Small Stuff Research Articles

Don't sweat the small stuff: A SWOT analysis for critical care pharmacists, appreciation for the past, present and future of the profession, and a call for reflection.

In an effort to expedite the publication of articles, AJHP is posting manuscripts online as soon as possible after acceptance. Accepted manuscripts have been peer-reviewed and copyedited, but are posted online before technical formatting and author proofing. These manuscripts are not the final version of record and will be replaced with the final article (formatted per AJHP style and proofed by the authors) at a later time.

The Two- to Four-Day Predictability of Midlatitude Cyclones: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Abstract We use convection-permitting idealized simulations of moist midlatitude cyclones to compare the growth of synoptic-scale perturbations derived from an adjoint model with the growth of equal-energy-norm, monochromatic-wavelength perturbations at the smallest resolved scale. For initial magnitudes comparable to those of initial-condition uncertainties in present-day data assimilation systems, the adjoint perturbations produce a “forecast bust,” significantly changing the intensity and location of the cyclone and its accompanying precipitation. In contrast, the small-scale-wave perturbations project strongly onto the moist convection, but the upscale growth from the random displacement of individual convective cells does not significantly alter the cyclone’s development nor its accompanying precipitation through 2–4-day lead times. Instead, the differences in convection generated at early times become negligible because the development of subsequent convection is driven by the mostly unchanged synoptic-scale flow. Reducing the perturbation magnitudes by factors of 10 and 100 demonstrates that nonlinear dynamics play an important role in the displacement of the cyclone by the full-magnitude adjoint perturbations, and that the upscale growth of small-magnitude, small-scale perturbations is too slow to significantly change the cyclone. These results suggest that a sensitive dependence on the synoptic-scale initial conditions, analogous to that of the Lorenz (1963) system, may be more relevant to 2–4-day midlatitude-cyclone forecast busts than the upscale error growth in the Lorenz (1969) model.

Erin E. Stache.

"My favorite molecule/material is polystyrene… The best advice I have ever been given is: 'Don't sweat the small stuff.' " Find out more about Erin E. Stache in her Introducing… Profile.

Don't sweat the small stuff: a conversation about nanosafety.

Bengt Fadeel and Phil Sayre discuss lessons learned with respect to the safety assessment of nanomaterials, and provide a perspective on current and future challenges.

Don’t sweat the small stuff; anger rumination and lack of forgiveness are related to aggressive driving behaviours

Aggressive drivers pose a significant road safety threat to themselves and other road users. Therefore, understanding the relationships between certain cognitive processes and increased frequency of aggression has the potential to reduce road trauma through intervention. This study examined the relationships between anger rumination and forgiveness with trait driving anger and aggressive driving. These factors have previously been individually identified as predictors of aggression; but have yet to be considered simultaneously, despite recognised association between forgiveness and rumination tendencies outside of road safety research. Aggressive driving was measured across three facets of behaviour: verbal aggression, physical aggression, and use of the vehicle to display anger. Adaptive constructive responses to driving anger were also considered. Five hundred and one drivers (mean age = 43.7; SD = 17.7; men = 53.8%) completed an online questionnaire seeking information on these factors. Structural equation modelling showed that, after controlling for gender, 62% of the variance in aggressive driving was explained by a combination of trait driving anger, more frequent rumination and lower levels of forgiveness. Specifically, lower levels of forgiveness predicted more anger rumination (accounting for 49% of the variance), and the relationship between anger rumination and aggression was fully mediated by trait driving anger. A second model demonstrated that 17% of the variance in adaptive constructive responses to anger could be explained by higher levels of forgiveness, lower rumination and driving anger. Efforts to improve driver behaviour need to focus primarily on the reduction of driving anger. This could be achieved by reducing rumination through the promotion of forgiveness for the behaviour of other drivers.

Don't sweat the small stuff: skin mechanisms of sodium homeostasis and associations with long-term blood pressure.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that the kidney is the principal regulator of chronic blood pressure though the ability to sense pressure and adjust blood volume accordingly, recent clinical and preclinical evidence suggests that skin clearance of Na+ through sweat significantly contributes to long-term blood pressure and risk of hypertension. Evidence indicates that changes in skin Na+ content negatively associate with renal function, and factors that influence the concentration of Na+ in sweat are affected by major regulators of Na+ excretion by the kidney such as angiotensin and aldosterone. In addition, known regulatory mechanisms that regulate the amount of sweat produced do not include changes in Na+ intake or blood volume. Because of these reasons, it will be hard to quantify the contribution of Na+ clearance through sweat to blood pressure regulation and hypertension. While Chen et al. demonstrate significant negative associations between sweat Na+ concentration and blood pressure, it is likely that Na+ clearance through the skin has a short-term influence on blood pressure and sweat Na+ concentration is most likely a biomarker of renal function and its key role in hypertension.

It is time for ancient DNA to sweat the small stuff.

