Commentary: Older adults can improve compensatory stepping with repeated postural perturbations

A commentary on: Older adults can improve compensatory stepping with repeated postural perturbations by Dijkstra,B.W., Horak,F.B., Kamsma,Y.P.T., and Peterson,D.S.(2015).Front.AgingNeurosci. 7:201. doi:10.3389/fnagi.2015.00201. In sum, the results of Dijkstra etal. (2015) are of importance and significance for the field of falls prevention and stability control in aging. In particular, the work highlights the importance of multidirectional step or perturbation training, due to a lack of transfer across tasks. Whether this would hold for multidirectional gait perturbations is unclear, due to the influence of forward velocity during walking. Future work should explore different types, intensities and frequencies of perturbations in order to determine the most effective strategy for improving dynamic stability control in healthy older adults and inpatients with declined locomotor performance and increased falls risk. Finally, as Dijkstra etal. (2015) and previous studies found floor effects in the adaptation of young participants, further attempts should be made to appropriately scale perturbations to participant or groupability, in order to reliably compare adaptation across different groups

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The impact of COVID-19 on learning for final year nursing students

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been severe, particularly for the health and social care sector. For nursing students, this has caused major disruption and uncertainty to their studies. However, this exceptional situation has also created unique learning opportunities exposing students to unprecedented circumstances that offer new experiences and encourage resourcefulness and initiative in their practice as they transition to registered practice. This chapter has provided a fantastic opportunity to explore the experience of a final year undergraduate nursing module which took an innovative approach to learning about quality and service improvement. We will share with readers a snapshot of the experiences and reflections of nursing students who were learning and working through the initial waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK

The impact of COVID-19 on learning for final year nursing students

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been severe, particularly for the health and social care sector. For nursing students, this has caused major disruption and uncertainty to their studies. However, this exceptional situation has also created unique learning opportunities exposing students to unprecedented circumstances that offer new experiences and encourage resourcefulness and initiative in their practice as they transition to registered practice. This chapter has provided a fantastic opportunity to explore the experience of a final year undergraduate nursing module which took an innovative approach to learning about quality and service improvement. We will share with readers a snapshot of the experiences and reflections of nursing students who were learning and working through the initial waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK

Class experience in McEwan's atonement

Ian McEwan's critically acclaimed novel Atonement has attracted a number of different interpretations across many themes. However, there has been little attention paid to the issue of class in this work. I seek to rectify this lacuna by offering an examination of the novel utilizing the understanding of class developed by E. P. Thompson. Thompson understands class as a historical relationship that is developed over time and is associated with core concepts such as class experience, class consciousness, class struggle, class hegemony, and fetishism. I use these categories to examine the main characters such as Robbie, Cecilia, and Paul Marshall to illuminate and enhance our understanding of the class contradictions present in the novel. This not only demonstrates the richness of Thompson's framework but also the quality of McEwan's own writing on what he sees as the important issue of class. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC