388 research outputs found
Education for Sustainable Development: Towards the Sustainable University
We planned this conference in anticipation of the end of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), and the start of the next phase for those involved in ESD here and internationally. At Plymouth University, 2015 marks ten year anniversary since cross-‐institutional work on sustainability and sustainability education was spearheaded by the founding of the Centre for Sustainable Futures (CSF). Coincidentally, 2015 also marks a ten years since the influential HEFCE policy document ‘Sustainable Development in Higher Education’ was released. Holding the conference in January – named after the Roman god of doorways, of endings and beginnings – we sought to look at some of what has been achieved in sustainability education to date and explore its prospects as we move forward. Following an enthusiastic response to the call for abstracts, the conference featured a diverse range of research papers, posters, and roundtable presentations from academics and practitioners across the UK and beyond. The conference was arranged around three overarching themes: ESD Pedagogy: Criticality, Creativity, and Collaboration What are the teaching and learning processes that enable students to develop their own capacity to think critically and creatively in the face of global sustainability challenges and, secondly, to act collaboratively in ways that pursue more hopeful and sustainable futures? Innovative Learning Spaces for ESD What are the physical environments that provide opportunities for new forms of sustainability education to flourish? What lies beyond the lecture hall that is conducive to student learning through inquiry-‐based, active, participatory, interdisciplinary and experiential methods? Towards the Sustainable University What are effective approaches for leading institutional change, organisational learning, and staff CPD towards sustainability? This publication focuses on the last theme – Towards the Sustainable University. The previous PedRIO Occasional Paper 8 looks at the first theme ESD Pedagogy: Criticality, Creativity, and Collaboration
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"Engaging with birth stories in pregnancy: a hermeneutic phenomenological study of women's experiences across two generations"
BACKGROUND: The birth story has been widely understood as a crucial source of knowledge about childbirth. What has not been reported is the effect that birth stories may have on primigravid women's understandings of birth. Findings are presented from a qualitative study exploring how two generations of women came to understand birth in the milieu of other's stories. The prior assumption was that birth stories must surely have a positive or negative influence on listeners, steering them towards either medical or midwifery-led models of care.
METHODS: A Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used. Twenty UK participants were purposively selected and interviewed. Findings from the initial sample of 10 women who were pregnant in 2012 indicated that virtual media was a primary source of birth stories. This led to recruitment of a second sample of 10 women who gave birth in the 1970s-1980s, to determine whether they were more able to translate information into knowledge via stories told through personal contact and not through virtual technologies
RESULTS: Findings revealed the experience of 'being-in-the-world' of birth and of stories in that world. From a Heideggerian perspective, the birth story was constructed through 'idle talk' (the taken for granted assumptions of things, which come into being through language). Both oral stories and those told through technology were described as the 'modern birth story'. The first theme 'Stories are difficult like that', examines the birth story as problematic and considers how stories shape meaning. The second 'It's a generational thing', considers how women from two generations came to understand what their experience might be. The third 'Birth in the twilight of certainty,' examines women's experience of Being in a system of birth as constructed, portrayed and sustained in the stories being shared.
