location of completed forms.

Reduced motor facilitation during action observation in schizophrenia : a mirror neuron deficit?

Impairments in social cognitive functioning are well documented in schizophrenia, however the neural basis of these deficits is unclear. A recent explanatory model of social cognition centers upon the activity of mirror neurons, which are cortical brain cells that become active during both the performance and observation of behavior. Here, we test for the first time whether mirror neuron functioning is reduced in schizophrenia. Fifteen individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and fifteen healthy controls completed a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiment designed to assess mirror neuron activation. While patients demonstrated no abnormalities in cortical excitability, motor facilitation during action observation, putatively reflecting mirror neuron activity, was reduced in schizophrenia. Dysfunction within the mirror neuron system may contribute to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

Large scale multiuser digital mind mapping tool : a study in usability

Project work can involve multiple people from varying disciplines coming together to solve problems as a group. Large scale interactive displays are presenting new opportunities to support such interactions with interactive and semantically enabled cooperative work tools such as intelligent mind maps. In this paper, we present a novel digital, touch-enabled mind-mapping tool as a first step towards achieving such a vision. This first prototype allows an evaluation of the benefits of a digital environment for a task that would otherwise be performed on paper or flat interactive surfaces. Observations and surveys of 12 participants in 3 groups allowed the formulation of several recommendations for further research into: new methods for capturing text input on touch screens; inclusion of complex structures; multi-user environments and how users make the shift from single- user applications; and how best to navigate large screen real estate in a touch-enabled, co-present multi-user setting.

A continental-scale tool for acoustic identification of European bats

Summary 1. Acoustic methods are used increasingly to survey and monitor bat populations. However, the use of acoustic methods at continental scales can be hampered by the lack of standardized and objective methods to identify all species recorded. This makes comparable continent-wide monitoring difficult, impeding progress towards developing biodiversity indicators, transboundary conservation programmes and monitoring species distribution changes. 2. Here we developed a continental-scale classifier for acoustic identification of bats, which can be used throughout Europe to ensure objective, consistent and comparable species identifications. We selected 1350 full-spectrum reference calls from a set of 15 858 calls of 34 European species, from EchoBank, a global echolocation call library. We assessed 24 call parameters to evaluate how well they distinguish between species and used the 12 most useful to train a hierarchy of ensembles of artificial neural networks to distinguish the echolocation calls of these bat species. 3. Calls are first classified to one of five call-type groups, with a median accuracy of 97·6%. The median species-level classification accuracy is 83·7%, providing robust classification for most European species, and an estimate of classification error for each species. 4. These classifiers were packaged into an online tool, iBatsID, which is freely available, enabling anyone to classify European calls in an objective and consistent way, allowing standardized acoustic identification across the continent. 5. Synthesis and applications. iBatsID is the first freely available and easily accessible continental- scale bat call classifier, providing the basis for standardized, continental acoustic bat monitoring in Europe. This method can provide key information to managers and conservation planners on distribution changes and changes in bat species activity through time.

The clinical utility of the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia as a routine assessment in nursing homes

Objective To examine the clinical utility of the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia (CSDD) in nursing homes. Setting 14 nursing homes in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia. Participants 92 residents with a mean age of 85 years. Measurements Consenting residents were assessed by care staff for depression using the CSDD as part of their routine assessment. Specialist clinicians conducted assessment of depression using the Semi-structured Clinical Diagnostic Interview for DSM-IV-TR Axis I Disorders for residents without dementia or the Provisional Diagnostic Criteria for Depression in Alzheimer Disease for residents with dementia to establish expert clinical diagnoses of depression. The diagnostic performance of the staff completed CSDD was analyzed against expert diagnosis using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Results The CSDD showed low diagnostic accuracy, with areas under the ROC curve being 0.69, 0.68 and 0.70 for the total sample, residents with dementia and residents without dementia, respectively. At the standard CSDD cutoff score, the sensitivity and specificity were 71% and 59% for the total sample, 69% and 57% for residents with dementia, and 75% and 61% for residents without dementia. The Youden index (for optimizing cut-points) suggested different depression cutoff scores for residents with and without dementia. Conclusion When administered by nursing home staff the clinical utility of the CSDD is highly questionable in identifying depression. The complexity of the scale, the time required for collecting relevant information, and staff skills and knowledge of assessing depression in older people must be considered when using the CSDD in nursing homes.

