436 research outputs found
Bricks and Mortarboard - an Education and Business Partnership Project
Peterbrook is a large two-form entry primary school with a 40 place nursery, on the Solihull/Birmingham border. This paper outlines a joint initiative which involved Peterbrook Primary School with a company working in the locality (Lend Lease) together with Solihull Education and Business Partnership. The project was supported by the Engineering Employers Federations' Technology Tree programme, which aims to bring together local engineering companies and schools in partnership, which bring all round benefits. The importance of design and technology as a subject in our National Curriculum is widely acknowledged. It enables the child to learn about how materials have been used to make products that people need or want, and to realise that designers have to consider how new products could affect the people who use or make them and the effects they may have on the environment
Health visitorsâ views on promoting oral health and supporting clients with dental health problems: a qualitative study
Background - Inequalities in dental decay in young children persist, resulting in high admission rates for general anaesthetics for tooth extractions. Health visitors have the potential to improve dental attendance and oral health in families least likely to engage with dental services. There is little evidence on health visitor views on this.
Methods - Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 17 health visitors working in both affluent and deprived areas in a single UK city. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, anonymized and analysed following a constructivist grounded theory approach.
Results - Knowledge of oral health was high and health visitors requested oral health education specific to the communities they worked in. Health visitors reported effective, formal referral processes to other health services but not to primary NHS dental services even when dealing with infants in pain. Health visitors interviewed were largely unaware of specific NHS dental services which reduce barriers to dental care including interpreting services and dental services for children with additional needs.
Conclusions - Health visitors interviewed were knowledgeable and enthusiastic about oral health but not about dental services. Inadequate links with NHS dental services may limit their effectiveness in oral health improvement and this needs to be addressed
Semiparametric posterior corrections
We present a new approach to semiparametric inference using corrected
posterior distributions. The method allows us to leverage the adaptivity,
regularization and predictive power of nonparametric Bayesian procedures to
estimate low-dimensional functionals of interest without being restricted by
the holistic Bayesian formalism. Starting from a conventional nonparametric
posterior, we target the functional of interest by transforming the entire
distribution with a Bayesian bootstrap correction. We provide conditions for
the resulting to possess calibrated frequentist
properties and specialize the results for several canonical examples: the
integrated squared density, the mean of a missing-at-random outcome, and the
average causal treatment effect on the treated. The procedure is
computationally attractive, requiring only a simple, efficient post-processing
step that can be attached onto any arbitrary posterior sampling algorithm.
Using the ACIC 2016 causal data analysis competition, we illustrate that our
approach can outperform the existing state-of-the-art through the propagation
of Bayesian uncertainty.Comment: 53 page
Gene Loss and Horizontal Gene Transfer Contributed to the Genome Evolution of the Extreme Acidophile âFerrovumâ
IndexaciĂłn: Web of Science. Scopus.Acid mine drainage (AMD), associated with active and abandoned mining sites, is a habitat for acidophilic microorganisms that gain energy from the oxidation of reduced sulfur compounds and ferrous iron and that thrive at pH below 4. Members of the recently proposed genus "Ferrovurn" are the first acidophilic iron oxidizers to be described within the Betaproteobacteria. Although they have been detected as typical community members in AMD habitats worldwide, knowledge of their phylogenetic and metabolic diversity is scarce. Genomics approaches appear to be most promising in addressing this lacuna since isolation and cultivation of "Ferrovurn" has proven to be extremely difficult and has so far only been successful for the designated type strain-Ferrovum myxofaciens" P3G. In this study, the genomes of two novel strains of "Ferrovurn" (PN-J185 and Z-31) derived from water samples of a mine water treatment plant were sequenced. These genomes were compared with those of "Ferrovum" sp. JA12 that also originated from the mine water treatment plant, and of the type strain (P3G). Phylogenomic scrutiny suggests that the four strains represent three "Ferrovum" species that cluster in two groups (1 and 2). Comprehensive analysis of their predicted metabolic pathways revealed that these groups harbor characteristic metabolic profiles, notably with respect to motility, chemotaxis, nitrogen metabolism, biofilm formation and their potential strategies to cope with the acidic environment. For example, while the "F myxofaciens" strains (group 1) appear to be motile and diazotrophic, the non-motile group 2 strains have the predicted potential to use a greater variety of fixed nitrogen sources. Furthermore, analysis of their genome synteny provides first insights into their genome evolution, suggesting that horizontal gene transfer and genome reduction in the group 2 strains by loss of genes encoding complete metabolic pathways or physiological features contributed to the observed diversification.http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2016.00797/ful
Obscurity and Gender Resistance in Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry
publication-status: Submittedtypes: Article© 2012 by Taylor & FrancisSince his death in 1865, military surgeon James Barry has alternately been classified as a
cross-dressing woman or as an intersexed individual. Patricia Dunckerâs novel James
Miranda Barry (1999) poses an important challenge to such readings, as it does not
reveal any foundational truth about Barryâs sex. Resting on obscurity rather than
revelation, the text frustrates the desire to know the past in terms of gender binaries and
stable sexual identity categories. Drawing on feminist and queer theorisations of the
relation between gender and time, this essay demonstrates that Dunckerâs use of obscurity
opens up alternative strategies of gender resistance.The Wellcome Trus
Does gender matter? A cross-national investigation of primary class-room discipline.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupFewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about the underachievement of boys, with claims that the lack of male ârole modelsâ in schools has an adverse effect on boysâ academic motivation and engagement. Although previous research has examined âteachingâ as institutional talk, menâs linguistic behaviour in the classroom remains largely ignored, especially in regard to enacting discipline. Using empirical spoken data collected from four primary school classrooms in both the UK and in Germany, this paper examines the linguistic discipline strategies of eight male and eight female teachers using Interactional Sociolinguistics to address the question, does teacher gender matter?Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
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