Growing in Glasgow: Innovative practices and emerging policy pathways for urban agriculture

Driven by shared concerns about climate change, social justice and health and wellbeing, Urban Agriculture (UA) is an emergent global movement. In this paper, we present an exploratory case study of UA practice on the Southside of Glasgow, UK that traced the emergence and development of four UA projects. Data from the four projects revealed a diversity of practices, including temporary gardening projects organised by local volunteers, a community and market garden operated by a charity, a food shop and vegetable distribution service run by a social enterprise, and a permanent growing space for charities and schools provided by local government. UA practitioners in Glasgow have sought to re-purpose vacant and derelict land, build social cohesion, contribute to environmental and food sustainability and provide participation space for marginalised groups. Reflecting on future avenues for research on UA in Glasgow, we have identified two broad policy pathways that are emerging both at the local level and through national legislation in Scotland to harness local urban food growing and support UA. We conclude by pointing to a need to preserve the self-organising spirit of UA in Scotland as new legislation comes into force

Nutritional support for head-injured patients

Copyright John Wiley & Sons. This review is published as a Cochrane Review in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2004, Issue 3. Cochrane Reviews are regularly updated as new evidence emerges and in response to comments and criticisms, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews should be consulted for the most recent version of the Review.’ Perel, P. , Yanagawa, T. , Bunn, F. , Roberts, I. , Wentz, R. and Pierro, A. Nutritional support for head-injured patients. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2004, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD001530. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001530.pub2Background: Head injury increases the body's metabolic responses, and therefore nutritional demands. Provision of an adequate supply of nutrients is associated with improved outcome. The best route for administering nutrition (parenterally (TPN) or enterally (EN)), and the best timing of administration (for example, early versus late) of nutrients needs to be established. Objectives: To quantify the effect on mortality and morbidity of alternative strategies of providing nutritional support following head injury. Search strategy: Trials were identified by computerised searches of the Cochrane Injuries Group specialised register, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, MEDLINE, EMBASE, National Research Register, Web of Science and other electronic trials registers. Reference lists of trials and review articles were checked. The searches were last updated in July 2006. Selection criteria: Randomised controlled trials of timing or route of nutritional support following acute traumatic brain injury. Data collection and analysis: Two authors independently abstracted data and assessed trial quality. Information was collected on death, disability, and incidence of infection. If trial quality was unclear, or if there were missing outcome data, trialists were contacted in an attempt to get further information. Main results: A total of 11 trials were included. Seven trials addressed the timing of support (early versus delayed), data on mortality were obtained for all seven trials (284 participants). The relative risk (RR) for death with early nutritional support was 0.67 (95% CI 0.41 to 1.07). Data on disability were available for three trials. The RR for death or disability at the end of follow-up was 0.75 (95% CI 0.50 to 1.11). Seven trials compared parenteral versus enteral nutrition. Because early support often involves parenteral nutrition, three of the trials are also included in the previous analyses. Five trials (207 participants) reported mortality. The RR for mortality at the end of follow-up period was 0.66 (0.41 to 1.07). Two trials provided data on death and disability. The RR was 0.69 (95% Cl 0.40 to 1.19). One trial compared gastric versus jejunal enteral nutrition, there were no deaths and the RR was not estimable. Authors' conclusions: This review suggests that early feeding may be associated with a trend towards better outcomes in terms of survival and disability. Further trials are required. These trials should report not only nutritional outcomes but also the effect on death and disability.Peer reviewe

Mosaicking with cosmic microwave background interferometers

Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by interferometers offer several advantages over single-dish observations. The formalism for analyzing interferometer CMB data is well developed in the flat-sky approximation, valid for small fields of view. As the area of sky is increased to obtain finer spectral resolution, this approximation needs to be relaxed. We extend the formalism for CMB interferometry, including both temperature and polarization, to mosaics of observations covering arbitrarily large areas of the sky, with each individual pointing lying within the flat-sky approximation. We present a method for computing the correlation between visibilities with arbitrary pointing centers and baselines and illustrate the effects of sky curvature on the l-space resolution that can be obtained from a mosaic.Comment: 9 pages; submitted to Ap

Setting priorities to inform assessment of care homes’ readiness to participate in healthcare innovation: a systematic mapping review and consensus process

© 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedOrganisational context is known to impact on the successful implementation of healthcare initiatives in care homes. We undertook a systematic mapping review to examine whether researchers have considered organisational context when planning, conducting, and reporting the implementation of healthcare innovations in care homes. Review data were mapped against the Alberta Context Tool, which was designed to assess organizational context in care homes. The review included 56 papers. No studies involved a systematic assessment of organisational context prior to implementation, but many provided post hoc explanations of how organisational context affected the success or otherwise of the innovation. Factors identified to explain a lack of success included poor senior staff engagement, non-alignment with care home culture, limited staff capacity to engage, and low levels of participation from health professionals such as general practitioners (GPs). Thirty-five stakeholders participated in workshops to discuss findings and develop questions for assessing care home readiness to participate in innovations. Ten questions were developed to initiate conversations between innovators and care home staff to support research and implementation. This framework can help researchers initiate discussions about health-related innovation. This will begin to address the gap between implementation theory and practice.Peer reviewe

Mobile Computing in Physics Analysis - An Indicator for eScience

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Grid-enabled physics analysis environment for handheld and other resource-limited computing devices as one example of the use of mobile devices in eScience. Handheld devices offer great potential because they provide ubiquitous access to data and round-the-clock connectivity over wireless links. Our solution aims to provide users of handheld devices the capability to launch heavy computational tasks on computational and data Grids, monitor the jobs status during execution, and retrieve results after job completion. Users carry their jobs on their handheld devices in the form of executables (and associated libraries). Users can transparently view the status of their jobs and get back their outputs without having to know where they are being executed. In this way, our system is able to act as a high-throughput computing environment where devices ranging from powerful desktop machines to small handhelds can employ the power of the Grid. The results shown in this paper are readily applicable to the wider eScience community.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Presented at the 3rd Int Conf on Mobile Computing & Ubiquitous Networking (ICMU06. London October 200

Bayesian semi-blind component separation for foreground removal in interferometric 21-cm observations

We present in this paper a new Bayesian semi-blind approach for foreground removal in observations of the 21-cm signal with interferometers. The technique, which we call HIEMICA (HI Expectation-Maximization Independent Component Analysis), is an extension of the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) technique developed for two-dimensional (2D) CMB maps to three-dimensional (3D) 21-cm cosmological signals measured by interferometers. This technique provides a fully Bayesian inference of power spectra and maps and separates the foregrounds from signal based on the diversity of their power spectra. Only relying on the statistical independence of the components, this approach can jointly estimate the 3D power spectrum of the 21-cm signal and, the 2D angular power spectrum and the frequency dependence of each foreground component, without any prior assumptions about foregrounds. This approach has been tested extensively by applying it to mock data from interferometric 21-cm intensity mapping observations under idealized assumptions of instrumental effects. We also discuss the impact when the noise properties are not known completely. As a first step toward solving the 21 cm power spectrum analysis problem we compare the semi-blind HIEMICA technique with the commonly used Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Under the same idealized circumstances the proposed technique provides significantly improved recovery of the power spectrum. This technique can be applied straightforwardly to all 21-cm interferometric observations, including epoch of reionization measurements, and can be extended to single-dish observations as well.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, added some discussions about the impact of noise misspecificatio