140 research outputs found

    The mad manifesto

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    The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023). Using a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning (UDL) training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within intentionally underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced. The manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques: 1. Seek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms. 2. UDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential. 3. Advocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility. 4. Refuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance. 5. Remind students and allies that university space is a non-neutral affective container. 6. Operationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus. 7. Seek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential. 8. Revise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access. 9. Eliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students. 10. Vigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed. 11. Treat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend. 12. Create non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom. 13. Seek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it. 14. Center madness in inclusive methodologies designed to explicitly resist carceral logics. 15. Create counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power. 16. Strive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences. 17. Create pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice. 18. Vector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment

    Understanding building and urban environment interactions: An integrated framework for building occupancy modelling

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    Improving building energy efficiency requires accurate modelling and a comprehensive understanding of how occupants use building space. This thesis focuses on modelling building occupancy to enhance the predictive accuracy of occupancy patterns and gain a better understanding of the causal reasons for occupancy behaviour. A conceptual framework is proposed to relax the restriction of isolated building analysis, which accounts for interactions between buildings, its occupants, and other urban systems, such as the effects of transport incidents on occupancy and circulation in buildings. This thesis also presents a counterpart mapping of the framework that elaborates the links between modelling of transport and building systems. To operationalise the proposed framework, a novel modelling approach which has not been used in the current context, called the hazard-based model, is applied to model occupancy from a single building up to a district area. The proposed framework is further adapted to integrate more readily with transport models, to ensure that arrivals and departures to and from the building are consistent with the situation of the surrounding transport systems. The proposed framework and occupancy models are calibrated and validated using Wi-Fi data and other variables, such as transport and weather parameters, harvested from the South Kensington campus of Imperial College London. In addition to calibrating the occupancy model, integrating a travel simulator produces synthetic arrivals into or around the campus, which are further distributed over campus buildings via an adapted technique and feed the occupancy simulations. The model estimation results reveal the causal reasons for or exogenous effects on individual occupancy states. The validation results confirm the ability of the proposed models to predict building occupancy accurately both on average and day by day across the future dataset. Finally, evaluating occupancy simulations for various hypothetical scenarios provides valuable suggestions for efficient building design and facility operation.Open Acces

    Time for a Nappy Change: beliefs and attitudes towards modern cloth nappies.

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    The United Nations Environment Programme highlights how the use of disposable nappies has become unsustainable, yet the practice of using modern cloth nappies (MCN) is niche. This study uses mixed methods of survey, story completion and focus group methods to explore how behaviour beliefs and attitudes to behaviour contribute to families’ decision making regarding the nappy system they use for their children. 1588 responded to the survey; 38 completed story completion activity; 24 participated in groups. This study finds that beliefs about the performance as a nappy, environmental credentials, financial considerations, laundry, effort, and hygiene differ according to the level of personal experience of using MCN. While beliefs about the environmentalcredentials of MCN create powerful drivers for the intention to use MCN, other beliefs about the upfront costs, laundry and effort contribute a negative attitude to MCN overall if their support network of other MCN users is not established. Current MCN users found using cloth nappy retailer websites, nappy libraries, and social media groups, including pre-loved and-sell groups, to be beneficial in improving attitude to MCN. This study concludes that interventions that simultaneously reduce or remove perceived barriers such as upfront costs, financial risks and too much effort, paired with campaigns which increase the likelihood of finding support, are more likely, than individual interventions, to be effective in increasing the number of families using MCN.Further study is needed to investigate the potential of interventions which reduce the financial risks such as, easy to access hire kits, spread the cost of MCN and pre-natal and newborn public services such as midwives and health visitors being well informed and encouraging of the use of MCN.<br/

    Tradução médica: uma experiência de estágio (curricular) na Escola de Medicina

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    Dissertação de mestrado em Tradução e Comunicação MultilingueNo âmbito de um esforço crescente de internacionalização, a Escola de Medicina da Universidade do Minho criou o Núcleo de Internacionalização (IAO), cujo objetivo principal é apoiar todas as atividades desenvolvidas nas redes internacionais existentes na Escola e estimular novas iniciativas. Além disso, pretende também apoiar a dinamização de um ambiente de aprendizagem global no qual estudantes, docentes e membros de serviços administrativos possam usufruir dos privilégios transformativos de uma educação internacional e em expansão, construindo, assim, um espaço de diálogo e partilha. Com o objetivo de promover a internacionalização da Escola, a EM promove e participa em vários Programas de Mobilidade nacionais e internacionais. O objetivo do presente projeto de estágio é apresentar e descrever o trabalho desenvolvido durante o estágio curricular correspondente ao segundo semestre do 2º ano do Mestrado em Tradução e Comunicação Multilingue da Universidade do Minho. Este estágio durou quatro meses, no Núcleo Internacionalização, da Escola de Medicina, localizado no Campus de Gualtar da UMinho, em Braga. Este relatório consistirá de um breve enquadramento teórico sobre tradução médica, as principais caraterísticas e dificuldades, assim como o papel do tradutor enquanto especialista nesta área e a função das cat tools nesta área da tradução. Serão apresentadas as vantagens e desvantagens da utilização de ferramentas de tradução e a sua utilidade em tradução médica, especialmente durante o meu estágio.As part of a growing internationalization effort, the School of Medicine of the University of Minho created the International Affairs Office (IAO), whose main objective is to support all activities carried out in the international networks existing at the School and to encourage new initiatives. In addition, it also intends to support the promotion of a global learning environment in which students, teachers and members of administrative services can enjoy the transformative privileges of an international and expanding education, thus building a space for dialogue and sharing. With the aim of promoting the internationalization of the School, EMED promotes and participates in several national and international Mobility Programs. The objective of this internship report is to present and describe the work carried out during the curricular internship corresponding to the second semester of the second year of the Master in Translation and Multilingual Communication at the University of Minho. This internship lasted four months, at the International Affairs Office, at the School of Medicine, located at the UMinho’s Gualtar Campus, in Braga. This report will consist of a brief theoretical framework on medical translation, the main characteristics and difficulties, as well as the role of the translator as a specialist in this area and the role of cat tools in this area of translation. The advantages and disadvantages of using translation tools and their usefulness in medical translation will be presented, especially during my internship

