"Engaging with birth stories in pregnancy: a hermeneutic phenomenological study of women's experiences across two generations"

BACKGROUND: The birth story has been widely understood as a crucial source of knowledge about childbirth. What has not been reported is the effect that birth stories may have on primigravid women's understandings of birth. Findings are presented from a qualitative study exploring how two generations of women came to understand birth in the milieu of other's stories. The prior assumption was that birth stories must surely have a positive or negative influence on listeners, steering them towards either medical or midwifery-led models of care. METHODS: A Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used. Twenty UK participants were purposively selected and interviewed. Findings from the initial sample of 10 women who were pregnant in 2012 indicated that virtual media was a primary source of birth stories. This led to recruitment of a second sample of 10 women who gave birth in the 1970s-1980s, to determine whether they were more able to translate information into knowledge via stories told through personal contact and not through virtual technologies RESULTS: Findings revealed the experience of 'being-in-the-world' of birth and of stories in that world. From a Heideggerian perspective, the birth story was constructed through 'idle talk' (the taken for granted assumptions of things, which come into being through language). Both oral stories and those told through technology were described as the 'modern birth story'. The first theme 'Stories are difficult like that', examines the birth story as problematic and considers how stories shape meaning. The second 'It's a generational thing', considers how women from two generations came to understand what their experience might be. The third 'Birth in the twilight of certainty,' examines women's experience of Being in a system of birth as constructed, portrayed and sustained in the stories being shared. CONCLUSIONS: The women pregnant in 2012 framed their expectations in the language of choice, whilst the women who birthed in the 1970s-1980s framed their experience in the language of safety. For both, however, the world of birth was the same; saturated with, and only legitimised by the birth of a healthy baby. Rather than creating meaningful understanding, the 'idle talk' of birth made both cohorts fearful of leaving the relative comfort of the 'system', and of claiming an alternative birth

Altered urothelial ATP signaling in a major subset of human overactive bladder patients with pyuria

Overactive Bladder (OAB) is an idiopathic condition, characterized by urgency, urinary frequency, and urgency incontinence, in the absence of routinely traceable urinary infection. We have described microscopic pyuria (≥10 wbc/μl) in patients suffering from the worst symptoms. It is established that inflammation is associated with increased ATP release from epithelial cells, and extracellular ATP originating from the urothelium following increased hydrostatic pressure is a mediator of bladder sensation. Here, using bladder biopsy samples, we have investigated urothelial ATP signaling in OAB patients with microscopic pyuria. Basal, but not stretch-evoked, release of ATP was significantly greater from the urothelium of OAB patients with pyuria than from non-OAB patients or OAB patients without pyuria (<10 wbc/μl). Basal ATP release from the urothelium of OAB patients with pyuria was inhibited by the P2 receptor antagonist suramin and abolished by the hemichannel blocker carbenoxolone, which differed from stretch-activated ATP release. Altered P2 receptor expression was evident in the urothelium from pyuric OAB patients. Furthermore, intracellular bacteria were visualized in shed urothelial cells from ∼80% of OAB patients with pyuria. These data suggest that increased ATP release from the urothelium, involving bacterial colonization, may play a role in the heightened symptoms associated with pyuric OAB patients

The discursive construction of childhood and youth in AIDS interventions in Lesotho's education sector: Beyond global-local dichotomies

This is the post-print version of this article. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D,Society and Space 28(5) 791 – 810, 2010, available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 Pion.In southern Africa interventions to halt the spread of AIDS and address its social impacts are commonly targeted at young people, in many cases through the education sector. In Lesotho, education-sector responses to AIDS are the product of negotiation between a range of ‘local’ and ‘global’ actors. Although many interventions are put forward as government policy and implemented by teachers in schools, funding is often provided by bilateral and multilateral donors, and the international ‘AIDS industry’—in the form of UN agencies and international NGOs—sets agendas and makes prescriptions. This paper analyses interviews conducted with policy makers and practitioners in Lesotho and a variety of documents, critically examining the discourses of childhood and youth that are mobilised in producing changes in education policy and practice to address AIDS. Focusing on bursary schemes, life-skills education, and rights-based approaches, the paper concludes that, although dominant ‘global’ discourses are readily identified, they are not simply imported wholesale from the West, but rather are transformed through the organisations and personnel involved in designing and implementing interventions. Nonetheless, the connections through which these discourses are made, and children are subjectified, are central to the power dynamics of neoliberal globalisation. Although the representations of childhood and youth produced through the interventions are hybrid products of local and global discourses, the power relations underlying them are such that they, often unintentionally, serve a neoliberal agenda by depicting young people as individuals in need of saving, of developing personal autonomy, or of exercising individual rights.RGS-IB

Neural Networks based Smart e-Health Application for the Prediction of Tuberculosis using Serverless Computing.