CONCLUSIONS: The women pregnant in 2012 framed their expectations in the language of choice, whilst the women who birthed in the 1970s-1980s framed their experience in the language of safety. For both, however, the world of birth was the same; saturated with, and only legitimised by the birth of a healthy baby. Rather than creating meaningful understanding, the 'idle talk' of birth made both cohorts fearful of leaving the relative comfort of the 'system', and of claiming an alternative birth
Theory of reasoned action for continuous improvement capabilities: a behavioral approach
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Comparison of 5-year progression of retinitis pigmentosa involving the posterior pole among siblings by means of SD-OCT: a retrospective study
The blockchain technology promises to transform finance, money and evengovernments. However, analyses of blockchain applicability and robustness typicallyfocus on isolated systems whose actors contribute mainly by running the consensusalgorithm. Here, we highlight the importance of considering trustless platformswithin the broader ecosystem that includes social and communication networks. Asan example, we analyse the flash-crash observed on 21st June 2017 in the Ethereumplatform and show that a major phenomenon of social coordination led to acatastrophic cascade of events across several interconnected systems. We proposethe concept of “emergent centralisation” to describe situations where a single systembecomes critically important for the functioning of the whole ecosystem, and arguethat such situations are likely to become more and more frequent in interconnectedsocio-technical systems. We anticipate that the systemic approach we propose willhave implications for future assessments of trustless systems and call for the attentionof policy-makers on the fragility of our interconnected and rapidly changing world
Knowledge sharing for innovation performance improvement in micro/SMEs: an insight from the creative sector
As economies become more reliant on innovative, knowledge-intensive firms, understanding the interaction between knowledge and improving innovation performance is increasingly important. Although most UK businesses are micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (micro/SMEs), knowledge management research has tended to focus on large companies Knowledge sharing can be critical for innovation performance, especially for smaller players with limited resources. Our study presents an insight from micro/SMEs operating in the highly knowledge-intensive and innovative games/entertainment software development sector. Using a mixed method approach, we investigate knowledge sharing and its contribution to firm innovation performance improvements. Our findings suggest that micro/SMEs are at the forefront of the creative sector precisely because of their smaller size. Our study reveals evidence of knowledge donation but limited evidence of knowledge collection in the knowledge sharing process. We develop a model highlighting the importance of industry context, individual knowledge and organizational size in knowledge sharing for innovation performance
Harnessing the ‘Essential Tension’ of Design: The Complex Relationship between the Firm and Designer Consultants
Towards a belief revision based adaptive and context sensitive information retrieval system
In an adaptive information retrieval (IR) setting, the information seekers' beliefs about which terms are relevant or nonrelevant will naturally fluctuate. This article investigates how the theory of belief revision can be used to model adaptive IR. More specifically, belief revision logic provides a rich representation scheme to formalize retrieval contexts so as to disambiguate vague user queries. In addition, belief revision theory underpins the development of an effective mechanism to revise user profiles in accordance with information seekers' changing information needs. It is argued that information retrieval contexts can be extracted by means of the information-flow text mining method so as to realize a highly autonomous adaptive IR system. The extra bonus of a belief-based IR model is that its retrieval behavior is more predictable and explanatory. Our initial experiments show that the belief-based adaptive IR system is as effective as a classical adaptive IR system. To our best knowledge, this is the first successful implementation and evaluation of a logic-based adaptive IR model which can efficiently process large IR collections
Enteral feeding reduces metabolic activity of the intestinal microbiome in Crohn’s disease: an observational study
Background/Objectives:
Enteral feeding will induce remission in as many as 80–90% of compliant patients with active Crohn’s disease (CD), but its method of action remains uncertain. This study was designed to examine its effects on the colonic microbiome.
Methods/Subjects:
Healthy volunteers and patients with CD followed a regimen confined to enteral feeds alone for 1 or 2 weeks, respectively. Chemicals excreted on breath or in faeces were characterised at the start and at the end of the feeding period by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.
Results:
One week of feeding in healthy volunteers caused significant changes in stool colour and deterioration in breath odour, together with increased excretion of phenol and indoles on the breath. Feeding for 2 weeks in patients with CD produced significant improvements in symptoms and a decrease in the concentration of C-reactive protein. The faecal concentrations of microbial products, including short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), and potentially toxic substances, including 1-propanol, 1-butanol and the methyl and ethyl esters of SCFAs, showed significant falls.
