A Socio-Ecological Approach to GIS Least-Cost Modelling for Regional Mining Infrastructure Planning: A Case Study from South-East Sulawesi, Indonesia

Regional planning approaches to mining infrastructure aim to reduce the conflict associated with mining operations and existing land uses, such as urban areas and biodiversity conservation, as well as the cumulative impacts that occur offsite. In this paper, we describe a method for conducting Geographical Information System (GIS) least-cost path and least-cost corridor analysis for linear mining infrastructure, such as roads. Least-cost path analysis identifies the optimal pathways between two locations as a function of the cost of traveling through different land use/cover types. In a case study from South-East Sulawesi, Indonesia, we identify potential linear networks for road infrastructure connecting mines, smelters, and ports. The method used interview data from government officials to characterise their orientation (perceived importance and positive/negative attitude) toward the social and environmental factors associated with mining infrastructure. A cost-surface was constructed by integrating spatial layers representing the social and environmental factors to identify areas that should be avoided and areas that were compatible with linear infrastructure using the least-cost path analysis. We compared infrastructure scenario outputs from local and national government officials by the degree of spatial overlap and found broad spatial agreement for infrastructure corridors. We conclude by discussing this approach in relation to the wider social-ecological and mine planning literature and how quantitative approaches can reduce the conflict associated with infrastructure planning

Value of infarct location in the prediction of functional outcome in patients with an anterior large vessel occlusion: results from the HERMES study

Purpose: Follow-up infarct volume (FIV) is moderately associated with functional outcome. We hypothesized that accounting for infarct location would strengthen the association of FIV with functional outcome. Methods: We included 252 patients from the HERMES collaboration with follow-up diffusion weighted imaging. Patients received endovascular treatment combined with best medical management (n = 52%) versus best medical management alone (n = 48%). FIV was quantified in low, moderate and high modified Rankin Scale (mRS)-relevant regions. We used binary logistic regression to study the relation between the total, high, moderate or low mRS-relevant FIVs and favorable outcome (mRS < 2) after 90 days. The strength of association was evaluated using the c-statistic. Results: Small lesions only occupied high mRS-relevant brain regions. Lesions additionally occupied lower mRS-relevant brain regions if FIV expanded. Higher FIV was associated with a higher risk of unfavorable outcome, as were volumes of tissue with low, moderate and high mRS relevance. In multivariable modeling, only the volume of high mRS-relevant infarct was significantly associated with favorable outcome. The c-statistic was highest (0.76) for the models that included high mRS-relevant FIV or the combination of high, moderate and low mRS-relevant FIV but was not significantly different from the model that included only total FIV (0.75). Conclusion: This study confirms the association of FIV and unfavorable functional outcome but showed no strengthened association if lesion location was taken into account

Sketching women in court: The visual construction of co-accused women in court drawings

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’

Safety and immunogenicity of heterologous versus homologous prime-boost schedules with an adenoviral vectored and mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (Com-COV): a single-blind, randomised, non-inferiority trial

