Maltese national birth weight for gestational age centile values

The relevance of using literature derived birth weight for gestational age centile charts for the Maltese population is debatable. The study set out to develop national weight for gestational age centile charts and compare these to other populations. Method: Anonymised birth weight for gestational age data with relevant maternal and neonatal observations over the period 1995-2009 were obtained from national statistics. The formats were standardised and imported into an SQL database that enabled filtration for single live births and grouping by sex. The data was scrutinized manually for obvious keying errors. The best estimate of gestational age from the last menstrual period (LMP) and expected date of delivery (EDD) was selected using established guidelines. A Box-Cox gamma transform was used to fit the model and generate separate centile charts. The data was compared to previous birth weight data reported in Maltese newborns in previous decades and to data from other countries. Results: A total of 58,899 neonates were included in the study and birth weight for gestational age centile charts were generated between 23 and 42 weeks of gestation using Revolution R with VGAM. There has been a statistically significant gradual fall in mean birth weight in Maltese newborns over the last four decades. There are also statistically significant differences between the Maltese data and those from other countries. Conclusion: The observed differences make the use of national birth weight for gestational age centile charts desirable both for routine clinical assessment and epidemiological studies.peer-reviewe

Tourism and community celebrations in Malta

This paper aims to explore the relationship between tourism and community celebrations. 1 This relationship is often presented as being of an uni-directional casual nature, with positive or negative effects depending on the observer's prejudices. Hence some argue that tourism boosts such ritual events, providing an audience and funds which expand their size. Others point to increasing disaffection with such rituals on the part of the 'locals', as the meaning of the event is irreparably altered in the process of turning it into a tourist commodity. On the basis of observations I made while conducting anthropological fieldwork in a Maltese village 2 which I will here call HalHarrub, I shall argue that both views are misleading insofar as they overlook the polysemic nature of ritual events and the manifold effects of tourism.peer-reviewe

Maltese Court Delays and the Ethnography of Legal Practice

This article starts by critiquing two recent attempts to sociologically account for court delays in Mediterranean societies. The first account was produced by the sociologist David Nelken and uses the concept of legal culture to explore the causes of court delays in Italian criminal trials, while the second account was produced by the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, who sees court delays in Crete as metonymically encapsulating a broader cultural context. It is argued that both accounts omit an important dimension of the issue, which is how such delays are produced and justified at the level of legal practice itself. By referring to the author’s fieldwork in the Maltese civil courts it is argued that court delays are best explained with reference to the social relations involved in legal practice, particularly those between lawyers and clients. Delays must be related to the ways in which lawyers see their role in litigation and these professional understandings are in turn connected to the kinds of expectations that their clients have of them. In this article particular attention will be paid to discursive invocations of these professional understandings by Maltese lawyers in the mid-1990’s, while resisting administrative reforms intended to streamline the procedures through which evidence is compiled in court. Delays were justified as necessary consequences of the lawyer’s professional role as locally understood. This is possible as, although often considered as synonymous with corruption, delay as a professional strategy is capable of signalling an extraordinary range of meanings. In particular, delay makes it possible for lawyers both to affirm and to traverse the distance between everyday and legal concepts of evidence, truth and reality. Delay is an intrinsic part of the practical symbolism through which the specificity of “the legal” is enacted. Through delay Maltese lawyers cope with the specific demands of their clients by performing specific professional understandings of legal representation as a matter of balancing between patronage and professional detachment. The generative matrix of these professional understandings can itself be located in the colonial encounters which shaped Maltese legal history and its mixed jurisdiction

Laws and stories: an ethnographic study of Maltese legal representation

This thesis is the outcome of anthropological fieldwork in Malta, focusing on the process of legal representation during court litigation. Paul Ricoew's (1984) theory of narration is applied to enhance understanding of legal representation. It highlights the social uses of narrative as a discursive vehicle mediating between litigants' subjective experience and paradigmatic legal rules. It is argued that legal representation can be fruitfully investigated from the standpoint of the story-telling relations involved. The relations of production, exchange and consumption of evidence before the Maltese courts are then explored. It is shown how clients' stories are often attempts to control socially distant lawyers by engulfing them in patronage relationships. Lawyers' diffident reactions are in turn derived from their efforts to balance between patronage and professional ideals of detachment. This is reflected in the way lawyers draft judicial acts during litigation, where 'patron’ lawyers tend to give most weight to the subjunctive stories' of clients. This same tension between paradigmatic legal rules and subjunctive stories' also characterises the production of testimony in court. Both court-room litigation and adjudication operate to produce a single narrative version of the facts. This reflects the moral pressure which stories place on judges, compelling them to reinterpret the legal rules. Finally these observations are embedded within Maltese society and their theoretical implications elaborated. This thesis demonstrates how court litigation is the site of disguised processes of abstraction and contextualisation, where the abstracting of 'paradigmatic narratives' founds legal entitlement and the narrative contextualisation of legal rules leads to their re-interpretation. This indicates that legal rules are closer to social experience than is often thought and illuminates the relationship between legal and anthropological representation. Recent anthropological trends to resort to narrative modes of description are seen to be implicitly juridical

