Transgender Healthcare Teaching in the Undergraduate Medical School Curriculum

With increasing recognition of the diverse and specific needs of transgender individuals in a health care setting, lack of knowledge, poor attitudes and prejudice towards transgender patients can result in this population being afraid to access medical care. Educating medical students early in their career in a sensitive and inclusive manner could help change these attitudes. It has been shown that medical undergraduates and post-graduates often feel unprepared or uncomfortable in caring for transgender patients due to lack of training and experience2-4. The aim of this study was to address this through introduction of basic transgender healthcare education into the University of Glasgow undergraduate medical curriculum, with the goal of implementing further interactive and fully inclusive teaching

Licensee Beware: The Seventh Circuit Holds That a Patent License by Any Other Name Is Not the Same

In a case of first impression, the Seventh Circuit incorrectly held that a settlement agreement for patent infringement may never be considered a license. In Waterloo Furniture Components Ltd. v. Haworth, Inc., the court mischaracterizes the nature of license agreements and their relationship to the rights of patent holders. It does so by drawing a potential false dichotomy between settlements and licensing agreements. In this holding, the court misunderstands the purpose of a license agreement, its legal effects, and its dual prospective and retrospective qualities as recognized by the Federal Circuit and other appellate courts

An Institution for Male Juvenile Offenders for the State of New Mexico

The purpose of this thesis is to ascertain the needs of the State of New Mexico with regard to the male juvenile offender in 1965. The site location is to be determined from the research. The thesis is to contain sufficient research to develop a State program for the male juvenile offender and an architectural solution for the program

A novel behavioral fish model of nociception for testing analgesics

Pain is a major symptom in many medical conditions, and often interferes significantly with a person's quality of life. Although a priority topic in medical research for many years, there are still few analgesic drugs approved for clinical use. One reason is the lack of appropriate animal models that faithfully represent relevant hallmarks associated with human pain. Here we propose zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a novel short-term behavioral model of nociception, and analyse its sensitivity and robustness. Firstly, we injected two different doses of acetic acid as the noxious stimulus. We studied individual locomotor responses of fish to a threshold level of nociception using two recording systems: a video tracking system and an electric biosensor (the MOBS system). We showed that an injection dose of 10% acetic acid resulted in a change in behavior that could be used to study nociception. Secondly, we validated our behavioral model by investigating the effect of the analgesic morphine. In time-course studies, first we looked at the dose-response relationship of morphine and then tested whether the effect of morphine could be modulated by naloxone, an opioid antagonist. Our results suggest that a change in behavioral responses of zebrafish to acetic acid is a reasonable model to test analgesics. The response scales with stimulus intensity, is attenuated by morphine, and the analgesic effect of morphine is blocked with naloxone. The change in behavior of zebrafish associated with the noxious stimulus can be monitored with an electric biosensor that measures changes in water impedance. © 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Telling the story of the Computer Geek: children becoming authors and translators

The paper offers a case study of two bilingual girls aged 10, born in London, of Albanian-speaking families who arrived in the UK as refugees. An earlier study, when the girls were aged six, explored the strategies they used as they learned to read with their mothers in Albanian using dual language books. Four years on, supported by a primary school in East London that values the bilingualism of its pupils, the girls have become authors. Based on observation, recordings and transcription, the present study follows them as they create their own dual language book: composing a joint story in English and translating it into Albanian. Through an analysis of transcripts and observations, the paper explores how the girls face the challenges of translation. Working together in school, without a dictionary, the girls use their own linguistic resources to negotiate meaning and to achieve the close translation that they know is expected in a dual language text. In the process, they reveal to the researcher their understanding of how their languages work. In a reflection on their journey towards biliteracy, they acknowledge the important role played by their teachers in encouraging their bilingual development and reveal their pride in becoming authors

21 years in east London: issues in policy, research and practice

This paper is very much an introduction to work-in-progress and is based on a presentation at a seminar at London Metropolitan University and the ensuing debate (Mau, 2011). It builds on personal experience as a practitioner in the community language sector for 21 years (Sneddon, 1993), and on experience of research in the field, some of which was carried out with my late colleague Peter Martin. Peter and I began to explore some of the many dimensions of diversity in the complementary school sector on our doorstep in east London. We were fascinated by the way it developed organically to meet the very specific needs of highly localised communities and how issues of power and status impact in different ways and offer different opportunities and challenges to differently situated communities (Sneddon & Martin, forthcoming)

Practice, Pleasure and Persistence: Collaborative Learning in Turkish

This chapter provides an example of the author’s research and observation into the development of reading skills in bilingual children. It focuses on a small group of children in London who had encountered dual language books in English and Turkish in the course of sessions designed to support their reading in English. It particularly concentrates on an observational visit to the school where the author is read to in both Turkish and English by two boys. The author found that being a non-Turkish speaker helped the progress of this research because the children did not see her as a teacher and instead gained confidence in performing translations of the text for her. The transcript of the children reading together also reveals the interesting strategies these particular bilingual children have adopted for dealing with words difficult to explain in English

Shpresa Programme: An Evaluation of the Paul Hamlyn Funded Project

Shpresa (meaning hope in Albanian) was set up in 2003 to meet the needs of the community of Albanian speakers, from Albania and from Kosovo living in the area of east London, many of whom arrived around the year 2000 as refugees. The organisation runs four main projects: a children’s project, a youth project, a women’s project and a resettlement project which works to develop the skills of volunteers and deploy them in the community. It currently has 500 paid upmembers, over 2000 people use its services over a year and 900 people use them every week. The present report brings together and updates three earlier interim evaluations produced in October 2010 and in March and October 2011. The report outlines the organisational structure, the staffing relevant to the present project and the systems in place for supporting and monitoring the organisation’s work. The body of the report is organised around the five agreed outcomes, four of which were to be evaluated in the first year of the project

Global Gene Expression Profiling of Individual Human Oocytes and Embryos Demonstrates Heterogeneity in Early Development

Early development in humans is characterised by low and variable embryonic viability, reflected in low fecundity and high rates of miscarriage, relative to other mammals. Data from assisted reproduction programmes provides additional evidence that this is largely mediated at the level of embryonic competence and is highly heterogeneous among embryos. Understanding the basis of this heterogeneity has important implications in a number of areas including: the regulation of early human development, disorders of pregnancy, assisted reproduction programmes, the long term health of children which may be programmed in early development, and the molecular basis of pluripotency in human stem cell populations. We have therefore investigated global gene expression profiles using polyAPCR amplification and microarray technology applied to individual human oocytes and 4-cell and blastocyst stage embryos. In order to explore the basis of any variability in detail, each developmental stage is replicated in triplicate. Our data show that although transcript profiles are highly stage-specific, within each stage they are relatively variable. We describe expression of a number of gene families and pathways including apoptosis, cell cycle and amino acid metabolism, which are variably expressed and may be reflective of embryonic developmental competence. Overall, our data suggest that heterogeneity in human embryo developmental competence is reflected in global transcript profiles, and that the vast majority of existing human embryo gene expression data based on pooled oocytes and embryos need to be reinterpreted