Background: Use of heterologous prime-boost COVID-19 vaccine schedules could facilitate mass COVID-19 immunisation. However, we have previously reported that heterologous schedules incorporating an adenoviral vectored vaccine (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, AstraZeneca; hereafter referred to as ChAd) and an mRNA vaccine (BNT162b2, Pfizer–BioNTech; hereafter referred to as BNT) at a 4-week interval are more reactogenic than homologous schedules. Here, we report the safety and immunogenicity of heterologous schedules with the ChAd and BNT vaccines. Methods: Com-COV is a participant-blinded, randomised, non-inferiority trial evaluating vaccine safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity. Adults aged 50 years and older with no or well controlled comorbidities and no previous SARS-CoV-2 infection by laboratory confirmation were eligible and were recruited at eight sites across the UK. The majority of eligible participants were enrolled into the general cohort (28-day or 84-day prime-boost intervals), who were randomly assigned (1:1:1:1:1:1:1:1) to receive ChAd/ChAd, ChAd/BNT, BNT/BNT, or BNT/ChAd, administered at either 28-day or 84-day prime-boost intervals. A small subset of eligible participants (n=100) were enrolled into an immunology cohort, who had additional blood tests to evaluate immune responses; these participants were randomly assigned (1:1:1:1) to the four schedules (28-day interval only). Participants were masked to the vaccine received but not to the prime-boost interval. The primary endpoint was the geometric mean ratio (GMR) of serum SARS-CoV-2 anti-spike IgG concentration (measured by ELISA) at 28 days after boost, when comparing ChAd/BNT with ChAd/ChAd, and BNT/ChAd with BNT/BNT. The heterologous schedules were considered non-inferior to the approved homologous schedules if the lower limit of the one-sided 97·5% CI of the GMR of these comparisons was greater than 0·63. The primary analysis was done in the per-protocol population, who were seronegative at baseline. Safety analyses were done among participants receiving at least one dose of a study vaccine. The trial is registered with ISRCTN, 69254139. Findings: Between Feb 11 and Feb 26, 2021, 830 participants were enrolled and randomised, including 463 participants with a 28-day prime-boost interval, for whom results are reported here. The mean age of participants was 57·8 years (SD 4·7), with 212 (46%) female participants and 117 (25%) from ethnic minorities. At day 28 post boost, the geometric mean concentration of SARS-CoV-2 anti-spike IgG in ChAd/BNT recipients (12 906 ELU/mL) was non-inferior to that in ChAd/ChAd recipients (1392 ELU/mL), with a GMR of 9·2 (one-sided 97·5% CI 7·5 to ∞). In participants primed with BNT, we did not show non-inferiority of the heterologous schedule (BNT/ChAd, 7133 ELU/mL) against the homologous schedule (BNT/BNT, 14 080 ELU/mL), with a GMR of 0·51 (one-sided 97·5% CI 0·43 to ∞). Four serious adverse events occurred across all groups, none of which were considered to be related to immunisation. Interpretation: Despite the BNT/ChAd regimen not meeting non-inferiority criteria, the SARS-CoV-2 anti-spike IgG concentrations of both heterologous schedules were higher than that of a licensed vaccine schedule (ChAd/ChAd) with proven efficacy against COVID-19 disease and hospitalisation. Along with the higher immunogenicity of ChAd/BNT compared with ChAD/ChAd, these data support flexibility in the use of heterologous prime-boost vaccination using ChAd and BNT COVID-19 vaccines. Funding: UK Vaccine Task Force and National Institute for Health Research