When one thinks of the field of ancient DNA it conjures images of extinct megafauna, from mammoths and woolly rhinos, through to the giant, flightless elephant bird (but hopefully not dinosaurs - despite the pervasive idea of 'dino DNA' from Jurassic park). These taxa have fascinating evolutionary histories, and their extinction stories need to be told. At the other end of the vertebrate scale, however, is the often neglected 'small stuff' - lizards, frogs, and other herpetofauna. But here's the rub - extracting DNA from the bones of this 'small stuff' is not only difficult, it often destroys the sample. In this issue, Scarsbrook et al. (2023) describe a new way to study the ancient (or historical) DNA of small vertebrates that is minimally destructive. The authors use the method to reconstruct the dynamic evolutionary history of New Zealand geckos and make new insights into how remnant populations should be managed. This work provides some key insights into New Zealand geckos but also opens up opportunities of biomolecular research on the smallest of vouchered vertebrate samples held within museum collections.

Sweat the Small Stuff, How Small Incidents of Negative Workplace Behavior Lead to Larger Misconduct

Small losses, measurable incremental negative workplace behaviors that do not align with organizational and societal norms often trigger a dynamic, magnifying process that produces greater undesirable outcomes, which once started, can often result in a downward spiral. Quickly addressing small problems can prevent minor misconduct and wrongdoing from escalating into greater difficulties later that can appear unstoppable. Failure to tackle the small issues and big problems will often follow. Managers should celebrate small victories or wins but also need to address small losses. Just as small wins can result in significant organizational gains, small losses can result in business losses.

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Heroes Never Sweat the Small Stuff: Fortuna in The CW’s Supernatural

The TV show Supernatural (2005–2020) features itinerant brothers Sam and Dean Winchester battling pagan gods from ancient Greco-Roman mythology who pose a threat to the present-day American way of life. The show utilizes two key concepts to define perils to American culture and values: the frontier myth and the myth of American exceptionalism. In a remote town in Alaska (i.e., the frontier), the brothers encounter the Roman goddess Fortuna, who reveals to the Winchesters how they can protect America. Fortuna’s appearance signifies a shift in how the show’s heroes, Sam and Dean, see themselves: they are forced to experience the despair everyday Americans feel when their luck runs out. A critical analysis of several key episodes will demonstrate that as the series advances, the focus on the brothers’ erasure of pagan threats to America is replaced by a critique of monotheistic religion, a reexamination of the myth of American exceptionalism, and social commentary on the problems with a culture based on consumerism.

“It’s the small stuff you can’t see”: Stories of mental wellness, community, and leisure told by new arrivants of colour to a mid-sized, South-Western Ontario city

ABSTRACT There is a tendency for new arrivants to experience a decrease in self-reported mental health as they spend more time in their new country of settlement. We wanted to discern whether new arrivants of colour (<10 years) to a mid-sized Ontario city had a similar story. With the knowing that positive and inclusive leisure experiences can buffer stressors for individuals, this research sought to hear about the mental well-being of new arrivants (between the ages 18–64) and the ways leisure enhances or detracts from their perceived mental well-being. Through photo elicitation qualitative interviews with five new arrivants contextualized existing literature in this area and described experiences of isolation, their transition experience, social stress and support, and building social capital through bridging and bonding. From our analysis, a novel finding we called, ”a perception of necessity for leisure” was a novel contribution to the new arrivant leisure literature.

The Quest to Understand and Resolve Persistent Dissociative Processes: A Discussion of Levy and Shalgi, “Imagination and Fantasy: The Dialectic Nature of the Encounter with Trauma and Dissociation”

ABSTRACT Clinicians have a debt to pay to our patients that includes speaking in language as experience near as possible to their subjective reality. In this discussion I endeavor to spell-out the internal transitional space in which dissociatively endowed ways of being interact with each other and find ways to interact with the world in the service of survival and toleration of overwhelming intense affects and memories of severe adversity. While agreeing with the big stuff written by Shalgi and Levy, the important small stuff that makes a big difference is highlighted as a way to support the efforts of forward-thinking clinicians like Shalgi and Levy.

A Conversation With … Kamali Thompson MD, MBA, US Olympic Alternate in Fencing and Orthopaedic Surgery Resident.

A Conversation With … Kamali Thompson MD, MBA, US Olympic Alternate in Fencing and Orthopaedic Surgery Resident.

Don’t sweat the small stuff? Superstitious Organizational Learning from Experience with Near Misses

A near-miss is an event where the possibility of a failure is present but does not materialize. Many organizations in high-hazard industries have recently adopted near-miss learning systems in the hope that their members will learn from such events to prevent significant failures from occurring in the future. The challenge with correctly learning from near misses is that since the event is not a failure, decision makers must recognize that although a negative event did not happen, it might have occurred. If decision makers do not correctly distinguish between successes and near-misses, organizations and their members can systematically take away the wrong lessons from the event and future performance could decline (rather than improve) as experience accumulates. This negative learning pattern, referred to as “superstitious learning,” has been identified in other contexts, but has not been explored in connection to near misses. In addition to exploring the role of near-misses in superstitious learning, we also explore what signals for learning are provided from heterogeneous versus homogenous near-miss experiences. We use data from reportable safety incidents in the US coal mining industry and a behavioral study set in the context of a coal mining decision to test our hypotheses.

