128 research outputs found
Land Use and Transport: Settlement Patterns and the Demand for Travel. Stage 2 Background Technical Report
Relationship between sibling jealousy and jealousy in romantic relationships
Research examining whether or not there is a relationship between sibling jealousy and jealousy in romantic relationships
Spatial Planning for Sustainable Transport?
Robin Hickman, Catherine Seaborn, Peter Headicar,
David Banister and Corinne Swain consider the crucial
role of spatial planning in reducing the demand for trave
The Life of John Wishart (1850â1926): Study of an Academic Surgical Career Prior to the Flexner Report
BACKGROUND: The 1910 Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada is often taken as the point when medical schools in North America took on their modern form. However, many fundamental advances in surgery, such as anesthesia and asepsis, predated the report by decades. To understand the contribution of educators in this earlier period, we investigated the forgotten career of John Wishart, founding Professor of Surgery at Western University, London Ontario.
METHODS: Archives at the University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, London City Library, and Wellington County Museum were searched for material about Wishart and his times.
RESULTS: A fragmented biography can be assembled from family notes and obituaries with the help of contemporary documents compiled by early 20th century medical school historians. Wishart assisted Abraham Groves in the first reported operation for which aseptic technique was used (1874). He was considered locally to perform pioneering surgery, including an appendectomy in 1886. Wishart was a founding member of the medical faculty at Western University in 1881, initially as Demonstrator of Anatomy and subsequently as its first Professor of Clinical Surgery, which post he held until 1910. Comprehensive notes from his undergraduate lectures demonstrate his teaching style, which mixed organized didacticism with practical advice. The role of the Flexner review in the termination of his professorship is hinted at in minutes of Faculty of Medicine meetings. Wishart was a foundation fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a founding physician of London\u27s Catholic hospital, St. Joseph\u27s, despite his own Protestant background.
CONCLUSIONS: Wishart\u27s career comprised all the elements of modern academic surgery, including pioneering service, research, and teaching. Surgery at Western owes as much to Wishart as it does to university reorganization in response to the Flexner report.
PMID: 2227097
Pinsight: A Novel Way of Creating and Sharing Digital Content through 'Things' in the Wild
Existing platforms for sharing locative digital content rely on the use of mobile phones for accessing the content. This can be a major deterrent to wider public access and also hinders immediacy and 'in the moment' discoverability. Building on previous work in situated public installations, we developed Pinsight, a novel platform for enabling end-users, such as local communities, to create and share digital content in-situ with public audiences through physical interactive devices. Pinsight is based on a set of design principles that focus on supporting both the expressiveness of content creators and the appeal to public audiences. This paper describes the design of the platform and how it supports sharing knowledge in ways different to conventional media. Through preliminary evaluations and two in-the-wild studies, we explore how such a situated technology can be used by different user groups (content designers, history communities, local residents) for sharing content with public audiences (visitors, pedestrians, residents) in different contexts
Computers in Secondary Schools: Educational Games
This entry introduces educational games in secondary schools. Educational
games include three main types of educational activities with a playful
learning intention supported by digital technologies: educational serious
games, educational gamification, and learning through game creation.
Educational serious games are digital games that support learning objectives.
Gamification is defined as the use of "game design elements and game thinking
in a non-gaming context" (Deterding et al. 2011, p. 13). Educational
gamification is not developed through a digital game but includes game elements
for supporting the learning objectives. Learning through game creation is
focused on the process of designing and creating a prototype of a game to
support a learning process related to the game creation process or the
knowledge mobilized through the game creation process. Four modalities of
educational games in secondary education are introduced in this entry to
describe educational games in secondary education: educational purpose of
entertainment games, serious games, gamification, and game design
Gamification through leaderboards : an empirical study in engineering education
Universities are looking for solutions to engage more students in STEM
domains and enhance their learning performance (LP). In this context,
gamification is put forward as a solution to achieve this aim. The present
study examined the effect of gamification â building on leaderboards â on LP.
Furthermore, mediating variables, such as intrinsic motivation, selfâefficacy,
engagement, and background variables, such as sex, previous gaming
experience, and undergraduate major, were considered. A pretestâposttest
quasiâexperimental design with an experimental and a control condition was set
up (n = 89) in an Introductory Computer Programming course. We observed a
significant improvement in the LP of students in the gamified condition.
