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Trigger finger is a common condition affecting the hand. Therapeutic variability surrounds the management of trigger finger, especially in the mild cases. The aim of this study was to survey secondary care surgeons to describe the current management of trigger fingers. The steering group developed a survey for hand surgeons. Following piloting, the survey was distributed to hand surgeons in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. A total of 713 plastic surgeons and orthopaedic surgeons were invited to participate in the online survey and 440 (62%) surgeons completed the survey. In both mild and moderate cases of trigger finger, steroid injection was the preferred treatment option. Open surgery was the treatment of choice for severe cases. However, there was variation in delivery of care, including type and dosage of steroid, site of injection, interval between injections, maximum number of injections, type of incision and treatment of patients with diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis. This highlights the need for a better evidence base for the treatment of trigger fingers.

A drive toward professionalism animates a large section of the theatre and performance industry, but it also has its critics. Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten worry that professionalization has taken over cultural institutions, particularly the university, where the pursuit of knowledge has been replaced by ruthless careerism (26). Similarly, Olivier Choinière writes about the damaging culture of grants that turns artists into administrators. “Administration is eating away at us,” he claims. “It prevents us from thinking like artists” (30). But if professionalism directs energy away from creativity toward marketability, should we embrace its opposite: incompetence?

Rev. of Williamson, Janice, ed. Omar Khadr, Oh Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. Scrivener Creative Review, no. 38, 2013, pp. 84-91.

During the Arab Spring, protesters sought to circulate to the world images of atrocities being carried out by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But their attempts to capture the “truth” of what was happening was often undermined by, among other things, the low-resolution of the camera phones they were using. This failure also reveals wider problems in the activist tactic of using images to expose power. Although a photograph may provide a document of reality, it is one that is shaped by the political positions of those who capture it. Protesters responded to this dilemma by creating “post-truth” images that are self-consciously ideological and seek less to expose the truth than to ridicule the regime. This spirit of post-truth politics similarly animates Rabih Mroué’s performance lecture The Pixelated Revolution and Guillermo Calderón’s metatheatrical play Kiss, both of which confront the problem of trying to follow the events of the Syrian Civil War from outside the country. Through a close reading of these plays, this essay shows how Mroué and Calderón present post-truth methods of performance that investigate the Syrian Civil War and confront the limits of what can be known about it.

In Hannah Moscovitch’s play about the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, three soldiers stand and address the audience as if they are being interviewed by a journalist. Who are they talking to? The story they tell is about the violence they endured and committed overseas as well as the dysfunctional sexual and psychological states they fell into as they were pushed to their limits. As they struggle to rationalize the decisions they made to an audience they perceive as potentially hostile, it becomes clear that they are speaking across a chasm of misunderstanding. As the play’s curt title, This Is War, suggests, their stories strip away the sanitized mythologies that surround humanitarian intervention to reveal the brutal truth that former General Rick Hillier introduced us to in a 2005 CTV News story on hunting al Qaeda in Afghanistan: the job of the Canadian Forces these days is simply “to kill people.”

The notion of post-truth has multiple genealogies, some of which come from philosophical inquiries and others from political opportunism. In today's supposedly post-truth climate, in which "alternative facts" are carted out to defend untenable positions and accusations of "fake news" are levelled against political opponents, the relationship between fact and fiction has catapulted to the foreground of public discourse. However intense its reappearance, the deliberate conflation of truth and lies to nefarious ends is hardly new, as witnessed by a set of coinages appearing over the last century to describe it, such as "terminological inexactitude" (Winston Churchill), "doublethink" (George Orwell), "strategic misrepresentation" (Harvard Business School), or "alternative facts" (Kellyanne Conway). But the first problem with the notion of post-truth is its suggestion that there is—or was—ever an unproblematic 'truth' to be departed from. A century of critical thinking across the disciplines of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, poststructuralism, and deconstruction has put pressure on the notion that truth is accessible in the first place. We place our 'post-factual' issue of Canadian Theatre Review at the convergence of two discourses. The first concerns the debate over the aesthetics of the 'real' in theatre and performance studies, which has arisen in response to a set of trends in contemporary practice, including documentary and verbatim theatre, post dramatic theatre, and immersive or participatory performance. The second discourse is that arising in the public sphere over the last two years about truth/post-truth, facts/alternative facts, news/fake news, objectivity/bias, or reportage and opinion. CTR Editor-in-Chief Jenn Stephenson, in a blog post titled "Theatre of the Real in the Age of Post-Reality," outlines the conflict at the intersection of these two discourses. Finding herself writing a book about the former while the latter caught fire, Stephenson posed the difficult question of whether there was something about theatre's unsettling of certainty, of fixed identity positions, of knowledge itself, that had helped create a public sphere in which a distrust of truth could manifest as a complete denial of reality.

