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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently implemented the Strength at Home (SAH) program to prevent and end use of IPV in Veterans. SAH is an evidence-based, trauma-informed, cognitive-behavioral intervention for Veterans who use, or are at risk for using, IPV. A previous pilot evaluation of implementation outcomes at 10 VA hospitals indicated slow hospital and clinician adoption rates. The implementation strategy was then revised to address several barriers to timely implementation including securing institutional support, pre-training preparation, and relationship building. The present study used program evaluation metrics from 27 VA hospitals to examine whether the change in implementation strategy improved adoption of the SAH intervention. Results indicated significantly improved hospital and clinician adoption rates and hospital-time-to adoption, but not clinician time-to-adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active oscillators, with purely hydrodynamic coupling, are useful simple models to understand various aspects of motile cilia synchronization. Motile cilia are used by microorganisms to swim and to control the flow fields in their surroundings; the patterns observed in cilia carpets can be remarkably complex, and can be changed over time by the organism. It is often not known to what extent the coupling between cilia is due to just hydrodynamic forces, and neither is it known if it is biological or physical triggers that can change the dynamical collective state. Here we treat this question from a very simplified point of view. We describe three possible mechanisms that enable a switch in the dynamical state, in a simple scenario of a chain of oscillators. We find that shape-change provides the most consistent strategy to control collective dynamics, but also imposing small changes in frequency produces some unique stable states. Demonstrating these effects in the abstract minimal model proves that these could be possible explanations for gait switching seen in ciliated micro organisms like Paramecium and others. Microorganisms with many cilia could in principle be taking advantage of hydrodynamic coupling, to switch their swimming gait through either a shape change that manifests in decreased coupling between groups of cilia, or alterations to the beat style of a small subset of the cilia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motile cilia are widespread across the animal and plant kingdoms, displaying complex collective dynamics central to their physiology. Their coordination mechanism is not generally understood, with previous work mainly focusing on algae and protists. We study here the entrainment of cilia beat in multiciliated cells from brain ventricles. The response to controlled oscillatory external flows shows that flows at a similar frequency to the actively beating cilia can entrain cilia oscillations. We find that the hydrodynamic forces required for this entrainment strongly depend on the number of cilia per cell. Cells with few cilia (up to five) can be entrained at flows comparable to cilia-driven flows, in contrast with what was recently observed in Chlamydomonas. Experimental trends are quantitatively described by a model that accounts for hydrodynamic screening of packed cilia and the chemomechanical energy efficiency of the flagellar beat. Simulations of a minimal model of cilia interacting hydrodynamically show the same trends observed in cilia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinated motion of cilia is a fascinating and vital aspect of very diverse forms of eukaryotic life, enabling swimming and propulsion of fluid across cellular epithelia. There are many questions still unresolved, and broadly they fall into two classes. (i) The mechanism of how cilia physically transmit forces onto each other. It is not known for many systems if the forces are mainly of hydrodynamical origin, or if elastic forces within the cytoskeleton are important. (ii) In those systems where we know that forces are purely hydrodynamical, we do not have a framework for linking our understanding of how each cilium behaves in isolation to the collective properties of two or more cilia. In this work, we take biological data of cilia dynamics from a variety of organisms as an input for an analytical and numerical study. We calculate the relative importance of external flows versus internal cilia flows on cilia coupling. This study contributes to both the open questions outlined above: firstly, we show that it is, in general, incorrect to infer cilium--cilium coupling strength on the basis of experiments with external flows, and secondly, we show a framework to recapitulate the dynamics of single cilia (the waveform) showing classes that correspond to biological systems with the same physiological activity (swimming by propulsion, versus forming collective waves). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forests are being clearcut over extensive areas of western North America, but plant community response to harvesting and slashburning under varying climatic conditions in central British Columbia, Canada is still largely unknown. Evaluation of resilience is hampered by the short history of logging, lack of long-term experiments and methodological limitations. To test the effect of clearcut logging, prescribed burning and reforestation on forest resilience, we recorded vascular plant cover repeatedly after treatment between 1981 and 2008 in 16 permanent research installations in three biogeoclimatic zones: Engelmann Spruce-Subalpine Fir, Interior Cedar-Hemlock and Sub-Boreal Spruce. We created a plant-trait dataset for the 181 recorded species to define plant functional types representing groups of plants that behave in similar ways and/or produce similar ecological outcomes. These