However, no interaction effect was detected, due to mediating and background
variables. The high learning gain is a favorable indicator that gamification
might be a promising approach to promote STEM programs
Diabetes and cardiovascular disease outcomes in the metabolically healthy obese phenotype
OBJECTIVE To determine the correlates of the âmetabolically healthy obeseâ (MHO) phenotype and the longitudinal risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD)/stroke associated with this phenotype. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The North West Adelaide Health Study is a prospective cohort study of 4,056 randomly selected adults aged â„18 years. Participants free of CVD/stroke and not underweight (n = 3,743) were stratified by BMI categories and metabolic risk, defined as having two or more International Diabetes Federation metabolic syndrome criteria, excluding waist circumference. RESULTS Correlates of the MHO (n = 454 [12.1%]) included smoking, socioeconomic disadvantage, and physical inactivity. Compared with metabolically healthy normal-weight subjects (n = 1,172 [31.3%]), the MHO were more likely to develop metabolic risk (15.5 vs. 33.1%, P < 0.001) and incident diabetes (odds ratio 2.09 [95% CI 0.87â5.03]) but not CVD/stroke (1.16 [0.58â2.29]) during 5.5â10.3 years of follow-up. These risks were not seen in MHO subjects maintaining metabolic health (n = 188 [67%]). Sustained metabolic health in obese participants was associated with age â€40 years and lower waist circumference. Compared with the metabolically at-risk obese, MHO women demonstrated a significantly higher (mean [SE]) percentage of leg fat (49.9 [0.5] vs. 53.2 [0.7]) and lower waist circumference (104 [0.6] vs. 101 cm [0.8]), despite no significant differences in overall adiposity. CONCLUSIONS âHealthyâ obesity was a transient state for one-third of subjects. Persistence of a MHO phenotype, which was associated with favorable outcomes, was related to younger age and a more peripheral fat distribution. The MHO phenotype may be sustained by promoting lower waist circumferences.Sarah L. Appleton, Christopher J. Seaborn, Renuka Visvanathan, Catherine L. Hill, Tiffany K. Gill, Anne W. Taylor, Robert J. Adams on behalf of the North West Adelaide Health Study Tea
Appropriateness of antibiotic treatment in intravenous drug users, a retrospective analysis
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Infectious disease is often the reason for intravenous drug users being seen in a clinical setting. The objective of this study was to evaluate the appropriateness of treatment and outcomes for this patient population in a hospital setting.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Retrospective study of all intravenous drug users hospitalized for treatment of infectious diseases and seen by infectious diseases specialists 1/2001â12/2006 at a university hospital. Treatment was administered according to guidelines when possible or to alternative treatment program in case of patients for whom adherence to standard protocols was not possible. Outcomes were defined with respect to appropriateness of treatment, hospital readmission, relapse and mortality rates. For statistical analysis adjustment for multiple hospitalizations of individual patients was made by using a generalized estimating equation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The total number of hospitalizations for infectious diseases was 344 among 216 intravenous drug users. Skin and soft tissue infections (n = 129, 37.5% of hospitalizations), pneumonia (n = 75, 21.8%) and endocarditis (n = 54, 15.7%) were most prevalent. Multiple infections were present in 25%. Treatment was according to standard guidelines for 78.5%, according to an alternative recommended program for 11.3%, and not according to guidelines or by the infectious diseases specialist advice for 10.2% of hospitalizations. Psychiatric disorders had a significant negative impact on compliance (compliance problems in 19.8% of hospitalizations) in multiple logistic regression analysis (OR = 2.4, CI 1.1â5.1, p = 0.03). The overall readmission rate and relapse rate within 30 days was 13.7% and 3.8%, respectively. Both non-compliant patient behavior (OR = 3.7, CI 1.3â10.8, p = 0.02) and non-adherence to treatment guidelines (OR = 3.3, CI 1.1â9.7, p = 0.03) were associated with a significant increase in the relapse rate in univariate analysis. In 590 person-years of follow-up, 24.6% of the patients died: 6.4% died during hospitalization (1.2% infection-related) and 13.6% of patients died after discharge.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Appropriate antibiotic therapy according to standard guidelines in hospitalized intravenous drug users is generally practicable and successful. In a minority alternative treatments may be indicated, although associated with a higher risk of relapse.</p
NICE : A Computational solution to close the gap from colour perception to colour categorization
The segmentation of visible electromagnetic radiation into chromatic categories by the human visual system has been extensively studied from a perceptual point of view, resulting in several colour appearance models. However, there is currently a void when it comes to relate these results to the physiological mechanisms that are known to shape the pre-cortical and cortical visual pathway. This work intends to begin to fill this void by proposing a new physiologically plausible model of colour categorization based on Neural Isoresponsive Colour Ellipsoids (NICE) in the cone-contrast space defined by the main directions of the visual signals entering the visual cortex. The model was adjusted to fit psychophysical measures that concentrate on the categorical boundaries and are consistent with the ellipsoidal isoresponse surfaces of visual cortical neurons. By revealing the shape of such categorical colour regions, our measures allow for a more precise and parsimonious description, connecting well-known early visual processing mechanisms to the less understood phenomenon of colour categorization. To test the feasibility of our method we applied it to exemplary images and a popular ground-truth chart obtaining labelling results that are better than those of current state-of-the-art algorithms
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