6,707 research outputs found
A Multi-level Analysis on Implementation of Low-Cost IVF in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Study of Uganda.
Introduction: Globally, infertility is a major reproductive disease that affects an estimated 186 million people worldwide. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the burden of infertility is considerably high, affecting one in every four couples of reproductive age. Furthermore, infertility in this context has severe psychosocial, emotional, economic and health consequences. Absence of affordable fertility services in Sub-Saharan Africa has been justified by overpopulation and limited resources, resulting in inequitable access to infertility treatment compared to developed countries. Therefore, low-cost IVF (LCIVF) initiatives have been developed to simplify IVF-related treatment, reduce costs, and improve access to treatment for individuals in low-resource contexts. However, there is a gap between the development of LCIVF initiatives and their implementation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Uganda is the first country in East and Central Africa to undergo implementation of LCIVF initiatives within its public health system at Mulago Womenâs Hospital.
Methods: This was an exploratory, qualitative, single, case study conducted at Mulago Womenâs Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. The objective of this study was to explore how LCIVF initiatives have been implemented within the public health system of Uganda at the macro-, meso- and micro-level. Primary qualitative data was collected using semi-structured interviews, hospital observations informal conversations, and document review. Using purposive and snowball sampling, a total of twenty-three key informants were interviewed including government officials, clinicians (doctors, nurses, technicians), hospital management, implementers, patient advocacy representatives, private sector practitioners, international organizational representatives, educational institution, and professional medical associations. Sources of secondary data included government and non-government reports, hospital records, organizational briefs, and press outputs. Using a multi-level data analysis approach, this study undertook a hybrid inductive/deductive thematic analysis, with the deductive analysis guided by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR).
Findings: Factors facilitating implementation included international recognition of infertility as a reproductive disease, strong political advocacy and oversight, patient needs & advocacy, government funding, inter-organizational collaboration, tension to change, competition in the private sector, intervention adaptability & trialability, relative priority, motivation &advocacy of fertility providers and specialist training. While barriers included scarcity of embryologists, intervention complexity, insufficient knowledge, evidence strength & quality of intervention, inadequate leadership engagement & hospital autonomy, poor public knowledge, limited engagement with traditional, cultural, and religious leaders, lack of salary incentives and concerns of revenue loss associated with low-cost options.
Research contributions: This study contributes to knowledge of factors salient to implementation of LCIVF initiatives in a Sub-Saharan context. Effective implementation of these initiatives requires (1) sustained political support and favourable policy & legislation, (2) public sensitization and engagement of traditional, cultural, and religious leaders (3) strengthening local innovation and capacity building of fertility health workers, in particular embryologists (4) sustained implementor leadership engagement and inter-organizational collaboration and (5) proven clinical evidence and utilization of LCIVF initiatives in innovator countries. It also adds to the literature on the applicability of the CFIR framework in explaining factors that influence successful implementation in developing countries and offer opportunities for comparisons across studies
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Production networks in the cultural and creative sector: case studies from the publishing industry
The CICERONE project investigates cultural and creative industries through case study research, with a focus on production networks. This report, part of WP2, examines the publishing industry within this framework. It aims to understand the industryâs hidden aspects, address statistical issues in measurement, and explore the industryâs transformation and integration of cultural and economic values. The report provides an overview of the production network, explores statistical challenges, and presents qualitative analyses of two case studies. It concludes by highlighting the potential of the Global Production Network (GPN) approach for analyzing, researching, policymaking, and intervening in the European publishing network.