plant functional types, along with taxonomic analysis of diagnostic and indicator species, were then used to evaluate plant community response to disturbance. Twenty years post-treatment, species diversity increased in all zones and plant abundance was greatest in the Interior Cedar-Hemlock. Cover of understory plant functional types associated with mature conifer forests increased in all zones, constituting a significant proportion (> 40%) of the vegetation community by year 20. Response patterns varied by zone and with time. Understory species diagnostic of mature forests were present in all zones by year 20, but we identified indicator species sensitive to slashburning or requiring more time for recovery, including white-flowered rhododendron (Rhododendron albiflorum) and devil's club (Oplopanax horridus). Overall, loss of compositional or functional diversity following harvest and site remediation was not detected, suggesting that montane and subalpine forests in British Columbia are resilient to this treatment. However, because these forests can be slow to recover from disturbance, the post-disturbance assessment window of this study may not have been long enough to detect diminishment of ecosystem resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to international education in schools in the USA. Education professionals, business leaders, and politicians realize that schools and school leaders must identify multiple opportunities for students to interact with and experience a global society. Nationally, there has been a considerable investment of funds by several key foundations and much political talk about the need to push American education towards a model of schooling that expressly responds to the need for internationally competent citizens. Using mixed methodology design, this study is fueled by a desire to better understand several overarching elements in international education. In short, the authors of this paper posit that no further research, policy formation, or program development within the realm of international education for public schools can be undertaken until an understanding of the current state of international education and the capacity for internationalization is empirically explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stability and resilience of conifer-dominated vegetation communities following clear-cutting and slashburning in central British Columbia, were modeled across gradients of resource availability, fire return interval (FRI), and fire severity. We hypothesized that high resource availability and long fire-free intervals would enhance stability, whereas high resource availability and short fire-free intervals would confer resilience. Fire weather indices and pre- and post-burn fuel loads were recorded and vegetation regrowth monitored for 5–11 years at 12 sites. Stepwise regression was used to model rates of revegetation, increases in vascular species richness, and pre- and post-burn similarity of species composition as a function of the environmental variables. Predicted stability for four sub-boreal to subalpine vegetation communities with contrasting resource availability and FRI corresponded closely to our hypotheses. Rates of revegetation were more strongly correlated with resource availability, whereas composition-based response variables were more strongly correlated with the FRI. Based on revegetation rates, all ecosystems were predicted to have equal resilience. However, based on vegetation composition, mesic sub-boreal ecosystems were predicted to be more resilient than mesic subalpine ecosystems because the degree of change in species composition was less sensitive to increasing burn severity. More slashburned sites with a broader range of burn severities are needed to verify these preliminary models. La stabilité et la résilience des groupements végétaux dominés par des conifères à la suite d’une coupe à blanc et du brûlage des déchets de coupe dans le centre de la Colombie-Britannique ont été modélisées en fonction de gradients de disponibilité des ressources, de l’intervalle entre les feux et de la sévérité du feu. Nous avons émis l’hypothèse que la disponibilité élevée des ressources et de longs intervalles sans feux augmenteraient la stabilité tandis que la disponibilité élevée des ressources et de courts intervalles sans feux favoriseraient la résilience. L’indice forêt-météo et la charge de combustibles avant et après feu ont été notés et la végétalisation a été suivie pendant cinq à 11 ans dans 12 stations. La régression par degrés a été utilisée pour modéliser le taux de végétalisation, l’augmentation de la richesse en espèces vasculaires et la similitude de la composition en espèces avant et après le brûlage en fonction des variables environnementales. La prédiction de la stabilité de quatre groupements végétaux sub-boréaux à subalpins avec différentes disponibilités des ressources et des intervalles différents entre les feux correspondait étroitement à notre hypothèse. Le taux de végétalisation était plus étroitement corrélé avec la disponibilité des ressources tandis que les variables de réponse basées sur la composition étaient plus étroitement corrélées avec les intervalles entre les feux. Selon les prédictions, tous les écosystèmes avaient la même résilience sur la base du taux de végétalisation. Par contre, sur la base de la composition de la végétation, les prédictions indiquaient que les écosystèmes sub-boréaux mésiques étaient plus résilients que les écosystèmes subalpins mésiques parce que le degré de changement dans la composition en espèces était moins sensible à l’augmentation de la sévérité du brûlage. Il faudrait davantage de stations où les déchets de coupe ont été brûlés avec une plus large gamme de sévérités de brûlage pour vérifier ces modèles préliminaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]