Tracking Childhood Lead Exposure in Early Industrial Romanians.

Childhood lead exposure has been linked to severe adverse health outcomes throughout life. Measurements of lead in teeth have established that individuals living in contaminated environments show higher levels compared to individuals living further away, although less is known about when individuals are most susceptible to these exposures. We examined lead (Pb) concentrations (ppm) in teeth over the first 2.

Commentary response: Smartphone use and parenting: re-stratifying the multiverse for families of young children.

Concerns have been raised that smartphones may harm children and families. Arguably, risk-driven discourses are not always evidence-based. This is a problem, because blanket assumptions of risk drowns out nuanced empirical questions of what constitutes "good" parenting when it comes to smartphone use, and for whom.

Psycho-sensory relationships in chronic pain.

Background: Psychological variables contribute to pain- and injury-related outcomes. We examined the hypothesis that anatomical spread and intensity of persistent pain relate to anxiety-related variables: generalised anxiety, fear of pain and pain catastrophising.

Methods: An online survey was used to gather data from 413 women with persistent pain (low back pain, n = 139; fibromyalgia syndrome, n = 95; neck pain, n = 55; whiplash, n = 41; rheumatoid arthritis, n = 37; migraine, n = 46).

Modeling individualized trajectories of symptom change to improve feedback procedures in psychotherapy.

Objective: Psychotherapy feedback compares an individual's treatment progress to the averaged progress of all clients to determine whether their progress is sufficient. However, this can invoke the ecological fallacy if the average trajectory combines heterogenous trajectories with clinically meaningful differences. The current study, instead, explored individualized trajectories of change in psychotherapy and examined the feasibility of using these individualized models to predict clients' future trajectories.

Tuning into the real effect of smartphone use on parenting: a multiverse analysis.

Background: Concerns have been raised regarding the potential negative impacts of parents' smartphone use on the parent-child relationship. A scoping literature review indicated inconsistent effects, arguably attributable to different conceptualizations of parent phone use and conflation of phone use with technological interference.

Methods: Based on a sample of n = 3, 659 parents collected in partnership with a national public broadcaster, we conducted a multiverse analysis.

Quantifying conditional probability tables in Bayesian networks: Bayesian regression for scenario-based encoding of elicited expert assessments on feral pig habitat.

Bayesian networks are now widespread for modelling uncertain knowledge. They graph probabilistic relationships, which are quantified using conditional probability tables (CPTs). When empirical data are unavailable, experts may specify CPTs.

Does feedback improve psychotherapy outcomes compared to treatment-as-usual for adults and youth?

: Client-informed outcome feedback has consistently been shown to enhance psychotherapy outcomes for adults, particularly for clients at risk of treatment failure. However, there is a paucity of studies examining feedback in youth psychotherapy. Specifically, there is no research examining the feedback effect of the Youth-Outcome Questionnaire [Burlingame, G.

Effects of exposure to ambient ultrafine particles on respiratory health and systemic inflammation in children.

It is known that ultrafine particles (UFP, particles smaller than 0.1 μm) can penetrate deep into the lungs and potentially have adverse health effects. However, epidemiological data on the health effects of UFP is limited.

Characterising Uncertainty in Expert Assessments: Encoding Heavily Skewed Judgements.

When limited or no observed data are available, it is often useful to obtain expert knowledge about parameters of interest, including point estimates and the uncertainty around these values. However, it is vital to elicit this information appropriately in order to obtain valid estimates. This is particularly important when the experts' uncertainty about these estimates is strongly skewed, for instance when their best estimate is the same as the lowest value they consider possible.

Species richness on coral reefs and the pursuit of convergent global estimates.

Global species richness, whether estimated by taxon, habitat, or ecosystem, is a key biodiversity metric. Yet, despite the global importance of biodiversity and increasing threats to it (e.g.

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.

What is an expert? A systems perspective on expertise.

Expert knowledge is a valuable source of information with a wide range of research applications. Despite the recent advances in defining expert knowledge, little attention has been given to how to view expertise as a system of interacting contributory factors for quantifying an individual's expertise. We present a systems approach to expertise that accounts for many contributing factors and their inter-relationships and allows quantification of an individual's expertise.

Eliciting expert knowledge in conservation science.

Expert knowledge is used widely in the science and practice of conservation because of the complexity of problems, relative lack of data, and the imminent nature of many conservation decisions. Expert knowledge is substantive information on a particular topic that is not widely known by others. An expert is someone who holds this knowledge and who is often deferred to in its interpretation.

Bayesian classification and regression trees for predicting incidence of cryptosporidiosis.

Background: Classification and regression tree (CART) models are tree-based exploratory data analysis methods which have been shown to be very useful in identifying and estimating complex hierarchical relationships in ecological and medical contexts. In this paper, a Bayesian CART model is described and applied to the problem of modelling the cryptosporidiosis infection in Queensland, Australia.

Methodology/principal Findings: We compared the results of a Bayesian CART model with those obtained using a Bayesian spatial conditional autoregressive (CAR) model.

Elicitation by design in ecology: using expert opinion to inform priors for Bayesian statistical models.

Bayesian statistical modeling has several benefits within an ecological context. In particular, when observed data are limited in sample size or representativeness, then the Bayesian framework provides a mechanism to combine observed data with other "prior" information. Prior information may be obtained from earlier studies, or in their absence, from expert knowledge.

Zero tolerance ecology: improving ecological inference by modelling the source of zero observations.

A common feature of ecological data sets is their tendency to contain many zero values. Statistical inference based on such data are likely to be inefficient or wrong unless careful thought is given to how these zeros arose and how best to model them. In this paper, we propose a framework for understanding how zero-inflated data sets originate and deciding how best to model them.