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"Le, Brian"
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Which animal is fastest?
After Cheetah wins a 100-yard dash, King Lion is ready to crown him the world's fastest animal but other animals, even turtle, claim they are fastest in their own realms. Includes activities, facts about animals, and information about habitats.
Book
It’s not raining men: a mixed-methods study investigating methods of improving male recruitment to health behaviour research
Background
Although gender is an important determinant of health behaviour with males less likely to perform health-protective behaviours, samples in health behaviour research are heavily biased towards females. This study investigated the use of online social network, Facebook, to reach and recruit inactive males to a team-based, social, and gamified physical activity randomised controlled trial.
Methods
Methodological techniques included a narrative literature review, survey of inactive males (
n
= 34) who rated advertisement images and text captions on scales of 1–10, and trial Facebook-delivered recruitment campaigns. Advertisement effectiveness was measured by cost-per-click to the study website, number of expressions of interest, and study enrolments from males.
Results
Survey results showed that vibrant images of men exercising accompanied by concise captions (< 35 words) were most effective. An advertising campaign incorporating these components achieved a cost-per-click of $0.60, with 80% of
n
= 50 expressions of interest being from men, a marked improvement from baseline campaigns in which only 11% of expressions of interest were from men. Despite this, men who were recruited through the targeted campaign failed to enrol into the study, primarily due to reluctance to invite friends to join their team. An alternative strategy of encouraging females to invite men boosted male participation from 18% of the sample at baseline to 29% in the targeted recruitment phase.
Conclusions
Evidence-based approaches can improve Facebook recruitment outcomes, however, there are complex barriers hindering male recruitment to health behaviour studies that may necessitate multi-faceted strategies including involvement of family and friends.
Journal Article
Hainish novels & stories
\"For the first time, all of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels and stories are brought together in a single edition, complete and with new introductions by the author. Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, these remarkable works redrew the map of modern science fiction. In such visionary masterworks as the Nebula and Hugo Award winners The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Le Guin imagined a galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain--an array of worlds whose divergent societies was the result of both evolution and genetic engineering.\"-- Publisher's website.
Book
Target-agnostic drug prediction integrated with medical record analysis uncovers differential associations of statins with increased survival in COVID-19 patients
Drug repurposing requires distinguishing established drug class targets from novel molecule-specific mechanisms and rapidly derisking their therapeutic potential in a time-critical manner, particularly in a pandemic scenario. In response to the challenge to rapidly identify treatment options for COVID-19, several studies reported that statins, as a drug class, reduce mortality in these patients. However, it is unknown if different statins exhibit consistent function or may have varying therapeutic benefit. A Bayesian network tool was used to predict drugs that shift the host transcriptomic response to SARS-CoV-2 infection towards a healthy state. Drugs were predicted using 14 RNA-sequencing datasets from 72 autopsy tissues and 465 COVID-19 patient samples or from cultured human cells and organoids infected with SARS-CoV-2. Top drug predictions included statins, which were then assessed using electronic medical records containing over 4,000 COVID-19 patients on statins to determine mortality risk in patients prescribed specific statins versus untreated matched controls. The same drugs were tested in Vero E6 cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 and human endothelial cells infected with a related OC43 coronavirus. Simvastatin was among the most highly predicted compounds (14/14 datasets) and five other statins, including atorvastatin, were predicted to be active in > 50% of analyses. Analysis of the clinical database revealed that reduced mortality risk was only observed in COVID-19 patients prescribed a subset of statins, including simvastatin and atorvastatin. In vitro testing of SARS-CoV-2 infected cells revealed simvastatin to be a potent direct inhibitor whereas most other statins were less effective. Simvastatin also inhibited OC43 infection and reduced cytokine production in endothelial cells. Statins may differ in their ability to sustain the lives of COVID-19 patients despite having a shared drug target and lipid-modifying mechanism of action. These findings highlight the value of target-agnostic drug prediction coupled with patient databases to identify and clinically evaluate non-obvious mechanisms and derisk and accelerate drug repurposing opportunities.
