Effects of Popular Music on Memorization Tasks

This study investigated the effects that popular music has on memory performance. It was proposed that popular music would adversely affect both studying and memory recall. Forty introductory psychology students participated in the study. Subjects were given a list of fifty words to study in 6 ½ minutes, with music either being present or absent. This was termed the learning stage. In this study, four conditions were tested. In all 4 conditions, subjects were assigned to either a “music” pre-period or a “non-music” pre-period and a “music” post-period or a “non-music” post-period. After they had studied the words, subjects were given another 6 ½ minutes to recall the words either with or with out music present. This period was called the recall stage. The researchers hypothesized that music would have a detrimental effect on performance, these expected results were not found. Findings from this study suggested that students who study while listening to popular music performed at the same level as those without music present in either condition. Results indicated that women excelled in recall when the testing condition did not have music present in comparison to men

‘ISIS is not Islam’: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance

Powerful narratives that invoke religious concepts – jihad, Sharia, shahid, Caliphate, kuffar, and al-Qiyāmah – have accompanied jihadi violence but also inspired robust counter-narratives from Muslims. Taking a narrative criminological approach, we explore the rejection of religious extremism that emerges in everyday interactions in a religious community under intense pressure in Western societies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway, we argue that young Muslims suffer epistemic injustice in their narrative exclusion from the mainstream, and assess the narrative credibility they try to maintain in the face of marginalization. We suggest that young Muslims’ religious narratives reject a mainstream characterization of Islam as essentially a religion of aggression, and simultaneously join forces with that mainstream in seeking the narrative exclusion of the jihadi extremists

Nyhetens plass i et digitalt medieunivers: En kvalitativ studie av unge kvinners lave nyhetsforbruk

I samtiden preger det digitale og fragmentert medielandskapet nettgenerasjonens preferanser og vaner i hverdagen, også når det kommer til deres konsum av nyheter. Tidligere studier indikerer at spesielt jenter ser ut til å velge vekk de harde nyhetene til fordel for mykt og mer underholdende innhold. Formålet med undersøkelsen som presenteres i denne bacheloroppgaven er å få en bredere forståelse av unge jenters refleksjoner og forhold til harde nyheter på digitale flater. Temaer som nyhetsunnvikelse, nettgenerasjonen, nyhetspresentasjon, opinionsledere og opplevd nytteverdi har vist seg gjeldende gjennom denne studien, for å bedre forstå hvilke prioriteringer jentene gjør i sin mediehverdag. Vi har derfor lagt følgende problemstilling til grunn for vår forskning: “Hvordan reflekterer unge kvinner med lavt nyhetsforbruk over egen interesse for og konsum av harde nyheter på digitale flater?” For å best mulig kunne besvare dette spørsmålet, har vi utformet tre mer konkrete forskningsspørsmål: 1. I hvilken grad opplever jentene at presentasjon av harde nyheter på digitale flater passer overens med deres øvrige mediekonsum? 2. I hvilken grad har avsender og sosiale relasjoner betydning for deres nyhetskonsum? 3. Hvilken rolle spiller harde nyheter i deres hverdag? Vi har gjennom studie benyttet oss av et kvalitativt design med semistrukturelle dybdeintervjuer av ni unge kvinner på videregående skole i Oslo. Basert på de tre forskningsspørsmålene blir funnene i studien diskutert gjennom teoretiske tilnærminger som omhandler nyhetenes presentasjonsmåte, dens avsender og jentenes opplevde nytteverdi. Våre funn bekrefter flere av de samme forholdene som fremkommer i tidligere undersøkelser av fenomenet, men vi har også fått innsyn i interessante refleksjoner som vi ikke har sett tendenser til i andre studier. Trolig kan disse bidra til å nyansere forståelsen av fenomenet nyhetsunnvikelse. Det har gjennom vår studie vist seg at nyhetens presentasjonsmåte har en betydning for jentenes valg av konsum, sett i lys av deres preferanser og øvrige mediekonsum. Våre funn indikerer også at nyhetens avsender har en positiv innvirkning på deres faktiske konsum og forståelse av den gitte nyheten. Et siste moment som gjør seg gjeldende for jentenes prioriteringer av nyhetskonsum, er den opplevde nytteverdien de sitter igjen med

Technology transfer. Multi-purpose cows for milk, meat and traction in smallholder farming systems. Proceedings of a consultation

The aim of this consultation is to explore the practicality of extending technologies that enable the use of dairy cows for multiple purposes, to help develop a regional project to transfer these technologies to relevant countries in east and Central Africa. The focus of the consultation is on new technologies developed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (IAR) to help introduce multi-purpose crossbred cows into smallholder production systems, focussing on traction in addition to milk and meat production. Topics of discussion include development of cow traction technologies, social and cultural altitudes towards adoption of cow traction, extension efforts to spread the technology, draft power use in smallholder farming systems, research on the nutrition of cows, and potential and extent of use of cows for draft work. Countries involved in the study include Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, China and India

Users’ perception of the OH-EpiCap evaluation tool based on its application to nine national antimicrobial resistance surveillance systems

