Haversian canal structures can be associated with size effects in cortical bone

Prediction of periprosthetic failure may be improved by an improved model of bone elasticity which includes microstructural information. Micropolar theory facilitates such information to be included in a continuum model. We assessed the extent of bone’s micropolar behaviour in bending both numerically and experimentally. The numerical model was consistent with micropolar behaviour, and experimental results exhibited size effects that may have been confounded by surface roughness effects, as predicted numerically

Modelling micropolar behaviour in cortical bone

This presentation looks at modelling micropolar behaviour in cortical bon

Navigating Tough Topics: Books that Will Help Children Better Understand Life\u27s Challenges

Throughout childhood and adolescence, children and tweens face numerous difficult situations such as illness, death, bullying, racism, and more. Caring librarians and educators know that the right book used at the right time can spark conversations to help children understand and process life’s challenges. This presentation provides attendees with recommendations of the best books that address tough topics along with related resources to help children navigate them

Educating for Social Justice: Perspectives from Library and Information Science and Collaboration with K-12 Social Studies Educators

 Library and Information Science (LIS) as a discipline is guided by core values that emphasize equal access to information, freedom of expression, democracy, and education.  Importantly, diversity and social responsibility are specifically called out as foundations of the profession (American Library Association, 2004). Following from this, there has been a focus in LIS on educating librarians from a social justice perspective. In this essay we will discuss some of the strategies we use for training librarians to practice librarianship using a social justice framework as a way to help social studies teachers and other educators critically think through their role in educating for social justice in their classrooms. Some areas of particular transference from LIS to K-12 educators that we focus on include locating classroom technologies as sites of power and privilege, prioritizing print and digital materials representative of culturally diverse populations and relevant contexts, and expanding the notion of literacy to include multiple literacies. These strategies lay a foundation for a critically-oriented classroom as a step towards teaching for social justice, and provide opportunities for collaboration between social studies educators and librarians

The Lightest Beam Method - a methodology to find ultimate steel savings and reduce embodied carbon in steel framed buildings.

Building carbon intensity is related to material choice, but more importantly, material volume. The building structural frame itself is responsible for 20-30% of whole-life carbon over 50 years. This figure will double once we build net-zero operational carbon buildings. Carbon savings in the use of materials are therefore the key to reducing the environmental impact of buildings. Recent studies have shown that up to 40% of material in building structural frames could be successfully removed without a ffecting design code compliance. This unnecessary overdesign of buildings is in part due to a lack of structural optimisation, and acceptance by designers of conservative serviceability assumptions that represent the “low hanging fruit” of reducing embodied carbon in buildings. This paper examines steel frames buildings to determine the carbon savings that can be achieved for cross-section optimisation, as this is the most accessible form of optimisation, without changing the floor system and beam layout. For this purpose the Lightest Beam Method (LBM) was developed that studied non-composite universal beams (UB) members in buildings. Choosing the lightest section with the Eurocodes we can achieve 26.5% of steel savings by mass, with a half of beams governed by serviceability limit states (SLS). If deflection is calculated using variable loads, the proportion of beams governed by the SLS drops to 31.1% giving additional 2.2% mass savings. The highest steel savings of 34.5% can be achieved for lower natural frequency assumptions (3 Hz) and using the average rather than the characteristic steel yield strength. In this case the proportion of beams by mass governed by SLS drops to 19.7%. Based on available case studies it was found that 1/3 of steel in the frames could have been saved which represents 36% of initial embodied carbon or 5% of whole-life carbon for the building over 60 years.This paper is part of the project “Minimising Energy in Construction (MEICON)” funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant EP/P033679/2

Automated retrieval and analysis of published biomedical literature through natural language processing for clinical applications

The size of the existing academic literature corpus and the incredible rate of new publications offers a great need and opportunity to harness computational approaches to data and knowledge extraction across all research fields. Elements of this challenge can be met by developments in automation for retrieval of electronic documents, document classification and knowledge extraction. In this thesis, I detail studies of these processes in three related chapters. Although the focus of each chapter is distinct, they contribute to my aim of developing a generalisable pipeline for clinical applications in Natural Language Processing in the academic literature. In chapter one, I describe the development of “Cadmus”, An open-source system developed in Python to generate corpora of biomedical text from the published literature. Cadmus comprises three main steps: Search query & meta-data collection, document retrieval, and parsing of the retrieved text. I present an example of full-text retrieval for a corpus of over two hundred thousand articles using a gene-based search query with quality control metrics for this retrieval process and a high-level illustration of the utility of full text over metadata for each article. For a corpus of 204,043 articles, the retrieval rate was 85.2% with institutional subscription access and 54.4% without. Chapter Two details developing a custom-built Naïve Bayes supervised machine learning document classifier. This binary classifier is based on calculating the relative enrichment of biomedical terms between two classes of documents in a training set. The classifier is trained and tested upon a manually classified set of over 8000 abstract and full-text articles to identify articles containing human phenotype descriptions. 10-fold cross-validation of the model showed a performance of recall of 85%, specificity of 99%, Precision of 0.76%, f1 score of 0.82 and accuracy of 90%. Chapter three illustrates the clinical applications of automated retrieval, processing, and classification by considering the published literature on Paediatric COVID-19. Case reports and similar articles were classified into “severe” and “non-severe” classes, and term enrichment was evaluated to find biomarkers associated with, or predictive of, severe paediatric COVID-19. Time series analysis was employed to illustrate emerging disease entities like the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) and consider unrecognised trends through literature-based discovery

Building an adaptive brain across development: targets for neurorehabilitation must begin in infancy

Much progress has been made toward behavioural and pharmacological intervention in intellectual disability, which was once thought too difficult to treat. Down syndrome research has shown rapid advances, and clinical trials are currently underway, with more on the horizon. Here, we review the literature on the emergent profile of cognitive development in Down syndrome, emphasizing that treatment approaches must consider how some “end state” impairments, such as language deficits, may develop from early alterations in neural systems beginning in infancy. Specifically, we highlight evidence suggesting that there are pre- and early postnatal alterations in brain structure and function in Down syndrome, resulting in disturbed network function across development. We stress that these early alterations are likely amplified by Alzheimer’s disease progression and poor sleep. Focusing on three network hubs (prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and cerebellum), we discuss how these regions may relate to evolving deficits in cognitive function in individuals with Down syndrome, and to their language profile in particular

Accommodating quality and service improvement research within existing ethical principles

Funds were provided by a Canadian Institute of Health Research grant (Nominated PI: Monica Taljaard, PJT – 153045). Funds were also generously provided by Charles Weijer, who is funded by a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair.Peer reviewedPublisher PD