From care to uni : looked after children and care leavers in higher education in scotland

The research briefing is presented in the context of Scottish government policy in relation to widening access to higher education, in particular for students from a looked after background. The briefing reports findings from a review of the outcome agreements made between the Scottish Funding Council and Scotland's 19 HEIs in respect of statements about widening access to students from a looked after background. It also reports the findings of requests for information from HEIs made under FOI procedures about applications from students from a looked after background, offers made and enrolments. The conclusions include these: institutional outcome agreements in 2012-13 mostly appear to lack detail, and are arguably limited in ambition; Despite the existence of the UCAS voluntary declaration, not all HEIs have used this to collect data

Successful Liaison Marketing Strategies for Library Instruction: The Proof is in the Pudding

There are many tried and true forms of marketing libraries today. Networking, emailing, calling, and requesting an audience with a department are all common practices. The key to successfully utilizing these practices in your liaison areas is persistence

The Dark Web and Human Trafficking

This is a quantitative-comparative analysis that focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms that assist law enforcement agencies as they combat human trafficking. Human trafficking is a Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) which means it can impact every country in the world, and in doing so, impact every person in the world. AI uses machine-learning capabilities to identify clusters, odd and/or unusual font, words, numbers, and other markers in advertisements that promote the sale of human beings. Human trafficking affects males, females, and children of all ages and can include different types of trafficking such as sex and labor trafficking. By using these AI platforms, law enforcement officers are able to identify and help more human beings than ever before in a quicker timeframe. This quantitative-comparative analysis compared Spotlight, Traffick Jam, Traffick Cam, and Domain Insight Graph (DIG) to determine if these platforms were helping law enforcement. The study revolved around the questions of accuracy, consistency, and effectiveness with each platform and found that the majority of AI platforms led the way to promote better, more efficient platforms by the same companies that learned how changes could assist law enforcement more in the future. While each platform assisted in their own ways, there were deltas in each area that leads to the need for future research in the area of AI and how it can be used to help victims of human trafficking and convict human traffickers more in later years

Towards a Fairer Platform Economy: Introducing the Fairwork Foundation

This proposal envisions a way of holding platforms accountable through a programme of research focused on fair work. It operates under a governing belief that core transparent production networks can lead to better working conditions for digital workers around the world. The establishment of the Foundation and a certification scheme will provide demonstrable impact for digital workers, customers, and platforms. For digital workers, it addresses the twofold structural weakness that they face: first, the lack of ability to collectively bargain due to the fragmentation of the work process; and second, the asymmetry of information between workers and platforms. The certification process provides an important means to address these two challenges, along with building and developing connections between workers and institutions like trade unions and regulatory bodies. New kinds of work require innovations in organising techniques and regulations, and the Fairwork Foundation provides an important starting point for developing these in practice. As millions of people turn to platform work for their livelihoods, it is no longer good enough to imagine that there is nothing beyond the screen. Our clicks tie us to the lives and livelihoods of platform workers, as much as buying clothes tie us to the lives of sweatshop workers. And with that realisation of our interwoven digital positionalities comes the power to bring into being a fairer world of work

Twenty-five years of Health & Place: citation classics, internationalism and interdisciplinarity

To mark 25 years of Health & Place Health & Place, we identify and appraise some key contributions to the journal over this period. We use citation data to identify ‘classics’ from the journal's back catalogue. We also examine trends in the international reach and disciplinary homes of our authors. We show that there has been a near 7-fold increase in the number of published papers between the early and most recent years of the journal and that the journal's citation levels are amongst the top 2% of social science journals. Amongst the most cited papers, some clear themes are evident such as physical activity, diet/food, obesity and topics relating to greenspace. The profile of the journal's authors is becoming more internationally diverse, represents a broader range of disciplines, and increasingly demonstrating cross/interdisciplinary ways of working. Although Anglophone countries have led the way, there is an increasing number of contributions from elsewhere including emerging economies such as China. We conclude with some comments on likely future directions for the journal including enduring concerns such as greenspace, obesity, diet and unhealthy commodities (alcohol, tobacco, ultra-processed food) as well as more recent directions including planetary health, longitudinal and lifecourse analyses, and the opportunities (and challenges) of big data and machine learning. Whatever the thematic concerns of the papers over next 25 years, we will continue to welcome outstanding research that is concerned with the importance place makes to health

Dynamical evolution of gravitational leptogenesis

Radiatively-induced gravitational leptogenesis is a potential mechanism to explain the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. Gravitational tidal effects at the quantum loop level modify the dynamics of the leptons in curved spacetime and may be encoded in a low-energy effective action Seff . It has been shown in previous work how in a high-scale BSM theory the CP odd curvature-induced interactions in Seff modify the dispersion relations of leptons and antileptons differently in an expanding universe, giving rise to an effective chemical potential and a non-vanishing equilibrium lepton-antilepton asymmetry. In this paper, the CP even curvature interactions are shown to break lepton number current conservation and modify the evolution of the lepton number density as the universe expands. These effects are implemented in a generalised Boltzmann equation and used to trace the dynamical evolution of the lepton number density in different cosmological scenarios. The theory predicts a potentially significant gravitationally-induced lepton-antilepton asymmetry at very early times in the evolution of the universe

We Built It, They Came, Now What? Lessons Learned from Creating a Successful Course Integrated Information Literacy Program

What happens to an instruction program when it becomes successful; when demand for sessions outstrips available teaching space, technologies and teachers? Much instruction literature focuses on building programs, but there is little on managing a program that has become so popular that there are not enough spaces in the instruction calendar to handle the demand. This session will focus on building and sustaining such a program and the challenges to keep it moving forward. Over the last decade, Coastal’s instruction program has grown 68% and the number of students reached has grown 82%. This session will focus on the success factors and challenges of managing growth. It is exciting to see years of hard work and determination resulting in success, but how do you handle the demand from multiple constituencies? How do you prioritize your resources and staff? How do you conduct assessment and how do you use the results? If growth is an assessment measure, how much can your program grow? When do you determine what services to sacrifice in order to accommodate your information literacy mission? What happens when demand exceeds capacity? At what point do you say no? In the final portion, attendees will participate in an assessment of their own programs. With the presenters as facilitators, they will identify key areas for either creating or managing growth. Our goal is for participants to leave with ideas that can assist in renewing their programs or can serve as springboards for new initiatives