    Education and Research in the context of the digital and ecological transformation of agriculture in the Banat Region and Baden-Württemberg - towards resource efficiency and resilience

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    Ziel des Banat Green Deal Projekts GreenERDE (Bildung und Forschung im Kontext der digitalen und ökologischen Transformation des Agrarbereichs im Banat und Baden-Württemberg - auf dem Weg zu Ressourceneffizienz und Resilienz) war es entsprechend der landestypischen Schwerpunkte Berufliche Bildung, Umwelt, Wirtschaft und Capacity Building das bisherige Engagement Baden-Württembergs im landwirtschaftlichen Berufsbildungszentrum Voiteg mit einer nachhaltigen Entwicklungsstrategie zur Stärkung der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit des Agrarbereichs im rumänischen Banat und benachbarter Regionen mit innovativen fachlichen und gleichzeitig soziokulturell interessanten Inhalten zu verbinden. Das im Rahmen des Projekts durchgeführte Fortbildungsprogramm Landwirtschaft in Verantwortung für unsere gemeinsame Welt, zielt auf den Wissens- und Erfahrungstransfer unter Landwirten und anderen interessirten Personen in der Banat-Region, Rumänien und anderen Teilen der Welt ab. Aktuelle und zukünftige Herausforderungen, wie die ökologische Umstellung und die digitale Transformation der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion, aber auch soziale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Aspekte wurden adressiert. Innovatives und relevantes Wissen aus Praxis, Forschungs- oder Entwicklungsprojekten in ganz Europa und anderen Kontinenten wird in einem Trainingsformat für interessierte Teilnehmer präsentiert.The Banat Green Deal project "GreenERDE" (Education and Research in the context of the digital and ecological transformation of agriculture in the Banat Region and Baden-Württemberg - towards resource efficiency and resilience) aimed to strengthen the the competitiveness of the agricultural sector in the Romanian Banat, Baden-Württemberg and neighboring regions with innovative technical and at the same time socio-cultural connect interesting content. The advanced training program Farming in Responsibility for Our Common World carried out as part of this project aims at the transfer of knowledge and experience among farmers and other interested persons. Current and future challenges, such as ecological conversion and the digital transformation of agricultural production, but also social, economic and cultural aspects were addressed. Innovative and relevant knowledge from practice, research or development projects throughout Europe and other continents is presented

    Taking Computation to Data: Integrating Privacy-preserving AI techniques and Blockchain Allowing Secure Analysis of Sensitive Data on Premise

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    PhD thesis in Information technologyWith the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), digital pathology has seen significant progress in recent years. However, the use of medical AI raises concerns about patient data privacy. The CLARIFY project is a research project funded under the European Union’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) program. The primary objective of CLARIFY is to create a reliable, automated digital diagnostic platform that utilizes cloud-based data algorithms and artificial intelligence to enable interpretation and diagnosis of wholeslide-images (WSI) from any location, maximizing the advantages of AI-based digital pathology. My research as an early stage researcher for the CLARIFY project centers on securing information systems using machine learning and access control techniques. To achieve this goal, I extensively researched privacy protection technologies such as federated learning, differential privacy, dataset distillation, and blockchain. These technologies have different priorities in terms of privacy, computational efficiency, and usability. Therefore, we designed a computing system that supports different levels of privacy security, based on the concept: taking computation to data. Our approach is based on two design principles. First, when external users need to access internal data, a robust access control mechanism must be established to limit unauthorized access. Second, it implies that raw data should be processed to ensure privacy and security. Specifically, we use smart contractbased access control and decentralized identity technology at the system security boundary to ensure the flexibility and immutability of verification. If the user’s raw data still cannot be directly accessed, we propose to use dataset distillation technology to filter out privacy, or use locally trained model as data agent. Our research focuses on improving the usability of these methods, and this thesis serves as a demonstration of current privacy-preserving and secure computing technologies
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