Civic Service in Sub-Saharan Africa

Civic service in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects the complex social, cultural, economic, and political history of the region in a changing global world marked by increasing risks to human security and development. National and international service including local, informal, and community-based service continues to remain prominent and is an appropriate response to the intractable development issues facing these societies. New initiatives to address the marginalization of Africa from the new information economy and society will need to keep human development on the agenda. Civic service can make a significant contribution to mobilizing local and international efforts in partnership with governments and civil society. Future research and policy should address the institutional impediments to service, develop research capacity to strengthen a scholarship of civic engagement, and conceive of service as part of a broader social development strategy

Five-country Study on Service and Volunteering in Southern Africa: Zambia Country Report

The study documents and analyses civic service and volunteering in Zambia and also identifies formal and informal civic service programmes in Zambia

Fine-grained Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis: Recognizing the intensity, polarity, and attitudes of private states

Private states (mental and emotional states) are part of the information that is conveyed in many forms of discourse. News articles often report emotional responses to news stories; editorials, reviews, and weblogs convey opinions and beliefs. This dissertation investigates the manual and automatic identification of linguistic expressions of private states in a corpus of news documents from the world press. A term for the linguistic expression of private states is subjectivity.The conceptual representation of private states used in this dissertation is that of Wiebe et al. (2005). As part of this research, annotators are trained to identify expressions of private states and their properties, such as the source and the intensity of the private state. This dissertation then extends the conceptual representation of private states to better model the attitudes and targets of private states. The inter-annotator agreement studies conducted for this dissertation show that the various concepts in the original and extended representation of private states can be reliably annotated.Exploring the automatic recognition of various types of private states is also a large part of this dissertation. Experiments are conducted that focus on three types of fine-grained subjectivity analysis: recognizing the intensity of clauses and sentences, recognizing the contextual polarity of words and phrases, and recognizing the attribution levels where sentiment and arguing attitudes are expressed. Various supervised machine learning algorithms are used to train automatic systems to perform each of these tasks. These experiments result in automatic systems for performing fine-grained subjectivity analysis that significantly outperform baseline systems

OpinionFinder: a system for subjectivity analysis

Journal ArticleOpinionFinder is a system that performs subjectivity analysis, automatically identifying when opinions, sentiments, speculations and other private states are present in text. Specifically, OpinionFinder aims to identify subjective sentences and to mark various aspects of the subjectivity in these sentences, including the source (holder) of the subjectivity and words that are included in phrases expressing positive or negative sentiment

Examining the Literacy Practices of Engineers to Develop a Model of Disciplinary Literacy Instruction for K-12 Engineering (Work in Progress)

Despite efforts to diversify the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, engineering remains a White, male-dominated profession. Often, women and underrepresented students do not identify with STEM careers and many opt out of STEM pathways prior to entering high school or college. In order to broaden participation in engineering, new methods of engaging and retaining those who are traditionally underrepresented in engineering are needed. This work is based on a promising approach for encouraging and supporting diverse participation in engineering: disciplinary literacy instruction (DLI). Generally, teachers use DLI to provide K-12 students with a framework for interpreting, evaluating, and generating discipline-specific texts. This instruction provides students with an understanding of how experts in the discipline read, engage, and generate texts used to solve problems or communicate information. While models of disciplinary literacy have been developed and disseminated in several humanities and science fields, there is a lack of empirical and theoretical research that examines the use of DLI within the engineering domain. It is thought that DLI can be used to foster diverse student interest in engineering from a young age by removing literacy-based barriers that often discourage underrepresented students from entering and pursuing careers in STEM fields. This work-in-progress paper describes a new study underway to develop and disseminate a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. During this project, researchers will observe, interview, and collect written artifacts from engineers working across four sub-disciplines of engineering: aerospace/mechanical, biological, civil/environmental, and electrical/computer. Data that will be collected include interview transcripts, observation field notes, engineer logs of literacy practices, and photographs of texts that the engineers read and write. Data will be analyzed using constant comparative analytic (CCA) methods. CCA will be used to generate theoretical codes from the data that will form the basis for a model of disciplinary literacy in engineering. As a primary outcome of this research, the engineering DLI model will promote the use of DLI practices within K-12 engineering instruction in order to assist and encourage diverse, underrepresented students to engage in engineering courses of study and pursue STEM careers. Thus far, the research team has begun collecting and analyzing data from two electrical engineers. This work in progress paper will report on preliminary findings, as well as implications for K-12 classroom instruction. For instance, this study has shed insights on how engineers use texts as part of the process of conducting failure analysis, and the research team has begun to conceptualize how these types of texts might be used with K-12 students to help them conduct failure analyses during design testing. Ultimately, this project will result in a list of grade-appropriate texts, evaluative frameworks, and activities (e.g., failure analysis in testing) that K-12 engineering teachers can use to prepare their diverse students to think, act, read, and write like engineers

Prospectus, April 26, 2000

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2000/1014/thumbnail.jp

Impact of national policies on the microbial aetiology of surgical site infections in acute NHS hospitals in England: analysis of trends between 2000 and 2013 using multi-centre prospective cohort data

Our study aimed to evaluate changes in the epidemiology of pathogens causing surgical site infections (SSIs) in England between 2000 and 2013 in the context of intensified national interventions to reduce healthcare-associated infections introduced since 2006. National prospective surveillance data on target surgical procedures were used for this study. Data on causative organism were available for 72% of inpatient-detected SSIs meeting the standard case definitions for superficial, deep and organ-space infections (9767/13 531) which were analysed for trends. A multivariable logistic linear mixed model with hospital random effects was fitted to evaluate trends by pathogen. Staphylococcus aureus was the predominant cause of SSI between 2000 (41%) and 2009 (24%), decreasing from 2006 onwards reaching 16% in 2013. Data for 2005–2013 showed that the odds of SSI caused by S. aureus decreased significantly by 14% per year [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 0·86, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0·83–0·89] driven by significant decreases in methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) (aOR 0·71, 95% CI 0·68–0·75). However a small significant increase in methicillin-sensitive S. aureus was identified (aOR 1·06, 95% CI 1·02–1·10). Enterobacteriaceae were stable during 2000–2007 (12% of cases overall), increasing from 2008 (18%) onwards, being present in 25% of cases in 2013; the model supported these increasing trends during 2007–2013 (aOR 1·12, 95% CI 1·07–1·18). The decreasing trends in S. aureus SSIs from 2006 and the increases in Enterobacteriaceae SSIs from 2008 may be related to intensified national efforts targeted at reducing MRSA bacteraemia combined with changes in antibiotic use aimed at controlling C. difficile infections