What do we know about autism and policing globally? Preliminary findings from an international effort to examine autism and the criminal justice system.

Research has demonstrated that autistic individuals have higher rates of police contact, however, research has seldom explored the fundamental reasons for these interactions and how this might vary across international contexts. To remedy this, the Global Autism and Criminal Justice Consortium created and disseminated the Global Criminal Justice Survey. Descriptive statistics of survey respondents with and without police contact were compared to glean differential characteristics.

The Effect of Choline and Resistance Training on Strength and Lean Mass in Older Adults.

Choline plays many important roles, including the synthesis of acetylcholine, and may affect muscle responses to exercise. We previously observed correlations between low choline intake and reduced gains in strength and lean mass following a 12-week resistance exercise training (RET) program for older adults. To further explore these findings, we conducted a randomized controlled trial.

Clinical Nurses' View of Staffing During the Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented staffing challenges in providing care during the surge of critically ill patients. This qualitative descriptive study was conducted to obtain an understanding of clinical nurses' perspective of staffing in units during the first wave of the pandemic. Eighteen focus groups were conducted with registered nurses who worked on intensive care, telemetry, or medical-surgical units at 9 acute care hospitals.

Nurses' Perceptions of Infusion Therapy During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses were faced with challenges when caring for patients, safely administering intravenous (IV) medications and solutions, and protecting themselves from the virus. To address these challenges, nurses moved infusion pumps outside of intensive care unit (ICU) rooms of patients with COVID-19 to minimize their exposure to the virus, conserve personal protective equipment, and efficiently administer IV medications and solutions. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore and describe nurses' perception of managing infusion pumps outside the ICU rooms of patients with COVID-19 at 6 acute care hospitals.

Kanpumasatsu: A superficial self-massage with a dry towel to enhance relaxation and immune functions.

Prior to 2020, healthcare professionals in the United States already had high rate of burnout. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent need for public health measures to effectively mitigate its negative health impacts. Despite these measures including vaccination, masking, handwashing, and physical distancing, people continue to be affected by post-COVID conditions (PCC) or newly acquired infections.

Creating the Global Criminal Justice Survey: A Questionnaire Designed to Gather Perspectives from the Autism Community and Criminal Justice Professionals.

Autistic people's perceptions of their interactions with criminal justice professionals are predominantly negative; however, little is known about the state of interactions on a global scale. To further understanding, a comprehensive stakeholder questionnaire was created. Aspects of reliability and validity including evidence for test content and internal structure were gathered using expert reviews, cognitive interviewing, pilot data collection, and a larger data collection effort (N = 1618).

Common herbs for stress: The science and strategy of a botanical medicine approach to self-care.

Frontline healthcare workers have reported elevated levels of stress and increase prevalence of burnout symptoms since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With these heightened levels of stress and burnout comes a need for more evidence-based interventions to address these symptoms earlier, in both a safe and effective way. Some common botanical medicines have a measurable effect on perceived stress, neurotransmitter levels, and circulating cortisol levels indicating their ability to modify the stress response.

A conjunctive analysis of false accusations, official misconduct, and race in violent and sexual exonerations cases.

The National Registry of Exonerations tracks cases of individuals who have been convicted and exonerated in the United States since 1989. The objective of the current study was to explore the misconduct patterns in violent and sexual offense cases using a novel method with a focus on cases where suspects were falsely accused, either deliberately or by mistaken witness identification. A conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC) was conducted using 1690 males convicted of murder/manslaughter, rape/sexual assault, and child sexual abuse.

The Diverse World of Protists-an Ideal Community with which to Introduce Microscopy in the Microbiology Teaching Laboratory.

Protists and other eukaryotes are present in diverse terrestrial and aquatic environments. They can easily be collected from local ponds and streams. Although they are typically larger in size than prokaryotes, making them easy to study with even basic microscopes, microbiology laboratory courses often do not discuss them in detail and may only dedicate a short time to observing preserved samples.

Three or four levels of hierarchy minimize hydraulic power in leaves with pinnate dendritic venation.

We present a model of the hydraulic power required by the network of veins in a leaf with pinnate venation. The pinnate networks we study are dendritic networks with a single midrib and L levels of hierarchy, where L=2 corresponds to secondary veins branching from the midrib, L=3 additionally has tertiary veins branching from secondary veins, L=4 additionally has quaternary veins branching from tertiary veins, etc.We begin by utilizing the classic results of Murray to show that the minimal power required in a pipe of constant radius depends only on the length of the pipe and the volume flow rate to the 2/3 power.

