How do pregnancy and birth experiences influence planned place of birth in future pregnancies? Findings from a longitudinal, narrative study.

A perception that first birth is more risky than subsequent births has led to women planning births in Obstetric Units, and care providers supporting these choices. This study explored the influence of pregnancy and birth experiences on women’s intended place of birth in current and subsequent pregnancies. Methods: Prospective, longitudinal narrative interviews (n=122) with forty-one women in three English NHS sites. During postnatal interviews, women reflected on their recent births and discussed where they might plan to give birth in a future pregnancy. Longitudinal narrative analysis methods were used to explore these data. Results: Women’s experience of care in their eventual place of birth had more influence upon decisions about the (hypothetical) next pregnancy than planned place of birth during pregnancy did. Women with complex pregnancies usually planned hospital Obstetric Unit (OU) births, but healthy women with straightforward pregnancies also chose OU and would often plan the same for the future, particularly if they experienced OU during recent births. Discussion: The experience of giving birth in a hospital OU reinforced the notion that birth is risky and uncertain, and that hospital OU is the best or safest setting for birth. The assumption that women will opt for lower acuity settings for second or subsequent births was not supported by these data, which may mean that multiparous women who best fit criteria for non-OU births are reluctant to plan births in these settings. This highlights the importance of providing balanced information about risks and benefits of different birth settings to all women during pregnancy

Prophylactic, anti-paedophile hymn-writing in colonial India: an introduction to Amy Carmichael (1867-1951) and her missionary writings

This article aims to introduce the life, ministry, and writings of Amy Carmichael, a missionary best known for her establishment of the Dohnavur Fellowship in India, an organization which aimed to protect vulnerable children, especially devadasis (temple servants), from sexual exploitation. An overview is given of her publications and of their critical reception. It is demonstrated how she attempted to articulate an indigenous Indian theology through observations of the Indian landscape, fauna, and flora in her writings, and how her prophylactic hymns written for the children of the Fellowship were a response to her welfare work against paedophile abuse

What do students do? Training, research and learning: developing skills for the next generation of near-surface geophysicists

In the past decade, degree programmes throughout Europe have changed dramatically and near-surface geophysics is now commonly taught as a minor component of other undergraduate geoscience and related degree programmes. As a consequence, there has been a distinct change in the nature, scope and content of geophysical degrees and the skills set that graduates obtain throughout their studies. As an introduction to the Special Issue on Student-based Research, this commentary article discusses the expectations of employers, the competencies and skills of our undergraduate and postgraduate students and how these have changed over time. We highlight skill gaps and suggest ways in which the near-surface geophysical community can address these needs in a pragmatic and cost efficient manner. We hope to illustrate that a greater collaboration between industry and academia is the way forward and that innovative, cross-sector approaches to student learning and research are the solution to at least some of our problems

The growing utility of microbial genome sequences (Meeting Report)

© 2000 GenomeBiology.comA report from the Genome Biology session of the 4th annual conference on microbial genomes, Virginia, February 12-15, 2000

The sexuality assemblage: Desire, affect, anti-humanism

Two theoretical moves are required to resist the ‘humanist enticements’ associated with sexuality. Post-structuralism supplies the first, showing how the social produces culturally-specific sexual knowledgeabilities. A second anti-humanist move is then needed to overturn anthropocentric privileging of the human body and subject as the locus of sexuality. In this paper we establish a language and landscape for a Deleuze inspired anti-humanist sociology of sexuality that shifts the location of sexuality away from bodies and individuals. Sexuality in this view is an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. Assemblages territorialise bodies’ desire, setting limits on what it can do: this process determines the shape of sexuality, which is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted. We illustrate how this anti-humanist ontology may be applied to empirical data to explore sexualityassemblages, and conclude by exploring the theoretical and methodological advantages and disadvantages of an anti-humanist assemblage approach to sexuality

Assigned responsibility for remote robot operation

The remote control of robots, known as teleoperation, is a non-trivial task, requiring the operator to make decisions based on the information relayed by the robot about its own status as well as its surroundings. This places the operator under significant cognitive load. A solution to this involves sharing this load between the human operator and automated operators. This paper builds on the idea of adjustable autonomy, proposing Assigned Responsibility, a way of clearly delimiting control responsibility over one or more robots between human and automated operators. An architecture for implementing Assigned Responsibility is presented

Modeling High-Dimensional Multichannel Brain Signals

Our goal is to model and measure functional and effective (directional) connectivity in multichannel brain physiological signals (e.g., electroencephalograms, local field potentials). The difficulties from analyzing these data mainly come from two aspects: first, there are major statistical and computational challenges for modeling and analyzing high-dimensional multichannel brain signals; second, there is no set of universally agreed measures for characterizing connectivity. To model multichannel brain signals, our approach is to fit a vector autoregressive (VAR) model with potentially high lag order so that complex lead-lag temporal dynamics between the channels can be captured. Estimates of the VAR model will be obtained by our proposed hybrid LASSLE (LASSO + LSE) method which combines regularization (to control for sparsity) and least squares estimation (to improve bias and mean-squared error). Then we employ some measures of connectivity but put an emphasis on partial directed coherence (PDC) which can capture the directional connectivity between channels. PDC is a frequency-specific measure that explains the extent to which the present oscillatory activity in a sender channel influences the future oscillatory activity in a specific receiver channel relative to all possible receivers in the network. The proposed modeling approach provided key insights into potential functional relationships among simultaneously recorded sites during performance of a complex memory task. Specifically, this novel method was successful in quantifying patterns of effective connectivity across electrode locations, and in capturing how these patterns varied across trial epochs and trial types