467,388 research outputs found

    Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

    Get PDF
    Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

    Emergency Care Handover (ECHO study) across care boundaries : the need for joint decision making and consideration of psychosocial history

    Get PDF
    Background: Inadequate handover in emergency care is a threat to patient safety. Handover across care boundaries poses particular problems due to different professional, organisational and cultural backgrounds. While there have been many suggestions for standardisation of handover content, relatively little is known about the verbal behaviours that shape handover conversations. This paper explores both what is communicated (content) and how this is communicated (verbal behaviours) during different types of handover conversations across care boundaries in emergency care. Methods: Three types of interorganisational (ambulance service to emergency department (ED) in ‘resuscitation’ and ‘majors’ areas) and interdepartmental handover conversations (referrals to acute medicine) were audio recorded in three National Health Service EDs. Handover conversations were segmented into utterances. Frequency counts for content and language forms were derived for each type of handover using Discourse Analysis. Verbal behaviours were identified using Conversation Analysis. Results: 203 handover conversations were analysed. Handover conversations involving ambulance services were predominantly descriptive (60%–65% of utterances), unidirectional and focused on patient presentation (75%–80%). Referrals entailed more collaborative talk focused on the decision to admit and immediate care needs. Across all types of handover, only 1.5%–5% of handover conversation content related to the patient's social and psychological needs. Conclusions: Handover may entail both descriptive talk aimed at information transfer and collaborative talk aimed at joint decision-making. Standardisation of handover needs to accommodate collaborative aspects and should incorporate communication of information relevant to the patient's social and psychological needs to establish appropriate care arrangements at the earliest opportunity

    Development and evaluation of an intervention to improve further education students' understanding of higher education assessment criteria: three studies

    Get PDF
    Three studies about helping Further Education students prepare for study at universityThis paper reports three studies about preparing Further Education (FE) students for the transition to Higher Education (HE) by improving their understanding of HE assessment criteria. In study 1, students and tutors in both FE and HE were interviewed for a qualitative analysis of their understandings and expectations about assessment criteria. In study 2, students in FE and HE completed questionnaires measuring self-rated understanding and ability about assessment criteria, and beliefs about essay writing. Studies 1 and 2 both showed that FE students were more confident than HE students about their understanding and ability in relation to assessment criteria, but FE students’ understandings suggested more surface approaches to learning and more naïve epistemological beliefs. In study 3, a workshop intervention to improve FE students’ understandings of HE assessment criteria was evaluated in a comparative longitudinal trial. The intervention reduced FE students’ self-rated understanding and ability, and promoted more sophisticated beliefs about essay writing, by comparison with students who received standard tuition. We concluded that interventions to develop more realistic understandings of what is required in academic writing could be used to prepare FE students more effectively for the transition to HE

    User-centred interface design for cross-language information retrieval

    Get PDF
    This paper reports on the user-centered design methodology and techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements and how these requirements informed the first phase of the user interface design for a Cross-Language Information Retrieval System. We describe a set of factors involved in analysis of the data collected and, finally discuss the implications for user interface design based on the findings

    Data mining technology for the evaluation of learning content interaction

    Get PDF
    Interactivity is central for the success of learning. In e-learning and other educational multimedia environments, the evaluation of interaction and behaviour is particularly crucial. Data mining – a non-intrusive, objective analysis technology – shall be proposed as the central evaluation technology for the analysis of the usage of computer-based educational environments and in particular of the interaction with educational content. Basic mining techniques are reviewed and their application in a Web-based third-level course environment is illustrated. Analytic models capturing interaction aspects from the application domain (learning) and the software infrastructure (interactive multimedia) are required for the meaningful interpretation of mining results

    Culture and disaster risk management - synthesis of stakeholder attitudes during 3 Stakeholder Assemblies in Romania, Italy and Portugal