The CICERONE projectâs case study research delves into the publishing industry, investigating its production networks and examining key aspects often unseen by the public. The report addresses statistical challenges in measuring the industry and sheds light on its ongoing transformations and integration of cultural and economic values. It presents an overview of the production network, explores statistical issues, and provides qualitative analyses of two case studies. The report emphasizes the potential of the GPN approach for analyzing and intervening in the European publishing network, ultimately contributing to research, policymaking, and understanding within the industry
Seamless Multimodal Biometrics for Continuous Personalised Wellbeing Monitoring
Artificially intelligent perception is increasingly present in the lives of
every one of us. Vehicles are no exception, (...) In the near future, pattern
recognition will have an even stronger role in vehicles, as self-driving cars
will require automated ways to understand what is happening around (and within)
them and act accordingly. (...) This doctoral work focused on advancing
in-vehicle sensing through the research of novel computer vision and pattern
recognition methodologies for both biometrics and wellbeing monitoring. The
main focus has been on electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics, a trait well-known
for its potential for seamless driver monitoring. Major efforts were devoted to
achieving improved performance in identification and identity verification in
off-the-person scenarios, well-known for increased noise and variability. Here,
end-to-end deep learning ECG biometric solutions were proposed and important
topics were addressed such as cross-database and long-term performance,
waveform relevance through explainability, and interlead conversion. Face
biometrics, a natural complement to the ECG in seamless unconstrained
scenarios, was also studied in this work. The open challenges of masked face
recognition and interpretability in biometrics were tackled in an effort to
evolve towards algorithms that are more transparent, trustworthy, and robust to
significant occlusions. Within the topic of wellbeing monitoring, improved
solutions to multimodal emotion recognition in groups of people and
activity/violence recognition in in-vehicle scenarios were proposed. At last,
we also proposed a novel way to learn template security within end-to-end
models, dismissing additional separate encryption processes, and a
self-supervised learning approach tailored to sequential data, in order to
ensure data security and optimal performance. (...)Comment: Doctoral thesis presented and approved on the 21st of December 2022
to the University of Port
Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined
Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders
Amazonian Vision: Representations of Women Artists in Victorian Fiction
Title from PDF of title page, viewed June 14, 2023Dissertation advisors: Jennifer Phegley and Linda MitchellVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 320-337)Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Department of English Language and Literature. Department of History. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2023This dissertation examines representations of women artistsâwriters, musicians, painters, and photographersâin nineteenth-century British novels and poetry written by Charlotte BrontĂ«, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Anne BrontĂ«, Dinah Craik, Charlotte Yonge, and Amy Levy. It analyzes how their heroines wield literal and metaphorical vision to navigate the male gaze and male surveillance of the Victorian art world. These authors utilize the symbiotic relationship between vision and art to contest binary societal definitions that insisted men were creative and women imitative.
This study is arranged by forms of vision adopted by the characters addressed in each chapter. Chapter one examines how the heroines of Charlotte BrontĂ«âs Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Barrett Browningâs Aurora Leigh exercise âspiritual vision,â which facilitates Miltonic artistic agency as they author autobiographies following the blinding of their (male) romantic counterparts. Chapter two examines George Eliotâs use of contrasting characters in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda to show how Eliotâs women must step outside of the frame as art objects and wield âmoral visionâ to realize her vision of the artist as an instrument of human sympathy. Chapter three examines the âAmazonian visionâ adopted by women painters in Anne BrontĂ«âs The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Dinah Craikâs Olive, and Charlotte Yongeâs The Pillars of the House; they forge entry into the historically male-dominated visual art world and achieve financial self-sufficiency by selling their work. Finally, chapter four examines how adopting âmetropolitan visionâ empowers the speaker of Amy Levyâs âA London Plane-Treeâ poems and the Lorimer sisters in her novel The Romance of a Shop, respectively, as a poet and as professional photographers.