Introduction: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a One Health (OH) challenge. To achieve or maintain an effective and efficient AMR surveillance system, it is crucial to evaluate its performance in meeting the proposed objectives, while complying with resource restrictions. The OH-EpiCap tool was created to evaluate the degree of compliance of hazard surveillance activities with essential OH concepts across the following dimensions: organization, operational activities, and impact of the surveillance system. We present feedback on the application of the OH-EpiCap tool from a user's perspective, based on the use of the tool to evaluate nine national AMR surveillance systems, each with different contexts and objectives. Methods: The OH-EpiCap was assessed using the updated CoEvalAMR methodology. This methodology allows the evaluation of the content themes and functional aspects of the tool and captures the user's subjective experiences via a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) approach. Results and discussion: The results of the evaluation of the OH-EpiCap are presented and discussed. The OH-EpiCap is an easy-to-use tool, which can facilitate a fast macro-overview of the application of the OH concept to AMR surveillance. When used by specialists in the matter, an evaluation using OH-EpiCap can serve as a basis for the discussion of possible adaptations of AMR surveillance activities or targeting areas that may be further investigated using other evaluation tools.This study was funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research through the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR). The Portuguese case study was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 773830: One Health European Joint Programme (MATRIX project).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Setting clinical performance specifications to develop and evaluate biomarkers for clinical use

Background: Biomarker discovery studies often claim ‘promising’ findings, motivating further studies and marketing as medical tests. Unfortunately, the patient benefits promised are often inadequately explained to guide further evaluation, and few biomarkers have translated to improved patient care. We present a practical guide for setting minimum clinical performance specifications to strengthen clinical performance study design and interpretation. Methods: We developed a step-by-step approach using test evaluation and decision-analytic frameworks and present with illustrative examples. Results: We define clinical performance specifications as a set of criteria that quantify the clinical performance a new test must attain to allow better health outcomes than current practice. We classify the proposed patient benefits of a new test into three broad groups and describe how to set minimum clinical performance at the level where the potential harm of false-positive and false-negative results does not outweigh the benefits. (1) For add-on tests proposed to improve disease outcomes by improving detection, define an acceptable trade-off for false-positive versus true-positive results; (2) for triage tests proposed to reduce unnecessary tests and treatment by ruling out disease, define an acceptable risk of false-negatives as a safety threshold; (3) for replacement tests proposed to provide other benefits, or reduce costs, without compromising accuracy, use existing tests to benchmark minimum accuracy levels. Conclusions: Researchers can follow these guidelines to focus their study objectives and to define statistical hypotheses and sample size requirements. This way, clinical performance studies will allow conclusions about whether test performance is sufficient for intended use

Post-postfeminism? New feminist visibilities in postfeminist times

This article contributes to debates about the value and utility of the notion of postfeminism for a seemingly “new” moment marked by a resurgence of interest in feminism in the media and among young women. The paper reviews current understandings of postfeminism and criticisms of the term’s failure to speak to or connect with contemporary feminism. It offers a defence of the continued importance of a critical notion of postfeminism, used as an analytical category to capture a distinctive contradictory-but-patterned sensibility intimately connected to neoliberalism. The paper raises questions about the meaning of the apparent new visibility of feminism and highlights the multiplicity of different feminisms currently circulating in mainstream media culture – which exist in tension with each other. I argue for the importance of being able to “think together” the rise of popular feminism alongside and in tandem with intensified misogyny. I further show how a postfeminist sensibility informs even those media productions that ostensibly celebrate the new feminism. Ultimately, the paper argues that claims that we have moved “beyond” postfeminism are (sadly) premature, and the notion still has much to offer feminist cultural critics

The question-behaviour effect: a theoretical and methodological review and meta-analysis

Research has demonstrated that asking people questions about a behaviour can lead to behaviour change. Despite many, varied studies in different domains, it is only recently that this phenomenon has been studied under the umbrella term of the question-behaviour effect (QBE) and moderators of the effect have been investigated. With a particular focus on our own contributions, this article: (1) provides an overview of QBE research; (2) reviews and offers new evidence concerning three theoretical accounts of the QBE (behavioural simulation and processing fluency; attitude accessibility; cognitive dissonance); (3) reports a new meta-analysis of QBE studies (k = 66, reporting 94 tests) focusing on methodological moderators. The findings of this meta-analysis support a small significant effect of the QBE (g = 0.14, 95% CI = 0.11, 0.18, p < .001) with smaller effect sizes observed in more carefully controlled studies that exhibit less risk of bias and (4) also considers directions for future research on the QBE, especially studies that use designs with low risk of bias and consider desirable and undesirable behaviour separately

The PhyloPythiaS Web Server for Taxonomic Assignment of Metagenome Sequences

Metagenome sequencing is becoming common and there is an increasing need for easily accessible tools for data analysis. An essential step is the taxonomic classification of sequence fragments. We describe a web server for the taxonomic assignment of metagenome sequences with PhyloPythiaS. PhyloPythiaS is a fast and accurate sequence composition-based classifier that utilizes the hierarchical relationships between clades. Taxonomic assignments with the web server can be made with a generic model, or with sample-specific models that users can specify and create. Several interactive visualization modes and multiple download formats allow quick and convenient analysis and downstream processing of taxonomic assignments. Here, we demonstrate usage of our web server by taxonomic assignment of metagenome samples from an acidophilic biofilm community of an acid mine and of a microbial community from cow rumen