Can “political theatre” exist in today’s political climate? In the last few decades, our understanding of politics and theatre has undermined the basis on which prior generations of artists conceived of both politics and theatre. Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? sits at the intersection of critiques of dramatic theatre and new forms of post-dramatic, non-representational performance. The play tells the story of a man, Guy, who falls in love with a country, Sam, and critics have largely seen the play as an allegory for the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States. But while the play riffs on that metaphor, it also includes aspects that work against a political reading. Churchill’s depiction of the relationship as a sincere gay love affair raises questions about what it means to say that politicians are “in bed together.” As the play develops, the political critique and the personal relationships seem to work against each other, and the play becomes an elliptical invitation to think political theatre anew.

The returned soldier has been a central figure in the first wave of Canadian plays to deal with the War in Afghanistan. Returned soldiers emerge as protagonists in Pierre-Michel Tremblay’s Au Champ de Mars, Hannah Moscovitch’s This Is War, and George F. Walker’s Dead Metaphor while Evan Webber and Frank Cox-O’Connell Little Iliad deals with a soldier about to be dispatched to Afghanistan. The returned soldier, a damaged warrior and a witness to acts of unspeakable evil, is a liminal figure, connecting the passive humdrum of Canadian life to the brutality of the war zone far away. This paper looks at how such stories of the trauma of soldiers alternately participate in and critique a view of Canadian foreign policy as a series of innocent interventions in conflicts with violent, irrational enemies.

Matt Jones sat down with Peter Oldring from CBC's satirical news show This Is That to talk about comedy in the age of post-truth.

With the rapid development of technology and the advancement of Internet technology, various social networking platforms are gradually coming into people's view and occupying a higher and higher position. In the recommendation scenario, the user-item interaction naturally forms a bipartite heterogeneous graph structure and with the development of graph embedding and graph neural network technologies based on deep learning to process graph domain information, the combination of graph information and recommendation systems shows strong research potential and application prospects. The methodological improvement of the recommendation algorithm based on collaborative filtering takes advantage of the nature that user-items can form a bipartite graph in the recommendation scenario. The existing methods still have some shortcomings. The methods that only use weights or convolutional recurrent neural networks to implicitly model different historical behaviors lack explicit modeling of video switching relationships in serialized behaviors. The user's interest is changing all the time, so it is not possible to recommend based on the user's history, and it is necessary to consider both the long-term and short-term interest of the user according to the video content in order to achieve accurate recommendation of short videos. In this paper, we design a recommendation model based on graph neural network, which models users' long-term and short-term interests by two vector propagation methods, respectively.

We present a novel index that represents, in one combined metric, the integrity of terrestrial ecosystems globally at 1km2 resolution: the Ecosystem Integrity Index (EII). The index provides a simple, yet scientifically robust, way of measuring, monitoring and reporting on ecosystem integrity at any geographical scale. It is formed of three components, structure, composition, and function, and measured against a natural (current potential) baseline on a scale of 0 to 1. The index has been developed to help national governments measure and report on various of the goals and targets being developed within the draft post-2020 global biodiversity framework being negotiated under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and for non-state actor contributions to also be recognized. In doing so, it will enable these actors to make informed decisions on the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of ecosystems for which they are wholly or partly responsible. We find that ecosystem integrity is rapidly declining in terrestrial areas globally, with countries, on average, retaining less than half of their natural ecosystem integrity with a mean EII across all countries of 0.45 (SD: 0.20). This poses a challenge for nations and businesses seeking to halt and reverse decades of loss of nature around the world, but one that is not insurmountable. With sufficient effort, values of EII can increase at national and other scales, representing progress towards the vision of living in harmony with nature.