This work utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to synthesize discussion of the novels with historical sourcesâprimarily art histories, biographies, the authorsâ diaries and letters, and nineteenth-century periodical press articles. It finds that, in consideration of historical circumstances, the women authors under discussion exercised progressive vision of their own. This vision was surprisingly radical in its early manifestations but often reliant on spiritualization and abstraction; over time, in fiction as in history, women artistsâ presence in the art world gained immediacy and strength.Spiritual vision: the miltonic artist in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh -- Moral vision: sympathy, vanity, and art in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda -- Amazonian vision: painterly success in The tenant of Wildfell Hall, Olive, and The pillars of the house -- Metropolitan vision: London-inspired art in Amy Levy's "A London plane-tree" poems and The romance of a sho
âNot the story you want, Iâm sureâ: Mental health recovery and the narratives of people from marginalised communities
Background: The dominant narrative in mental health policy and practice has shifted in the 21st century from one of chronic ill health or incurability to an orientation towards recovery. A recovery-based approach is now the most frequently used in services in the Global North, and its relevance has also been explored in Global South settings. Despite the ubiquity of the recovery approach, people experiencing poverty, homelessness, intersecting oppressions (based for example on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or ability), and other forms of social marginalisation remain under-represented within recovery-oriented research. More inclusive research has been called for to ensure that knowledge of recovery processes is not based solely on the experiences of the relatively well-resourced.
Personal narratives of recovery from mental distress have played a central role in the establishment of the recovery approach within mental health policy and practice. Originating in survivor/service-user movements, the use of ârecovery narrativesâ has now become widespread for diverse purposes, including staff training to improve service delivery and increase empathy, public health campaigns to challenge stigma, online interventions to increase access to self-care resources, and as a distinctive feature of peer support. Research suggests that recovery-focused narratives can have benefits and also risks for narrators and recipients. At the same time, the elicitation of such narratives by healthcare researchers, educators and practitioners has been problematised by survivor-researchers and other critical theorists, as a co-option of lived experience for neoliberal purposes.
Following a systematic review of empirical research studies undertaken on characteristics of recovery narratives (presented in Chapter 4), a need for empirical research on the narratives of people from socially marginalised groups was identified. What kinds of stories might we/they be telling, and what are their experiences of telling their stories? What do their experiences tell us about the use of stories within a recovery approach?
Aim: Drawing on a body of critical scholarship, my aim is to conduct an empirical inquiry into (i) characteristics of recovery stories told by people from socially marginalised groups, and (ii) their experiences of telling their stories in formal and everyday settings.
Method: I undertook a critical narrative inquiry based on the stories of 77 people from marginalised groups, collected in the context of a wider study. This comprised narratives from people with lived experience of mental distress who additionally met one or more of the following criteria: (i) had experiences of psychosis; (ii) were from Black, Asian and other minoritised ethnic communities; (iii) are under-served by services (operationalised as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer + communities (LGBTQ+) or people identified as having multiple and complex needs); or (iv) had peer support roles. Two-part interviews were conducted (18 conducted by me). Part A consisted of an open-ended question designed to elicit a narrative, and part B was a semi-structured interview inviting participants to reflect on their experiences of telling their recovery stories in different contexts. Following Riessmanâs analytical approach, I undertook three forms of analysis: a structural narrative analysis of Part A across the dataset (informed by a preliminary conceptual framework developed in Chapter 4); a thematic analysis of Part B where participants additionally reflected on telling their stories; and an in-depth performative narrative analysis of two accounts (parts A and B) from people with multiple and complex needs.
Findings: In a structural analysis of Part A, the recovery narratives told by people from marginalised groups were found to be diverse and multidimensional. Most (97%) could be characterised by the nine dimensions described in the preliminary conceptual framework (Genre; Positioning; Emotional Tone; Relationship with Recovery; Trajectory; Turning Points; Narrative Sequence; Protagonists; and Use of Metaphors). Each dimension of the framework contained a number of different types. These were expanded as a result of the structural analysis to contain more types: for example, a âcyclicalâ type of trajectory was added), and a more comprehensive typology of recovery narratives was produced. Two narratives were found to be âoutliersâ, in that their structure, form and content could not adequately be described by the majority of existing dimensions and types. These served as exemplars of the frameworkâs limitations.
