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Large-scale, evidence-based interventions face challenges to program fidelity of implementation. We developed implementation strategies to support teachers implementing an evidence-based HIV prevention program in schools, Focus on Youth in The Caribbean (FOYC) and Caribbean Informed Parents and Children Together (CImPACT) in The Bahamas. We examined the effects of these implementation strategies on teachers' implementation in the subsequent year after the initial implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from 79 Grade 6 teachers in 24 government elementary schools. Teachers completed training workshops and a pre-implementation questionnaire to record their characteristics and perceptions that might affect their program fidelity. School coordinators and peer mentors provided teachers with monitoring, feedback, and mentoring. In Year 1, teachers on average taught 79.3% of the sessions and 80.8% of core activities; teachers in Year 2 covered 84.2% of sessions and 72.9% of the core activities. Teachers with "good" or "excellent" school coordinators in the second year taught significantly more sessions on average (7.8 vs. 7.0, t = 2.04, P < 0.05) and more core activities (26.3 vs. 23.0, t = 2.41, P < 0.05) than teachers with "satisfactory" coordinators. Teachers who had a "good" or "satisfactory" mentor taught more sessions than teachers who did not have a mentor (7.9 vs. 7.3; t = 2.22; P = 0.03). Two-level mixed-effects model analysis indicated that teachers' program fidelity in Year 1, confidence in the execution of core activities, and school coordinators' performance were significantly associated with Year 2 implementation dose. Implementation of FOYC + CImPACT was significantly associated with improved student outcomes. Teachers maintained high fidelity to a comprehensive HIV prevention program over 2 years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future program implementers should consider additional implementation support to improve the implementation of school-based programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evidence-based treatment (EBT) movement has primarily focused on core intervention content or treatment fidelity and has largely ignored practitioner skills to manage interpersonal process issues that emerge during treatment, especially with difficult-to-treat adolescents (delinquent, substance-using, medical non-adherence) and those of color. A chief complaint of "real world" practitioners about manualized treatments is the lack of correspondence between following a manual and managing microsocial interpersonal processes (e.g. negative affect) that arise in treating "real world clients." Although family-based EBTs share core similarities (e.g. focus on family interactions, emphasis on practitioner engagement, family involvement), most of these treatments do not have an evidence base regarding common implementation and treatment process problems that practitioners experience in delivering particular models, especially in mid-treatment when demands on families to change their behavior is greatest in treatment – a lack that characterizes the field as a whole. Failure to effectively address common interpersonal processes with difficult-to-treat families likely undermines treatment fidelity and sustained use of EBTs, treatment outcome, and contributes to treatment dropout and treatment nonadherence. Recent advancements in wearables, sensing technologies, multivariate time-series analyses, and machine learning allow scientists to make significant advancements in the study of psychotherapy processes by looking "under the skin" of the provider–client interpersonal interactions that define therapeutic alliance, empathy, and empathic accuracy, along with the predictive validity of these therapy processes (therapeutic alliance, therapist empathy) to treatment outcome. Moreover, assessment of these processes can be extended to develop procedures for training providers to manage difficult interpersonal processes while maintaining a physiological profile that is consistent with astute skills in psychotherapeutic processes. This paper argues for opening the "black box" of therapy to advance the science of evidence-based psychotherapy by examining the clinical interior of evidence-based treatments to develop the next generation of audit- and feedback- (i.e., systemic review of professional performance) supervision systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work is devoted to a new immuno-epidemiological model with distributed recovery and death rates considered as functions of time after the infection onset. Disease transmission rate depends on the intra-subject viral load determined from the immunological submodel. The age-dependent model includes the viral load, recovery and death rates as functions of age considered as a continuous variable. Equations for susceptible, infected, recovered and dead compartments are expressed in terms of the number of newly infected cases. The analysis of the model includes the proof of the existence and uniqueness of solution. Furthermore, it is shown how the model can be reduced to age-dependent SIR or delay model under certain assumptions on recovery and death distributions. Basic reproduction number and final size of epidemic are determined for the reduced models. The model is validated with a COVID-19 case data. Modelling results show that proportion of young age groups can influence the epidemic progression since disease transmission rate for them is higher than for other age groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The propagation characteristics of weakly nonlinear electron acoustic waves in the presence of nonisothermal (trapped) hot electrons are investigated in collisional plasmas. The dynamics of the nonlinear waves are found to be governed by Schamel–Burgers and Schamel–Korteweg–de Vries–Burgers-type equations depending on the strength of the nonisothermal parameter. Burgers’ terms appear due to the anomalous dissipation introduced by the collisions between cold electrons and immobile ions in the presence of collective phenomena (plasma current). The derived nonlinear equations are solved analytically with the help of the Tanh method. The time-dependent computational results well agree with the analytical results and predict the possibility of the oscillatory and monotonic shock-like structures depending on the strength of the collisional drag and nonisothermality of hot electrons. The trapped electrons significantly modify the amplitude and width of the nonlinear pulse. The results may explain the shock formation and the particle acceleration mechanism in auroral plasma