Navy and Polity: A 1963 Baseline

Although scholars employing cross cultural methodologies are making an increasing use of available data in various forms, their studies have not as yet dealt directly with military concerns

How can Exercise Referral Schemes increase physical activity: developing initial programme theory

Increasing activity levels is a priority for healthcare due to the role being active plays in preventing and treating multiple diseases. There is an increasing value of healthcare that is person-centred, which tailors support to meet people’s needs. The use of social prescribing, a community-based approach which focuses on a person’s strengths and encourages self management to improve wellbeing, has expanded rapidly in the United Kingdom. This approach has the potential to increase physical activity levels, but little is known about how this can be achieved. Exercise Referral is a person-centred community service which explicitly aims to increase physical activity. It has a detailed history, and lessons can be learnt about how it can achieve this outcome. Key documents, and best practice guidance over the history of exercise referral, highlighted several areas of learning for social prescribing. Active ingredients for success cover the following areas: partnership with medical referrers, standards of practice, offering counselling and a supportive journey for patients and robust practice management. These focal points are important as they bring essential resources and conditions into the limelight and consider prudent areas across the person’s journey, from first referral to the service content that is offered to them

Metacognition in schools: what does the literature suggest about the effectiveness of teaching metacognition in schools?

This paper focuses on a neglected area of school policy and practice: metacognition. As education becomes increasingly evidence-informed policy makers, school leaders and teachers are becoming increasingly research literate and have ready access to an ever-growing range of evidence about ‘what works’ in schools. Influential sources of evidence, such as the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, often indicate that teaching metacognition in schools can have a very positive effect on pupils’ outcomes. In this paper, we examine over fifty studies to ascertain the effect of teaching metacognition in schools on pupils’ outcomes and their wellbeing. Following our review it is clear that there is strong evidence indicating the when metacognition is effectively taught in schools then there is a very positive effect on pupil outcomes; there is less evidence about the relationship between teaching metacognition and pupil wellbeing, but the evidence which does exist is also very positive. Having identified that teaching metacognition can help improve pupil outcomes in schools, we then pose questions about the English government’s attitudes towards evidence-based practice. We ask why the government adopts some policies and strategies which have an international evidence base, while not adopting other policies or strategies which have at least an equally strong evidence base. This paper concludes by suggesting how policies and practices can be improved at in schools, Initial Teacher Education establishments and at the level of national policy

Ruminal bacterial communities differ in early-lactation dairy cows with differing risk of ruminal acidosis

IntroductionEarly-lactation Holstein cows (n= 261) from 32 herds in three regions (Australia, California, and Canada) were previously categorized using a discriminant analysis model as being at a high (26.1% of cows), medium (26.8% of cows), or low risk (47.1% of cows) of ruminal acidosis. We aimed to investigate if (1) risk of acidosis would be associated with ruminal bacterial taxa and dietary nutrient components, (2) there would be individual or combinations of bacterial taxa associated with acidosis-risk groups, and (3) the abundance of bacterial taxa would be associated with the intake of dietary nutrient components.MethodsDiets ranged from pasture supplemented with concentrates to total mixed rations. Bacteria 16S ribosomal DNA sequences from rumen samples collected < 3 hours after feeding via stomach tube were analyzed to determine bacterial presence. The relative abundance of each bacterial phylum and family was center log transformed and the transformed family data were subjected to two redundancy analysis biplots, one for acidosis risk group and one for region, to identify the 20 best-fit bacterial families from each respective redundancy analysis. A total of 29 unique families were identified when the lists of 20 families were combined from each redundancy analysis, and these 29 families were termed "influential" families." The association of acidosis-risk groups with the abundance of individual influential families was assessed by mixed models. Backward stepwise elimination mixed models were used to determine the bacterial taxa associated with each acidosis-risk group and the dietary nutrients associated with the abundance of the bacterial taxa.Results and discussionHigh-risk acidosis cows were associated with increased abundances of Anaerocella_f and Veillonellaceae and decreased abundances of several bacterial families with different characteristics. Five phyla: Firmicutes [odds ratio (OR) = 7.47 ± 7.43], Spirochaetes (OR = 1.28 ± 0.14), Lentisphaerae (OR = 0.70 ± 0.07), Planctomycetes (OR = 0.70 ± 0.09), and Tenericutes (OR = 0.44 ± 0.15), and nine families were associated with a higher risk of acidosis. Of the nine phyla identified to be of interest based on abundance and strength of association with acidosis-risk groups, all had one or more dietary nutrient that predicted their abundance. Sugar was the most frequently associated nutrient with the nine phyla, and was present in 78% (seven out of nine phyla) of the models; crude protein was present in 56% of models and crude fat was present in 44% of the models. Sugar and crude protein were most associated with the influential families and all but three families had one or more nutrient predictive of their abundance. Ruminal bacterial taxa are associated with ruminal acidosis; dietary sugar and crude protein are vital predictors of these and, thus, of ruminal acidosis risk

Social prescribing and physical activity: scoping an agenda for policy, practice and research

The Chief Medical Officer recommends that we should do at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week to keep us healthy and promote our wellbeing. Whilst the percentage of people achieving this target has increased in recent years many people do not reach this level on a regular basis and levels of inactivity remain stubbornly high. As it is well established that physical activity can contribute positively to an individual’s physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, personal development and social and community cohesion as well as national economic development, increasing physical active is now a worldwide priority and it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to support and motivate those not currently meeting physical activity target

