Digital History Profile

This year at the Madison Historical Review, we chose to profile an exciting digital history project out of Vanderbilt University. We interviewed Angela Sutton who is a historian and Postdoctoral fellow in Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she helps manage projects with the Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA). Her publications about the archive and its contents can be found in sx archipelagos (Issue 2, September 2017) and the Afro-Hispanic Review (coming out later in 2018)

Democratizing Knowledge: Using Wikipedia for Inclusive Teaching and Research in Four Undergraduate Classes

In preparation for the spring 2018 semester, the three of us came together to develop a Wikipedia-based project using feminist pedagogies in their teaching practice. With different assignments, students in the four courses collaborated in this effort to improve the diversity, breadth, and quality of information in the free encyclopedia in English. Moreover, the assignments challenged students\u27 research and information literacy skills via an authentic learning experience, specifically editing Wikipedia on art- and diversity-related topics while engaging with the Wikipedia community and teaching other students how to edit Wikipedia on underrepresented topics--the “social responsibility of a collective struggle” for inclusion in knowledge production. The course Creating Wikipedia for the Arts prepared students to host an Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon during which they taught participants about Wikipedia and how to edit it. Leading up to the event, students enrolled in Nineteenth-Century Art, Arts of Africa, and Foundations in Art Education researched notable9 individuals relevant to the topic of their course who did not have an article in Wikipedia or only had a short stub article in need of expansion and improvement. Using this research, they came to the edit-a-thon to create and improve articles, thus making their research freely available to anyone with Internet access

The Cranial Nerve Exam: Effectiveness of Peer-to-Peer Teaching and Experiential Learning in Speech-Language Pathology Graduate Students

This study sought to determine if speech-language pathology graduate students found peer-to-peer teaching and experiential learning beneficial in learning how to assess the cranial nerves. Graduate students in a motor speech disorders course completed an in-class cranial nerve examination in which they either portrayed clinicians or patients. Student groups utilized a reflective practice approach by teaching their peers how to assess the cranial nerves. Intensive practice sessions were offered almost daily for two weeks prior to the exam. Thirty-seven students completed an online survey about their knowledge and confidence in assessing cranial nerves and identifying diagnoses before starting the training for the exam; 36 participants completed the same survey post-exam training. Students reported feeling more confident and less anxious in evaluating the cranial nerves, assessing damages, and identifying diagnoses. This preliminary study indicates peer-to-peer teaching could be an effective strategy for learning how to evaluate cranial nerves

Novel immunostimulatory effects of osteoclasts and macrophages on human γδ T cells

25/10/2014 Acknowledgments The authors would like to acknowledge the Oliver Bird Foundation (RHE/00092/S1 24105) (A.P.) and Arthritis Research UK (18439) (K.T.) for funding this work, and to thank Dr Heather M. Wilson for the helpful comments on the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

'I don't think I ever had food poisoning' : A practice-based approach to understanding foodborne disease that originates in the home

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).Food stored, prepared, cooked and eaten at home contributes to foodborne disease which, globally, presents a significant public health burden. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate, analyse and interpret domestic kitchen practices in order to provide fresh insight about how the domestic setting might influence food safety. Using current theories of practice meant the research, which drew on qualitative and ethnographic methods, could investigate people and material things in the domestic kitchen setting whilst taking account of people's actions, values, experiences and beliefs. Data from 20 UK households revealed the extent to which kitchens are used for a range of nonfood related activities and the ways that foodwork extends beyond the boundaries of the kitchen. The youngest children, the oldest adults and the family pets all had agency in the kitchen, which has implications for preventing foodborne disease. What was observed, filmed and photographed was not a single practice but a series of entangled encounters and actions embedded and repeated, often inconsistently, by the individuals involved. Households derived logics and principles about foodwork that represented rules of thumb about 'how things are done' that included using the senses and experiential knowledge when judging whether food is safe to eat. Overall, food safety was subsumed within the practice of 'being' a household and living everyday life in the kitchen. Current theories of practice are an effective way of understanding foodborne disease and offer a novel approach to exploring food safety in the home.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Progress and prospects for the biological control of invasive alien grasses Poaceae) in South Africa

Historically, invasive alien grasses have not been considered a major threat in South Africa, and as a result, very few resources are allocated to their management. However, there is an increasing awareness of the severe environmental and socio-economic impacts of invasive grasses and the need for appropriate management options for their control. South Africa has a long history of successfully implementing weed biological control (biocontrol) to manage invasive alien plants, however much like the rest of the world, invasive grasses do not feature prominently as targets for biocontrol. The implementation and early indicators of success of the few grass biocontrol programmes globally and the finding that grasses can be suitable targets, suggests that biocontrol could start to play an important role in managing invasive alien grasses in South Africa. In this paper, we evaluated the prospects for implementing novel grass biocontrol projects over the next ten years against 48 grasses that have been determined to represent the highest risk based on their current environmental and economic impacts. The grasses were ranked in order of priority using the Biological Control Target Selection system. Five grasses were prioritised – Arundo donax L., Cortaderia jubata (Lem.) Stapf, Cortaderia selloana (Schult and Schult) Asch. and Graebn., Nassella trichotoma (Hack. ex Arech.), and Glyceria maxima (Hartm.) Holmb., based on attributes that make them suitable biocontrol targets. Arundo donax has already been the target of a biocontrol programme in South Africa. We reviewed the progress made towards the biocontrol of this species and discuss how this programme could be developed going forward. Moreover, we outline how biocontrol could be implemented to manage the remaining four high-priority targets. While biocontrol of grasses is not without its challenges (e.g. unresolved taxonomies, conflicts of interest and a lack of supporting legislation), South Africa has an opportunity to learn from existing global research and begin to invest in biocontrol of high-priority species that are in most need of control

