Ba\u27ath Party Archives and the Khmer Rouge Records: The Importance of Cultural Accessibility

This paper contrasts the handling, provenance, and application of the Ba’ath Party Archives with that of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge Records. While similar in many facets, the events surrounding the Ba’ath Party Archives received heavy ridicule while the international community largely supported the handling of the Khmer Rouge records. The comparison of the Cambodian and Iraqi case studies’ distinct differences reveal why international opinion varies. It also emphasizes a gap within standard understanding concerning archival law and practices. This exploration will reveal that current archival dialogue focuses too much on a dichotomous relationship between international and national concerns. The author posits that cultural accessibility is a shared concern and a more important standard when deciding on a strategy for addressing disputed archives

Processes of Sexual Orientation Questioning Among Heterosexual Women

Because very little is known about heterosexual identity development, this study assesses and describes sexual orientation questioning processes of heterosexual-identified women, and offers a comparison of these processes with those employed by their sexual-minority counterparts. Participants included 333 female college students (ages 18-23; M = 19.2). Two-hundred and twenty-eight participants primarily identified as “exclusively straight/heterosexual”; 105 participants indicated a sexual-minority identity. Sixty-seven percent of exclusively heterosexual respondents (n = 154) indicated having thought about and/or questioned their sexual orientation. The processes by which heterosexual participants described questioning their sexual orientation were coded for the presence of five emergent categories using an inductive thematic coding methodology. These five categories included: unelaborated questioning (19%), other-sex experiences (16%), exposure to sexual minorities (26%), assessment of same-sex attraction (48%), and evaluations of same-sex behavior (26%). Several unifying and differentiating themes emerged between sexual orientation groups. Results from this study suggest that contemporary young women’s heterosexuality is not necessarily an unexamined identity; indeed, the large majority of young women in this sample were deliberately identifying as heterosexual after contemplating alternative possibilities

The Role of Pop Culture and Entertainment Media in Adult Education Practice

After providing a framework for critical media literacy education, this paper reports on the preliminary results of a study in progress exploring adult educators’ consumption of entertainment media, how it affects their thinking about group identities, and how they draw on it in their teaching and learning

“Crash”-ing into Pop Culture in Dealing with Diversity: Adult Education and Critical Media Literacy about Movies and Television

This paper reports on the qualitative component of a study of what adult educators and adult learners “learn” about themselves and others based on portrayals of characters in film and television more generally, with particular attention to the recent Paul Haggis film “Crash.

A study on plain X-ray skull imaging in the public Primary Health Care Department in Malta

Background In January 2014, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published the guideline [CG176]: Head injury: assessment and early management. These guidelines advise that plain X-rays of the skull should not be used to diagnose significant brain injury without prior discussion with a neuroscience unit. However, they are useful as part of a skeletal survey for suspected non-accidental injury in children. Objectives Our study was conducted to quantify the skull X-rays performed over a period of 12 months and review whether the cases adhere to the NICE guideline [CG176]: Head injury: assessment and early management. Method A descriptive, retrospective, cross-sectional study design was applied. Data was obtained from the Radiology Information System (RIS) and the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). The Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 20 was used in the data analysis. Results There were 127 skull X-rays performed in primary health care centres in 2016. The majority of patients were males (56%, n = 71). There were 83 (65.4%) skull X-rays requested for cases of trauma or queries about fractures. Around 3% of requests (n = 4) were made to exclude foreign bodies. Conclusion After reaching the study objectives, it was noted that there is a need to increase awareness of the NICE guidelines to improve the use of skull radiography thus ensuring more efficient resource utilisation.peer-reviewe

GIGI: An Approach to Effective Imputation of Dense Genotypes on Large Pedigrees

Recent emergence of the common-disease-rare-variant hypothesis has renewed interest in the use of large pedigrees for identifying rare causal variants. Genotyping with modern sequencing platforms is increasingly common in the search for such variants but remains expensive and often is limited to only a few subjects per pedigree. In population-based samples, genotype imputation is widely used so that additional genotyping is not needed. We now introduce an analogous approach that enables computationally efficient imputation in large pedigrees. Our approach samples inheritance vectors (IVs) from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler by conditioning on genotypes from a sparse set of framework markers. Missing genotypes are probabilistically inferred from these IVs along with observed dense genotypes that are available on a subset of subjects. We implemented our approach in the Genotype Imputation Given Inheritance (GIGI) program and evaluated the approach on both simulated and real large pedigrees. With a real pedigree, we also compared imputed results obtained from this approach with those from the population-based imputation program BEAGLE. We demonstrated that our pedigree-based approach imputes many alleles with high accuracy. It is much more accurate for calling rare alleles than is population-based imputation and does not require an outside reference sample. We also evaluated the effect of varying other parameters, including the marker type and density of the framework panel, threshold for calling genotypes, and population allele frequencies. By leveraging information from existing genotypes already assayed on large pedigrees, our approach can facilitate cost-effective use of sequence data in the pursuit of rare causal variants

Teaching Critical Media Literacy in Adult and Higher Education: An Action Research Study

This paper discusses three findings of critical media literacy study: pleasure as a motivator and deterrent to becoming critical; the importance of facilitated discussion; and learning from application to practice

Institutional Repository and Archives Partnerships and Futures

A reality of dwindling resources in archives, as well as in higher education more broadly, is that the ability to purchase and maintain a specialized archives management and content management software is often out of reach. For Marshall University Special Collections, the solution to make finding aids and other digital archival materials accessible online required evaluating software already available at the university. Marshall Digital Scholar (MDS), an instance of the bepress institutional repository software, was chosen for its immediate availability, robust discovery services within the repository and through outside search engines, statistic tracking capability, metadata flexibility, support for multiple file types, and its availability to researchers on and off campus