The Ethical Duty to Reduce the Ecological Footprint of Industrialized Healthcare Services and Facilities.

According to the widely accepted principles of beneficence and distributive justice, I argue that healthcare providers and facilities have an ethical duty to reduce the ecological footprint of the services they provide. I also address the question of whether the reductions in footprint need or should be patient-facing. I review Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce's claim that achieving ecological sustainability in the healthcare sector requires rationing the treatment options offered to patients.

Using brief habit reversal and an interdependent group contingency to reduce public-speaking speech disfluencies.

This study replicated and extended previous research on the effectiveness of brief habit reversal, consisting of awareness training and competing response training (silent pause) in reducing the rate of speech disfluencies during public speaking. Nine university students, divided into 3 groups, delivered short speeches on a novel topic. Brief habit reversal combined with an interdependent group contingency resulted in a meaningful reduction in speech disfluencies with only 1 group requiring booster sessions.

Corticospinal Excitability during a Perspective Taking Task as Measured by TMS-Induced Motor Evoked Potentials.

Only by understanding the ability to take a third-person perspective can we begin to elucidate the neural processes responsible for one's inimitable conscious experience. The current study examined differences in hemispheric laterality during a first-person perspective (1PP) and third-person perspective (3PP) taking task, using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Participants were asked to take either the 1PP or 3PP when identifying the number of spheres in a virtual scene.

Does a measure of Medical Professional Identity Formation predict communication skills performance?

Objective: To validate an approach to measuring professional identity formation (PIF), we explore if the Professional Identity Essay (PIE), a stage score measure of medical professional identity (PI), predicts clinical communication skills.

Methods: Students completed the PIE during medical school orientation and a 3-case Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) where standardized patients reliably assessed communication skills in 5 domains. Using mediation analyses, relationships between PIE stage scores and communication skills were explored.

On deriving Murray's law from constrained minimization of flow resistance.

Murray's law, which states that the cube of the radius of a parent vessel equals the sum of the cubes of the radii of the daughter vessels, was originally derived by minimizing the cost of operation of blood flow in a single cylindrical tube. An alternative widely cited derivation by Sherman is based upon the optimization problem of minimizing the total flow resistance subject to a material constraint, and that study claimed that "Conservation of the sum of the cubes of the radii is the condition for minimal resistance whether the parent vessel divides symmetrically or asymmetrically, and whether it divides into two, three, four, or, presumably, any number of daughter vessels." In this paper we show that Sherman's analysis is flawed, since with N daughter vessels there are 2-N-1 sets of vessel radii which satisfy Murray's law but which do not yield minimal total flow resistance.

Measuring Community Integration: Development and Psychometrics of the Community Connections and Engagement Scale.

The objective of this community-based participatory research project was to develop a clinically useful, psychometrically-sound scale to measure community integration for adults with severe mental illness. Two researchers and an administrator of a behavioral health agency (BHA) recruited a group of providers, half with lived-experience of severe mental illness. Through a series of five focus groups, provider participants guided identification of four major domains of community integration and the development of 95 scale items; items and domains were reviewed by three external researchers with subject matter expertise.

An exploratory examination of intellectual disability and mental illness associated with alleged false confessions.

The National Registry of Exonerations tracks cases of individuals who have been wrongly convicted and exonerated since 1989. Their most recent report revealed that 12% of those exonerated gave false confessions. The current study used data from the National Registry of Exonerations and focused on a sample of 2,378 individuals convicted of felonies with a focus on sexual offenses, as such crimes tend to be viewed as particularly heinous with increased consequences for those convicted.

Reducing speech disfluencies during public speaking using brief habit reversal.

Recent research has evaluated the effects of brief habit reversal, consisting of either awareness training (AT) and competing response training (Mancuso & Miltenberger, 2016), or AT alone (Spieler & Miltenberger, 2017) in reducing speech disfluencies during public speaking. Although both formats of brief habit reversal reduced rates of speech disfluencies, results suggested that teaching a competing response (CR) may produce better outcomes. We aimed to replicate and extend those studies by evaluating the effects of AT and instructing the use of a CR (a silent pause) on rates of speech disfluencies and CRs during public speaking.