Who visits academic institutional repositories and why?: An analytical approach for a single high profile repository

Institutional Repositories have been set up all over the world, and are now mainstream business for academic libraries and other organisations. The nature of the visitors or users for these repositories is not well understood, and little work has been done in analysing the data the repositories generate on their visitors. This report looks at the analytics generated by the University of Canterbury Research Repository (UCRR) through its own internal statistics and Google Analytics. There are many issues with reconciling this data, as many factors influence the accuracy of the figures, including web search engine crawlers, deep linking, and copyright trolls. This report found that there are many visitors to the UCRR, and that it is difficult, but possible to create narratives for specific items indicating how they might be used. Generalisations, however are much harder to make, and though we can see who is visiting the UCRR, we cannot really ascertain why they do. This report provides suggestions for further research on repository users, particularly at gathering qualitative data from groups identified from this quantative analytics

A critique of the psychological contract and spirituality in the South African workplace viewed in the light of Utilitarianism and Deontology

The purpose of the paper is to review, critique and to conceptualise psychological contracts in the workplace and the related concept of spirituality, from an interactionist approach. This approach emphasizes the interactive nature of the working relationship (that is fluid and bi-directional) between an individual and the organisation. The psychological contract essentially defines how relationships in the workplace are applied and understood, and is described in this paper within the supplementary or subjective fit / value congruence paradigm and from a deontological perspective. This is in contrast with the formal employment contract that is more related to the complementary or objective fit / need fulfillment paradigm and the utilitarian approach. What is termed a psychological contract thus proposes a means of interpreting and hence improving the often tense relationships between employers and the employees that they oversee. Work and spirituality have also always been connected as employees seek to fulfill their human nature in the course of the need to work. Where there is trust, respect, tolerance, mentorship, objectivity and empathy in a workplace, there is evidence of a psychological contract and generally a sense of spirituality pervades the ethos of the organisation, leading to an perceived ethical culture / climate. Recommendations are also made for further research

Emergency correction of coagulation before major surgery in two elderly patients on oral anticoagulation

Recommendations for urgent reversal of oral anticoagulation with vitamin K(1 )antagonists are largely derived from case series employing empirical dosing regimens with vitamin K(1 )and prothrombin complex concentrates. Data on the use of prothrombin complex concentrates in this indication are scarce in the elderly who are at high risk of both hemorrhagic and thrombotic complications. The two cases presented here describe patients older than 75 years who underwent rapid International Normalized Ratio (INR) reversal with prothrombin complex concentrates for surgical treatment of a bleeding ruptured spleen and for emergency surgery of a dissecting aorta. Both patients had their INRs rapidly corrected to ≤ 1.6 and underwent operation without complications. Evidence on treatment of patients who present with elevated INR and who have major bleeding or need to undergo emergency surgery is based mainly on observational studies. The two elderly patients presented here underwent successful emergency surgery after their INRs had been corrected with the intravenous use of vitamin K(1 )in combination with prothrombin complex concentrate that was administered according to current guideline recommendations

Remote attestation of SEV-SNP confidential VMs using e-vTPMs

Departing from "your data is safe with us" model where the cloud infrastructure is trusted, cloud tenants are shifting towards a model in which the cloud provider is not part of the trust domain. Both silicon and cloud vendors are trying to address this shift by introducing confidential computing - an umbrella term that provides mechanisms for protecting the data in-use through encryption below the hardware boundary of the CPU, e.g., Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), AMD secure encrypted virtualization (SEV), Intel trust domain extensions (TDX), etc. In this work, we design and implement a virtual trusted platform module (vTPM) that virtualizes the hardware root-of-trust without requiring to trust the cloud provider. To ensure the security of a vTPM in a provider-controlled environment, we leverage unique isolation properties of the SEV-SNP hardware and a novel approach to ephemeral TPM state management. Specifically, we develop a stateless ephemeral vTPM that supports remote attestation without persistent state. This allows us to pair each confidential VM with a private instance of a vTPM that is completely isolated from the provider-controlled environment and other VMs. We built our prototype entirely on open-source components - Qemu, Linux, and Keylime. Though our work is AMD-specific, a similar approach could be used to build remote attestation protocol on other trusted execution environments (TEE).Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Global proteomics analysis of the response to starvation in <i>C. elegans</i>

Periodic starvation of animals induces large shifts in metabolism but may also influence many other cellular systems and can lead to adaption to prolonged starvation conditions. To date, there is limited understanding of how starvation affects gene expression, particularly at the protein level. Here, we have used mass-spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics to identify global changes in the Caenorhabditis elegans proteome due to acute starvation of young adult animals. Measuring changes in the abundance of over 5,000 proteins, we show that acute starvation rapidly alters the levels of hundreds of proteins, many involved in central metabolic pathways, highlighting key regulatory responses. Surprisingly, we also detect changes in the abundance of chromatin-associated proteins, including specific linker histones, histone variants, and histone posttranslational modifications associated with the epigenetic control of gene expression. To maximize community access to these data, they are presented in an online searchable database, the Encyclopedia of Proteome Dynamics (http://www.peptracker.com/epd/)

