Building good knowledge or blaming bad parents? Examining the construction of parents and parenting in a corpus of parent focussed cochlear implant research articles

Parents of deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) report feeling pressure to adhere to a very prescribed conceptualisation of ‘good parenting’, and in some cases report feeling judged or blamed, for example, if the child's progress post-CI is slower than expected. Previous investigations of the discourses of parenting science suggest that, while parent blame is rarely expressed explicitly, that normative, moral assumptions about how ‘good parents of a disabled child’ should feel, think and act are embedded within prevalent concepts and terminology. A disproportionate focus on evaluating individual parents' personal characteristics at the expense of more external, socially located issues has also been noted. Existing critiques, together with the author's lived experience provide the impetus for this study; in which corpus linguistics methods have been used to document the types of parents and parenting attributes constructed in a 420,982 corpus of research articles. The results indicate the prevalence of many highly evaluative parenting noun-collocates within the field; successful adaptation, a positive appraisal of the situation, realistic expectations, rational decisions, high involvement and full-time use of the CI are conflated with good parenting, whilst parents who present in alternate ways are construed as problematic. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Looked after children's right to contact with birth parents: An Australian study

In Australia, there are more than 46 000 children in out-of-home care (OOHC). Most of these children have been in OOHC for more than 2 years. Similarly, there are more than 407 000 children in the United States and over 80 800 in England who are ‘looked after’ with approximately one third of these children being in OOHC for more than 2 years. This paper concerns ‘looked after’ children's rights to contact with their birth parents. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) requires child protection systems to recognize the rights of children to maintain contact with their families except where this is not in the child's ‘best interests’. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study conducted in Australia exploring legal and family support practitioners' perceptions of barriers to contact between children in OOHC and their birth parents. The thematic analysis identified four themes: These were as follows: a focus on systems driven responses; lack of cultural recognition and responsiveness; carers' disconnection from birth parents; and parents' exclusion. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding and recognizing children's right to contact with birth parents.     

个人生物识别信息的界定

生物识别信息是对自然人的生物特征进行特定技术处理所形成的信息。个人生物特征具有不变性和唯一性的特点，这使生物识别能够一劳永逸地实现对个人身份的鉴别。经过特定技术处理所形成的生物识别信息也具有这些特点，因此任何对于生物识别信息的攻击都可能对个人产生不可逆转的影响。现实生活中，商业化收集的泛滥、限制行动自由、售卖和窃取、深度伪造以及诈骗已经成为侵害生物识别信息的重要表现。保护个人生物识别信息安全迫在眉睫，而准确界定生物识别信息是首要前提。综观国外立法经验，生物识别信息的构成应当聚焦三个要素：个人生物特征之反映、特定技术处理之环节、唯一性识别之功能。此三项要素也是认定生物识别信息的关键。生物识别信息可以通过含有个人生物特征的图像来采集，但是该图像仅仅是个人生物特征的反映。在没有进行特定技术处理之前，图像本身并不构成生物识别信息，无论该图像是电子图像抑或纸质照片。生物识别信息的本质是对个人生物特征进行的测量，即所谓的“特定技术处理”,至于测量的方式则在所不问。无论进行面对面的真人测量抑或从含有个人生物特征的图像中测量，所得的信息都是生物识别信息。单纯对于个人生物特征的描述不构成生物识别信息，个...     

Contaminated consignment simulation to support risk-based inspection design

Invasive nonnative plant pests can cause extensive environmental and economic damage and are very difficult to eradicate once established. Phytosanitary inspections that aim to prevent biological invasions by limiting movement of nonnative plant pests across borders are a critical component of the biosecurity continuum. Inspections can also provide valuable information about when and where plant pests are crossing national boundaries. However, only a limited portion of the massive volume of goods imported daily can be inspected, necessitating a highly targeted, risk-based strategy. Furthermore, since inspections must prioritize detection and efficiency, their outcomes generally cannot be used to make inferences about risk for cargo pathways as a whole. Phytosanitary agencies need better tools for quantifying pests going undetected and designing risk-based inspection strategies appropriate for changing operational conditions. In this research, we present PoPS (Pest or Pathogen Spread) Border, an open-source consignment inspection simulator for measuring inspection outcomes under various cargo contamination scenarios to support recommendations for inspection protocols and estimate pest slippage rates. We used the tool to estimate contamination rates of historical interception data, quantify tradeoffs in effectiveness and workload for inspection strategies, and identify vulnerabilities in sampling protocols as changes in cargo configurations and contamination occur. These use cases demonstrate how this simulation approach permits testing inspection strategies and measuring quantities that would otherwise be impossible in a field-based setting. This work represents the first steps toward a decision support tool for creating dynamic inspection protocols that respond to changes in available resources, workload, and commerce trends.     

A comparative study of adaptive trial designs for dose optimization

Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration Oncology Center of Excellence initiated Project Optimus to reform the dose optimization and dose selection paradigm in oncology drug development. The agency pointed out that the current paradigm for dose selection—based on the maximum tolerated dose (MTD)—is not sufficient for molecularly targeted therapies and immunotherapies, for which efficacy may not increase after the dose reaches a certain level. In these cases, it is more appropriate to identify the optimal biological dose (OBD) that optimizes the risk–benefit tradeoff of the drug. Project Optimus has spurred tremendous interest and urgent need for guidance on designing dose optimization trials. In this article, we review several representative dose optimization designs, including model-based and model-assisted designs, and compare their operating characteristics based on 10,000 randomly generated scenarios with various dose-toxicity and dose-efficacy curves and some fixed representative scenarios. The results show that, compared with model-based designs, model-assisted methods have advantages of easy-to-implement, robustness, and high accuracy to identify OBD. Some guidance is provided to help biostatisticians and clinicians to choose appropriate dose optimization methods in practice.