In a thematic analysis of Part B, my overarching finding was that power differentials between narrators and recipients could be seen as the key factor affecting participantsâ experiences of telling their recovery stories in formal and everyday settings. Four themes describing the possibilities and problems raised by telling their stories were identified: (i) âChallenging the status quoâ; (ii) âRisky consequencesâ; (iii) âProducing acceptable storiesâ and (iv) âUntellable storiesâ.
In a performative analysis of two narratives of people with multiple and complex needs (Parts A and B), I found two contrasting ways of responding to the invitation to tell a recovery story: a ânarrative of personal lackâ and a ânarrative of resistanceâ. I demonstrate how the genre of ârecovery narrativeâ, with its focus on transformation at the level of personal identity, may function to occlude social and structural causes of distress, and reinforce ideas of personal responsibility for ongoing distress in the face of unchanging living conditions.
Conclusion: The recovery narratives of people from socially marginalised groups are diverse and multidimensional. Told in some contexts, they may hold power to challenge the status quo. However, telling stories of lived experience and recovery is risky, and there may be pressure on narrators to produce âacceptableâ stories, or to omit or de-emphasise experiences which challenge dominant cultural narratives. A recovery-based approach to the use of lived experience narratives in research and practice may be contributing towards an over-emphasis on individualist approaches to the reduction of distress. This over-emphasis can be seen to reflect what has been identified as a global trend towards the âinstrumentalâ use of personal narratives for utilitarian purposes based on market values. Attention to power differentials and structural as well as agentic factors is vital to ensure that the use of narratives in research and practice does not contribute towards a decontextualised, reductionist form of recovery which pays insufficient attention to the economic, institutional and political injustices that people experiencing mental distress may systematically endure. A sensitive and socially just use of lived experience narratives will remain alert to a variety of power dimensions present within the contexts in which they are shared and hear
Paediatric Injury from Powered Off-Road Vehicles
Background
Powered off-road vehicles, such as quad-bikes and two-wheeled motorcycles, are popularly used recreationally by children, and are also used in a variety of farming and agricultural contexts. However, crashes can result in serious injuries and deaths, and as such are an important public health concern for Australian children. Compared to adults, children have different riding patterns, injury causes and risk factors relating to their level of development, as well as different patterns of injury outcomes and severity.
Aims
This work aims to investigate paediatric quad-bike and motorcycle riding patterns and behaviours, along with risk factors, injury severity, outcomes and potential avenues for injury prevention counter-measures. The work consists of five related studies.
Methods and Results
The first study was a survey of paediatric off-road vehicle riders, which was undertaken to characterise patterns of use, rider behaviours, experience and attitudes. Recreational motorcycle riding was most common, with children having high rates of previous riding experience and often participating in âstructuredâ riding within organised motorsports competitions and events. There was a small proportion of âunstructuredâ riding in the context of agriculture or on private properties. Riders generally rode frequently and used helmets and other protective gear.
The second study examined a group of children admitted to a paediatric hospital as a result of injury sustained from an off-road vehicle crash. In-depth crash investigation techniques examined injury mechanisms and related them to injury outcomes, along with rider, environmental and vehicular risk factors. A variety of recurring mechanisms emerged, particularly loss-of-control events leading to impacts with the ground or vehicle. A wide range of injuries were also observed, particularly to the extremities. A case-control component of the study identified a lower rider to vehicle weight ratio as a factor associated with higher crash risk.
The third and fourth studies used large, linked population-level hospital admission and mortality datasets. The first of these examined injury epidemiology and outcomes for paediatric off-road vehicle crashes across New South Wales over a 17-year time period. The outcomes for different vehicle types were compared. The findings demonstrated the large burden of injury caused by ORV crashes in terms of hospital admissions and operative interventions. Furthermore, although on an individual level, quad-bike injuries were associated with higher injury severity, the far greater number of two-wheeled off-road motorcycle crash admissions suggest that motorcycles should be an injury prevention priority.