Conclusions:
A significant change occurs in the production of microbial metabolites after enteral feeding in both healthy volunteers and patients with CD. Many of those detected in CD are toxic and may feasibly lead to the immunological attack on the gut microbiota, which is characteristic of inflammatory bowel disease. The reduction in the production of such metabolites after enteral feeding may be the reason for its effectiveness in CD
The relation between bone mineral density, bone turnover markers, and vitamin D status in ankylosing spondylitis patients with active disease: a cross-sectional analysis
Osteoporosis is a well recognized complication of ankylosing spondylitis (AS). This study indicates that increased bone turnover, inflammation, and low vitamin D levels are important in the pathophysiology of AS-related osteoporosis, and that bone turnover markers (BTM) are valuable markers to detect bone loss in AS. The aim of this study was to elucidate the pathophysiology of AS-related osteoporosis by investigating the relation between bone mineral density (BMD), BTM, vitamin D, and clinical assessments of disease activity and physical function, as well as to identify parameters that are related to low BMD (osteopenia or osteoporosis) in AS patients with active disease. One hundred twenty-eight consecutive Dutch AS outpatients were included in this cross-sectional study. Bath AS Disease Activity Index (BASDAI), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein, ASAS-endorsed disease activity score (ASDAS), Bath AS Functional Index (BASFI), bone formation markers procollagen type 1 N-terminal peptide (PINP) and osteocalcin (OC), bone resorption marker serum C-telopeptides of type I collagen (sCTX), 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHvitD), lumbar spine and hip BMD, and vertebral fractures were assessed. Z-scores of BTM were calculated using matched 10-year cohorts of a Dutch reference group to correct for the normal influence that age and gender have on bone turnover. sCTX Z-score, OC Z-score, BASDAI, age, and gender were independently related to low BMD. In addition, PINP Z-score, ESR, 25OHvitD, age, and gender were independently related to sCTX and/or OC Z-score. This study indicates that increased bone turnover, inflammation, and low vitamin D levels are important in the pathophysiology of AS-related osteoporosis. Furthermore, sCTX and OC Z-scores seem to be valuable markers to detect bone loss in AS patients in daily clinical practice where BMD of the lumbar spine, measured by DXA, may be overestimated due to osteoproliferation in patients with advanced AS
The effect of a brief social intervention on the examination results of UK medical students: a cluster randomised controlled trial
Background: Ethnic minority (EM) medical students and doctors underperform academically, but little evidence exists on how to ameliorate the problem. Psychologists Cohen et al. recently demonstrated that a written self-affirmation intervention substantially improved EM adolescents' school grades several months later. Cohen et al.'s methods were replicated in the different setting of UK undergraduate medical education.Methods: All 348 Year 3 white (W) and EM students at one UK medical school were randomly allocated to an intervention condition (writing about one's own values) or a control condition (writing about another's values), via their tutor group. Students and assessors were blind to the existence of the study. Group comparisons on post-intervention written and OSCE (clinical) assessment scores adjusted for baseline written assessment scores were made using two-way analysis of covariance. All assessment scores were transformed to z-scores (mean = 0 standard deviation = 1) for ease of comparison. Comparisons between types of words used in essays were calculated using t-tests. The study was covered by University Ethics Committee guidelines.Results: Groups were statistically identical at baseline on demographic and psychological factors, and analysis was by intention to treat [intervention group EM n = 95, W n = 79; control group EM n = 77; W n = 84]. As predicted, there was a significant ethnicity by intervention interaction [F(4,334) = 5.74; p = 0.017] on the written assessment. Unexpectedly, this was due to decreased scores in the W intervention group [mean difference = 0.283; (95% CI = 0.093 to 0.474] not improved EM intervention group scores [mean difference = -0.060 (95% CI = -0.268 to 0.148)]. On the OSCE, both W and EM intervention groups outperformed controls [mean difference = 0.261; (95% CI = -0.047 to -0.476; p = 0.013)]. The intervention group used more optimistic words (p < 0.001) and more "I" and "self" pronouns in their essays (p < 0.001), whereas the control group used more "other" pronouns (p < 0.001) and more negations (p < 0.001).Discussion: Cohen et al.'s finding that a brief self-affirmation task narrowed the ethnic academic achievement gap was replicated on the written assessment but against expectations, this was due to reduced performance in the W group. On the OSCE, the intervention improved performance in both W and EM groups. In the intervention condition, participants tended to write about themselves and used more optimistic words than in the control group, indicating the task was completed as requested. The study shows that minimal interventions can have substantial educational outcomes several months later, which has implications for the multitude of seemingly trivial changes in teaching that are made on an everyday basis, whose consequences are never formally assessed
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