5,770 research outputs found

    HIV and AIDS in Greater Manchester: service delivery in times of devolution, neoliberalism and austerity

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    This research examines the impact of devolution, neoliberalism and austerity on the governance and delivery of specialist HIV and AIDS physical and mental health services for service users across the Manchester City Region. This research further documents the decline of specialist HIV and AIDS healthcare, including mental health services, over the last decade and details the extent of these changes on people living with HIV and AIDS across the Manchester City Region. Focusing on the interplay of neoliberal policy interventions with the structural changes implied in devolution, the research locates the participants' accounts within the broader analysis of cultural, political and economic developments in health policy and (urban) governance. This thesis draws on a queer-feminist methodology and a series of semi-structured interviews with service users of HIV and AIDS healthcare provisions; organisations specialising in HIV and AIDS support, advice and advocacy services to improve health outcomes; healthcare staff specialising in HIV and AIDS healthcare and those who advocate for improved treatments; academics who work in the field of HIV studies; and activists who are campaigning for improved HIV and AIDS services. The interview data was analysed to show how funding changes have affected the delivery of HIV and AIDS healthcare services. Secondary data sources, such as public health data, were also utilised to address gaps within the interview data. The interview data shows that the shift to cheaper generalist services results in poorer service provision because healthcare staff may not understand the full range of needs of service users with HIV and AIDS. Moreover, the study participants pointed to the persistence of discrimination in healthcare settings, leading to poorer mental health. As a result, service users may stop taking their antiretroviral treatments. Historically, HIV has been heavily stigmatised, and this is a theme which arose in the data. This study focuses on specific campaigns, such as “U=U” and “You Can’t Pass It On,” which attempt to combat HIV-associated stigma and discrimination by creating awareness. Still, the efforts of these campaigns have only tended to reach those who know about HIV. In response, there has been some work in Manchester to educate healthcare professionals, but this is limited and still in its infancy. This study further argues that there is an urgent need for increased investment in specialist HIV and AIDS healthcare services. There needs to be a refocus on providing services across the Manchester City Region. Furthermore, the research data analysis suggests that even more funding may be required to achieve the goal of advanced specialist training among health professionals to secure adequate healthcare provisions for people living with HIV and AIDS within the Greater Manchester City Region

    Flood dynamics derived from video remote sensing

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    Flooding is by far the most pervasive natural hazard, with the human impacts of floods expected to worsen in the coming decades due to climate change. Hydraulic models are a key tool for understanding flood dynamics and play a pivotal role in unravelling the processes that occur during a flood event, including inundation flow patterns and velocities. In the realm of river basin dynamics, video remote sensing is emerging as a transformative tool that can offer insights into flow dynamics and thus, together with other remotely sensed data, has the potential to be deployed to estimate discharge. Moreover, the integration of video remote sensing data with hydraulic models offers a pivotal opportunity to enhance the predictive capacity of these models. Hydraulic models are traditionally built with accurate terrain, flow and bathymetric data and are often calibrated and validated using observed data to obtain meaningful and actionable model predictions. Data for accurately calibrating and validating hydraulic models are not always available, leaving the assessment of the predictive capabilities of some models deployed in flood risk management in question. Recent advances in remote sensing have heralded the availability of vast video datasets of high resolution. The parallel evolution of computing capabilities, coupled with advancements in artificial intelligence are enabling the processing of data at unprecedented scales and complexities, allowing us to glean meaningful insights into datasets that can be integrated with hydraulic models. The aims of the research presented in this thesis were twofold. The first aim was to evaluate and explore the potential applications of video from air- and space-borne platforms to comprehensively calibrate and validate two-dimensional hydraulic models. The second aim was to estimate river discharge using satellite video combined with high resolution topographic data. In the first of three empirical chapters, non-intrusive image velocimetry techniques were employed to estimate river surface velocities in a rural catchment. For the first time, a 2D hydraulicvmodel was fully calibrated and validated using velocities derived from Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle (UAV) image velocimetry approaches. This highlighted the value of these data in mitigating the limitations associated with traditional data sources used in parameterizing two-dimensional hydraulic models. This finding inspired the subsequent chapter where river surface velocities, derived using Large Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV), and flood extents, derived using deep neural network-based segmentation, were extracted from satellite video and used to rigorously assess the skill of a two-dimensional hydraulic model. Harnessing the ability of deep neural networks to learn complex features and deliver accurate and contextually informed flood segmentation, the potential value of satellite video for validating two dimensional hydraulic model simulations is exhibited. In the final empirical chapter, the convergence of satellite video imagery and high-resolution topographical data bridges the gap between visual observations and quantitative measurements by enabling the direct extraction of velocities from video imagery, which is used to estimate river discharge. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the significant potential of emerging video-based remote sensing datasets and offers approaches for integrating these data into hydraulic modelling and discharge estimation practice. The incorporation of LSPIV techniques into flood modelling workflows signifies a methodological progression, especially in areas lacking robust data collection infrastructure. Satellite video remote sensing heralds a major step forward in our ability to observe river dynamics in real time, with potentially significant implications in the domain of flood modelling science

