"cooperative extension"

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The opioid epidemic in the United States continues to disproportionately affect those in rural, compared to urban, areas due to a variety of treatment and recovery barriers. One mechanism to increase capacity of rural-serving providers is through delivery of training and technical assistance (TTA) for evidence-based programs by leveraging the Cooperative Extension System. Guided by the Interactive Systems Framework, the current study evaluates TTA delivered by the Northwest Rural Opioid Technical Assistance Collabroative to opioid prevention, treatment, and recovery providers on short- (satisfaction, anticipated benefit), medium-, (behavioral intention to change current practice), and long-term goals (changes toward adoption of evidence-based practices)...

Due to limited access to and consumption of fruits and vegetables, older adults are at increased risk of worsening or developing chronic diseases. This paper describes a community-academic partnership that provides a sustainable source of blackberries to attendees of a rural senior center. Qualitative research evaluated the partnership following implementation of a blackberry program. Focus groups and interviews included partners from a senior center, Cooperative Extension Service, and a detention center. Main themes: group power dynamics influenced communication between research and community leadership teams; unexpected project barriers emerged; and community leadership team suggested strategies to promote project longevity...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

BACKGROUND: The Be Well Home Health Navigator Program is a prospective, randomized controlled trial (RCT) implemented to compare a community health navigator program to usual care program to reduce contaminants in drinking water. DESIGN AND SETTING: This 4-year two-armed RCT will involve well owners in Oregon that have private drinking water wells that contain arsenic, nitrate, or lead above maximum contaminant levels. INTERVENTION: The intervention leverages the trusted relationship between Cooperative Extension Service (CES) Community Educators and rural well owners to educate, assist and motivate to make decisions and set actionable steps to mitigate water contamination...

Human cooperation can be facilitated by the ability to create a mental representation of one's own actions, as well as the actions of a partner, known as action co-representation. Even though other species also cooperate extensively, it is still unclear whether they have similar capacities. The Joint Simon task is a two-player task developed to investigate this action co-representation. We tested brown capuchin monkeys (Sapajus [Cebus] apella), a highly cooperative species, on a computerized Joint Simon task and found that, in line with previous research, the capuchins' performance was compatible with co-representation...

Face aging tasks aim to simulate changes in the appearance of faces over time. However, due to the lack of data on different ages under the same identity, existing models are commonly trained using mapping between age groups. This makes it difficult for most existing aging methods to accurately capture the correspondence between individual identities and aging features, leading to generating faces that do not match the real aging appearance. In this paper, we re-annotate the CACD2000 dataset and propose a consensus-agent deep reinforcement learning method to solve the aforementioned problem...

PURPOSE: Farmers have suicide rates much higher than the general population, with elevated mental health symptoms and high stress levels. Farmers are a hard-to-reach population due to occupational demands and a culture where conversations about mental health are often stigmatizing. This study explored ways to tailor suicide prevention strategies to unique characteristics of farmers by speaking with groups close to farmers who were open to discussing stress and suicide prevention: women married to farmers and agricultural Extension agents...

Black-spined prickly pear (Opuntia macrocentra Engelmann; Cactaceae) is a cactus native to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and northwest Mexico. The plant is often grown for ornamental purposes in the United States. In February 2023, virus-like symptoms such as concentric ringspots and chlorotic spots were observed on O. macrocentra plants grown at the vicinity of Maricopa County Cooperative extension, University of Arizona, Phoenix, AZ (33°24'24.6"N, 111°59'15.3"W). Total RNA was extracted from two samples (YPHC-60-A and YPHC-60-B), following the protocol by Tzanetakis et al...

A novel recursive cascaded full-resolution residual network (RCFRR-Net) for abdominal four-dimensional computed tomography (4D-CT) image registration was proposed. The entire network was end-to-end and trained in the unsupervised approach, which meant that the deformation vector field, which presented the ground truth, was not needed during training. The network was designed by cascading three full-resolution residual subnetworks with different architectures. The training loss consisted of the image similarity loss and the deformation vector field regularization loss, which were calculated based on the final warped image and the fixed image, allowing all cascades to be trained jointly and perform the progressive registration cooperatively...