C-Band All-Sky Survey: A First Look at the Galaxy

We present an analysis of the diffuse emission at 5 GHz in the first quadrant of the Galactic plane using two months of preliminary intensity data taken with the C-Band All Sky Survey (C-BASS) northern instrument at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, California. Combining C-BASS maps with ancillary data to make temperature-temperature plots we find synchrotron spectral indices of $\beta = -2.65 \pm 0.05$ between 0.408 GHz and 5 GHz and $\beta = -2.72 \pm 0.09$ between 1.420 GHz and 5 GHz for $-10^{\circ} < |b| < -4^{\circ}$, $20^{\circ} < l < 40^{\circ}$. Through the subtraction of a radio recombination line (RRL) free-free template we determine the synchrotron spectral index in the Galactic plane ($|b| < 4^{\circ}$) to be $\beta = -2.56 \pm 0.07$ between 0.408 GHz and 5 GHz, with a contribution of $53 \pm 8$ per cent from free-free emission at 5\,GHz. These results are consistent with previous low frequency measurements in the Galactic plane. By including C-BASS data in spectral fits we demonstrate the presence of anomalous microwave emission (AME) associated with the HII complexes W43, W44 and W47 near 30 GHz, at 4.4 sigma, 3.1 sigma and 2.5 sigma respectively. The CORNISH VLA 5 GHz source catalogue rules out the possibility that the excess emission detected around 30\;GHz may be due to ultra-compact HII regions. Diffuse AME was also identified at a 4 sigma level within $30^{\circ} < l < 40^{\circ}$, $-2^{\circ} < b < 2^{\circ}$ between 5 GHz and 22.8 GHz.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, submitted to MNRAS, referee's corrections made, awaiting for final approval for publicatio

Factors influencing the provision of end-of-life care for adolescents and young adults with advanced cancer: a scoping review

Background There is international recognition that cancer in young people is on the rise and that improvements in outcomes for young people lag well behind advances achieved for both children and older adults over the past 30 years. Cancer is the third leading cause of death in adolescents and young adults; however, little is known about how the end of life unfolds for those who die of the progressive disease. Objective This scoping review sought to locate and describe literature relating to end of life care for adolescents and young adults with cancer

Factors influencing the provision of End of Life care for adolescents and young adults with advanced cancer: a scoping review protocol

The objective of this review is to locate and describe literature relating to EoL care provision to adolescents and young adults with cancer. The specific areas of investigation will include: - Care service provision in adolescents and young adults with cancer during the EoL phase of care - Experiences and perceptions of adolescents and young adults with cancer during the EoL phase of care - Experience and perceptions of the health professionals and family members involved in their care. - Practices/intervention

Reproducible protocols for metagenomic analysis of human faecal phageomes

peer-reviewedAll sequence data used in the analyses were deposited in the Sequence read Archive (SRA) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra) under BioProject PRJNA407341. Sample IDs, meta data and corresponding accession numbers are summarised in Additional file 2: Table S2. All raw count tables, 16S taxonomic assignments, BLAST top hits for viral contigs and R code used for the analysis are available at (https://figshare.com/s/71163558b4f78e3e7ed6).Background Recent studies have demonstrated that the human gut is populated by complex, highly individual and stable communities of viruses, the majority of which are bacteriophages. While disease-specific alterations in the gut phageome have been observed in IBD, AIDS and acute malnutrition, the human gut phageome remains poorly characterised. One important obstacle in metagenomic studies of the human gut phageome is a high level of discrepancy between results obtained by different research groups. This is often due to the use of different protocols for enriching virus-like particles, nucleic acid purification and sequencing. The goal of the present study is to develop a relatively simple, reproducible and cost-efficient protocol for the extraction of viral nucleic acids from human faecal samples, suitable for high-throughput studies. We also analyse the effect of certain potential confounding factors, such as storage conditions, repeated freeze-thaw cycles, and operator bias on the resultant phageome profile. Additionally, spiking of faecal samples with an exogenous phage standard was employed to quantitatively analyse phageomes following metagenomic sequencing. Comparative analysis of phageome profiles to bacteriome profiles was also performed following 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. Results Faecal phageome profiles exhibit an overall greater individual specificity when compared to bacteriome profiles. The phageome and bacteriome both exhibited moderate change when stored at + 4 °C or room temperature. Phageome profiles were less impacted by multiple freeze-thaw cycles than bacteriome profiles, but there was a greater chance for operator effect in phageome processing. The successful spiking of faecal samples with exogenous bacteriophage demonstrated large variations in the total viral load between individual samples. Conclusions The faecal phageome sequencing protocol developed in this study provides a valuable additional view of the human gut microbiota that is complementary to 16S amplicon sequencing and/or metagenomic sequencing of total faecal DNA. The protocol was optimised for several confounding factors that are encountered while processing faecal samples, to reduce discrepancies observed within and between research groups studying the human gut phageome. Rapid storage, limited freeze-thaw cycling and spiking of faecal samples with an exogenous phage standard are recommended for optimum results