The age of misinformation: how does exposure to new information affect previously held beliefs?

At every turning point in our daily lives, we are exposed to information in the hopes of persuasion and changing our minds. But, what if none of this new information is actually doing anything to convince us? Political scientists have long been obsessed with this age-old question of what impact information exposure has on people, with the aim of determining how it can influence a democracy. Much of the current work, however, is either outdated or addresses too many factors at once. This piece, specifically, is aimed at examining the effects of social media on information exposure. When you interact with a post on Facebook that you either agree or disagree with, under what circumstances does that information actually impact your beliefs? Does it merely reinforce what you already believe or does it actively change what your opinion is? So, this thesis examines specifically what effect social media in particular has on the observational mind. The hope in examining this field is clarifying whether outreach across social media and educational information actually makes a difference in changing people’s mindsets and, in turn, their voting behavior. How can we expect to “win” people over to our sides, if the information that we are presenting them is meaningless

Alignment in total knee arthroplasty : what’s in a name?

Dissatisfaction following total knee arthroplasty is a well-documented phenomenon. Although many factors have been implicated, including modifiable and nonmodifiable patient factors, emphasis over the past decade has been on implant alignment and stability as both a cause of, and a solution to, this problem. Several alignment targets have evolved with a proliferation of techniques following the introduction of computer and robotic-assisted surgery. Mechanical alignment targets may achieve mechanically-sound alignment while ignoring the soft tissue envelope; kinematic alignment respects the soft tissue envelope while ignoring the mechanical environment. Functional alignment is proposed as a hybrid technique to allow mechanically-sound, soft tissue-friendly alignment targets to be identified and achieved

Evaluating Business Value of IT in Healthcare in Australia: The Case of an Intelligent Operational Planning Support Tool Solution

The healthcare sector is complex and intricate. It consists of a web of players including clinicians, healthcare organisations, regulators, payers, suppliers, patients and their families to mention the major groups. Taken together they form a complex ecosystem made up of multiple and dynamic sub-ecosystems. With the focus on incorporating technology into this context what we find is one of the most intricate and complex of e-ecosystems that must function effectively and efficiently in order to provide superior care and treat patients. The following tries to ascertain the value associated with the application of technology in healthcare; i.e. the business value of IT in healthcare. This is done by synthesising key literature and then applying it to a specific case of a nursing informatics technology solution. In so doing, a unifying framework is established that enables us to understand key activities that occur throughout this e-ecosystem

The Making of SCA Face: building a school of art and design identity within a university

SoADs that belong to universities can suffer keenly from the one-size-fits-all approach to corporate identity. This paper summarises the design and development of an online school profile and the sometimes amusing, nearly always frustrating experiences of the design team in dealing with corporate concepts of branding the university. The process involved analyzing the identity of Edith Cowan University’s School of Communications and Arts (SCA) and building a web-based interface (SCA Face) to encapsulate this large, multidisciplinary school. SCA Face showcases the school’s work and events in a manner precluded by the existing university website specifications and policies. The design was carried out on a collaborative basis, with a team member dedicated to needs analysis, and design meetings with the heads of each discipline area within the school. SCA Face grows through grass-roots ownership so that each area in the school is responsible for and manages its own content. The project uses school resources and skills. In this way, the final product highlights the school’s innovation through its design. In its reduction of complexity and integration of media it consciously runs counter to the university’s corporate style. We conclude that a SoAD identity should be sympathetic to the prospective and current student point-of-view rather than one that meets administrative expectations. We also explain the difficulties in finding a home for a website for which the university grudgingly gave permission, of getting senior management to agree to this view and how these problems are institutionalized by the intractability of IT service

Mental health nurses' attitudes towards the physical health care of people with severe and enduring mental illness: The development of a measurement tool

Background: It is well established that people with schizophrenia and related serious mental illnesses die prematurely and have significantly higher medical co-morbidity compared with the general population. Mental health nurses have a key role in improving the physical health of patients but their attitudes to this aspect of their role have not been systematically examined. Objectives: To develop and validate a measure of mental nurses’ attitudes towards physical health care. Design: The measurement tool was developed from a literature review, focus groups and responses to a postal questionnaire. Participants and setting: All registered nursing staff working within a NHS mental health trust in the UK were sent the questionnaire and 585 (52%) staff responded. Methods: Completed questionnaires were analysed by standard descriptive statistical methods. Exploratory factor analysis (principal component analysis) was used to examine and reduce attitude items to a coherent and parsimonious scale. Results: A 28-item measure comprised of four factors accounted for 42% of the variance. The factor solution appeared to provide meaningful dimensions, and the internal consistency of the measure and of its derived subscales was adequate (Cronbach’s alpha between 0.76 and 0.61). The factors were labelled nurses’ attitudes to involvement in physical health care; nurses’ confidence in delivering physical health care; perceived barriers to physical health care delivery and nurses’ attitudes to smoking. Validity was established by associations between the total scale and subscales with pre-determined respondent variables. Conclusion: The Physical Health Attitude Scale for mental health nurses (PHASe) is a first attempt to develop a valid and reliable measure of this important area. The initial development methods and its testing in a large sample provide indications of content and construct validity. Further testing in different samples and consequent refinement are necessary, however the PHASe appears to be a useful tool for measuring attitudes among this professional group and evaluating the effects of professional development

An Instance-Based Learning Statistical Framework for One-Shot and Few-Shot Human Action Recognition

Along with the exponential growth of online video creation platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, state of the art research involving quick and effective human action/gesture recognition remains crucial. This thesis presents an instance-based statistical framework which addresses the challenge of classifying short human action video clips, using a domain-specific feature design approach, capable of performing significantly well using as little as one training example per action (one-shot learning). The method is based on Gunner Farneback's dense optical flow (GF-OF) estimation strategy, Gaussian mixture models, and information divergence. We first aim to obtain accurate representations of the human movements/actions by clustering the results given by GF-OF using K-means method of vector quantization. We then proceed by representing the result of one instance of each action by a Gaussian mixture model. Furthermore, using Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence), we estimate the information divergences in an attempt to find similarities between the trained actions and the ones in the test videos. Classification is then done by matching each test video to the trained action with the highest similarity (a.k.a lowest KL-divergence value). We have performed experiments on the KTH and Weizmann Human Action datasets using One-Shot and K-Shot learning approaches, and the results reveal the discriminative nature of our proposed methodology in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques

Advanced propfan analysis for the family of commuter airplanes

Advanced propfans were selected to be used throughout the family of commuters. These propulsion systems offer a 25 to 28 percent fuel savings over comparably sized turbofans operating in the 1990s. A brief study of the propulsion systems available for the family of commuters is provided and the selection of the advanced turboprops justified. The propeller and engine designs and performance are discussed. The integration of these designs are examined. Also addressed is the noise considerations and constraints due to propfan installation