The second linked data study examined the subset of children who have multiple hospital admissions following off-road vehicle crashes. Children who re-present to hospital repeatedly are a particularly vulnerable group, prone to more serious injury, and higher overall costs to the healthcare system. âRecidivistâ riders were compared to non-recidivists across various demographic, vehicle and injury outcome factors, highlighting the areas in which potential recidivists may be identified or targeted for injury prevention interventions.
The fifth study was a systematic review of injury prevention countermeasures delivered through clinical environments such as hospitals and Emergency Departments, centred around the concept of the âTeachable Momentâ: that children may be more receptive or amenable to behaviour change after sustaining an injury. The strengths and weaknesses of interventions that apply this model were identified, which may inform potential interventions pertaining to off-road crashes. The review found that multi-modal approaches combining face-to-face counselling or teaching, supplemented with other forms of written or visual communication, often paired with the provision of safety equipment and accurate monitoring as the most effective means of intervention. However, injury prevention programs are often limited by short-term and largely self-reported outcome measures, so research and programs applying these findings to off-road vehicle riders should be designed with robust design methods and appropriate measures of behaviour change, knowledge gain or injury reduction.
Conclusion
The results of the project overall demonstrate that off-road vehicle injuries are a large and important cause of injury, disability and death for Australian children. An overarching theme of this project is to demonstrate that children who participate in off-road riding are a unique and vulnerable population. Riding patterns are largely recreational, and the resultant injuries are common, spanning the spectrum of severity. Factors associated with worse injury outcomes and recidivism are explored, which, along with the review of injury prevention countermeasures delivered in clinical settings, may help re-prioritise and target injury prevention resources and research.
Ultimately the goal of this project, as with any injury research, is to try to prevent or mitigate the severity off-road crashes. The studies investigate various aspects of paediatric off-road riding and provide important foundational knowledge for researchers and clinicians to work towards real-world applications and interventions
Liturgical Practices for Full Participation: Creating Opportunities for Engagement in Corporate Worship for People Living with Intellectual Disabilities at the Mooroolbark Salvation Army
The Mooroolbark Salvation Army is a place of welcome and acceptance for people with disabilities. However, people with intellectual disabilities often have limited opportunities for engagement in corporate worship. The act of worship is a practice everyone should be able to participate in, but barriers often limit engagement for people with disabilities. This project thesis explored and sought to address these barriers and create opportunities for full participation for people with intellectual disabilities. A small diverse group of people from the Mooroolbark Salvation Army came together for ten weeks commencing in February 2022 to consider how to attend to engagement opportunities in worship. During the weekly sessions, the group explored the topics of worship and liturgy. Theological themes such as the body of Christ and the imago Dei were also discussed in relation to full participation. The group also spent time participating in a variety of liturgical practices. These practices were then reviewed, and consideration was given to how each could be used or adapted to facilitate full participation for people with intellectual disabilities. The group then constructed twelve liturgies that seek to provide a variety of ways for people to engage in worship. These liturgies are the beginning of a journey to foster full participation for the people of the Mooroolbark Salvation Army who live with intellectual disabilities
An âotherâ experience of videogames: analyzing the connections between videogames and the lived experience of chronic pain
In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the âhumanâ and a false idea of âuniversalâ experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider additional sub-questions to further tease out why videogames disability, chronic pain, game design, lived experience, human centered design, embodiment in video games have impacted me so deeply and how this ties to my identity as a disabled woman. I further offer this dissertation to highlight the growing research of lived experience and disability in the field of game studies, providing empirical data that offers a foundational look of how I as a member of the chronic pain community think and feel about videogames, as well as how a small portion of the chronic pain community discusses videogames and the range of experiences this encompasses. In doing so, I unpack and argue on the relationship that exists between chronic pain and videogames, and further articulate why this matters.