Compact and Versatile QEPAS-Based Sensor Box for Simultaneous Detection of Methane and Infrared Absorber Gas Molecules in Ambient Air

In this work we report on an innovative sensor box employing two acoustic detection modules connected in series for quartz-enhanced photoacoustic multi-gas detection. One detection module is coupled with an internal distributed-feedback quantum cascade laser (DFB-QCL) emitting at ∼7.719 µm for methane (CH4) sensing, while the second module has been designed to be coupled with an external laser source targeting the absorption features of a specific gas molecule Mx in the infrared spectral range. The sensor box can thus be employed for any application, depending on the CH4/Mx gas combination to be detected. The ∼7.719 µm DFB-QCL also allowed water vapor monitoring. To demonstrate the sensor versatility, we report on the QEPAS-box environmental monitoring application by simultaneously detecting in air methane, which is a greenhouse gas, nitric oxide (NO), an ozone depleting substance, and water vapor. Sensitivity levels of 4.30 mV ppm−1 and 17.51 mV ppm−1 and minimum detection limits of 48 ppb and 11 ppb for methane and nitric oxide detection were achieved, respectively. The sensor box operation was tested by analysing ambient air. Average concentrations of ∼1.73 ppm of CH4, ∼0.134 ppm of NO and 1.8% of H2O were measured

Only two out of five articles by New Zealand researchers are free-to-access: a multiple API study of access, citations, cost of Article Processing Charges (APC), and the potential to increase the proportion of open access

We studied journal articles published by researchers at all eight New Zealand universities in 2017 to determine how many were freely accessible on the web. We wrote software code to harvest data from multiple sources, code that we now share to enable others to reproduce our work on their own sample set. In May 2019, we ran our code to determine which of the 2017 articles were open at that time and by what method; where those articles would have incurred an Article Processing Charge (APC) we calculated the cost if those charges had been paid. Where articles were not freely available we determined whether the policies of publishers in each case would have allowed deposit in a non-commercial repository (Green open access). We also examined citation rates for different types of access. We found that, of our 2017 sample set, about two out of every five articles were freely accessible without payment or subscription (41%). Where research was explicitly said to be funded by New Zealand’s major research funding agencies, the proportion was slightly higher at 45%. Where open articles would have incurred an APC we estimated an average cost per article of USD1,682 (for publications where all articles require an APC, that is, Gold open access) and USD2,558 (where APC payment is optional, Hybrid open access) at a total estimated cost of USD1.45m. Of the paid options, Gold is by far more common for New Zealand researchers (82% Gold, 18% Hybrid). In terms of citations, our analysis aligned with previous studies that suggest a correlation between publications being freely accessible and, on balance, slightly higher rates of citation. This is not seen across all types of open access, however, with Diamond OA achieving the lowest rates. Where articles were not freely accessible we found that a very large majority of them (88% or 3089 publications) could have been legally deposited in an institutional repository. Similarly, only in a very small number of cases had a version deposited in the repository of a New Zealand university made the difference between the publication being freely accessible or not (125 publications). Given that most New Zealand researchers support research being open, there is clearly a large gap between belief and practice in New Zealand’s research ecosystem

Holistic health record for Hidradenitis suppurativa patients.

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is a recurrent inflammatory skin disease with a complex etiopathogenesis whose treatment poses a challenge in the clinical practice. Here, we present a novel integrated pipeline produced by the European consortium BATMAN (Biomolecular Analysis for Tailored Medicine in Acne iNversa) aimed at investigating the molecular pathways involved in HS by developing new diagnosis algorithms and building cellular models to pave the way for personalized treatments. The objectives of our european Consortium are the following: (1) identify genetic variants and alterations in biological pathways associated with HS susceptibility, severity and response to treatment; (2) design in vitro two-dimensional epithelial cell and tri-dimensional skin models to unravel the HS molecular mechanisms; and (3) produce holistic health records HHR to complement medical observations by developing a smartphone application to monitor patients remotely. Dermatologists, geneticists, immunologists, molecular cell biologists, and computer science experts constitute the BATMAN consortium. Using a highly integrated approach, the BATMAN international team will identify novel biomarkers for HS diagnosis and generate new biological and technological tools to be used by the clinical community to assess HS severity, choose the most suitable therapy and follow the outcome.This work was supported by a Biomolecular Analyses for Tailored Medicine in AcneiNversa (BATMAN) project, funded by ERA PerMed (JTC_2018) through the Italian Ministry of Health, the “Fondazione Regionale per la Ricerca Biomedica” (FRRB), the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science, and Sport (MIZŠ), the Austrian Science fund (I 4229), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany (BMBF), and ANR automate (ANR-20-CE15-0018-01). This work was also supported by and by a grant from the Institute for Maternal and Child Health IRCCS ‘Burlo Garofolo/Italian Ministry of Health (RC16/2018) and by a Starting Grant (SG-2019-12369421) founded by the Italian Ministry of Health. Figures were created with BioRender.com