The Unintentional Effects on Body Donation Programs of a Competency-Based Curriculum in Postgraduate Medical Education

As medical programs place increasing importance on competency-based training and surgical simulations for residents, anatomy laboratories, and body donation programs find themselves in a position of adapting to changing demands. To better assess the demand for “life-like” cadaveric specimens and evaluate the possible impacts that competency-based medical education could have upon the body donation program of McGill University, Canada, the authors tracked, over the course of the last 10 years, the number of soft-embalmed specimens, along with the number of teaching sessions and the residents enrolled in competency-based programs that are using cadaveric material. The results reveal that the number of soft-embalmed specimens used within residency training increased from 5 in 2009 to 35 in 2019, representing an increase from 6% of bodies to 36.5% of the total number of body donors embalmed in this institution. Correspondingly, the number of annual teaching sessions for residents increased from 19 in 2012 to 116 in 2019. These increases in teaching are correlated with increasing number of residents enrolled in competency-based programs over the last 3 years (Pearson r ranging from 0.9705 to 0.9903, and R² ranging from 0.9418 to 0.9808). Those results suggest that the new skill-centered curricula which require residents to perform specific tasks within realistic settings, exhibit a growing demand for “life-like” cadaveric specimens. Institutions’ body donation programs must, therefore, adapt to those greater need for cadaveric specimens, which presents many challenges, ranging from the logistical to the ethical.     

Does modality matter? A latent profile and transition analysis of sedentary behaviours among school-aged youth: The UP&DOWN study

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to identify profiles of sedentary behaviour (SB) patterns, based on leisure-time self-reported SB modalities (screen, educative, social, and relaxing) and to evaluate changes in these profiles over 2 years among Spanish youth aged 8–18 years. Latent profile analysis (LPA), a data-driven analytic approach, was used to identify groups of boys and girls (n = 1553; 48% girls; mean±SD age: 12.56 ± 2.49 y) with distinct SB profiles using the SB modalities (time/d) as input variables. Latent transition analysis, an extension of LPA that uses longitudinal data, was used to analyse 2-year changes in these profiles. At baseline, four and three SB profiles were found among boys (labelled: screen, educative, social, and relaxing) and girls (labelled: screen/social, educative, and relaxing), respectively. Overall, more girls (range: 48%-67%) had the same profile over time, than boys (40%-52%). Participants with a screen or relaxing SB profile at baseline were more likely to have an educative profile after 2 years. Youth with a social and an educative SB profile at baseline were more likely to transition to profiles characterized by higher screen and social SB, respectively. Using a novel and person-centered approach, this study identified gender-specific SB profiles that were moderately stable over time.     

Quality flaw prediction in Spanish Wikipedia: A case of study with verifiability flaws

In this work, we present the first quality flaw prediction study for articles containing the two most frequent verifiability flaws in Spanish Wikipedia: articles which do not cite any references or sources at all (denominated Unreferenced) and articles that need additional citations for verification (so-called Refimprove). Based on the underlying characteristics of each flaw, different state-of-the-art approaches were evaluated. For articles not citing any references, a well-established rule-based approach was evaluated and interesting findings show that some of them suffer from Refimprove flaw instead. Likewise, for articles that need additional citations for verification, the well-known PU learning and one-class classification approaches were evaluated. Besides, new methods were compared and a new feature was also proposed to model this latter flaw. The results showed that new methods such as under-bagged decision trees with sum or majority voting rules, biased-SVM, and centroid-based balanced SVM, perform best in comparison with the ones previously published.     

The Influence of Hygroscopic Materials on the Fluctuation of Relative Humidity in Museums Located in Historical Buildings

ABSTRACT

The preservation of artefacts in museum collections is profoundly affected by fluctuations in temperature and, especially, relative humidity (RH). Since the late nineteenth century, many studies have been carried out on the best way to control hygrothermal conditions. In old buildings located in maritime temperate climate zones (such as Portugal) with strong thermal inertia, and which have low ventilation rate (relative to the volume and number of visitors), daily and seasonal hygroscopic inertia may help to assure the maintenance of RH stabilization conditions. The use of expensive active systems may be minimized through the passive behaviour of internal finishing building materials. This work presents the results of an experimental laboratory study conducted in a flow chamber to demonstrate the enormous potential of hygroscopic materials in stabilizing interior relative humidity. Based in these results and in-situ monitoring in a museum housed in a building, located in Porto, with a typical construction of the 1950s (granite masonry and reinforced concrete slabs), a numerical analysis was done to quantify the influence of hygroscopic materials in stabilizing the interior relative humidity.     

Recording the war effort: immigrant communities in Latin America and the memory of the Great War

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to analyse the initiatives undertaken by some immigrant communities residing in Latin America to record their mobilisation around the First World War. After the armistice, European communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and other countries gathered detailed information about their activities during the conflict, published as profusely illustrated books of remembrance, offered to their governments as proof of their loyalty. The article intends to establish the peculiar nature of these publications as records of the war effort, and analyse the agents and processes of their elaboration, and their role as commemorative but also as archival documents.