YUCSA: A CLIPS expert database system to monitor academic performance

The York University CLIPS Student Administrator (YUCSA), an expert database system implemented in C Language Integrated Processing System (CLIPS), for monitoring the academic performance of undergraduate students at York University, is discussed. The expert system component in the system has already been implemented for two major departments, and it is under testing and enhancement for more departments. Also, more elaborate user interfaces are under development. We describe the design and implementation of the system, problems encountered, and immediate future plans. The system has excellent maintainability and it is very efficient, taking less than one minute to complete an assessment of one student

Validation of safeguard protection from potential building explosion

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Transformation in a changing climate: a research agenda

The concept of transformation in relation to climate and other global change is increasingly receiving attention. The concept provides important opportunities to help examine how rapid and fundamental change to address contemporary global challenges can be facilitated. This paper contributes to discussions about transformation by providing a social science, arts and humanities perspective to open up discussion and set out a research agenda about what it means to transform and the dimensions, limitations and possibilities for transformation. Key focal areas include: (1) change theories, (2) knowing whether transformation has occurred or is occurring; (3) knowledge production and use; (4), governance; (5) how dimensions of social justice inform transformation; (6) the limits of human nature; (7) the role of the utopian impulse; (8) working with the present to create new futures; and (9) human consciousness. In addition to presenting a set of research questions around these themes the paper highlights that much deeper engagement with complex social processes is required; that there are vast opportunities for social science, humanities and the arts to engage more directly with the climate challenge; that there is a need for a massive upscaling of efforts to understand and shape desired forms of change; and that, in addition to helping answer important questions about how to facilitate change, a key role of the social sciences, humanities and the arts in addressing climate change is to critique current societal patterns and to open up new thinking. Through such critique and by being more explicit about what is meant by transformation, greater opportunities will be provided for opening up a dialogue about change, possible futures and about what it means to re-shape the way in which people live

Effective Delivery of Pressure Training: Perspectives of Athletes and Sport Psychologists

Pressure training (PT) strategically increases pressure in training to prepare athletes to perform under pressure. Although research has studied how to create pressure during training, PT’s effectiveness may depend on more than creating pressure. A practitioner’s delivery of sport psychology interventions can moderate their effectiveness, so the current study explored perspectives of sport psychologists and athletes on the characteristics of effective PT delivery in applied settings. Eight international-level athletes and eight sport psychologists participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews in which they described their experience participating in or conducting PT, respectively. Thematic analysis produced four themes relating to effective delivery: a) Collaboration with athletes and coaches: “with,” not “to”, b) Integration into training, c) Upfront transparency, and d) Promoting learning before and after PT. The themes provide guidance for planning, conducting, and following up on PT sessions in applied settings. The best practices discussed could increase athletes’ receptiveness to PT

Citation count distributions for large monodisciplinary journals

Many different citation-based indicators are used by researchers and research evaluators to help evaluate the impact of scholarly outputs. Although the appropriateness of individual citation indicators depends in part on the statistical properties of citation counts, there is no universally agreed best-fitting statistical distribution against which to check them. The two current leading candidates are the discretised lognormal and the hooked or shifted power law. These have been mainly tested on sets of articles from a single field and year but these collections can include multiple specialisms that might dilute their properties. This article fits statistical distributions to 50 large subject-specific journals in the belief that individual journals can be purer than subject categories and may therefore give clearer findings. The results show that in most cases the discretised lognormal fits significantly better than the hooked power law, reversing previous findings for entire subcategories. This suggests that the discretised lognormal is the more appropriate distribution for modelling pure citation data. Thus, future analytical investigations of the properties of citation indicators can use the lognormal distribution to analyse their basic properties. This article also includes improved software for fitting the hooked power law

The Accuracy of Confidence Intervals for Field Normalised Indicators

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Journal of Informetrics on 07/04/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.03.004 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.When comparing the average citation impact of research groups, universities and countries, field normalisation reduces the influence of discipline and time. Confidence intervals for these indicators can help with attempts to infer whether differences between sets of publications are due to chance factors. Although both bootstrapping and formulae have been proposed for these, their accuracy is unknown. In response, this article uses simulated data to systematically compare the accuracy of confidence limits in the simplest possible case, a single field and year. The results suggest that the MNLCS (Mean Normalised Log-transformed Citation Score) confidence interval formula is conservative for large groups but almost always safe, whereas bootstrap MNLCS confidence intervals tend to be accurate but can be unsafe for smaller world or group sample sizes. In contrast, bootstrap MNCS (Mean Normalised Citation Score) confidence intervals can be very unsafe, although their accuracy increases with sample sizes

UK clinical guideline for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis

The National Osteoporosis Guideline Group (NOGG) has revised the UK guideline for the assessment and management of osteoporosis and the prevention of fragility fractures in postmenopausal women, and men age 50 years and older. Accredited by NICE, this guideline is relevant for all healthcare professionals involved in osteoporosis management. INTRODUCTION The UK National Osteoporosis Guideline Group (NOGG) first produced a guideline on the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis in 2008, with updates in 2013 and 2017. This paper presents a major update of the guideline, the scope of which is to review the assessment and management of osteoporosis and the prevention of fragility fractures in postmenopausal women, and men age 50 years and older. METHODS Where available, systematic reviews, meta-analyses and randomised controlled trials were used to provide the evidence base. Conclusions and recommendations were systematically graded according to the strength of the available evidence. RESULTS Review of the evidence and recommendations are provided for the diagnosis of osteoporosis, fracture-risk assessment and intervention thresholds, management of vertebral fractures, non-pharmacological and pharmacological treatments, including duration and monitoring of anti-resorptive therapy, glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis, and models of care for fracture prevention. Recommendations are made for training; service leads and commissioners of healthcare; and for review criteria for audit and quality improvement. CONCLUSION The guideline, which has received accreditation from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE), provides a comprehensive overview of the assessment and management of osteoporosis for all healthcare professionals involved in its management. This position paper has been endorsed by the International Osteoporosis Foundation and by the European Society for the Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases

Ethnicity and low wage traps: favouritism, homosocial reproduction and economic marginalization

This article analyses the relationship between cultural difference, social connections and opportunity structures using interview evidence from low-paid workers and managers in local government, the health service, facilities management and housing. Exploring the operation of homosocial reproduction it reveals the double-edged nature of informality and the role of favouritism in particular in perpetuating ethnic advantage and privilege. While demonstrating that uses of homosocial reproduction need to be sensitive to intersections of identities or categories of difference, the article adds further evidence of the persistent gap between equal opportunities policies and practice for ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom labour market. The article concludes that stronger forms of positive action, and even positive discrimination, are needed to address the low pay traps and restricted opportunities of ethnic minority workers