Mega-sport events, micro and small business leveraging: introducing the "MSE–MSB leverage model"

Micro and small business (MSB) interests legitimize mega-sport event (MSE) candidature bids. Yet, MSB interests can be sidelined in the event lead up, live staging, and legacy periods. This article provides a detailed: 1) review of MSE impacts on existing MSBs residing within targeted host communities, 2) conceptual and practical examination of MSE leveraging opportunities, 3) synthesis of good inclusionary practices identified in previous MSE case studies. As a result, a series of general and specific ways MSEs can foster MSB leveraging and legitimize local interests are suggested. We present a comprehensive analysis of key works since mid-1990s related to the themes identified above. Our analysis identifies that there is limited conceptual and empirical research on MSB impact and leveraging activities in the context of MSEs, yet significant evidence points to negative experiences, disruption, and displacement effects on residential (host) communities. We purposively focus on good practice in the context of other MSEs from the Olympics Games (e.g., London 2012, Rio 2016) and FIFA World Cup (e.g., South Africa, 2010) to inform recommendations and managerial implications. We outline a systematic series of ways MSBs can be structurally excluded from accessing MSE leveraging opportunities. Building on Chalip’s widely adopted event leverage model (ELM), we present the “MSE–MSB Leverage Model” to illustrate how MSEs can (re)position MSBs as legitimate stakeholders to support greater leveraging opportunities and better (re)distribute event benefits back into host communities across planning and delivery stages. These range from reconfiguring: 1) event planning principles and policies, 2) regulatory and trading environments, and 3) the development of MSB business to-business networks and partnerships

The measurement of subjective wellbeing in people with intellectual disability in Australia

The importance of measuring quality of life, and most particularly the personal wellbeing of people with intellectual disabilities (ID), is now recognized. The measurement of wellbeing is an important component of program evaluation and can assist in the identification and planning of individualized support needs. There remains, however, a need for further research in this area. This paper describes a new scale, the Personal Wellbeing Index Intellectual Disability Scales (PWI-ID), which has been shown to be valid and reliable. Data is presented regarding its use in the measurement of wellbeing in people with ID and the focus of discussion is on its advantages and limitations.<br /

Thirst for knowledge: the effects of curiosity and interest on memory in younger and older adults

Given age-related memory impairments, one’s level of curiosity or interest could enhance memory for certain information. In the current study, younger and older adults read trivia questions, rated how curious they were to learn each answer, provided confidence and interest ratings, and judgments of learning (JOL) after learning the answer. No age-related differences in memory were found. Analyses indicated that curiosity and interest contributed to the formation of JOLs. Additionally, interest had a unique increasing relationship with older, but not younger, adults’ memory performance after a week. The results suggest that subjective interest may serve to enhance older adults’ memory

Pyocyanine formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Although the production of a diffusible blue-green pigment, pyocyanine by Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the common place observations of bacteriology, many aspects of phenomenon remain to be explained. Burton, Eagles and Campbell (1948) and Ingledew and Campbell (1969a) showed, with the ATCC 9027 strain, that phosphate deficiency in the culture medium is one of the factors which induce pyocyanine synthesis. The object of this investigations were: (a) To confirm the earlier work on the role of phosphate deficiency and to explore the effect of altering other constituents of the medium. This was done with NCTC 6750, the type strain of P. aeruginosa. (b) To attempt to explain how to phosphate level of the medium regulates pyocyanine production. (c) To investigate the possible role of pyocyanine in the metabolism of the parent organism. To provide a chemical basis for the investigations, pyocyanine and some related phenazines were synthesized and considerable effort taken to characterize their absorption spectra in the ultra-violet, visible and infra-red regions

Room to Glo: A systematic comparison of semantic change detection approaches with word embeddings

Word embeddings are increasingly used for the automatic detection of semantic change; yet, a robust evaluation and systematic comparison of the choices involved has been lacking. We propose a new evaluation framework for semantic change detection and find that (i) using the whole time series is preferable over only comparing between the first and last time points; (ii) independently trained and aligned embeddings perform better than continuously trained embeddings for long time periods; and (iii) that the reference point for comparison matters. We also present an analysis of the changes detected on a large Twitter dataset spanning 5.5 years.This work was supported by The Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1

Memory for allergies and health foods: how younger and older adults strategically remember critical health information

Objectives. While older adults often display memory deficits, with practice they can sometimes selectively remember valuable information at the expense of less value information. We examined age-related differences and similarities in memory for health-related information under conditions where some information was critical to remember. Method. In Experiment 1, participants studied three lists of allergens, ranging in severity from 0 (not a health risk) to 10 (potentially fatal), with the instruction that it was particularly important to remember items to which a fictional relative was most severely allergic. After each list, participants received feedback regarding their recall of the high-value allergens. Experiment 2 examined memory for health benefits, presenting foods that were potentially beneficial to the relative’s immune system. Results. While younger adults exhibited better overall memory for the allergens, both age groups in Experiment 1 developed improved selectivity across the lists, with no evident age differences in severe allergen recall by List 2. Selectivity also developed in Experiment 2, although age differences for items of high health benefit were present. Discussion. The results have implications for models of selective memory in older age, and for how aging influences the ability to strategically remember important information within health-related contexts

“A sustained, productive, constructive relationship with someone who can help”—A qualitative exploration of the experiences of help seekers and support persons using the emergency department during a suicide crisis

For Australians experiencing a suicide crisis, the emergency department (ED) is the recommended point of contact for intervention and to ensure personal safety. However, negative ED experiences can deter individuals from returning, thus impacting future suicide risk. In order to improve the ED environment for individuals in suicidal crisis, an in-depth understanding of this experience is needed. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 help seekers and 16 support persons were conducted. A grounded theory approach uncovered a core organising concept—all participants wanted a “a sustained, productive, constructive relationship with someone who can help” during the ED visit—which guided analysis. Thematic analysis resulted in two themes and four subthemes exploring the systemic and interpersonal aspects of the ED visit and the roadblocks and pathways to development of the relationship. Interpersonal factors included aspects of staff interaction and presence of a support person. Systemic factors related to aspects controlled by the physical space and internal policies and procedures and included aspects such as the chaotic environment, long waiting times, and access to staff. Overwhelmingly, there were more roadblocks than pathways reported by participants. Improving the ED environment, increasing staff training and encouraging the presence of support persons may help mitigate some of these roadblocks

Assessing the impact of OCR quality on downstream NLP tasks

A growing volume of heritage data is being digitized and made available as text via optical character recognition (OCR). Scholars and libraries are increasingly using OCR-generated text for retrieval and analysis. However, the process of creating text through OCR introduces varying degrees of error to the text. The impact of these errors on natural language processing (NLP) tasks has only been partially studied. We perform a series of extrinsic assessment tasks — sentence segmentation, named entity recognition, dependency parsing, information retrieval, topic modelling and neural language model fine-tuning — using popular, out-of-the-box tools in order to quantify the impact of OCR quality on these tasks. We find a consistent impact resulting from OCR errors on our downstream tasks with some tasks more irredeemably harmed by OCR errors. Based on these results, we offer some preliminary guidelines for working with text produced through OCR