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) with e-health records is creating a new era of advancements in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, which is reshaping the modern landscape of healthcare. In this paper, we propose a neural networks-based smart e-health application for the prediction of Tuberculosis (TB) using serverless computing. The performance of various Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architectures using transfer learning is evaluated to prove that this technique holds promise for enhancing the capabilities of IoT and e-health systems in the future for predicting the manifestation of TB in the lungs. The work involves training, validating, and comparing Densenet-201, VGG-19, and Mobilenet-V3-Small architectures based on performance metrics such as test binary accuracy, test loss, intersection over union, precision, recall, and F1 score. The findings hint at the potential of integrating these advanced Machine Learning (ML) models within IoT and e-health frameworks, thereby paving the way for more comprehensive and data-driven approaches to enable smart healthcare. The best-performing model, VGG-19, is selected for different deployment strategies using server and serless-based environments. We used JMeter to measure the performance of the deployed model, including the average response rate, throughput, and error rate. This study provides valuable insights into the selection and deployment of ML models in healthcare, highlighting the advantages and challenges of different deployment options. Furthermore, it also allows future studies to integrate such models into IoT and e-health systems, which could enhance healthcare outcomes through more informed and timely treatments

Q-Module-Bot: A Generative AI-Based Question and Answer Bot for Module Teaching Support

Contributions: In this article, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based Q&A system has been developed by integrating information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, using course materials as a knowledge base and facilitating real-time student interaction through a chat interface. Background: The rise of advanced AI exemplified by ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, has sparked interest in its application within higher education. AI has the potential to reshape education delivery through chatbots and related tools, improving remote learning and mitigating challenges, such as student isolation and educator administrative burdens. Yet, ChatGPT’s practical applications in education remain uncertain, potentially due to its novel and enigmatic nature. Additionally, current e-learning chatbot systems often suffer from development complexity and a lack of input from key stakeholders, leading to developer-focused solutions rather than user-centered ones. Intended Outcomes: In this manuscript, we introduce a practical implementation of AI in education by creating a system called Q-Module-Bot that is accessible for both technical and nontechnical educators to harness e-learning benefits and demystify generative pretraining transformer (GPT). Application Design: The proposed Q-Module-Bot system has utilized pretrained large language models (LLMs) to build a Q&A system that helps students with their queries and supports education delivery using content extracted from a virtual learning environment (VLE). Findings: The prototype and system evaluation confirm the effectiveness of a scalable cross-departmental tool featuring source attribution and real-time responses. While successful in encouraging wider acceptance of GPT use cases in higher education, refinements are needed for full integration into the VLE and expansion to other modules/courses

RGIM: An Integrated Approach to Improve QoS in AODV, DSR and DSDV Routing Protocols for FANETS Using the Chain Mobility Model

Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) are a collection of unmanned aerial vehicles that communicate without any predefined infrastructure. FANET, being one of the most researched topics nowadays, finds its scope in many complex applications like drones used for military applications, border surveillance systems and other systems like civil applications in traffic monitoring and disaster management. Quality of service (QoS) performance parameters for routing e.g. delay, packet delivery ratio, jitter and throughput in FANETs are quite difficult to improve. Mobility models play an important role in evaluating the performance of the routing protocols. In this paper, the integration of two selected mobility models, i.e. random waypoint and Gauss–Markov model, is implemented. As a result, the random Gauss integrated model is proposed for evaluating the performance of AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector), DSR (dynamic source routing) and DSDV (destination-Sequenced distance vector) routing protocols. The simulation is done with an NS2 simulator for various scenarios by varying the number of nodes and taking low- and high-node speeds of 50 and 500, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed model improves the QoS performance parameters of AODV, DSR and DSDV protocol