    Panacea or producer? Analysing the relationship between international Law and disaster risk

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    This thesis seeks to critically analyse the relationship between international law and disaster risk. Despite the increasing global threat that disasters present, international law’s engagement with their prevention remains at a relatively nascent stage compared to the development of other areas of the law. However, the progress that has been made since the United Nation’s International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s suggests that international law is widely viewed as a valuable tool in addressing the issue and reducing the risk of disasters. In contrast to this, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways that international law itself may also play a role in the creation of disaster risk. It is here that the project makes an important and original contribution, by interrogating this presupposition and analysing the ways that international law itself may be culpable in the creation and exacerbation of risk. Through a novel, compound theoretical lens combining Marxist and Third World approaches to international law and insights from disaster theory, the thesis highlights the longstanding complicity of international law in the production of disaster risk. The thesis draws on understandings of disasters as processes that reach back through time, and thus begins its analysis with an examination of the early history of international law and the role of its colonial doctrines in the historic construction of vulnerability and hazards. It then turns to modern international law, particularly within the realm of international economic law, to examine the continuing legacies of these early developments and the ongoing role of international law in disaster risk creation. Overall, the thesis offers an original contribution to conversations on the connection between international law and disaster risk. Rather than focusing only on the positive role that international law can have in the reduction of disaster risk found in the majority of the literature, it seeks to highlight more pathological aspects of the relationship between the two and the implications of this. It ultimately concludes that unless the burgeoning field of international disaster law engages more with such critical accounts of international law and their understandings of the harm the law produces, then it will remain blind to a major source of disaster risk creation and be unsuccessful in achieving its normative aims

    An examination of the verbal behaviour of intergroup discrimination

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    This thesis examined relationships between psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, prejudicial attitudes, and dehumanization across three cross-sectional studies with an additional proposed experimental study. Psychological flexibility refers to mindful attention to the present moment, willing acceptance of private experiences, and engaging in behaviours congruent with one’s freely chosen values. Inflexibility, on the other hand, indicates a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions, entanglement with one’s thoughts, and rigid behavioural patterns. Study 1 found limited correlations between inflexibility and sexism, racism, homonegativity, and dehumanization. Study 2 demonstrated more consistent positive associations between inflexibility and prejudice. And Study 3 controlled for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, finding inflexibility predicted hostile sexism and racism beyond these factors. While showing some relationships, particularly with sexism and racism, psychological inflexibility did not consistently correlate with varied prejudices across studies. The proposed randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention to reduce sexism through enhanced psychological flexibility. Overall, findings provide mixed support for the utility of flexibility-based skills in addressing complex societal prejudices. Research should continue examining flexibility integrated with socio-cultural approaches to promote equity

    Introduction of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carrying wAlbB Wolbachia sharply decreases dengue incidence in disease hotspots

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    Partial replacement of resident Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with introduced mosquitoes carrying certain strains of inherited Wolbachia symbionts can result in transmission blocking of dengue and other viruses of public health importance. Wolbachia strain wAlbB is an effective transmission blocker and stable at high temperatures, making it particularly suitable for hot tropical climates. Following trial field releases in Malaysia, releases using wAlbB Ae. aegypti have become operationalized by the Malaysian health authorities. We report here on an average reduction in dengue fever of 62.4% (confidence intervals 50-71%) in 20 releases sites when compared to 76 control sites in high rise residential areas. Importantly the level of dengue reduction increased with Wolbachia frequency, with 75.8% reduction (61-87%) estimated at 100% Wolbachia frequency. These findings indicate large impacts of wAlbB Wolbachia invasions on dengue fever incidence in an operational setting, with incidence expected to further decrease as wider areas are invaded

