You're either with us or against us

Darwell's image from his series 'Legacy: Inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone' was used as a double page spread within a short story by Douglas Coupland on the end of the world wherein he imagines a world where humanity has disappeared but the technology keeps running towards an inevitable conclusion. Issue abstract: One of Adbusters’ classic issues, You’re Either With Us or Against Us explores the climate of fear, racism and intolerance that overwhelmed America in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The issue focuses on the ways in which the language of freedom became America’s greatest marketing pitch. It provides a fascinating look at how advertisers exploited, and ultimately shaped, America’s idea of national identity. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” - George W. Bush. Featuring [...] Douglas Coupland on the end of the world

Limitations for health research with restricted data collection from UK primary care

Purpose UK primary care provides a rich data source for research. The impact of proposed data collection restrictions is unknown. This study aimed to assess the impact of restricting the scope of electronic health record (EHR) data collection on the ability to conduct research. The study estimated the consequences of restricted data collection on published Clinical Practice Research Datalink studies from high impact journals or referenced in clinical guidelines. Methods A structured form was used to systematically analyse the extent to which individual studies would have been possible using a database with data collection restrictions in place: (1) retrospective collection of specified diseases only; (2) retrospective collection restricted to a 6‐ or 12‐year period; (3) prospective and retrospective collection restricted to non‐sensitive data. Outcomes were categorised as unfeasible (not reproducible without major bias); compromised (feasible with design modification); or unaffected. Results Overall, 91% studies were compromised with all restrictions in place; 56% studies were unfeasible even with design modification. With restrictions on diseases alone, 74% studies were compromised; 51% were unfeasible. Restricting collection to 6/12 years had a major impact, with 67 and 22% of studies compromised, respectively. Restricting collection of sensitive data had a lesser but marked impact with 10% studies compromised. Conclusion EHR data collection restrictions can profoundly reduce the capacity for public health research that underpins evidence‐based medicine and clinical guidance. National initiatives seeking to collect EHRs should consider the implications of restricting data collection on the ability to address vital public health questions

Discourse and religion in educational practice

Despite the existence of long-held binaries between secular and sacred, private and public spaces, school and religious literacies in many contemporary societies, the significance of religion and its relationship to education and society more broadly has become increasingly topical. Yet, it is only recently that the investigation of the nexus of discourse and religion in educational practice has started to receive some scholarly attention. In this chapter, religion is understood as a cultural practice, historically situated and embedded in specific local and global contexts. This view of religion stresses the social alongside the subjective or experiential dimensions. It explores how through active participation and apprenticeship in culturally appropriate practices and behaviors often mediated intergenerationally and the mobilisation of linguistic and other semiotic resources but also affective, social and material resources, membership in religious communities is constructed and affirmed. The chapter reviews research strands that have explored different aspects of discourse and religion in educational practice as a growing interdisciplinary field. Research strands have examined the place and purpose of religion in general and evangelical Christianity in particular in English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes and the interplay of religion and teaching and learning in a wide range of religious and increasingly secular educational contexts. They provide useful insights for scholars of discourse studies to issues of identity, socialisation, pedagogy and language policy

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

La nostalgia és una arma = La nostalgie ést une arme

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX180756 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The Canadians

"he Canadians playfully, affectionately and informatively re-imagines one of the most revered photography books of the 20th century, Robert Frank’s The Americans. The source for the imagery is the print archive of The Globe and Mail, over 20,000 prints, all of which have been donated to the newly-formed Canadian Institute of Photography housed within the National Gallery of Canada. Eighty of these photographs have been selected for this book and will also form the basis of a national touring exhibition. These functionary press photographs, made to illustrate news stories (such as the state of the roads after a severe winter, a politician on the campaign trail or the opening of a new laundromat) held no pretensions to be works of photographic art. Taken together, however, they describe Canadian culture during a time of transformation. The book begins with an insightful and irreverent introduction by Douglas Coupland, bringing together themes illuminated in these photographs and taking us on a guided tour of a Canada gone but not forgotten." -- Publisher's website