region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A compartmental epidemiological model with distributed recovery and death rates is proposed. In some particular cases, the model can be reduced to the conventional SIR model. However, in general, the dynamics of epidemic progression in this model is different. Distributed recovery and death rates are evaluated from COVID-19 data. The model is validated by the epidemiological data for different countries, and it shows better agreement with the data than the SIR model. The time-dependent disease transmission rate is estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weakly nonlinear ion acoustic wave group dynamics at critical non-thermal parameter is investigated in the frame work of Gardner equation in non-thermal plasmas. Also the wave modulation due to self-interactions near the critical parameter is investigated by a nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The non-thermal parameter modifies the wave dispersion and the parameter space of wave modulation. At the boundary of this parameter space, the wave group dynamics is shown to be governed by a modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation. These equations are solved numerically with the help of a pseudo-spectral scheme and the solutions predict a wide class of nonlinear structures related to wave and wave group dynamics of the weakly nonlinear wave. The numerical solutions and the growth rate of the modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation confirm that the ion acoustic wave is modulationally unstable near the marginal state. The results are discussed in the context of astrophysical observations in auroral region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much research on Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in terms of functional impairment associated with the disorder. On the other hand, Dysthymic Disorder (DD) has not received much attention in the literature in relation to the functional disability associated with the disorder. Similarly, the moderator effect of religiosity has been studied in many physical and mental health disorders, but has not been explored in DD. The aims of the present study were to explore the association between DD and functional disability, and to study the moderator effect of religiosity on the association. The data for the study was obtained from consortium of Psychiatric Epidemiologic Survey (CPES). The survey collected data on prevalence of mental health problems and the sociocultural determinants, in the national population. The present study utilized the data on DD and factors such as race, gender, marital status, employment status, and religiosity, in order to explore association between DD and disability and the effect of religiosity on the association. Results show that the subjects who have endorsed DD are 1.092 times more likely to have functional disability than those who have not endorsed DD. The association is statistically significant with the 95% CI for the Odds Ratio (OR) as 1.072 - 1.113. The religiosity has not shown a significant effect on the association between DD and functional disability. In conclusion there is statistically significant association between DD and the functional disability. Although the cross-sectional study design makes it difficult to determine the causal relationship, the results may signify that DD could potentially cause significant functional impairment. Further longitudinal studies are needed to probe the association between DD and disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditions for the existence of low-frequency electrostatic drift wave in pair-ion plasma are discussed. It is shown that the temperature and/or mass difference of both species could produce drift wave in a pair-ion plasma. The results are discussed in the context of the fullerene pair-ion plasma experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lasso proved to be an extremely successful technique for simultaneous estimation and variable selection. However lasso has two major drawbacks. First, it does not enforce any grouping effect and secondly in some situation lasso solutions are inconsistent for variable selection. To overcome this inconsistency adaptive lasso is proposed where adaptive weights are used for penalizing different coefficients. Recently a doubly regularized technique namely elastic net is proposed which encourages grouping effect i.e. either selection or omission of the correlated variables together. However elastic net is also inconsistent. In this paper we study adaptive elastic net which does not have this drawback. In this article we specially focus on the grouped selection property of adaptive elastic net along with its model selection complexity. We also shed some light on the bias-variance tradeoff of different regularization methods including adaptive elastic net. An efficient algorithm was proposed in the line of LARS-EN, which is then illustrated with simulated as well as real life data examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation with a linear Landau damping term describing weakly nonlinear and weakly dispersive ion-acoustic waves in an electron-positron-ion plasma is derived. It is found that the Landau damping causes the solitary wave amplitude to decay with time. It is also found that in absence of Landau damping, both linear wave phase velocity and solitary wave amplitude decrease with the increase of positron density, whereas, both increase with the increase of positron temperature. On the other hand, the Landau damping rate decreases with the increase of both positron density and temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear properties of small amplitude dust acoustic waves, incorporatingboth the ion inertial effect and dust drift effect have been studied.The effect of dust charge variation is also incorporated. It is seen thatdue to the dust charge variation, a Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equationwith positive or negative damping term depending on the wave velocityand the ring parameters governes the nonlinear dust acoustic wave. It isseen that the damping or growth arises due to the assumption that dusthydrodynamical time scale is much smaller than that of the dust chargingscale. This assumption is valid only for planetary rings such as Saturn'sF, G and E rings. Numerical investigations reveal thatall the three rings in F, G and E, dust acoustic solitary wave admits both negative and positive potentials. Instability arises from the available freeenergy of drift motion of dust grains only for the wave with wave velocity λ 0, the drift velocity of the dust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]