Journal Article
Eyes are More than Cameras: The Rhetorical Infrastructure of Vision Care and Its Impact on Patients with Eye Movement Disorders
This paper explores how an intellectual account that describes eyes as cameras shapes clinical practices of measurement and correction in vision care. For patients with eye movement disorders (EMDs), which are complex, not easily treated, and often incurable, the acuity-centric system of vision care often reduces their experiences to standardized assessments that fail to address the full scope of their needs. Bringing together rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) research, quality-of-life studies, patient testimonies, and qualitative responses from our survey of people with EMDs, we examined patients' frustrations within a system that prioritizes acuity correction over a nuanced understanding of their complex conditions. We used the framework of the quest narrative as derived from the domains of theater and improv to highlight the multiplicity of ways that people with non-normative bodies navigate a normative infrastructure over time. This paper contributes to RHM scholarship in two primary ways: 1) by operationalizing critical disability studies critiques of biomedical normativity within care contexts and 2) detailing the care-related experiences of people defined as having rare disabilities or diseases. KEYWORDS: eye movement disorders (EMDs), patient-provider encounters, quality of life, rhetorical infrastructure, visual disability
Journal Article
Always coming home
A master builder of faraway, fantastic worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin, at mid-career, found in her native California the inspiration for what was to be her greatest literary construction: nothing less than an entire ethnography of a future society, the Kesh, living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. This Library of America edition of her 1985 classic Always Coming Home, prepared in close consultation with the author, features new material added by Le Guin just before her death, including for the first time the complete text of the novella-within-the-novel, Dangerous People. Survivors of an ecological catastrophe brought on by heedless industrialization, the Kesh live in hard-won balance with their environment and between genders. Le Guin meditates here more deeply and more personally on themes explored earlier in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Always Coming Home is comprised of \"translations\" of a wide array of Kesh writings: a three-part narrative by a woman named Stone Telling recounting her travels beyond the Valley, where she lives with the mysterious, patriarchal Condor people; \"Chapter 2\" of a novel by the brilliant Kesh writer Wordriver, in which a woman's disappearance reveals hidden tensions within and beyond her clan; poems; folk tales for adults and children; verse dramas; recipes; even an alphabet and glossary of the Kesh language. To this extraordinary architecture, Le Guin has added a special section of new material, including the two \"missing\" chapters of the Kesh novel Dangerous People, newly discovered poetry and meditations of the Kesh people, and a guide to their syntax. With evocative illustrations by artist Margaret Chodos-Irvine, and Le Guin's own hand-drawn maps, the cumulative effect is, in the words of Samuel R. Delany, \"Le Guin's most consistently lyric and luminous book.\"
Book
Transcriptomics-based drug repositioning pipeline identifies therapeutic candidates for COVID-19
The novel SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged in December 2019 and has few effective treatments. We applied a computational drug repositioning pipeline to SARS-CoV-2 differential gene expression signatures derived from publicly available data. We utilized three independent published studies to acquire or generate lists of differentially expressed genes between control and SARS-CoV-2-infected samples. Using a rank-based pattern matching strategy based on the Kolmogorov–Smirnov Statistic, the signatures were queried against drug profiles from Connectivity Map (CMap). We validated 16 of our top predicted hits in live SARS-CoV-2 antiviral assays in either Calu-3 or 293T-ACE2 cells. Validation experiments in human cell lines showed that 11 of the 16 compounds tested to date (including clofazimine, haloperidol and others) had measurable antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2. These initial results are encouraging as we continue to work towards a further analysis of these predicted drugs as potential therapeutics for the treatment of COVID-19.
Journal Article
Image intensifier distortion influences a surgeon’s ability to aim guidewires during orthopaedic procedures
ObjectiveAccurate insertion of a guidewire under image intensifier guidance is a fundamental skill required by orthopaedic surgeons. This study investigated how image intensifier distortion, which is composed of pin-cushion and sigmoidal components, changed the apparent trajectory of a guidewire, and the resulting deviation between the intended and actual guidewire tip position.Materials and methodsIntraoperative image intensifier images for 220 consecutive patients with hip fractures were retrospectively corrected for distortion using a global polynomial method. The deviation between the intended and actual guidewire tip positions was calculated. Additional distortion parameters were tested using an image intensifier produced by a different manufacturer, and a flat-panel c-arm.ResultsDeviation was approximately 1 cm if the guidewire was aimed from the extremity of the image and almost 0 if the entry point was only 20% from the centre (p < 0.001). The direction of deviation was different for left and right hips, with average deviations measuring 3 mm proximal and 5 mm distal respectively (p < 0.001). The flat-panel c-arm almost completely eliminated distortion.ConclusionsImage intensifier distortion significantly altered the intended trajectory of a guidewire, with guidewires aimed from the image periphery more affected than guidewires aimed from the centre. Furthermore, for right hips, guidewires should be aimed distal to their intended position, and for left hips they should be aimed proximal to achieve their desired position. The flat-panel c-arm eliminated the effect of distortion; hence, it may be preferable if precision in guidewire positioning is vital.
Journal Article