Reporting of Adverse Events in Published and Unpublished Studies of Health Care Interventions : A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: We performed a systematic review to assess whether we can quantify the underreporting of adverse events (AEs) in the published medical literature documenting the results of clinical trials as compared with other nonpublished sources, and whether we can measure the impact this underreporting has on systematic reviews of adverse events. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Studies were identified from 15 databases (including MEDLINE and Embase) and by handsearching, reference checking, internet searches, and contacting experts. The last database searches were conducted in July 2016. There were 28 methodological evaluations that met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 9 studies compared the proportion of trials reporting adverse events by publication status. The median percentage of published documents with adverse events information was 46% compared to 95% in the corresponding unpublished documents. There was a similar pattern with unmatched studies, for which 43% of published studies contained adverse events information compared to 83% of unpublished studies. A total of 11 studies compared the numbers of adverse events in matched published and unpublished documents. The percentage of adverse events that would have been missed had each analysis relied only on the published versions varied between 43% and 100%, with a median of 64%. Within these 11 studies, 24 comparisons of named adverse events such as death, suicide, or respiratory adverse events were undertaken. In 18 of the 24 comparisons, the number of named adverse events was higher in unpublished than published documents. Additionally, 2 other studies demonstrated that there are substantially more types of adverse events reported in matched unpublished than published documents. There were 20 meta-analyses that reported the odds ratios (ORs) and/or risk ratios (RRs) for adverse events with and without unpublished data. Inclusion of unpublished data increased the precision of the pooled estimates (narrower 95% confidence intervals) in 15 of the 20 pooled analyses, but did not markedly change the direction or statistical significance of the risk in most cases. The main limitations of this review are that the included case examples represent only a small number amongst thousands of meta-analyses of harms and that the included studies may suffer from publication bias, whereby substantial differences between published and unpublished data are more likely to be published. CONCLUSIONS: There is strong evidence that much of the information on adverse events remains unpublished and that the number and range of adverse events is higher in unpublished than in published versions of the same study. The inclusion of unpublished data can also reduce the imprecision of pooled effect estimates during meta-analysis of adverse events

Madness and the law: The Derrida/Foucault debate revisited

In this article the Derrida/Foucault debate is scrutinised with two closely related aims in mind: (1) reconsidering the way in which Foucault’s texts, and especially the more recently published lectures, should be read; and (2) establishing the relation between law and madness. The article firstly calls for a reading of Foucault which exceeds metaphysics with the security it offers, by taking account of Derrida’s reading of Foucault as well as of the heterogeneity of Foucault’s texts. The article reflects in detail on a text of Derrida on Foucault (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’) as well as a text of Foucault on Blanchot (‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside’). The latter text shows that Foucault was at times acutely aware of the difficulty involved in exceeding metaphysics and that he realised the importance in this regard of a reflection on literature. These reflections tie in closely with Foucault’s History of Madness as well as with Derrida’s reflections on literature and on madness. Both Derrida and Foucault contend that law has much to learn from literature in understanding the relation between itself and madness. Literature more specifically points to law’s ‘origin’ in madness. The article contends that a failure to take seriously this origin, also in the reading of Foucault’s lectures, would amount to a denial by law of itself

Dynamic summarization of bibliographic-based data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Traditional information retrieval techniques typically return excessive output when directed at large bibliographic databases. Natural Language Processing applications strive to extract salient content from the excessive data. Semantic MEDLINE, a National Library of Medicine (NLM) natural language processing application, highlights relevant information in PubMed data. However, Semantic MEDLINE implements manually coded schemas, accommodating few information needs. Currently, there are only five such schemas, while many more would be needed to realistically accommodate all potential users. The aim of this project was to develop and evaluate a statistical algorithm that automatically identifies relevant bibliographic data; the new algorithm could be incorporated into a dynamic schema to accommodate various information needs in Semantic MEDLINE, and eliminate the need for multiple schemas.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We developed a flexible algorithm named Combo that combines three statistical metrics, the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD), Riloff's RlogF metric (RlogF), and a new metric called PredScal, to automatically identify salient data in bibliographic text. We downloaded citations from a PubMed search query addressing the genetic etiology of bladder cancer. The citations were processed with SemRep, an NLM rule-based application that produces semantic predications. SemRep output was processed by Combo, in addition to the standard Semantic MEDLINE genetics schema and independently by the two individual KLD and RlogF metrics. We evaluated each summarization method using an existing reference standard within the task-based context of genetic database curation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Combo asserted 74 genetic entities implicated in bladder cancer development, whereas the traditional schema asserted 10 genetic entities; the KLD and RlogF metrics individually asserted 77 and 69 genetic entities, respectively. Combo achieved 61% recall and 81% precision, with an F-score of 0.69. The traditional schema achieved 23% recall and 100% precision, with an F-score of 0.37. The KLD metric achieved 61% recall, 70% precision, with an F-score of 0.65. The RlogF metric achieved 61% recall, 72% precision, with an F-score of 0.66.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Semantic MEDLINE summarization using the new Combo algorithm outperformed a conventional summarization schema in a genetic database curation task. It potentially could streamline information acquisition for other needs without having to hand-build multiple saliency schemas.</p