    Dataflow Programming and Acceleration of Computationally-Intensive Algorithms

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    The volume of unstructured textual information continues to grow due to recent technological advancements. This resulted in an exponential growth of information generated in various formats, including blogs, posts, social networking, and enterprise documents. Numerous Enterprise Architecture (EA) documents are also created daily, such as reports, contracts, agreements, frameworks, architecture requirements, designs, and operational guides. The processing and computation of this massive amount of unstructured information necessitate substantial computing capabilities and the implementation of new techniques. It is critical to manage this unstructured information through a centralized knowledge management platform. Knowledge management is the process of managing information within an organization. This involves creating, collecting, organizing, and storing information in a way that makes it easily accessible and usable. The research involved the development textual knowledge management system, and two use cases were considered for extracting textual knowledge from documents. The first case study focused on the safety-critical documents of a railway enterprise. Safety is of paramount importance in the railway industry. There are several EA documents including manuals, operational procedures, and technical guidelines that contain critical information. Digitalization of these documents is essential for analysing vast amounts of textual knowledge that exist in these documents to improve the safety and security of railway operations. A case study was conducted between the University of Huddersfield and the Railway Safety Standard Board (RSSB) to analyse EA safety documents using Natural language processing (NLP). A graphical user interface was developed that includes various document processing features such as semantic search, document mapping, text summarization, and visualization of key trends. For the second case study, open-source data was utilized, and textual knowledge was extracted. Several features were also developed, including kernel distribution, analysis offkey trends, and sentiment analysis of words (such as unique, positive, and negative) within the documents. Additionally, a heterogeneous framework was designed using CPU/GPU and FPGAs to analyse the computational performance of document mapping

    Preliminary survey of the information preservation needs of the marine conservation community

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    Observations of environmental degradation, ecosystem change, fisheries collapses, and biodiversity loss have raised concerns over our ability to preserve marine communities. Knowledge plays a key role in any attempt to preserve these ecosystems. However, the basic natural history knowledge necessary to understand these systems has also degraded as the discipline of ecology has evolved in response to technological pressure and changing funding priorities within science. To make matters worse significant species losses occurred before many ecosystems were monitored making it difficult to determine the nature of undisturbed systems. This thesis analyzes the data currently being produced by the marine ecologists and conservationists in order to describe to librarians and information scientists what efforts can be taken to preserve data critical for ongoing conservation efforts. Description of data generated for the purposes of aquatic ecology was obtained through a domain analysis of the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems. Three years of data generation was recorded for all full-length research articles published between 2016-2018. The data is heterogeneous; however, important trends were uncovered. There is a large amount of geographic data being produced within the context of determining biodiversity. Physical sampling of the environment means that adequate data preservation requires museum resources play a part in preserving specimens. Accessibility of data will determine its utility to ongoing studies, and online resources can easily facilitate needed accessibility

    Introduction to Psychology

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    Introduction to Psychology is a modified version of Psychology 2e - OpenStax

    Projected Changes in Flood Peak Discharge Across Iowa: A Flood Frequency Perspective - 20-SPR2-002

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    Numerous modeling studies point to an intensification of the hydrological cycle under projected climate warming, with increasing frequency of extreme events, including heavy rainfall and flooding. So, what would projected changes in flooding mean for the Iowa Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the bridges and structures that constitute Iowa’s highway system? How resilient are these highway structures to different climate warming scenarios? Addressing these questions requires flood frequency analysis. The current methodology relies on the guidelines by Bulletin 17C. However, issues related to regionalization of at-site estimates as well as accounting for the projected changes in the climate system have received little attention despite the potentially large impacts, including to the IDOT’s infrastructure. Here the authors have focused on the examination of the projected changes in flooding across Iowa using the hydrologic model developed by the Iowa Flood Center (IFC). The focus is on high-resolution and downscaled outputs from CMIP5 (Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) and CMIP6, and different scenarios. The results point to an increase in flood hazard across much of state, especially for high emission scenarios and towards the end of the 21st century. Moreover, the authors have developed a web interface - the Iowa Flood Frequency and Projections tool (IFFP) - that provides projections of flooding to the end of the twenty first century at any river reaches in the State of Iowa
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