Buoyancy Amid the Pandemic: Resilience in Rough Waters

Buoyancy Amid the Pandemic: Resilience in Rough Waters

HECR-Net: Height-Embedding Context Reassembly Network for Semantic Segmentation in Aerial Images

Semantic segmentation in aerial images has become an indispensable part in remote sensing image understanding for its extensive application prospects. It is crucial to jointly reason the 2-D appearance along with 3-D information and acquire discriminative global context to achieve better segmentation. However, previous approaches require accurate elevation data (e.g., nDSM and Digital Surface Model (DSM)) as additional inputs to segment semantics, which sorely limits their applications. On the other hand, due to the various forms of objects in complex scenes, the global context is generally dominated by features of salient patterns (e.g., large objects) and tends to smooth inconspicuous patterns (e.g., small stuff and boundaries). In this article, a novel joint framework named height-embedding context reassembly network (HECR-Net) is proposed. First, considering the fact that the corresponding elevation data is insufficient while we still want to exploit the serviceable height information, to alleviate the above data constraint, our method simultaneously predicts semantic labels and height maps from single aerial images by distilling height-aware embeddings implicitly. Second, we introduce a novel context-aware reorganization module to generate a discriminative feature with global context appropriately assigned to each local position. It benefits from both the global context aggregation module for ambiguity eliminating and local feature redistribution module for detailed refinement. Third, we make full use of the learning height-aware embeddings to promote the performance of semantic segmentation via introducing a modality-affinitive propagation block. Finally, without bells and whistles, the segmentation results on ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam data set illustrate that the proposed HECR-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Localizing the transnational call center industry: Training creole speakers in Dominica to serve Pidgin speakers in Hawai‘i

AbstractThis study considers whether localized language training for call centers can fruitfully challenge the homogenizing principles of call center practices by examining a training program that aimed to familiarize offshore call center workers with Pidgin, the creole language that is widely spoken in Hawaiʻi. Call center agents in Dominica were familiarized with key aspects of Pidgin relevant to call center work, including the expression of empathy in response to customer complaints. The analysis focuses on how we drew awareness to the pragmatics of Pidgin empathy through Pidgin contextualization cues in scenarios we devised. We then examine how the call center agents displayed their awareness of these cues in role plays. The agents readily demonstrated their understandings in talk about pragmatic differences during our instruction, but the role play interactions revealed the limits of their ability to deploy similar locally appropriate pragmatics due to the homogenizing confines of call center business practices.Dis pepah try see local kine training for call centah can mek stuff bettah, cuz the way big company stay like make all da call centah same kine. We go look one training program we wen make for teach people no live Hawaiʻi about Pidgin. Call centah workah in Dominica wen learn abaut Pidgin stuff can use you work call centah, like how for show feeling wen customah call for make huhu. Da analysis tawk about how we wen get dem fo look how local people show feeling using small kine stuff. Den we stay tawk how da call center people wen show deir manaʻo of dis small kine stuff wen dey make pretend fo be customah and call centah workah. Da call centah people wen quick show they akamai abaut dis wen dey wen tawk abaut how people ack diffrent but wen dey waz make pretend dey no can make same like Hawaiʻi people cuz da way all da call centah like mek everbady all same.

Sweat the small stuff: The human microvasculature and heart disease.

Traditionally thought of primarily as the predominant regulator of myocardial perfusion, it is becoming more accepted that the human coronary microvasculature also exerts a more direct influence on the surrounding myocardium. Coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD) not only precedes large artery atherosclerosis, but is associated with other cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It is also highly predictive of cardiovascular events in patients with or without atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. This review focuses on this recent paradigm shift and delves into the clinical consequences of CMD. Concepts of how resistance arterioles contribute to disease will be discussed, highlighting how the microvasculature may serve as a potential target for novel therapies and interventions. Finally, both invasive and non-invasive methods with which to assess the coronary microvasculature both for diagnostic and risk stratification purposes will be reviewed.

Rewilding the small stuff: the effect of ecological restoration on prokaryotic communities of peatland soils

To investigate the effect that restoration has on the microbiome of wetland soils, we used 16S amplicon sequencing to characterize the soil prokaryotic communities of retired cranberry farms that were restored to approximate the peat wetlands they once were. For comparison, we also surveyed the soil communities of active cranberry farms, retired cranberry farms and natural peat wetlands that were never farmed. Our results show that the prokaryotic communities of active cranberry farms are distinct from those of natural peat wetlands. Moreover, 4 years after restoration, the prokaryotic community structure of restored cranberry farms had shifted, resulting in a community more similar to natural peat wetlands than to active farms. Meanwhile, the prokaryotic communities of retired cranberry farms remained similar to those of active farms. The observed differences in community structure across site types corresponded with significant differences in inferred capacity for denitrification, methanotrophy and methanogenesis, and community composition was also correlated with previously published patterns of denitrification and carbon sequestration measured from the same soil samples. Taken together, these results suggest that ecological restoration efforts have the potential to restore ecosystem functions of soils and that they do so by 'rewilding' the communities of resident soil microbes.

Don't stressor the small stuff.

Freshwaters are subject to a multitude of threats, but complex interactions among stressors are context-dependant and less common than expected.