Developing business developing careers : how and why employers are supporting the career development of their employees

This publication sets out the case for employers to engage with the idea of career development

Computers: the user perspective-2/e

Computers: The User Perspective, 2nd edition, is oriented toward future computer users, not future computer specialist. Users-also called end-users-treat the computer as a tool for working with reports, spreadsheets, databases, and the like. They are not the specialist who will write programs for computers or who will design computer system. Too many introductory texts, we believe, try to please both users and specialist, and as a result fail both. They don’t provideenough technical detail for the specialist but they offer too much detail and not enough practical, business-related information for the user

Exploring associations between perceived HCV status and injecting risk behaviors among recent initiates to injecting drug use in Glasgow

The aim of this study was to explore the influence of testing for hepatitis C virus (HCV) and perceived HCV status on injecting risk behavior. A cross-sectional, community-wide survey was undertaken at multiple sites throughout Greater Glasgow during 2001-2002. Four hundred ninety-seven injecting drug users (IDUs) consented to participate and were interviewed using a structured questionnaire to ascertain HCV test history and injecting risk behavior. The average age of participants was 27 years and the majority of the sample were male (70.4%). Participants had been injecting for an average duration of 2.5 years. Logistic regression analysis revealed no significant associations between having been tested and injecting risk behavior. After adjustment for potential confounding variables, HCV-negatives were significantly less likely to borrow needles/syringes and spoons or filters as compared with unawares and were significantly less likely to borrow spoons or filters as compared with HCV-positives. Due to the cross-sectional design of the study, it is uncertain whether this reduction in risk behavior could be attributed to perception of HCV status. Further research is recommended to consolidate the evidence for this relationship

Teaching an intensive core course for medical students in the era of Covid-19: Mindful Medical Practice on Zoom

Background The COVID19 pandemic brought many challenges, including delivering interactive courses such as the Mindful Medical Practice (MMP) program to medical students. It also provided opportunities to trial online teaching of the program using technologies such as Zoom. Approach Medical educators from McGill University in Montreal and The Rural Clinical School of Western Australia in Busselton collaborated via Zoom to adapt the MMP program to an online format. This involved weekly meetings to adapt each class and debrief following its delivery. A number of adaptations were required which were implemented with ease while maintaining the program’s integrity. Evaluation The facilitator found the course relatively straightforward to teach with Zoom. In their essays at the end of the coursethe students reported that the MMP program was a valuable experience that they found to be “enjoyable”, “positive”, “interesting”, “beneficial” and “refreshing”. They reported that the online experience offered benefits over face-to-face delivery and was particularly helpful during the COVID19 pandemic. Reflection There were a number of potential limitations: this was a relatively small group of students; the students were already well acquainted with the facilitator; the students and the facilitator were experienced in using Zoom for teaching. The major strength was a clear demonstration of the feasibility of delivering the entire program online that is particularly relevant during this time of stress and uncertainty and also expands the potential to provide this teaching to students and universities across the world

Late Holocene Tsunami Deposits at Salt Creek, Washington, USA

We interpret two thin sand layers in the estuarine marsh at Salt Creek, on the southern shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, as the products of tsunamis propagated by earthquakes at the Cascadia subduction zone. The sand layers extend for about 60 m along the left bank of the creek about 800 m from the mouth, and can be traced to the base of a nearby upland area. One layer is exposed in the creek bank about 400 m further upstream, but they are only patchily distributed in the rest of the central area of the marsh. Both layers contain brackish-marine epipsammic diatoms. The lower sand layer marks a sharp contact between intertidal peaty mud and overlying mud, perhaps reflecting modest coseismic subsidence in association with tsunami deposition, but little or no change in the bracketing sediment occurs in association with the upper sand layer. The ages of the sand layers are not closely constrained, but were most likely deposited by tsunamis generated by great earthquakes at the Cascadia subduction zone about 1650 and 1300 years ago. The Cascadia great earthquake of AD1700 may have induced slight subsidence in the marsh, but no tsunami deposit was detected at the inferred contact. The absence of deposits from the marsh immediately inland of the 4 m-high barrier beach indicates that the largest tsunamis in the late Holocene at this site have not overtopped the barrier, which suggests that these tsunamis were likely only 2-3 m high

RoseNet: Predicting Energy Metrics of Double InDel Mutants Using Deep Learning

An amino acid insertion or deletion, or InDel, can have profound and varying functional impacts on a protein's structure. InDel mutations in the transmembrane conductor regulator protein for example give rise to cystic fibrosis. Unfortunately performing InDel mutations on physical proteins and studying their effects is a time prohibitive process. Consequently, modeling InDels computationally can supplement and inform wet lab experiments. In this work, we make use of our data sets of exhaustive double InDel mutations for three proteins which we computationally generated using a robotics inspired inverse kinematics approach available in Rosetta. We develop and train a neural network, RoseNet, on several structural and energetic metrics output by Rosetta during the mutant generation process. We explore and present how RoseNet is able to emulate the exhaustive data set using deep learning methods, and show to what extent it can predict Rosetta metrics for unseen mutant sequences with two InDels. RoseNet achieves a Pearson correlation coefficient median accuracy of 0.775 over all Rosetta scores for the largest protein. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the necessary quantity of data required to accurately emulate the structural scores for computationally generated mutants. We show that the model can be trained on minimal data (<50%) and still retain a high level of accuracy.Comment: Presented at Computational Structural Bioinformatics Workshop 202

Data value and care value in the practice of health systems: A case study in Uganda.

In anthropology, interest in how values are created, maintained and changed has been reinvigorated. In this case study, we draw on this literature to interrogate concerns about the relationship between data collection and the delivery of patient care within global health. We followed a pilot study conducted in Kayunga, Uganda that aimed to improve the collection of health systems data in five public health centres. We undertook ethnographic research from July 2015 to September 2016 in health centres, at project workshops, meetings and training sessions. This included three months of observations by three fieldworkers; in-depth interviews with health workers (n = 15) and stakeholders (n = 5); and six focus group discussions with health workers. We observed that measurement, calculation and narrative practices could be assigned care-value or data-value and that the attempt to improve data collection within health facilities transferred 'data-value' into health centres with little consideration among project staff for its impact on care. We document acts of acquiescence and resistance to data-value by health workers. We also describe the rare moments when senior health workers reconciled these two forms of value, and care-value and data-value were enacted simultaneously. In contrast to many anthropological accounts, our analysis suggests that data-value and care-value are not necessarily conflicting. Actors seeking to make changes in health systems must, however, take into account local forms of value and devise health systems interventions that reinforce and enrich existing ethically driven practice