How medical students demonstrate their professionalism when reflecting on experience

Objectives:  This paper aims to examine the discourses used by students in a formal assessment of their ability to demonstrate professional values when reflecting on their experiences. Methods:  We carried out a discourse analysis of 50 randomly selected essays from a summative assessment undertaken by all five year groups of students in one UK medical school. Results:  Students were able to identify a wealth of relevant examples and to articulate key principles of professional practice. They were also able to critique behaviours and draw appropriate conclusions for their own intended professional development. Detailed textual analysis provided linguistic clues to the depth of apparent reflection: recurrent use of rhetorical language with minimal use of first-person reflections, lack of analysis of underlying factors, and simplistic views of solutions may all indicate students whose ability to learn by reflection on experience needs further development. There were also areas in which cohorts as a whole appeared to have a limited grasp of the important professional issues being addressed. Conclusions:  Assessing written reflections is a useful way of making students link their experiences with professional development. The detailed analysis of language usage may help to refine marking criteria, and to detect students and course components where reflective learning competencies are not being achieved

The representation of women in the family in Spanish television fiction

The rise of television drama in the late nineties challenged comedy as the most popular and resilient genre of fiction. The diversity of themes and growing complexity of new narratives have relegated family representations –key to comedy’s success- to contextualize sentimental and sexual relationships and, to a lesser extent, the work sphere of female characters. This article analyses the context and family relations of 709 female characters represented, with varying degrees of importance, in 84 programs of Spanish television fiction (series, serials, TV movies, miniseries and sketches) premiered in 2012 and 2013. The approach combines quantitative (SPSS coding) and qualitative (socio-semiotics and script theory) methods. The analysis reveals that Spanish television fiction offers a complex picture of family relationships, which mixes clichés and stereotypes, while trying to capture reality. Generational conflicts are the most common misunderstandings in everyday representations of female characters, although most of the women generally have the support of their families to address problems and difficulties of their exciting fictional experiences.El auge del drama televisivo, a finales de los noventa, le disputó a la comedia el protagonismo que la había convertido en el género más popular y resistente de la ficción a lo largo de más de cuatro décadas. La variedad de temáticas y la creciente complejidad narrativa de los nuevos formatos de ficción fueron relegando las representaciones de la familia, la clave del éxito de la comedia, al contexto de los avatares sentimentales, sexuales y, en menor medida, laborales de los personajes femeninos. Este artículo analiza el contexto y las relaciones familiares de los 709 personajes femeninos representados, con un grado variable de protagonismo, en los 84 programas de la ficción televisiva española de estreno (series, seriales, TVmovies, miniseries y sketches), emitidos a lo largo de 2012 y 2013. El método utilizado combina técnicas cuantitativas (codificación en SPSS) y cualitativas (socio-semiótica y script theory). El análisis revela que la ficción televisiva española proyecta una imagen compleja de la familia, en la que se mezclan tópicos y estereotipos, pero que intenta reflejar la realidad. Los conflictos generacionales representen las desavenencias más frecuentes de la vida cotidiana de los personajes analizados, aunque la mayor parte de las mujeres representadas en el contexto familiar suelen contar con apoyo de los suyos para afrontar los problemas y los conflictos de sus azarosas existencias de ficción.Este artículo ha sido elaborado en el marco del proyecto “La construcción social de la mujer en la ficción televisiva y la web 2.0: estereotipos, recepción y retroalimentación” (FEM2012-33411), financiado por el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. En esta parte de la investigación han participado, además de las autoras, Deborah Castro, Mariluz Sánchez, Belén Granda, Tatiana Hidalgo, Elsa Soro y Karina Tiznado (investigadoras), y Marc Bellmunt, Germán Muñoz, Lucía Trabajo, Estitxu Garay y Amaia Nerecan (colaboradores)

Extending the adverbial coverage of a NLP oriented resource for French

This paper presents a work on extending the adverbial entries of LGLex: a NLP oriented syntactic resource for French. Adverbs were extracted from the Lexicon-Grammar tables of both simple adverbs ending in -ment '-ly' (Molinier and Levrier, 2000) and compound adverbs (Gross, 1986; 1990). This work relies on the exploitation of fine-grained linguistic information provided in existing resources. Various features are encoded in both LG tables and they haven't been exploited yet. They describe the relations of deleting, permuting, intensifying and paraphrasing that associate, on the one hand, the simple and compound adverbs and, on the other hand, different types of compound adverbs. The resulting syntactic resource is manually evaluated and freely available under the LGPL-LR license.Comment: Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP'11), Chiang Mai : Thailand (2011

Non-linear finite element analysis of flexible pipes for deep-water applications

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonFlexible pipes are essential components in the subsea oil and gas industry, where they are used to convey fluids under conditions of extreme external pressure and (often) axial load, while retaining low bending stiffness. This is made possible by their complex internal structure, consisting of unbonded components that are, to a certain extent, free to move internally relative to each other. Due to the product's high value and high cost of testing facilities, much e ort has been invested in the development of analytical and numerical models for simulating flexible pipe behaviour, which includes bulk response to various loading actions, calculation of component stresses and use of this data for component fatigue calculations. In this work, it is proposed that the multi-scale methods currently in widespread use for the modelling of composite materials can be applied to the modelling of flexible pipe. This allows the large-scale dynamics of an installed pipe (often several kilometers in length) to be related to the behaviour of its internal components (with characteristic lengths in millimeters). To do this, a formal framework is developed for an extension of the computational homogenisation procedure that allows multiscale models to be constructed in which models at both the large and small scales are composed of different structural elements. Within this framework, a large-scale flexible pipe model is created, using a two-dimensional corotational beam formulation with a constitutive model representative of flexible pipe bulk behaviour, which was obtained by further development of a recently proposed formulation inspired by the analogy between the flexible pipe structural behaviour and that of plastic materials with non-associative flow rules. A three-dimensional corotational formulation is also developed. The model is shown to perform adequately for practical analyses. Next, a detailed finite element (FE) model of a flexible pipe was created, using shell finite elements, generalised periodic boundary conditions and an implicit solution method. This model is tested against two analytical flexible pipe models for several basic load cases. Finally, the two models are used to carry out a sequential multi-scale analysis, in which a set of simulations using the detailed FE model is carried out in order to find the most appropriate coefficients for the large-scale model.EPSRC CASE studentship, with Lloyd's Register EME