1,253 research outputs found
Is there a Correlation between Contractor’s Health and Safety Performance and their Profit Margin?
This paper analyses the relationship of on-site health and safety performance and the anticipated profit margin. It reports on the main findings of the research which includes the analysis of historical safety records of 22 construction projects and their profit margins. A scoring system was adapted to measure performance and profit. Analysis of the results indicates that the better the health and safety score of a project the more profit that project is likely to make and vice versa. In short, projects that recorded safety incidents during construction have also made a loss in their profit margins as a result of fall in productivity, disruption and penalties
Exploring Gay Men’s Experiences of Shame in Relation to Sexuality and HIV and the Implications for Sense of Self and Relationships
Background: For many researchers, the focus of their work exploring the negative consequences of identifying as a gay man living with HIV has centred around stigma. Yet, over the past few years many have questioned whether the broad definition of stigma alone is able to explain the negative implications of identifying both as a sexual minority but also the impacts living with HIV. More recently, some authors have begun to question whether the emotion of shame is of more central concern. However, there has been little investigative research into shame in relation to sexuality or HIV status.
Aims: Given the gaps within the literature, the study sought to explore whether shame was something experienced by gay men, and if so how they understood and experienced it in relation to both sexuality and HIV. The study also sought to investigate the impacts on both sense of self and relationships with others.
Methods: Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological epistemology, this study adopted a qualitative, interpretative phenomenological approach to exploring the shame experiences of 10 gay men living with HIV. The men were all recruited from central London NHS HIV community services and participated in semi-structured interviews.
Results: Five master themes were found across participant interviews 1) Sexuality: An Unacceptable Difference, 2) Managing an Unacceptable Self, 3) HIV: Rejection of the “Dirty” Self, 4) Negotiating a “Dirty” Identity, 5) Moving to a More Meaningful Self.
Conclusion: Despite arguments of the increasing acceptance of alternative sexual identities and the normalisation of HIV, the participants in the study reported experiencing shame as a distressing, layered emotion in response to living with two highly stigmatising identities. These layered experiences of shame often resulted in a sense of the self as inferior in comparison to heteronormative ideals and a number of unwanted difficulties within interpersonal relationships. However, participants also reported their HIV diagnosis as providing some meaning but after several years of difficulty. Implications for clinical practice, policy and research are discussed
Perioperative factor concentrate therapy
Transfusion of allogeneic plasma has been a life-saving measure for decades in patients with severe trauma or suffering from major surgical blood loss. The safety of allogeneic blood components has improved in terms of pathogen transmission, but haemostatic efficacy of plasma is hindered by the large volume and time required for thawing and infusion. Several plasma-derived and recombinant factor concentrates are clinically available and indicated for targeted replacement of missing coagulation elements in hereditary disorders of thrombosis and haemostasis. When used appropriately, factor concentrate therapy can rapidly restore deficient factor(s) without causing volume overload. The haemostatic defect in perioperative patients is often multifactorial, and therefore careful clinical judgement and timely coagulation testing must be exercised before the administration of factor concentrates. In this review, the rationale for including factor concentrates in perioperative haemostatic management will be discussed in conjunction with the limitations of plasma transfusio
Fungal genomics in respiratory medicine: what, how and when?
Respiratory infections caused by fungal pathogens present a growing global healthconcern and are a major cause of death in immunocompromised patients. Worryingly,coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) resulting in acute respiratory distress syndrome,has been shown to predispose some patients to fungal co-infection and secondarypulmonary aspergillosis. Aspergillosis is most commonly caused by the fungalpathogen Aspergillus fumigatus and primarily treated using the triazole drug group,however in recent years, this fungus has been rapidly gaining resistance against theseantifungals. This is of serious clinical concern as multi-azole resistant forms ofaspergillosis have a higher risk of mortality when compared against azole-susceptibleinfections. With the increasing numbers of COVID-19 and other classes ofimmunocompromised patients, early diagnosis of fungal infections is critical to ensuringpatient survival. However, time-limited diagnosis is difficult to achieve with currentculture-based methods. Advances within fungal genomics have enabled moleculardiagnostic methods to become a fast, reproducible, and cost-effective alternative fordiagnosis of respiratory fungal pathogens and detection of antifungal resistance. Herewe describe what techniques are currently available within molecular diagnostics, howthey work and when they have been used
‘I don’t know what gender is, but I do, and I can, and we all do’: an interview with Clare Hemmings
What follows is an interview with Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. A leading figure in UK feminist theory, her research insists that we acknowledge matters of ambivalence and uncertainty in our history-making, storytelling and theorising. As such, it contributes to and has productively intervened in many fields, including feminist epistemology, affect theory, historiography and sexuality studies. Beginning with her first book, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), continuing in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), and most overtly in Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (2018), Hemmings interrogates and challenges dominant modes and expressions
of gender and sexuality from a feminist positionality that is itself under-theorised and rarely articulated: that of a feminine bisexual woman. As Hemmings notes, bisexual positionality encompasses the affective capacity for a ‘combination of heterosexual and homosexual desire’ (Hemmings, 2002a; 2002b: 17) and thus generates ‘radical reconfigurations’ (Hemmings, 2002b: 197) of our understanding of the relations between gender,
sex and desire. Yet bisexuality has been repeatedly reproduced, within both feminist and queer theory, ‘as an abstract and curiously lifeless middle. As a lesbian and feminist who has occupied that supposedly ‘lifeless middle ground’, albeit differently (I have had two long-term relationships, one with a man, one with a woman), I was interested in speaking with Clare about these issues, and was compelled to do so after I attended an event that she co-organised at the London School of
Economics, a screening of Sylvie Tissot’s film about the French feminist Christine Delphy that included Delphy herself. As soon as Delphy entered the theatre and began walking down the stairs to the podium, the audience burst spontaneously into a standing ovation and long applause:
'[T]his moment involved both a shared jouissance and the returning of haunting conflicts within feminism – conflicts that we wish had been resolved long ago –because it entailed both exhilarating and dissonant affects, it became a sort of feminist moment par excellence, a moment where solidarity is never exempted from the (re)emergence of disagreements, and where the fantasy of a collective fusion becomes the condition for those conflicts to emerge' (Eloit in Delphy et al., 2016: 151).