Selling space and time : the case of sejjieh dekorattiv

Sometime during the late 1980's, the weathered stones from dismantled or collapsed dry-stone walls started being gathered, and their outer surfaces were sawn away in laminae about an inch thick. Such laminae, weathered and rugged on one side, freshly cut and smooth on the other, were then glued side by side to the facades of newly-built houses. The neatly cut, white limestone ashlar masonry in which these facades, like most buildings in Malta, had been raised, was concealed beneath the collage of darkened and irregularly shaped slices of rubble. At first glance, the areas treated in this way had been transformed into a rubble wall. Ethnographic research has been conducted in San Gwann, a suburban village and Rabat, a small town. Several streets were explored in these localities in order to obtain some understanding of the distribution of sejjieh dekorattiv throughout the village or town, paying close attention to the role it plays in the context of particular facades. Fifteen informal interviews were carried out with a number of home-owners, aimed at eliciting their perceptions of sejjieh dekorattiv. This article is the first result of an ongoing research project. Important issues, such as the trends which emerge from the overall distribution of sejjieh dekorattiv throughout Malta as a whole have not as yet been tackled. The observations which follow must not be seen as definitive. They should rather be seen as an attempt to initiate discussion and investigation of this issue.peer-reviewe

Clinical Legal Education in Malta: Learning from experience and identifying the challenges

This paper introduces the reader to clinical legal education in Malta by: 1) outlining how the internal hybridity of the Maltese legal system and the juxtaposition of English and Continental models in Maltese legal education have influenced the development of the Law Clinic at the University of Malta; 2) describing how the Maltese clinical model operates currently; 3) reviewing the experiences of students involved in clinical work

Yammer: Investigating its Impact on Employee Knowledge Sharing during Product Development

Global manufacturing continues to grow, creating the need for enhanced innovation during New Product Development (NPD); this in-turn requires increased utilization of employee-generated knowledge. Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), such as Yammer.com, is one method identified which can allow organisations to connect employees across departments and physical boundaries. This paper summarises the results of a dual-moderated focus group conducted with 15 employees of a UK-based sports manufacturer, aimed at identifying the impact of Yammer on employee knowledge generation and sharing during NPD projects. Results indicate that employees see benefit in its use and would welcome greater embeddedness of ESNs in the NPD process. However, barriers are identified which may inhibit its successful deployment, including issues relating to security and intellectual property rights. Identified benefits of using Yammer include: an improved ability to find people with specific domain knowledge; increased awareness of communities of practice; and the matching of problems with solutions

Promoting the integration of third-country nationals through the labour market : combating discrimination in employment : the case of third-country nationals in Malta

The paper identifies a series of obstacles to the integration of Third Country Nationals as a category within the Maltese labour market, including: TCNs’ lack of knowledge about the procedures for obtaining a work permit; institutionalised discrimination against them as a category in allowing their entry into the labour market; opaque, dilatory and discretionary procedures for obtaining and renewing work permits and for recognising TCNs’ qualifications; poor knowledge by managers about handling workplace diversity and intercultural issues, abuse of employers’ leverage powers as regards wages and other conditions of employment, linguistic problems, overlapping and poorly defined political responsibilities for integration, lack of cooperation between institutional stakeholders and pervasive discrimination against foreigners in relation to utility rates and other areas of social life.peer-reviewe

Examining the relationship between early childhood temperament, trauma, and posttraumatic stress disorder

A greater understanding of why some people are more at risk of developing PTSD is required. We examine the relationship between temperament traits in early childhood and subsequent trauma exposure and risk of PTSD. We used data on 2017 participants from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Temperament was measured using the Carey Infant Temperament Scale (average score from ages 6 and 24 months). This provided data on 9 individuals traits, and Easy, Medium, and Difficult temperament clusters. Trauma exposure was measured from 0 to 17 years, and PTSD at age 23 years using the PTSD Checklist for DSM-V (PCL-5). Regression models were used to estimate associations between temperament and both trauma and PTSD, and to examine mediation (of temperament to PTSD pathway) and interaction (temperament X trauma on PTSD) effects. 1178 (58.4%) individuals were exposed to a trauma in childhood and 112 (5.5%) had PTSD. Higher levels of Intensity were associated with a small increase in trauma exposure (OR(adjusted) 1.23, 95% CI 1.12, 1.34; p < 0.001) and PTSD (OR(adjusted) 1.27, 95% CI 1.05, 1.54; p = 0.012). Higher levels of Activity, Adaptability, Mood and Threshold temperament traits were also associated with trauma exposure. Medium (OR(adjusted) 1.49, 95% CI 1.21, 1.84; p < 0.001) and Difficult (OR(adjusted) 1.47, 95% CI 1.18, 1.84; p = 0.001) temperament clusters were associated with increased trauma exposure compared to an Easy cluster, but were not associated with PTSD. The relationship between trait Intensity and adult PTSD was partially mediated by childhood/adolescent trauma (Indirect OR(adjusted) 1.08, 95% CI 1.01, 1.16, p = 0.024, proportion mediated 26.2%). There was some evidence that trait Intensity modified the relationship between trauma and PTSD (OR(adjusted) 1.66, 95% CI 1.07, 2.55, p = 0.023). PTSD in early adulthood is more common in those with intense stimuli responsiveness in childhood. Temperament traits might be useful predictors of trauma exposure and mental health outcomes and offer potential targets for supportive interventions

The environmental stewardship program: lessons on creating long-term agri-environment schemes

The conservation of biodiversity on private land is both a high priority and a considerable challenge. An effective response to this challenge requires a combination of legislative and incentive mechanisms, coupled with preparedness by government to review and revise administrative arrangements. Preliminary results from the Environmental Stewardship Program, established by the Australian Government, highlight that there is a role for market-based approaches. However, implementation of this program through a Commonwealth bureaucracy was not without its challenges. Here we provide an overview of the program’s implementation from 2007 to 2012, followed by discussion of some key lessons learned