The Third Way for the Third Sector: Using Design to Transfer Knowledge and Improve Service in a Voluntary Community Sector Organisation

This paper describes a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership that concluded in September 2011. Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) is a UK-wide activity that helps organisations to improve their competitiveness and productivity by making better use of knowledge, technology and skills within universities, colleges and research organisations. This paper details the outcome of a KTP between Age UK Newcastle and Northumbria University’s School of Design that aimed to use Design approaches to improve the charity’s services. This paper will describe the recent context for organisations operating in the Voluntary Community Sector and discuss the relevance of a Design approach to both the improvement of customer services in this circumstance, as well as the transfer of knowledge to a capacity-starved organisation. It will also document how Design was used to achieve both of these aims, and the resulting impact of this engagement on the organisation and stakeholders

Accessing the literature: using bibliographic databases to find journal articles. Part 1

Research in primary dental care, recertification, continuing professional development, lifelong learning, peer review and quality healthcare are all informed by the published literature. Dental practitioners can find out about reliable and up-to-date information available in the published literature by searching bibliographic databases. Published in two parts, this article describes the databases relevant to clinical dental practice and explains the generic skills required to search them effectively, focusing on MEDLINE, the database most relevant for the majority of dental practitioners, which is freely available via the World Wide Web (WWW). The article differentiates between sensitivity (maximum recall) and specificity (relevance of recall), and suggests how to identify a manageable number of relevant citations, how to save the citations, and how to obtain the full text. In part 2, the article concludes by alerting readers to some of the limitations and pitfalls of database-searching

State education as high-yield investment: human capital theory in European policy discourse

Human Capital Theory has been an increasingly important phenomenon in economic thought over the last 50 years. The central role it affords to education has become even more marked in recent years as the concept of the ‘knowledge economy’ has become a global concern. In this paper, the prevalence of Human Capital Theory within European educational policy discourse is explored. The paper examines a selection of policy documents from a number of disparate European national contexts and considers the extent to which the ideas of Human Capital Theory can be seen to be influential. In the second part of the paper, the implications of Human Capital Theory for education are considered, with a particular focus on the possible ramifications at a time of economic austerity. The paper argues that Human Capital Theory risks offering a diminished view of the person, a diminished view of education, but that with its sole focus on economic goals leaves room for educationists and others to argue for the educational, social, and moral values it ignores, and for the conception of the good life and good society it fails to mention

Physician decision making in selection of second-line treatments in immune thrombocytopenia in children.

Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is an acquired autoimmune bleeding disorder which presents with isolated thrombocytopenia and risk of hemorrhage. While most children with ITP promptly recover with or without drug therapy, ITP is persistent or chronic in others. When needed, how to select second-line therapies is not clear. ICON1, conducted within the Pediatric ITP Consortium of North America (ICON), is a prospective, observational, longitudinal cohort study of 120 children from 21 centers starting second-line treatments for ITP which examined treatment decisions. Treating physicians reported reasons for selecting therapies, ranking the top three. In a propensity weighted model, the most important factors were patient/parental preference (53%) and treatment-related factors: side effect profile (58%), long-term toxicity (54%), ease of administration (46%), possibility of remission (45%), and perceived efficacy (30%). Physician, health system, and clinical factors rarely influenced decision-making. Patient/parent preferences were selected as reasons more often in chronic ITP (85.7%) than in newly diagnosed (0%) or persistent ITP (14.3%, P = .003). Splenectomy and rituximab were chosen for the possibility of inducing long-term remission (P < .001). Oral agents, such as eltrombopag and immunosuppressants, were chosen for ease of administration and expected adherence (P < .001). Physicians chose rituximab in patients with lower expected adherence (P = .017). Treatment choice showed some physician and treatment center bias. This study illustrates the complexity and many factors involved in decision-making in selecting second-line ITP treatments, given the absence of comparative trials. It highlights shared decision-making and the need for well-conducted, comparative effectiveness studies to allow for informed discussion between patients and clinicians