Changes in sleep during mid-to-late life are associated with risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Mechanistic understanding of this association necessitates measurement tools able to quantify these sleep changes longitudinally and accurately. We conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis of validity studies of non-invasive sleep-measuring devices published since 2015 that record sleep metrics associated with AD in adults over 40 (mean 52.9, SD 6.1 years). We reviewed 52 studies, including 32 wearable and ten non-wearable single or multi-sensor devices validated against polysomnography (minimum one night). The apnoea hypopnoea index and oxygen desaturation index were accurately measured across devices. Total sleep time and sleep efficiency were significantly overestimated (p

Light-sheet microscopes must compromise between field of view, optical sectioning, resolution, and detection efficiency. High-numerical-aperture (NA) detection objective lenses provide high resolution but their narrow depth of field fails to capture effectively the fluorescence signal generated by the illumination light sheets, in imaging large volumes. Here, we present ExD-SPIM (extended depth-of-field selective-plane illumination microscopy), an improved light-sheet microscopy strategy that solves this limitation by extending the depth of field (DOF) of high-NA detection objectives to match the thickness of the illumination light sheet. This extension of the DOF uses a phase mask to axially stretch the point-spread function of the objective lens while largely preserving lateral resolution. This matching of the detection DOF to the illumination-sheet thickness increases total fluorescence collection, reduces background, and improves the overall signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We demonstrate, through numerical simulations and imaging of bead phantoms as well as living animals, that ExD-SPIM increases the SNR by more than three-fold and dramatically reduces the rate of fluorescence photobleaching, when compared to a low-NA system with an equivalent depth of field. Compared to conventional high-NA detection, ExD-SPIM improves the signal sensitivity and volumetric coverage of whole-brain activity imaging, increasing the number of detected neurons by over a third., 9 pages, 3 figures; supplementary material included

Immune checkpoint therapy (ICT) causes durable tumor responses in a subgroup of patients. Profiling T cell receptor beta (TCRβ) repertoire structure in ICT responders and non-responders provides mechanistic insight into what constitutes an effective anti-tumor response, and could result in the development of predictive biomarkers of response to identify and stratify patients for ICT. To examine how the TCRβ repertoire dynamics contribute to ICT response, we utilized an established murine model that excludes variation in host genetics, environmental factors and tumor mutation burden, limiting variation between animals to naturally diverse TCRβ repertoires. Oligoclonal expansion of TCRβ clonotypes that corresponded with a low TCRβ diversity was observed in responding tumors prior to ICT. We modeled TCRβ cluster dynamics during ICT and found that select clonotypes expanded slower in responders compared to non- responders. Clonally expanded CD8+ tumor infiltrating T cells in non-responders exhibited a T cell exhaustion phenotype. We conclude that an early burst of clonal expansion followed by a contraction during ICT is associated with response.

Mutations and aberrant gene expression during cellular differentiation lead to neurodevelopmental disorders, such as Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS), which results from the deletion of an imprinted locus on paternally inherited chromosome 15. We analyzed chromatin-associated RNA in human induced pluripotent cells (iPSCs) upon depletion of hybrid small nucleolar long non-coding RNAs (sno-lncRNAs) and 5’ snoRNA capped and polyadenylated long non-coding RNAs (SPA-lncRNAs) transcribed from the locus deleted in PWS. We found that rapid ablation of these lncRNAs affects transcription of specific gene classes. Downregulated genes contribute to neurodevelopment and neuronal maintenance, while upregulated genes are predominantly involved in the negative regulation of cellular metabolism and apoptotic processes. Our data reveal the importance of SPA-lncRNAs and sno-lncRNAs in controlling gene expression in iPSCs and provide a platform for synthetic experimental approaches in PWS studies. We conclude that ncRNAs transcribed from the PWS locus are critical regulators of a transcriptional signature, which is important for neuronal differentiation and development.

Due to the continued disparities in breast cancer, improved models are being needed to inform policy related to existing social disparities related to cancer. First ordinal least squares regression was used to determine the relationship of sociodemographic measures (i.e. poverty rate and social inequity) on breast cancer incidence in the United States. Gini coefficient was used as a measure of income inequality. Next, Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), a local spatial model, was used to explore the impact location has on the relationship between sociodemographic measures and breast cancer. Mappings of the results are presented, which can assist policymakers to address inequities and social determinants when funding cancer interventions. The GWR model is then compared to linear regression models that do not take into consideration location, highlighting the benefits of spatial models in cancer policy research. More studies applying spatial regression techniques are needed in order to accurately inform policy.