Delphy’s presence, and the film about her, reminded me that (1) feminist thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s were extraordinarily sophisticated in their understanding of how gender constitutes us as men and women; (2) this analysis is still mostly absent from public conversations; and (3) we still long for such conversations. My interview with Clare Hemmings is thus a continuation of this moment of shared jouissance and haunting. It was conducted informally, in 2017, in Clare’s office, in what was then the Gender Institute, in Columbia House at the LSE. For over 90 minutes during
a grey afternoon in London, we spoke on a range of topics, from Clare’s intellectual history to her (then) forthcoming book on Emma Goldman. We discussed her background as a poststructuralist theorist who also carries out empirical research and the challenge of studying sexuality in the archive. In the portion of the interview that appears below, we talk in detail about Clare’s early work on bisexuality and how her thinking contributes to theorising gender in the present
An unexpected twist: Sperm cells coil to the right in land snails and to the left in song birds
In animals, cell polarity may initiate symmetry breaking
very early in development, ultimately leading to whole-body
asymmetry. Helical sperm cells, which occur in a variety of
animal clades, are one class of cells that show clearly visible
bilateral asymmetry. We used scanning-electron microscopy
to study coiling direction in helical sperm cells in two
groups of animals that have figured prominently in the sperm
morphology literature, namely land snails, Stylommatophora
(514 spermatozoa, from 27 individuals, belonging to 8 species
and 4 families) and songbirds, Passeriformes (486 spermatozoa,
from 26 individuals, belonging to 18 species and 8 families).
We found that the snail sperm cells were consistently dextral
(clockwise), whereas the bird sperm cells were consistently
sinistral (counterclockwise). We discuss reasons why this
apparent evolutionary conservatism of sperm cell chirality may
or may not be related to whole-body asymmetry
The influence of long- and short-term volcanic strain on aquifer pressure:a case study from Soufrière Hills Volcano, Montserrat (W.I.)
Aquifers are poroelastic bodies that respond to strain by changes in pore pressure. Crustal deformation due to volcanic processes induces pore pressure variations that are mirrored in well water levels. Here, we investigate water level changes in the Belham valley on Montserrat over the course of two years (2004-2006). Using finite element analysis, we simulate crustal deformation due to different volcanic strain sources and the dynamic poroelastic aquifer response. While some additional hydrological drivers cannot be excluded, we suggest that a poroelastic strain response of the aquifer system in the Belham valley is a possible explanation for the observed water level changes. According to our simulations, the shallow Belham aquifer responds to a steadily increasing sediment load due to repeated lahar sedimentation in the valley with rising aquifer pressures. A wholesale dome collapse in May 2006 on the other hand induced dilatational strain and thereby a short-term water level drop in a deeper-seated aquifer, which caused groundwater leakage from the Belham aquifer and thereby induced a delayed water level fall in the wells. The system thus responded to both gradual and rapid transient strain associated with the eruption of Soufrière Hills Volcano (Montserrat). This case study gives field evidence for theoretical predictions on volcanic drivers behind hydrological transients, demonstrating the potential of hydrological data for volcano monitoring. Interrogation of such data can provide valuable constraints on stress evolution in volcanic systems and therefore complement other monitoring systems. The presented models and inferred results are conceptually applicable to volcanic areas worldwide
The impulsive horse:Comparing genetic, physiological and behavioral indicators to those of human addiction.
Crib Biting and Equine Gastric Ulceration Syndrome: do horses that display oral stereotypies have altered gastric anatomy and physiology?
Equine Gastric Ulceration Syndrome (EGUS) and Crib biting are two separate conditions suffered by horses. Previous research has hypothesised causal relationships between these two conditions, whereby the behavior is driven by a requirement to stimulate saliva production to buffer gastric juice. However to date there is limited empirical evidence to support this notion. To identify if the anatomy and physiology of the equid stomach differed in crib biting (CB) horses and non-crib biting controls (N-CB) a two part experiment was conducted using cadaver stomachs. Twenty four stomachs (n=12) CB and (n=12) N-CB were collected from an abattoir. Duplicate 1.5 cm squared sections were taken from the fundic and pyloric mucosa for histology and H&E staining to identify gastrin (G) producing cells. Slides were scored using an adapted four point scale. A further 18 stomachs, (n=9) CB and (n=9) N-CB were collected to test the pH of the mucosa and digesta from the fundic and pyloric regions. G cell concentrations were analysed by Mann Whitney U-46 test. Stomach content pH was analysed by one-way ANOVA and L.S.D post hoc. Relationships between digesta and mucosal pH were evaluated by correlation. In both parts of the study there was no difference between the G-cell concentration (P>0.05) and pH (P>0.05) between CB and N-CB horses. There was a positive correlation between digesta and the mucosal surface of pyloric region in CB horses (R2 0.66, P<0.001), but not in N-CB horses. These findings suggest, from cadavers, that CB and N-CB stomachs are not anatomically nor physiologically different. It is plausible that there is no direct inherent link between CB and EGUS rather that both conditions are linked to environmental and physiological stress
- …