Estimating the impact of reduced inertia on frequency stability due to large-scale wind penetration in Australian electricity network

Large-scale integration of non-inertial generators such as wind farms will create frequency stability issues due to reduced system inertia. Inertia based frequency stability study is important to predict the performance of power system with increased level of renewables. This paper focuses on the impact large-scale wind penetration on frequency stability of the Australian Power Network. MATLAB simulink is used to develop a frequency based dynamic model utilizing the network data from a simplified 14-generator Australian power system. The loss of generation is modeled as the active power disturbance and minimum inertia required to maintain the frequency stability is determined for five-area power system.

A description of neck motor performance, neck pain, fatigue, and mental effort while driving in a sample with chronic whiplash-associated disorders

Objective: Individuals with chronic whiplash-associated disorders (WADs) often note driving as a difficult task. This study’s aims were to (1) compare, while driving, neck motor performance, mental effort, and fatigue in individuals with chronic WAD against healthy controls and (2) investigate the relationships of these variables and neck pain to self-reported driving difficulty in the WAD group. Design: This study involved 14 participants in each group (WAD and control). Measures included self-reported driving difficulty and measures of neck pain intensity, overall fatigue, mental effort, and neck motor performance (head rotation and upper trapezius activity) while driving a simulator. Results: The WAD group had greater absolute path of head rotation in a simulated city area and used greater mental effort (P = 0.04), but there were no differences in other measures while driving compared with the controls (all P Q 0.05). Self-reported driving difficulty correlated moderately with neck pain intensity, fatigue level, and maximum velocity of head rotation while driving in the WAD group (all P G 0.05). Conclusions: Individuals with chronic WAD do not seem to have impaired neck motor performance while driving yet use greater mental effort. Neck pain, fatigue, and maximum head rotation velocity could be potential contributors to self-reported driving difficulty in this group.

Clustering and labeling a web scale document collection using Wikipedia clusters

Clustering is an important technique in organising and categorising web scale documents. The main challenges faced in clustering the billions of documents available on the web are the processing power required and the sheer size of the datasets available. More importantly, it is nigh impossible to generate the labels for a general web document collection containing billions of documents and a vast taxonomy of topics. However, document clusters are most commonly evaluated by comparison to a ground truth set of labels for documents. This paper presents a clustering and labeling solution where the Wikipedia is clustered and hundreds of millions of web documents in ClueWeb12 are mapped on to those clusters. This solution is based on the assumption that the Wikipedia contains such a wide range of diverse topics that it represents a small scale web. We found that it was possible to perform the web scale document clustering and labeling process on one desktop computer under a couple of days for the Wikipedia clustering solution containing about 1000 clusters. It takes longer to execute a solution with finer granularity clusters such as 10,000 or 50,000. These results were evaluated using a set of external data.

What is the scale of intimate partner homicide?

Intimate partner homicides are fatal violent attacks perpetrated by intimate partners, and are often the extreme and unplanned consequence of abusive relationships. Although recognised as an important risk factor for death and disability among women, previous country-level assessments and the recent Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (GBD 2010)4 have not considered the extent of intimate partner violence among male victims...

Conformational Spread in the Flagellar Motor Switch: A Model Study

The reliable response to weak biological signals requires that they be amplified with fidelity. In E. coli, the flagellar motors that control swimming can switch direction in response to very small changes in the concentration of the signaling protein CheY-P, but how this works is not well understood. A recently proposed allosteric model based on cooperative conformational spread in a ring of identical protomers seems promising as it is able to qualitatively reproduce switching, locked state behavior and Hill coefficient values measured for the rotary motor. In this paper we undertook a comprehensive simulation study to analyze the behavior of this model in detail and made predictions on three experimentally observable quantities: switch time distribution, locked state interval distribution, Hill coefficient of the switch response. We parameterized the model using experimental measurements, finding excellent agreement with published data on motor behavior. Analysis of the simulated switching dynamics revealed a mechanism for chemotactic ultrasensitivity, in which cooperativity is indispensable for realizing both coherent switching and effective amplification. These results showed how cells can combine elements of analog and digital control to produce switches that are simultaneously sensitive and reliable. © 2012 Ma et al.