    Get PDF
    This report provides a synthesis of the results of three CARISMAND Stakeholder Assemblies held in A) Bucharest,Romania on April 14-15, 2016; B) Rome,Italy on February 27-28, 2017; and C) Lisbon,Portugal on February 27-28, 2018. These Stakeholder Assemblies, together with six Citizen Summits (see Deliverables D5.3 – D5.9) were part of the CARISMAND cycle of events (see Figure 1 below). This cycle of events was the key concept at the core of the CARISMAND project which aimed to ensure a comprehensive feedback loop betweendisaster practitioners and citizens. It also allowed for the progression of ideas co-created by disaster practitioners and citizens. The locations of the three Stakeholder Assemblies were chosen due to their rather different “backgrounds”. The three countries had been struck at the time of the respective event by different types of disasters. In addition, the three countries have very different “cultures”, or cultural impacts, at a societal level. Romania has a comparatively strong authoritative systems due to its political history; Italy has experienced a strong direct in-flow of migrants in the last years due to its geological location; and Portugal has long been a traditional “melting pot” where, over more than a millennium, people from different cultural backgrounds and ethnic origins (in particular North Africa, South America, and Europe) have lived together. Accordingly, these differences were expected to allow a wide range of practitioners’ attitudes and perceptions related to cultural factors in disaster management to emerge. In order to not only gather a variety of attitudes and perceptions but also promote cross-sectional knowledge transfer, the audience in all three events consisted of a wide range of practitioners who are typically involved in disaster management, e.g., civil protection agencies , the emergency services, paramedics, nurses, environmental protection agencies, the Red Cross, firefighters, the military, and the police. Further, these practitioners were from several regions in the respective country; in Portugal, the Stakeholder Assembly also included practitioners from the island of Madeira. The 40-60 participants per event were recruited via invitations sent to various organisations and institutions that play a role in disaster management, and via direct contacts of local partners in the CARISMAND consortium. Each assembly consisted of a mix of presentations and discussion groups to combine dissemination with information gathering (for detailed schedules see Appendices A1-A3). In an initial general assembly, the event started with presentations of the CARISMAND project and its main goals and concepts. Then, participants were split into small working groups in separate breakout rooms, where they discussed and provided feedback on a specific topic. After each working group session, panel discussions allowed the participants to present the results of their working group to the rest of the audience. After each panel discussion, keynote speakers gave presentations related to the topic that had been discussed during the working groups. This schedule was designed to ensure that participants are provided with detailed information about recent developments in disaster management, but without influencing the attitudes and perceptions expressed in the working groups. In the third Stakeholder Assembly, different sets of recommendations for practitioners (related to the use of cultural factors in disaster management) were presented to the general audience, followed by small discussion group sessions as described above.The project was co-funded by the European Commission within the Horizon2020 Programme (2014–2020).peer-reviewe

    An exploration of the potential of Automatic Speech Recognition to assist and enable receptive communication in higher education

    Get PDF
    The potential use of Automatic Speech Recognition to assist receptive communication is explored. The opportunities and challenges that this technology presents students and staff to provide captioning of speech online or in classrooms for deaf or hard of hearing students and assist blind, visually impaired or dyslexic learners to read and search learning material more readily by augmenting synthetic speech with natural recorded real speech is also discussed and evaluated. The automatic provision of online lecture notes, synchronised with speech, enables staff and students to focus on learning and teaching issues, while also benefiting learners unable to attend the lecture or who find it difficult or impossible to take notes at the same time as listening, watching and thinking

    Measuring and monitoring injury

    Get PDF

    The role of data in health care disparities in medicaid managed care

    Get PDF
    BACKGROUND: The Affordable Care Act includes provisions to standardize the collection of data on health care quality that can be used to measure disparities. We conducted a qualitative study among leaders of Medicaid managed care plans, that currently have access to standardized quality data stratified by race and ethnicity, to learn how they use it to address disparities. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 health plan leaders across 9 Medicaid managed care plans in California. We used purposive sampling to maximize heterogeneity in geography and plan type (e.g., non-profit, commercial). We performed a thematic analysis based on iterative coding by two investigators. RESULTS: We found 4 major themes. Improving overall quality was tightly linked to a focus on standardized metrics that are integral to meeting regulatory or financial incentives. However, reducing disparities was not driven by standardized data, but by a mix of factors. Data were frequently only examined by race and ethnicity when overall performance was low. Disparities were attributed to either individual choices or cultural and linguistic factors, with plans focusing interventions on recently immigrated groups. CONCLUSIONS: While plans' efforts to address overall quality were often informed by standardized data, actions to reduce disparities were not, at least partly because there were few regulatory or financial incentives driving meaningful use of data on disparities. Standardized data, as envisaged by the Affordable Care Act, could become more useful for addressing disparities if they are combined with policies and regulations that promote health care equity

    The Evolution of Embedding Metadata in Blockchain Transactions

    Get PDF
    The use of blockchains is growing every day, and their utility has greatly expanded from sending and receiving crypto-coins to smart-contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations. Modern blockchains underpin a variety of applications: from designing a global identity to improving satellite connectivity. In our research we look at the ability of blockchains to store metadata in an increasing volume of transactions and with evolving focus of utilization. We further show that basic approaches to improving blockchain privacy also rely on embedding metadata. This paper identifies and classifies real-life blockchain transactions embedding metadata of a number of major protocols running essentially over the bitcoin blockchain. The empirical analysis here presents the evolution of metadata utilization in the recent years, and the discussion suggests steps towards preventing criminal use. Metadata are relevant to any blockchain, and our analysis considers primarily bitcoin as a case study. The paper concludes that simultaneously with both expanding legitimate utilization of embedded metadata and expanding blockchain functionality, the applied research on improving anonymity and security must also attempt to protect against blockchain abuse.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Network
    corecore