Report on Phase Three: The professional capabilities framework

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Labeling research in support of through-the-season area estimation

The development of LANDSAT-based through-the-season labeling procedures for corn and soybeans is discussed. A model for predicting labeling accuracy within key time periods throughout the growing season is outlined. Two methods for establishing the starting point of one key time period, viz., early season, are described. In addition, spectral-temporal characteristics for separating crops in the early season time period are discussed

Report on Phase One: The social work curriculum.

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Report on Phase Two: The readiness to practise of NQSWs.

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Therapeutic creativity and the lived experience of grief in the collaborative fiction film Lost Property

This collaborative project aimed to represent the embodied experience of grief in a fiction film by drawing on research, and on the personal and professional experience of all involved: academics; an artist; bereavement therapists and counsellors; and professional actors, cinematographers, sound engineers and other film crew. By representing grief in a more phenomenologically minded manner, the project sought to capture the lived experience of loss on screen while contributing meaningfully to the discourse on practice-as-research. Hay, Dawson and Rosling used a collaborative fiction film and participatory action research to investigate whether storying loss, and representing it through narrative, images and embodied movement, is therapeutic. Participatory action research was beneficial in facilitating changes in the co-researchers’ thinking, feeling and practice, and in enabling participants to inhabit multiple roles in a manner that expanded their disciplinary boundaries. However, while the project’s effect on some of the participants demonstrated the ways that creativity and meaning making can support adaptive grieving, it also revealed the risks of using participatory action research and fiction film to investigate highly emotive topics such as grief

Negative regulation of the androgen receptor gene through a primate specific androgen response element present in the 5' UTR

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. Acknowledgements This work was supported by funding from the Chief Scientist Office, Government of Scotland (Grant Nos CZB/4/477 and ETM/258). DNL was supported by the Association for International Cancer Research (Grant No. 03–127)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Genetic Analysis of a Maternal Assistance Score in Sheep

Maternal behaviour is important for lamb survival, as ewes perform many behaviours that affect the chances of a lamb surviving. Collecting maternal behaviour data directly at lambing is time consuming and not considered suitable for acquiring the large volumes of data that would be required for using as selection criteria within commercial breeding flocks. The aim of this study was to investigate if a simple scoring system is heritable and assesses expression of behaviours that reduce the probability of lamb mortality. Ewe behaviour was scored on a 3-point Maternal Assistance Score (MAS): (1) the ewe shows a high level of maternal interest (assumed if no intervention required); (2) the ewe shows limited interest in her lamb; and (3) the ewe shows no interest in her lamb. A total of 19 453 MAS were collected over 12 years, across 24 farms (including both indoor and outdoor lambing systems) and 12 different breed lines that make up the Innovis breeding programme. Ewe parity, breed, number of lambs carried, flock, lambing batch, lambing day within flock and pre-mating weight all had a significant effect on MAS (P<0.05). The maternal assistance score was shown to be heritable (h2=0.05) and repeatable (0.10), positively genetically correlated to lambing difficulty (rg=0.29) and amount of assistance the lamb required to suckle from the ewe (rg=0.88), and negatively genetically correlated with the number of lambs successfully reared (rg=0.49). This study shows that an easy to measure score can be used by shepherds with large breeding flocks, based on whether the ewe requires further assistance to support her lamb rearing. The score could be used in breeding programmes to select for lamb rearing ability in the future and potentially lead to an improvement in lamb welfare through a reduction in mortality

Effect of Maxillary Osteotomy on Speech in Cleft Lip and Palate: Instrumental Outcomes of Velopharyngeal Function

Objective: To investigate the effect of maxillary osteotomy on velopharyngeal function in cleft lip and palate (CLP) using instrumental measures. / Design: A prospective study. / Participants: A consecutive series of 20 patients with CLP undergoing maxillary osteotomy by a single surgeon were seen at 0 to 3 months presurgery (T1), 3 months (T2), and 12 months (T3) post-surgery. / Interventions: Nasalance was measured on the Nasometer II 6400. For videofluoroscopy and nasendoscopy data, visual perceptual ratings, for example, palatal lift angle (PLAn), and quantitative ratiometric measurements, for example, closure ratio (CRa), were made using a validated methodology and computer software. Reliability studies were undertaken for all instrumental measures. / Main Outcome Measures: Repeated measures analysis of variance (with time at 3 levels) for nasalance and each velar parameter. Planned comparisons across pairs of time points (T1-T2, T1-T3, and T2-T3) including effect sizes. / Results: A significant difference over time was found for nasalance (P = .001) and planned comparisons across pairs of time points were significant between T1 and T2 (P = .008), T1 and T3 (P = .002), but not between T2 and T3 (P = .459) providing evidence that maxillary osteotomy can impact on nasalance adversely and that the changes seen are permanent and stable. There were also significant differences over time for PLAn (P = .012) and CRa (P = −.059) and planned comparisons for both velar parameters reflected similar findings to those of nasalance. / Conclusions: Maxillary osteotomy can adversely affect velopharyngeal function in patients with CLP. The study provides evidence for a much earlier post-surgery review even as early as 3 months after surgery

Technical report three: TISWEANZ taxonomy.

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