Caregiving in multiple sclerosis and quality of life: a meta-synthesis of qualitative research

Objective: The lack of adequate conceptualisation and operationalisation of quality of life (QoL) limits the ability to have a consistent body of evidence to improve QoL research and practice in informal caregiving for people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Thus, we conducted a meta-synthesis of qualitative research to improve the conceptual understanding of the experiences of MS carers and to identify factors that affect carers' QoL. Design: Systematic searches of five electronic databases yielded 17 qualitative studies which were synthesised using the principles of meta-ethnography. Results: The synthesis resulted in nine inter-linking themes: Changes and losses; challenges revolving around MS; caregiving demands; burden of care; future concerns; external stressors; experiences of support; strategies used in managing the caregiving role; and motivating factors. Our findings suggest that MS carers can have both positive and negative experiences which may bring challenges and rewards to the carers. Conclusion: We present a proposed QoL model for MS caregiving which can be used to inform the development of interventions for MS carers to improve their QoL. However, further empirical research is needed to examine the utility of this model and to explore the concept of QoL in MS carers in more detail

A Time Purified Separated Antiproton Beam At The AGS

Physic

Cyber security fear appeals:unexpectedly complicated

Cyber security researchers are starting to experiment with fear appeals, with a wide variety of designs and reported efficaciousness. This makes it hard to derive recommendations for designing and deploying these interventions. We thus reviewed the wider fear appeal literature to arrive at a set of guidelines to assist cyber security researchers. Our review revealed a degree of dissent about whether or not fear appeals are indeed helpful and advisable. Our review also revealed a wide range of fear appeal experimental designs, in both cyber and other domains, which confirms the need for some standardized guidelines to inform practice in this respect. We propose a protocol for carrying out fear appeal experiments, and we review a sample of cyber security fear appeal studies, via this lens, to provide a snapshot of the current state of play. We hope the proposed experimental protocol will prove helpful to those who wish to engage in future cyber security fear appeal research

Underground railroads: citizen entitlements and unauthorized mobility in the antebellum period and today

In recent years, some scholars and prominent political figures have advocated the deepening of North American integration on roughly the European Union model, including the creation of new political institutions and the free movement of workers across borders. The construction of such a North American Union, if it included even a very thin trans-state citizenship regime, could represent the most significant expansion of individual entitlements in the region since citizenship was extended to former slaves in the United States. With such a possibility as its starting point, this article explores some striking parallels between the mass, legally prohibited movement across boundaries by fugitive slaves in the pre-Civil War period, and that by current unauthorized migrants to the United States. Both were, or are, met on their journeys by historically parallel groups of would-be helpers and hinderers. Their unauthorized movements in both periods serve as important signals of incomplete entitlements or institutional protections. Most crucially, moral arguments for extending fuller entitlements to both groups are shown here to be less distinct than may be prima facie evident, reinforcing the case for expanding and deepening the regional membership regime

Developing reading-writing connections; the impact of explicit instruction of literary devices on the quality of children's narrative writing

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary devices used by professional writers or “mentor authors”? The study was conducted with 18 teachers, working as research partners in nine elementary schools over one school year. The research group explored ways of developing children as reflective authors, able to draft and redraft writing in response to peer and teacher feedback. Daily literacy sessions were complemented by weekly writing workshops where students engaged in authorial activity and experienced writers' perspectives and readers' demands (Harwayne, 1992; May, 2004). Methods for data collection included video recording of peer-peer and teacher-led group discussions and audio recording of teacher-child conferences. Samples of children's narrative writing were collected and a comparison was made between the quality of their independent writing at the beginning and end of the research period. The research group documented the importance of peer-peer and teacher-student discourse in the development of children's metalanguage and awareness of audience. The study suggests that reading, discussing, and evaluating mentor texts can have a positive impact on the quality of children's independent writing