In Chapter 1 I provide necessary history and information regarding my research to better articulate the findings as presented in the following chapters. In Chapter 2, I analyze my connection to Animal Crossing: New Leaf (AC:NL) (Nintendo EAD, 2012) and explore opportunities about genre and mechanics as reflections of my own daily lived experience with chronic pain, especially including my experience in a 2014 pain rehabilitation program. Through this process, I define the âslice of lifeâ genre and argue that AC:NL is exemplary of its markers.
In Chapter 3 I provide a deep reading and analysis of Nintendoâs GameCube release Chibi-Robo! (Skip Ltd. et al., 2005) to ârestoryâ the titular main character to have chronic pain like my own. Through the lens of debility and capacitation machines, I map these ideas onto the biopsychosocial model to organize a thorough analysis of his restoried identity. In modding the gameâs narrative to reflect a lived experience of chronic pain like my own, I interweave fanfiction with deep reading and deep gameplay to unpack what representation I am looking for in videogames both narratively and mechanically. In this I further argue how this practice can be used to inform future game design.
Finally, in Chapter 4, I interview members of the chronic pain community to understand their perspective on the connections between their lived experience with chronic pain and videogames, as well as how additional factors of their identity impact those experiences. For this I engage in a mixed methods design to conduct a survey and formal interviews to offer foundational work on how the chronic pain community interacts with videogames. I offer this project to intersect current research in chronic pain and videogames (and its related technology) that focuses on games as tools for âcuringâ pain, and argue the importance of considering what embodiment people with chronic pain already have in videogames instead.
Ultimately, I argue for the necessity to complicate current design practices in human centered design (HCD) and game design. To do so, I highlight the lived experience of Othered identities to combat misguided notions of âuniversalâ intent. In this, I analyze the inherent connections between videogames and disability, in this case chronic pain, through embodiment and lived experience. I center in on how my experience of chronic pain has impacted the way in which I engage and think about with videogames, and further, how my experiences align with that of the chronic pain community
Next-Generation Industrial Control System (ICS) Security:Towards ICS Honeypots for Defence-in-Depth Security
The advent of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing has led to an increased convergence of traditional manufacturing and production technologies with IP communications. Legacy Industrial Control System (ICS) devices are now exposed to a wide range of previously unconsidered threats, which must be considered to ensure the safe operation of industrial processes. Especially as cyberspace is presenting itself as a popular domain for nation-state operations, including against critical infrastructure. Honeypots are a well-known concept within traditional IT security, and they can enable a more proactive approach to security, unlike traditional systems. More work needs to be done to understand their usefulness within OT and critical infrastructure. This thesis advances beyond current honeypot implementations and furthers the current state-of-the-art by delivering novel ways of deploying ICS honeypots and delivering concrete answers to key research questions within the area. This is done by answering the question previously raised from a multitude of perspectives. We discuss relevant legislation, such as the UK Cyber Assessment Framework, the US NIST Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, and associated industry-based standards and guidelines supporting operator compliance. Standards and guidance are used to frame a discussion on our survey of existing ICS honeypot implementations in the literature and their role in supporting regulatory objectives. However, these deployments are not always correctly configured and might differ from a real ICS. Based on these insights, we propose a novel framework towards the classification and implementation of ICS honeypots. This is underpinned by a study into the passive identification of ICS honeypots using Internet scanner data to identify honeypot characteristics. We also present how honeypots can be leveraged to identify when bespoke ICS vulnerabilities are exploited within the organisational networkâfurther strengthening the case for honeypot usage within critical infrastructure environments. Additionally, we demonstrate a fundamentally different approach to the deployment of honeypots. By deploying it as a deterrent, to reduce the likelihood that an adversary interacts with a real system. This is important as skilled attackers are now adept at fingerprinting and avoiding honeypots. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate that honeypots can provide several benefits to the cyber security of and alignment to regulations within the critical infrastructure environment
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