Drawing (Out) the Evil (M)other of the Family Court

As an artist, PhD researcher, and lone mother to three teenagers, this article introduces a theory of matricentric drawing through an autoethnographic practice of performance drawing. During COVID-19, I turned to my ex-husband to share the care of our children, which backfired with devastating long-term consequences. Rather than softening the blow of the pandemic, the request for help had a slow and destructive effect on our mental health and wellbeing, opening the door for him to remove them from my care. Made in the lead up to the final hearing of a court case in which I risked losing custody of my children, the drawing process began as a reflection upon legal descriptions of myself as an evil (m)other through a textual analysis of the court bundle. The article documents my autoethnographic reflections, as they visualized the effect of legal abuse upon my body and triggered gesture and movements, which were then performed as drawing acts in the family home. With reference to research on single mothers, the impact of COVID-19 and the underlying culture of misogyny, mother blaming, and postseparation legal abuse in the UK family courts, I consider how an autoethnographic approach to my art practice activated drawing as a maternal battle cry, disarming the attacks in legalese and re-armouring my body in preparation for the final hearing. Performed through drawing on the floor and filmed from above within the space of the kitchen, the camera documents the interweaving of daily motherwork with acts of performance drawing. As the drawing evolves, the gestures unfold in synchrony with the authenticity of mother love and care through recorded speech interactions documenting family life. The article considers how matricentric feminism (O’Reilly) informs my arts practice in distinguishing motherhood from mothering as matri-centric drawing enacts an othering of the self. It is useful both in arts-practice research as reflective writing on performance drawing and feminist activism, as data for researchers and policymakers in disentangling the multiple effects on the health and wellbeing of lone mothers and their children during and after the pandemic

Biological methods for cell-cycle synchronization of mammalian cells

Understanding the molecular and biochemical basis of cellular growth and division involves the investigation of regulatory events that most often occur in a cell-cycle phase-dependent fashion. Studies examining cell-cycle regulatory mechanisms and progression invariably require cell-cycle synchronization of cell populations. Thus, many methods have been established to synchronize cells at specific phases of the cell cycle. Several of the common methods involve pharmacological agents, which act at various points throughout the cell cycle. Because of adverse cellular perturbations resulting from many of the synchronizing drugs used, other synchrony methods that involve less perturbation of biological systems, such as serum deprivation, contact inhibition, and centrifugal elutriation have a significant advantage. The advantages and disadvantages of these cell synchronization methods are discussed in this review

A Study of Style Effects on OCR Errors in the MEDLINE Database

The National Library of Medicine has developed a system for the automatic extraction of data from scanned journal articles to populate the MEDLINE database. Although the 5-engine OCR system used in this process exhibits good performance overall, it does make errors in character recognition that must be corrected in order for the process to achieve the requisite accuracy. The correction process works by feeding words that have characters with less than 100% confidence (as determined automatically by the OCR engine) to a human operator who then must manually verify the word or correct the error. The majority of these errors are contained in the affiliation information zone where the characters are in italics or small fonts. Therefore only affiliation information data is used in this research. This paper examines the correlation between OCR errors and various character attributes in the MEDLINE database, such as font size, italics, bold, etc. and OCR confidence levels. The motivation for this research is that if a correlation between the character style and types of errors exists it should be possible to use this information to improve operator productivity by increasing the probability that the correct word option is presented to the human editor. We have determined that this correlation exists, in particular for the case of characters with diacritics

Community-Based Discharge Planning Improves Health Services

Basing discharge services in the community has improved services for people transitioning out of an acute care mental healthcare facility. It has also reduced readmissions rates, curbing the demand for inpatient services at the hospital level.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Co-producing composite storytelling comics : (counter) narratives by academics of working-class heritage

