Project description:Value orientations used to explain or justify conservation have been rooted in arguments about how much and in what context to emphasize the intrinsic versus instrumental value of nature. Equally prominent are characterizations of beliefs known as the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), often used to help explain pro-environmental behaviour. A recent alternative to these positions has been identified as 'relational value'-broadly, values linking people and ecosystems via tangible and intangible relationships to nature as well as the principles, virtues and notions of a good life that may accompany these. This paper examines whether relational values are distinct from other value orientation and have potential to alleviate the intrinsic-instrumental debate. To test this possibility, we sought to operationalize the construct-relational values-by developing six relational statements. We ask: 1) Do the individual statements used to characterize relational values demonstrate internal coherence as either a single or multi-dimensional construct? 2) Do relational value statements (including those strongly stated) resonate with diverse populations? 3) Do people respond to relational value statements in a consistently different way than NEP scale statements? Data for this work is drawn from an online panel of residents of northeastern US (n = 400), as well as a sample of Costa Rican farmers (n = 253) and tourists in Costa Rica (n = 260). Results indicate relational values are distinct as a construct when compared to the NEP.
Project description:The global pandemic of COVID-19 has brought significant attentions to three important features of disease direct reporting systems: traceability, reliability, and effectiveness. A traditional disease direct reporting system has a central node of control, with a hierarchical structure that goes up from locals (cities and counties) to regions and eventually reaches a central data repository. Such systems are often prone to easy data loss, arbitrary or unauthorized data changes, and unreliable traceability to individual nodes. Blockchain, as a new disruptive technology, provides a potential solution. Leveraging blockchain's features of decentralization, unforgeability, whole-process traceability, we develop a method for disease information tracing with key components including infectious disease information collection, information chain-style storage, and information query. Our blockchain-based infectious disease traceability method can promptly collect disease information and form the disease information time series blockchain. We demonstrate that the information chain constructed is authentic and transparent, and it can be queried and maintained at any node in the system. Consequently, the infectious disease information on the blockchain can be monitored and queried any time, thereby greatly facilitating the tracing of the propagation paths of infectious diseases.
Project description:Clinical trial consent for protocols and their revisions should be transparent for patients and traceable for stakeholders. Our goal is to implement a process allowing for collection of patients' informed consent, which is bound to protocol revisions, storing and tracking the consent in a secure, unfalsifiable and publicly verifiable way, and enabling the sharing of this information in real time. For that, we build a consent workflow using a trending technology called Blockchain. This is a distributed technology that brings a built-in layer of transparency and traceability. From a more general and prospective point of view, we believe Blockchain technology brings a paradigmatical shift to the entire clinical research field. We designed a Proof-of-Concept protocol consisting of time-stamping each step of the patient's consent collection using Blockchain, thus archiving and historicising the consent through cryptographic validation in a securely unfalsifiable and transparent way. For each protocol revision, consent was sought again. We obtained a single document, in an open format, that accounted for the whole consent collection process: a time-stamped consent status regarding each version of the protocol. This document cannot be corrupted and can be checked on any dedicated public website. It should be considered a robust proof of data. However, in a live clinical trial, the authentication system should be strengthened to remove the need for third parties, here trial stakeholders, and give participative control to the peer users. In the future, the complex data flow of a clinical trial could be tracked by using Blockchain, which core functionality, named Smart Contract, could help prevent clinical trial events not occurring in the correct chronological order, for example including patients before they consented or analysing case report form data before freezing the database. Globally, Blockchain could help with reliability, security, transparency and could be a consistent step toward reproducibility.
Project description:Objectives: We aimed to investigate how optometrists in Hong Kong are managing myopic and "pre-myopic" children. Methods: Clinical files for children aged 6 to 10 years old who had eye examinations from 2017 to 2021 were retrospectively reviewed. Children were grouped by the initial spherical equivalent refractive error (SER) as myopes or pre-myopes. The demographic data, refractive error, and myopia management recommended by the optometrists were analyzed. Results: A total of 1,318 children (859 myopes and 459 pre-myopes) from ten clinics in Hong Kong were included. Over 5 years, myopia management recommendations shifted significantly (p < 0.001). In 2017, only 18.4% of children were recommended to pursue myopia control (MC), increasing to 42.8% by 2021. The use of MC spectacle lenses increased from 7.3% in 2017 to 36.8% in 2021, becoming the most recommended option. Orthokeratology, MC contact lenses, and atropine remained stable at less than 5% over this period. Children recommended for MC approaches had significantly more myopia than those recommended single-vision lenses or monitoring (p < 0.05). Age of the first visit significantly correlated with SER change from the first visit to the next recommendation update for pre-myopes (r = 0.27, p = 0.013) but not for myopes. Conclusions: From 2017 to 2021, myopia management patterns in Hong Kong shifted significantly, with more children being recommended for myopia control. MC spectacle lenses emerged as the most commonly recommended method. Younger pre-myopes at their first visit were more likely to have earlier management updates.
Project description:In the era of modernized medicine, thoracic surgery has been focusing on achieving minimally invasive surgery and providing a one-stop solution in treating thoracic diseases. Particularly in the Asia population, where patients are keen to have smaller wound and shorter hospital stay, thoracic surgery in Hong Kong has evolved from the traditional open thoracotomy approach to video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS). In our institution, uniportal VATS for major lung resection was developed in 2012. While uniportal VATS has brought advantages into managing thoracic pathologies, it also brought challenges like instrument fencing during manipulation and suboptimal visualization angle. To improve the procedure and its outcomes, novel techniques and equipment have been developed, for example, double-hinged instruments, robotic assisted technology and magnetic anchored and guided endoscopes (MAGS). With advanced medical imaging nowadays, management of small lung nodules or ground glass opacity (GGO) is in higher demand than ever before. Our hybrid operating room (HOR) can incorporate instant and real-time imaging in lesion localization, and provide treatment via VATS or electromagnetic navigated bronchoscopic (ENB) ablation in a one-stop manner. This paper will review the literature related to the historical development and clinical outcomes of thoracic surgery in Hong Kong and discuss the future perspective of ongoing development.
Project description:We report the nearly complete genome of a norovirus GII.4 Hong Kong[P31] variant (GII strain Hu/HK/2019/GII.4 Hong Kong[P31]/CUHK-NS-2200) that was detected in a patient with gastroenteritis in August 2019. The genome was sequenced by metagenomic next-generation sequencing and was found to have 92.8% nucleotide similarity to the closest GII.4 norovirus sequence in GenBank.