UK PID Consortium: Cost-Benefit Analysis

This report was commissioned by Jisc in early 2021, as part of their multi-year programme exploring how persistent identifiers (PIDs) can be used to reduce friction in the ongoing transition to open research. The vital contribution that PIDs can make to systemic efficiencies was highlighted in the UK Government's recent policy paper on reducing bureaucratic burdens on research, innovation and higher education. In this paper, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) committed to “stopping multiple asks for data or information that already exists elsewhere e.g. in ORCID, CrossRef, DataCite and Companies House." The 2019 PID Roadmap for open access to UK research report summarised several years of work exploring ‘pain points’ in open access workflows. It identified five priority PIDs likely to contribute the greatest efficiency gains across the UK and global research information network: ● DOIs for outputs (Crossref and DataCite) ● Grants (Crossref) ● ORCID IDs for people ● RAiD (Research Activity iDs) for projects ● ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs for organisations A graphical representation of the benefits of the five priority PIDs at each stage of a typical research lifecycle including grant application, output publication, and research reporting and evaluation is shown in Appendix A. One of the PID roadmap report’s recommendations was that the UK should establish a ‘multi-PID consortium’ to optimise access to and adoption of five priority PIDs for open research. This original consortium proposal assumed that membership fees and coverage were the major barriers to the realisation of the system-wide benefits of PIDs. Other challenges identified included the lack of integrations between research information management, reporting systems, and institutional repositories. Subsequent research undertaken as part of the PIDs for OA project, which followed the original report, extended the analysis, and found that: technical and financial barriers to adoption are too high; existing PID adoption is seen as under-delivering on expected benefits; and integrations are often partial and slow to arrive. Conversely, membership and service fees were not seen as an insurmountable hurdle by most. In light of these findings, the project stakeholder group (made up of more than 30 representatives from the research community, including individual experts, funders, research managers, publishers, repository providers, librarians, and researchers) concluded that the major issues preventing benefits realisation for existing PID systems are, in fact, inconsistent coverage, poor adoption, and relatively low levels of integration in information systems. The group therefore proposed that a PID consortium should be focussed on providing practical support for lowering the barriers to PID adoption, monitoring progress in increasing the coverage of PID registries, and driving adoption and increasing integrations with third-party systems by creating consensus among stakeholders. A subset of the stakeholder group was tasked with evaluating the consortium concept and making recommendations for next steps. In its final report, this task group concluded that the potential value of PIDs to drive efficiency gains and generate new insight into research activities was significant, but would only be realised with a significant, UK-wide improvement in levels of adoption and coverage. Reaching these levels will incur integration costs, and is likely to require significant investment in coordination and support. The group recommended that the project team should do more work to explore questions around the likely costs of wide-scale PID integration and the potential benefits which might accrue as a result. “The answer to this should be provided by a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. The analysis should gather data on the current UK-wide research information flows indicated by the value propositions, and compare them with examples of highly automated PID-optimised workflows from around the world (such as the work that has already been undertaken in Portugal and Australia2). In costing the real-world time savings from these examples and scaling them to match the volume of UK research information, it will be possible to model the benefits of varying levels of PID integration. Cost modelling would cover memberships and the levels of support needed to achieve those levels of integration, thus building the business case for investments in adoption support.” This report presents the findings of our research into the current levels of PID adoption and usage, the likely benefits that they have already brought, and the scale of potential benefits that remain to be realised, based on the level of UK research activity. For the bulk of the concrete cost-saving calculations, we have focused on those PIDs that are already widely in use, especially ORCID IDs for people and DOIs for outputs (primarily research data and journal articles). For the other ‘priority’ entities, such as projects and grants, we can assess likely gains based on previous efforts to quantify the costs of manually inputting and cleaning data, together with the number of such entities covered in existing information systems. We have balanced these findings against previous estimates of the costs of PID integration, and the likely costs of scaled-up support, which we have based on information provided by current UK national PID consortia for DataCite (led by the British Library) and ORCID (led by Jisc). Throughout, we have based our findings on the lowest plausible estimate. While this means that benefits will certainly be significantly underestimated, we believe a conservative approach offers the best basis for an assessment of any likely return on investment in extended PID adoption and integrations at the national level

Novel oscillator for use in near-field microwave microscopy

This paper presents a near-field scanning microscope hardware embodiment using a high-speed, low-cost oscillator circuit, comprising of an RF amplifier with positive feedback. This is compared to a conventional configuration of a vector network analyser with both the measured frequency and constant frequency modes for height measurement of a metal surface. The constant frequency mode achieved similar results but with half the sampling time

Nursing competence: not just a skills list

Whilst undertaking a funded (A$230K) project aimed at developing a clinical assessment tool for pre-registration nursing programmes across Australia, our initial work involved an analysis of the curriculum documents of all but one Australian University Nursing programme. This enabled us to identify skills taught and assessed in most or all programmes. A concern consistently raised, was that we were in danger of reducing nursing to a list of skills. Having identified competencies that would be assessed in clinical practice via our tool, the project was extended to capture those competencies/areas of skill which newly graduating nurses need to possess but which one cannot guarantee will be able to be assessed in clinical areas; in other words, those competencies/skills which would need to be covered in Simulated Learning Environments (SLEs). Via a modified aggregation of skills lists from the 36 Universities. In this way, 1300 skills were reduced to 270+, categorised within initially 30 skills areas. This was undertaken in part, via a consideration of the work of Anderson 87 and Meretoja 04 who considered the roles of nurses (educator, manager, communicator, etc) as well as the Essentials of Care project (NSW Health 2007). This work is now being considered by the (Australian) National Health Workforce Taskforce (NHWT) as the basis for their plans to identify (nursing) curriculum content for the SLEs they intend to set up across the country, aimed at improving skills and easing the problems associated with a shortage of clinical placements, for a variety of health professions, including nursing. This paper will briefly outline the parent project and then focus on the process we followed to generate a conceptually based schema for the identification of nursing competencies, which could usefully be developed and assessed in Simulation and clinical practice settings