While early gendered messages mold children's expectations about the world, we know relatively little about the depictions of women in politics and exposure to gender stereotypes in elementary social studies curricula. In this article, we examine the coverage of political leaders in the children's magazine TIME for Kids, a source commonly found in elementary school classrooms. Coding all political content from this source over six years, we evaluate the presence of women political leaders and rate whether the leaders are described as possessing gender-stereotypic traits. Our results show that although TIME for Kids covers women leaders in greater proportion than their overall representation in politics, the content of the coverage contains gendered messages that portray politics as a stereotypically masculine field. We show that gendered traits are applied differently to men and to women in politics: feminine and communal traits are more likely to be applied to women leaders, while men and women are equally described as having masculine and agentic traits. Portrayals of women political leaders in stereotype-congruent ways is problematic because early messages influence children's views of gender roles.

Guangxi, a province in southwestern China, has the second highest reported number of HIV/AIDS cases in China. This study aimed to develop an accurate and effective model to describe the tendency of HIV and to predict its incidence in Guangxi. HIV incidence data of Guangxi from 2005 to 2016 were obtained from the database of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network models, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, generalised regression neural network (GRNN) models and exponential smoothing (ES) were used to fit the incidence data. Data from 2015 and 2016 were used to validate the most suitable models. The model performances were evaluated by evaluating metrics, including mean square error (MSE), root mean square error, mean absolute error and mean absolute percentage error. The LSTM model had the lowest MSE when the N value (time step) was 12. The most appropriate ARIMA models for incidence in 2015 and 2016 were ARIMA (1, 1, 2) (0, 1, 2)12 and ARIMA (2, 1, 0) (1, 1, 2)12, respectively. The accuracy of GRNN and ES models in forecasting HIV incidence in Guangxi was relatively poor. Four performance metrics of the LSTM model were all lower than the ARIMA, GRNN and ES models. The LSTM model was more effective than other time-series models and is important for the monitoring and control of local HIV epidemics.

Inappropriate use of antibiotics is contributing to a serious antimicrobial resistance problem in Asian hospitals. Despite resource constraints in the region, all Asian hospitals should implement antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programs to optimize antibiotic treatment, improve patient outcomes, and minimize antimicrobial resistance. This document describes a consensus statement from a panel of regional experts to help multidisciplinary AMS teams design programs that suit the needs and resources of their hospitals. In general, AMS teams must decide on appropriate interventions (eg, prospective audit and/or formulary restriction) for their hospital, focusing on the most misused antibiotics and problematic multidrug-resistant organisms. This focus is likely to include carbapenem use with the goal to reduce carbapenem-resistant gram-negative bacteria. Rather than initially trying to introduce a comprehensive, hospital-wide AMS program, it would be practical to begin by pilot testing a simple program based on 1 achievable core intervention for the hospital. AMS team members must work together to determine the most suitable AMS interventions to implement in their hospitals and how best to put them into practice. Continuous monitoring and feedback of outcomes to the AMS teams, hospital administration, and prescribers will enhance sustainability of the AMS programs.

Due to the lack of basic information on water required by maize (Zea mays L.) in Brazil, the large amount of water applied usually exceeds crop requirements, wasting water and energy. In this study, we measured crop evapotranspiration (ETc) as evaporative heat flux from a centre pivot-irrigated maize plantation in Southern Brazil during winter and summer seasons, using the Bowen ratio method to evaluate how the degree of canopy-atmosphere coupling affects crop water needs and irrigation management. Irrigation requirements were determined by comparing ETc with reference evapotranspiration (ETo), derived from the Penman–Monteith equation and expressed as the ETc/ETo (Kc) ratio. In this study, the average Kc values obtained were 1.31 and 0.90 for the winter and summer, respectively. Using aerodynamic and canopy resistance measurements, the decoupling factor (Ω) was computed. Ω values tending to zero (0.09 and 0.20 for winter and summer, respectively) showed that strong coupling of maize plants to the atmosphere and sensitivity to high air temperatures, vapour pressure deficits and wind speed caused variations in Kc in relation to ETo ranges. During the experimental period, the Kc value ranged from 0.92 when the ETo exceeded 4 mm d−1 to 1.64 when the ETo was less than 2 mm d−1.

Nighttime eating is often associated with a negative impact on weight management and cardiometabolic health. However, data from recent acute metabolic studies have implicated a benefit of ingesting a bedtime snack for weight management. The present study compared the impact of ingesting a milk snack containing either 10 (BS10) or 30 g (BS30) protein with a non-energetic placebo (BS0) 30 min before bedtime on next morning metabolism, appetite and energy intake in mildly overweight males (age: 24·3 (sem 0·8) years; BMI: 27·4 (sem 1·1) kg/m2). Next morning measurements of RMR, appetite and energy intake were measured using indirect calorimetry, visual analogue scales and an ad libitum breakfast, respectively. Bedtime milk ingestion did not alter next morning RMR (BS0: 7822 (sem 276) kJ/d, BS10: 7482 (sem 262) kJ/d, BS30: 7851 (sem 261) kJ/d, P=0·19) or substrate utilisation as measured by RER (P=0·64). Bedtime milk ingestion reduced hunger (P=0·01) and increased fullness (P=0·04) during the evening immediately after snack ingestion, but elicited no effect the next morning. Next morning breakfast (BS0: 2187 (sem 365) kJ, BS10: 2070 (sem 336) kJ, BS30: 2582 (sem 384) kJ, P=0·21) and 24 h post-trial (P=0·95) energy intake was similar between conditions. To conclude, in mildly overweight adults, compared with a non-energetic placebo, a bedtime milk snack containing 10 or 30 g of protein does not confer changes in next morning whole-body metabolism and appetite that may favour weight management.

Neural mass models are ubiquitous in large-scale brain modelling. At the node level, they are written in terms of a set of ordinary differential equations with a non-linearity that is typically a sigmoidal shape. Using structural data from brain atlases, they may be connected into a network to investigate the emergence of functional dynamic states, such as synchrony. With the simple restriction of the classic sigmoidal non-linearity to a piecewise linear caricature, we show that the famous Wilson–Cowan neural mass model can be explicitly analysed at both the node and network level. The construction of periodic orbits at the node level is achieved by patching together matrix exponential solutions, and stability is determined using Floquet theory. For networks with interactions described by circulant matrices, we show that the stability of the synchronous state can be determined in terms of a low-dimensional Floquet problem parameterised by the eigenvalues of the interaction matrix. Moreover, this network Floquet problem is readily solved using linear algebra to predict the onset of spatio-temporal network patterns arising from a synchronous instability. We further consider the case of a discontinuous choice for the node non-linearity, namely the replacement of the sigmoid by a Heaviside non-linearity. This gives rise to a continuous-time switching network. At the node level, this allows for the existence of unstable sliding periodic orbits, which we explicitly construct. The stability of a periodic orbit is now treated with a modification of Floquet theory to treat the evolution of small perturbations through switching manifolds via the use of saltation matrices. At the network level, the stability analysis of the synchronous state is considerably more challenging. Here, we report on the use of ideas originally developed for the study of Glass networks to treat the stability of periodic network states in neural mass models with discontinuous interactions.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been used in healthcare and medical research for the past two decades. In particular, the use of fNIRS in academic and clinical psychiatry has increased rapidly owing to its advantages over other neuroimaging modalities. fNIRS is a tool that can potentially supplement clinical interviews and mental state examinations to establish a psychiatric diagnosis and monitor treatment progress. This article provides a review of the theoretical background of fNIRS, key principles of its applications in psychiatry and its limitations, and shares a vision of its future applicability in psychiatric research and clinical practice.