BACKGROUND: Healthy eating and active living policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes are implemented across the United States through Cooperative Extension. However, translating multisector PSE changes to practice in community settings is challenging and there is a lack of knowledge about barriers and facilitators to PSE changes among state Extension systems using standardized frameworks. Therefore, a research-to-practice partnership effort aimed to identify Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service Family and Consumer Science (LFCS) practitioners' barriers and facilitators to implementing PSE changes in rural Louisiana communities...

BACKGROUND: South Asians are a rapidly growing population in the United States. Breast cancer is a major concern among South Asian American women, who are an understudied population. We established the South Asian Breast Cancer (SABCa) study in New Jersey during early 2020 to gain insights into their breast cancer-related health attitudes. Shortly after we started planning for the study, the COVID-19 disease spread throughout the world. In this paper, we describe our experiences and lessons learned from recruiting study participants by partnering with New Jersey's community organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic...

The National Cooperative Extension System offers walking programs, but impacts are underreported. One program offered in two state systems is FitEx, an 8-week, group-based behavior change intervention. The purpose of this work was to evaluate FitEx through the RE-AIM (reach, effect, adoption, implementation, maintenance) Framework, with a primary focus on reach and effectiveness (individual-level dimensions). Through a pragmatic, natural experiment, the impact of FitEx was assessed from 2015 to 2020. Reach was operationalized as the number and characteristics of eligible community members who participated...

INTRODUCTION: COVID-19 acutely shocked both socio-economic and food systems in 2020. We investigated the impact of COVID-19 on production and consumption of gardened produce, backyard poultry, wild game and fish, and foraged mushrooms, berries, and other plants in New York State, aiming to understand crisis influenced food choice and motivations, including food security. METHODS: We conducted an online, cross-sectional survey in October-December 2020 with a convenience sample of participants ( n = 505) with an interest in gardening, poultry rearing, foraging, hunting, and/or fishing from six counties in upstate New York...

FitEx is an 8-week, group-based physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption program co-created and implemented with the Cooperative Extension System. Effectiveness and delivery personnel perceptions of the program are promising; however, ongoing adaptations are required to continuously meet shifting needs of both researchers and delivery systems. We applied the APDER iterative cycles of implementation over 15 years to understand dynamic and ongoing adaptations as well as implications for FitEx sustainability...

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to describe the experiences influencing food pantry stakeholders' and emergency food providers' ability to meet their shoppers' needs. DESIGN: We conducted 5 focus groups. SETTING: Food pantries in Minnesota in late 2019 and early 2020. PARTICIPANTS: The sample included 37 participants with various roles in the emergency food system. PHENOMENON OF INTEREST: Barriers and challenges facing emergency food providers/stakeholders and practices and resources providers employ...

OBJECTIVE: The effectiveness of the National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) in improving diet quality (DQ) in community settings is largely unknown. This study aimed to evaluate the DQ changes of Extension DPP participants. METHODS: A single-group, repeated-measures design was used to evaluate an Extension-implemented DPP using the PreventT2 curriculum. Participants were overweight adults with or at high risk for prediabetes (n = 88). Weight and DQ (Healthy Eating Index-2015, Dietary Screener Questionnaire) were evaluated using mixed-effects regression...

Several environmental level factors exacerbate poor health outcomes in rural populations in the United States, such as lack of access to healthy food and locations to be physically active, which support healthy choices at the individual level. Thus, utilizing innovative place-based approaches in rural locations is essential to improve health outcomes. Leveraging community assets, like Cooperative Extension, is a novel strategy for implementing community-driven interventions. This prospective cohort study (n = 152), recruited in 2019 and surveyed again in 2020 and 2021, examined individual level changes in diet and physical activity in one rural Appalachian county...

Increasing the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices can help maintain sufficient food production while reducing its environmental impact. To ensure this adoption, it is important to assess the research and training needs of those helping farmers and producers adopt sustainable agricultural practices. However, there is a gap in the literature related to the training needs of producers in the Western United States for sustainable agriculture. Needs assessments help organizations, such as the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program and Cooperative Extension, to address the demonstrated needs of intended audiences...

As the cognition of spine develops, deep learning (DL) emerges as a powerful tool with tremendous potential for advancing research in this field. To provide a comprehensive overview of DL-spine research, our study utilized bibliometric and visual methods to retrieve relevant articles from the Web of Science database. VOSviewer and CiteSpace were primarily used for literature measurement and knowledge graph analysis. A total of 273 studies focusing on deep learning in the spine, with a combined total of 2302 citations, were retrieved...