Comorbidities and Race/Ethnicity Among Adults with Stimulant Use Disorders in Residential Treatment

Comorbid physical and mental health problems are associated with poorer substance abuse treatment outcomes; however, little is known about these conditions among stimulant abusers at treatment entry. This study compared racial and ethnic groups on baseline measures of drug use patterns, comorbid physical and mental health disorders, quality of life, and daily functioning among cocaine and stimulant abusing/dependent patients. Baseline data from a multi-site randomized clinical trial of vigorous exercise as a treatment strategy for a diverse population of stimulant abusers (N = 290) were analyzed. Significant differences between groups were found on drug use characteristics, stimulant use disorders, and comorbid mental and physical health conditions. Findings highlight the importance of integrating health and mental health services into substance abuse treatment and could help identify potential areas for intervention to improve treatment outcomes for racial and ethnic minority groups

Reaching the Thai People of Southeast Asia: A Model for Discipleship and Leadership Training

This thesis addresses training the Thai national leadership in discipleship and leadership qualities to develop a church planting movement with the main goal of evangelizing the unreached people groups throughout the countries of China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. The Thai have become dependent on foreign funds and though they are an independent people, they are beginning to realize that there are strings attached—with money comes control. The model will be built around a sustainable farm, which will help in developing vocational skills in order to become indigenous and autonomous. In this thesis it is my purpose to present a plan to help them reach the goal of a church planting movement by developing discipleship and leadership training

Online grooming:moves and strategies

Using transcripts of chatroom grooming interactions, this paper explores and evaluates the usefulness of Swales’ (1981) move analysis framework in contributing to the current understanding of online grooming processes. The framework is applied to seven transcripts of grooming interactions taken from perverted-justice.com. The paper presents 14 identified rhetorical moves used in chatroom grooming and explores the broad structures that grooming conversations take by presenting these structures as colour-coded visualisations which we have termed “move maps”. It also examines how some individual linguistic features are used to realise a single move termed “Assessing and Managing Risk”. The findings suggest that move analysis can usefully contribute in two key ways: determining communicative functions associated with 'grooming language' and the visualisation of variation between grooming interactions

Contesting the Dominant Discourse of Child Sexual Abuse: Sexual Subjects, Agency, and Ethics

Responding to previous scholars’ call to explore the complexities of child sexual abuse (CSA), this article presents narratives of CSA and scrutinizes a binary construction underpinning this discourse of CSA, namely, the positioning of children as powerless and adults as powerful. The narratives belong to three Indonesian young people who have had sexual interactions with adults when they were children. The findings demonstrate how this binary positioning has been both drawn upon and resisted in the ways participants understand their sexual experiences. This article contributes to the existing literature by providing analyses of some vignettes of everyday experiences of how children might be constituted as sexual subjects, including their capability to exercise agency, perform resistance, and negotiate ethics. The implications of the findings are discussed in relation to how the recognition of children as sexual subjects and their sexual agency might be beneficial for parents, educators, and counselors

A facile and green route to terpene derived acrylate and methacrylate monomers and simple free radical polymerisation to yield new renewable polymers and coatings

We present new acrylic monomers derived directly from abundant naturally available terpenes via a facile, green and catalytic approach. These monomers can be polymerised to create new polymers with a wide range of mechanical properties that positions them ideally for application across the commodity and specialty plastics landscape; from packaging, cosmetic and medical, through to composites and coatings. We demonstrate their utility through formation of novel renewable polymer coatings

A framework for the co-benefits and trade- offs of resilience & sustainability certification programs

Although concepts of resiliency and sustainability have long been tenets within the culture of design, their modern classification, measurement, and codification in the late 20th and early 21st century are fiercely debated. The need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigate the impacts of global climate change influence current debates around the ways in which to operationalize sustainability and resilience within the built environment. This debate contributes to the confounding relationship between the consensus of ‘sustainability' (i.e. carbon reduction) and the myriad domains of ‘resilience' for designers, which include ecosystems, cities, communities, and individual buildings. The clarity of this debate is further attenuated in the variety of outcomes it seeks, the timescales in which it operates, and the necessary tradeoffs inherent in the process. While sustainability is concerned with resource use and the "carrying capacity of the earth” (Moffatt 2014), increases in manmade and natural disasters have focused attention on how design professionals evaluate both building's impact on the environment (sustainability) and the environment's impact on building (resilience). This paper proposes a framework for describing the synergies and discords that occur between several ‘resilience' and ‘sustainability' building certification programs (BCP). The evolution of various concepts of resilience are briefly explored and used to later inform this framework. Several BCPs are cited within this framework. A matrix showing the relationships between multiple green building rating systems and resilience rating systems is used to incorporate the interpretations of resilience cited in this paper. This comparison includes the rating system origin, application, and range of implementation as it considers resilience scholarship. The table aims to identify the problems, objectives, and co-benefits of various green building rating criteria and resilience criteria. Comparing several rating systems, the gaps and overlapping objectives in each system are identified as they relate to ‘sustainability' or ‘resiliency' outcomes

Contextualising Chinese migration to Africa

Who are ‘the Chinese’ in Africa? Why are they there? As China’s engagement with African countries intensifies, and the size of the Chinese population in Africa increases, these questions have elicited substantial attention. Many attempts to provide answers, especially in the media and popular publications, are problematically based on uninformed stereotypes and undifferentiated notions of ‘the Chinese’, by implication a homogeneous group lacking contextualisation. Seeking to address such characterisations, this paper uses the digital communications of present and prospective Chinese migrants to provide a more nuanced picture of the motivations, preoccupations and migration experiences of private entrepreneurs and state-owned enterprise workers

Reprogramming human T cell function and specificity with non-viral genome targeting.

Decades of work have aimed to genetically reprogram T cells for therapeutic purposes1,2 using recombinant viral vectors, which do not target transgenes to specific genomic sites3,4. The need for viral vectors has slowed down research and clinical use as their manufacturing and testing is lengthy and expensive. Genome editing brought the promise of specific and efficient insertion of large transgenes into target cells using homology-directed repair5,6. Here we developed a CRISPR-Cas9 genome-targeting system that does not require viral vectors, allowing rapid and efficient insertion of large DNA sequences (greater than one kilobase) at specific sites in the genomes of primary human T cells, while preserving cell viability and function. This permits individual or multiplexed modification of endogenous genes. First, we applied this strategy to correct a pathogenic IL2RA mutation in cells from patients with monogenic autoimmune disease, and demonstrate improved signalling function. Second, we replaced the endogenous T cell receptor (TCR) locus with a new TCR that redirected T cells to a cancer antigen. The resulting TCR-engineered T cells specifically recognized tumour antigens and mounted productive anti-tumour cell responses in vitro and in vivo. Together, these studies provide preclinical evidence that non-viral genome targeting can enable rapid and flexible experimental manipulation and therapeutic engineering of primary human immune cells