This work was supported by the Society for Research into Higher Education, (grant number Davis NR2129).Composite storytelling as a social qualitative research method represents a growing spirit of creativity to explore themes of social injustice. This article discusses the potential methodological affordances and challenges of such approaches when used to collectively unsettle, interrogate and (re)imagine what it means to become an academic of working-class heritage. The participatory project discussed in this paper involved eight social science and humanities academics in UK-based elite higher education institutions. In a series of storytelling sessions, the participants created narrative encounters to foster moments of critique and analysis to explore the complex social realities of their routes into and through academia as people of working-class origins. Working alongside an illustrator, the participants used empirical insights to create composite stories in multimodal comic formats. Through this work, we seek to prompt further discussions about the generative possibilities of pursuing similar methods in the social sciences and beyond to challenge forms of social injustice.Peer reviewe

Introducing service improvement to the initial training of clinical staff

BACKGROUND: It is well recognised in healthcare settings that clinical staff have a major influence over change in how services are provided. If a culture of systematic service improvement is to be established, it is essential that clinical staff have an understanding of what is required and their role in its application. METHODS: This paper describes the development of short educational interventions (a module of 6-8 contact hours or a longer module of 18-30 h) for inclusion in the initial training of future clinical staff (nursing, medicine, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dietetics, social work, operating department practice, public health and clinical psychology) and presents the results of an evaluation of their introduction. Each module included teaching on process/systems thinking, initiating and sustaining change, personal and organisational development, and public and patient involvement. RESULTS: Over 90% of students considered the modules relevant to their career. Nearly 90% of students felt that they could put their learning into practice, although the actual rate of implementation of changes during the pilot period was much lower. The barriers to implementation most commonly cited were blocks presented by existing staff, lack of time and lack of status of students within the workforce. CONCLUSION: This pilot demonstrates that short educational interventions focused on service improvement are valued by students and that those completing them feel ready to contribute. Nevertheless, the rate of translation into practice is low. While this may reflect the status of students in the health service, further research is needed to understand how this might be enhanced

Discordant Risk: Overweight and cardiometabolic risk in Chinese adults

Recent US work identifies “metabolically healthy overweight” and “metabolically at risk normal weight” individuals. Less is known for modernizing countries with recent increased obesity. Fasting blood samples, anthropometry and blood pressure from 8,233 adults aged 18–98 in the 2009 nationwide China Health and Nutrition Survey, were used to determine prevalence of overweight (Asian cut point, BMI≥23 kg/m2) and five risk factors [pre-diabetes/diabetes (HbA1c≥5.7%) inflammation (hsCRP ≥3 mg/L), pre-hypertension/hypertension (SBP/DBP≥130/85 mmHg), high triglycerides (≥150 mg/dL), low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (70 years: 73%). Abdominal obesity was highly predictive of metabolic risk, irrespective of overweight (e.g., “metabolically at risk overweight” relative to “metabolically healthy normal weight” [men: Relative Risk Ratio (RRR) =39.06; 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 23.47, 65.00; women: RRR=22.26; 95% CI: 17.49, 28.33]). To conclude, a large proportion of Chinese adults have metabolic abnormalities. High hypertension risk with age, irrespective of obesity underlies the low prevalence of metabolically healthy overweight. Screening for cardiometabolic-related outcomes dependent upon overweight will likely miss a large portion of the Chinese at-risk population

The Question of Safety: An Exploration of Errors among Undergraduate Nursing Students Placed on Clinical Learning Contracts

This study was conducted to understand patient safety from an educationsystems perspective (Gregory, Guse, Davidson Dick, Russell, 2007). Within the health care system, addressing patient safety from a systems perspective is receiving increasing attention and action. In contrast, nursing education has primarily addressed patient-safety matters from an individual student, rather than a systems-based perspective. Understanding the impact of nursing education systems on students, with respect to patient safety, remains significantly under-researched. A systems perspective entails “looking within” and reviewing how existing program structures and processes (eg., curriculum, sequencing of courses, student access to skills labs, clinical practice models, math calculation tests, etc.) foster or undermine patient safety among nursing students. The findings from this study revealed that patient safety was narrowly understood by the majority of stakeholder groups as “safe patient care.” With few exceptions among the participants, patient safety was equated to safe medication administration (notably, the Five Rights).The Manitoba Institute for Patient Safety (MIPS). Faculty Endowment Fund, Faculty of Nursing, University of Manitoba. In addition, the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) provided a research studentship to support one of the research assistants (Katherine Egan)