Hong Kong Summer Service Program (July 4-August 12, 2005)

Now in its second year, the Hong Kong Summer Service Program is sponsored by the Lingnan Foundation, and administered by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the Asia-Pacific Institute of Ageing Studies (APIAS). After undergoing a competitive application and interview process organized by lIE, six students from Lingnan University, Sun Yat-sen University and Lingnan (University) College were selected to participate in the program, which involves a 6-week summer internship with a community/ social service organization in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Summer Service interns were placed in a non-profit organization that addresses a social concern related to their interests. With support and guidance from APIAS, each Fellow worked in their placement organization for the duration of the program, gaining practical experience in the operation of a social service organization. They worked with executives and administrators to learn all aspects of the operation of the organization as well as doing hands on work in the services provided by the organization. To enhance their program experience, interns worked with their organization and APIAS supervisor to propose and initiate at least one service project during their internship. This year, projects undertaken by the interns included creative art classes for children, intergenerational bridge-building activities between children and the elderly, and an outing to Lingnan University for residents of a local elderly home. Interns were required to submit program proposals, budgets and reports for their chosen projects. In addition to presenting their findings at the closing seminar, after the conclusion of the program interns submit final evaluation reports, detailing their experiences, findings and results of their internship

The employers’ priorities : vocational skills and capabilities for management accountants

There has been increasing pressure on the providers of higher education to align courses with the needs of employers. Surveys have documented the importance of developing a broad range of vocational skills. However, priorities must be established, based on the demands of the workplace, within this identified skills gap. The first section of this paper identifies the need for the development of vocational skills in general, and then specifically in the area of management accounting. The second section presents the views of employers of management accountants on the relative importance of a specified set of vocational skills, and the level of these skills exhibited by graduates and recently qualified management accountants. These measures are then combined in a ‘weighted importance indicator’ to indicate the skills that are most in need of development

The Combination of Smoking and Overweight is Associated with Dyslipidemia Among Inpatients and Hypertension Among Outpatients with Schizophrenia

SUMMARYObjective:As the physical health of patients with schizophrenia is relatively poor and their risk of prematuredeath is considerably increased compared with the general population, we examined the associationbetween lifestyle-related diseases and smoking, drinking, and overweight in inpatients and outpatients withschizophrenia.Methods:The study design was cross-sectional. Subjects were 138 inpatients and 135 outpatients withschizophrenia from a psychiatric hospital in Japan. They were asked for information concerning smokingand alcohol use, and height and weight were measured to calculate body mass index. Data on hypertension,dyslipidemia, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and use of atypical antipsychotics were acquired frommedical records.Results:Inpatients were more likely to receive atypical antipsychotic medication and less likely to drinkalcohol. The smoking prevalence was 38.4% (53.8% in men, 17.2% in women) in inpatients and 39.3%(56.3% in men, 20.3% in women) in outpatients. Multivariate odds ratio( OR) for hypertension was significantlyhigher among outpatients than inpatients. After adjustment for age, sex, and use of atypical antipsychoticmedication, overweight smokers showed a significantly higher OR for dyslipidemia (3.17, 95% CI:1.07-9.37) among inpatients, and a significantly higher OR for hypertension (3.15, 95% CI:1.14-8.74)among outpatients. When the reference group is non-smokers with BMI below 25, smokers with BMI of 25or more had a significant higher OR( 3.38, 95% CI:1.36-8.38) for dyslipidemia among patients with schizophrenia.Conclusion:After adjustment for atypical antipsychotic medication use, the combination of smoking andoverweight was significantly associated with the prevalence of dyslipidemia among inpatients and hypertensionamong outpatients with schizophrenia

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Promoting health and well-being through physical education partnerships

The United Nations recently approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which forms a guideline policy for all nations. While the UN have strongly advised that partnerships are essential for the implementation of these global goals, within local communities there is little evidence of how this is best done or what it looks like in practice. This paper shares a health and wellbeing community initiative that achieves goals three and four of the SDGs, and in doing so models how to implement physical education partnerships as advocated by the UN. The highly successful innovative initiative is “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness” (2011–2014).This paper shares a health and wellbeing partnership, modelling implementation of physical education (PE) advocated by the United Nations (UN). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) exemplifies global efforts towards equality, specifically Goal 3 and 4 address health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into cross sector “partnerships”, identified as essential for the implementation of the SDGs. This is significant as the UN acknowledge a present gap of information on partnerships in action and a need for reporting from the ground level. The project “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness”, began as a partnership between a university and nearby schools and quickly grew to involve Australian Registered Training Organisations, the local health industry, Education departments and sport governing bodies. The collaborations involved pre-service teachers teaching Health and PE lessons to children in a disadvantaged socio-economic area, creating valuable learning experiences for stakeholders. Local and global communities were involved in research and reform. The project creatively optimised resources available through state, Australian and international connections. International partnerships enabled identification of unique contextual opportunities. Programme planning was strengthened with data gathered from an England and Wales Ofsted awarded Primary Physical Education course. Various methods, including; semi-structured interviews, reflective journal, observations, document analysis, and Student Evaluation of Teaching Units (SETU) were adopted. SETU is valid and reliable data collected by the university for the purposes of research. The findings support that partnerships enable SDG implementation and the research paper offers direction for localisation

Women's leadership in the Asian Century: does expansion mean inclusion?

This paper draws on British Council commissioned research in response to concerns about women's absence from senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia. The study sought existing knowledge from literature, policies, and available statistics and collected original interview data from 30 academics in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A central finding was that gender is not a category of analysis in higher education policy, research or statistical data in the region. Our interview data suggest that leadership was frequently not an object of desire for women. Being associated with particular types of masculinities, leadership often carried a heavy affective load for those women who transgressed patriarchal socio-cultural norms and disrupted the symbolic order of women being led by men. Leadership was frequently perceived and experienced by women in terms of navigating a range of ugly feelings and toxicities that depleted aspirations, well-being and opportunities

Identification of Novel SNPs by Next-Generation Sequencing of the Genomic Region Containing the APC Gene in Colorectal Cancer Patients in China

We described an approach of identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in complete genomic regions of key genes including promoters, exons, introns, and downstream sequences by combining long-range polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or NimbleGen sequence capture with next-generation sequencing. Using the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene as an example, we identified 210 highly reliable SNPs by next-generation sequencing analysis program MAQ and Samtools, of which 69 were novel ones, in the 123-kb APC genomic region in 27 pair of colorectal cancers and normal adjacent tissues. We confirmed all of the eight randomly selected high-quality SNPs by allele-specific PCR, suggesting that our false discovery rate is negligible. We identified 11 SNPs in the exonic region, including one novel SNP that was not previously reported. Although 10 of them are synonymous, they were predicted to affect splicing by creating or removing exonic splicing enhancers or exonic splicing silencers. We also identified seven SNPs in the upstream region of the APC gene, three of which were only identified in the cancer tissues. Six of these upstream SNPs were predicted to affect transcription factor binding. We also observed that long-range PCR was better in capturing GC-rich regions than the NimbleGen sequence capture technique.MOST, Chin

Of Research reviews and practice guides: Translating rapidly growing research on adolescent literacy into updated practice recommendations.

The demand for evidence-based instructional practices has driven a large supply of research on adolescent literacy. Documenting this supply, Baye, Inns, Lake, and Slavin’s 2019 article in Reading Research Quarterly synthesized far more studies, with far more rigorous methodology, than had ever been collected before. What does this mean for practice? Inspired by this article, I investigated how this synthesis compared with the 2008 U.S. Institute of Education Sciences practice guide for adolescent literacy. I also include two contemporary documents for context: Herrera, Truckenmiller, and Foorman’s (2016) review and the U.K. Education Endowment Foundation’s 2019 practice guide for secondary schools. I first examine how these documents define adolescent, reading, and evidence, and propose more inclusive definitions. I then compare their respective evidence bases, finding that the quality and quantity of evidence have dramatically changed. Only one of the 34 studies in the 2008 U.S. practice guide met Baye et al.’s inclusion criteria in 2019, and the average sample size in Baye et al.’s studies was 22 times as large as those in the 2008 U.S. practice guide. I also examine the potential implications for a new practice guide’s instructional recommendations and comment on the expansion of research in technology, disciplinary literacy, and writing—topics scarcely covered in the 2008 U.S. practice guide but which have been extensively researched since then. Finally, I call for revision of the U.S. practice guide and the establishment of standing committees on adolescent literacy to help educators translate the latest research findings into updated practices