Branding as Soft Power: How Canada’s International Image Renders Hard Borders Pliable

Being neither a hegemonic force nor a developing nation, Canada’s classification as a “middle power” requires its cooperation with other state actors as it otherwise lacks the necessary means to care for itself in isolation (Bickerton and Gagnon 2014). For Canada, producing and maintaining a successful international brand is paramount to operating effectively within the ambit of soft power. Delving deeper into Canada’s soft-power strategies, this article analyzes how Canada employs its economic and diplomatic arsenal to develop a reputable brand, using it to influence nations across the world and advance its policy agenda. More specifically, this article assesses the country’s commitment to deliver humanitarian aid and resolve armed conflicts at a diplomatic level through international consortia such as the United Nations Security Council (Lamy et al. 2017). Another area where Canada has earned an admirable reputation in the eyes of the global community is in international public health initiatives (Kirton 2012). Moreover, as an architect of diplomatic lobbying and cultural engineering, Canada has succeeded in capturing the hearts and minds of historic adversaries, for instance, the Russian government and nation (Potter 2009). Lastly, through its perseverance and careful branding, Canada has managed to leverage its way into the hypercompetitive Hollywood cinema scene, broadcasting its national talent for the whole world to see (Tremblay 2004). In light of these accomplishments, made possible by a brand forged through years of consistent action and tangible results, Canada has successfully rendered hard borders pliable

Improving the analysis and use of patient complaints in the English National Health Service

The English National Health Service (NHS) receives over 200,000 patient complaints annually. Complaints provide rich narratives of poor and unsafe care, and are often submitted with the aim of preventing harm from occurring to others. Inquiries into safety failures have demonstrated that complaints signal problems where internal systems fail. Yet, their insights remain underutilised due to their complex unstructured nature, a disregard for their informational value, and a complaints process designed for case-by-case redress. This work develops evidence-based and theory-informed approaches towards improving the analysis and use of complaints in the English NHS. Using process modelling and realist review methods, this thesis generates theory on how and under what conditions healthcare settings can achieve both case-by-case redress and system-wide analysis of complaints. Findings identify the need for a robust coding taxonomy to detect systemic problems with healthcare delivery, and support the prioritisation of deeper qualitative analysis and investigation. The inter-rater reliability of the existing NHS complaints reporting scheme ‘KO41a’ is tested across four NHS Trusts, and compared to the psychometrically robust and theory-informed Healthcare Complaints Analysis Tool (HCAT). Results highlight the limited discriminative value of KO41a, and indicate HCAT as a reliable alternative in most investigated settings. Drawing from social science approaches to safety, the final study conducts data linkage and narrative analysis of complaints and staff incident reports, and demonstrates the contributions of using complainants’ interpretation and sense-making of adverse events to test, challenge, and complement staff representations of the causes and severity of harm. Collectively, the work in this thesis demonstrates why patient and staff perspectives need to be combined for a more holistic understanding of patient safety, and provides a pragmatic, evidence-based pathway towards integrating complaints into the historically staff-driven quality monitoring and improvement systems.Open Acces

Animacy in Morphosyntactic Variation

In this dissertation, I demonstrate that animacy of subject referents strongly conditions verbal morphosyntactic variation in English varieties. Using three quantitative case studies, I investigate copula and subject verb agreement in two English varieties, Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). For each of the case studies -- (1) MAE auxiliary contraction, (2) AAVE copula contraction and dele- tion, and (3) AAVE verbal -s deletion -- human subjects like the boy significantly prefer the contracted or null form, while non-human subjects like the book prefer the full or overt form. The first two case studies, MAE contraction and the parallel feature in AAVE, copula contraction and deletion, demonstrate that inanimate subjects predict the full form, while contracted and (AAVE) deleted forms are more likely with animate subjects. This finding supports Labov\u27s 1969 analysis that AAVE contraction is similar to MAE contraction, and that AAVE contraction and deletion share conditioning constraints. The third case study, AAVE verbal -s, is widely considered not to be grammatically conditioned. However, I find that AAVE verbal -s is also conditioned by animacy, indicating that verbal -s is part of the underlying grammar. Taken together, I use these case studies to argue that animacy is a domain-general processing cue that grammars can structurally reify. These animacy effects in English shed new light on old variables. From a sociolinguistic perspective, we see that initially unintuitive and unexplored factors like animacy in English are robust predictors of variation. Furthermore, these results allow us to make progress on controversial aspects of grammatical analysis in AAVE, as well as refine our understanding of MAE morphosyntactic variation. These results may also be brought to bear in future discussions of the relationship between MAE and AAVE grammars. Finally, this dissertation contributes to the ongoing question in linguistic and psychological literature about the place of animacy in language, and how processing and grammar interact in linguistic conditioning. With animacy so significantly conditioning variation and having such profound theoretical implications, it is clear that future studies should give careful consideration to the role of animacy in language variation

The Impact of Developmental Mathematics Courses and Age, Gender, and Race and Ethnicity on Persistence and Academic Performance in Virginia Community Colleges

This research study examined the 2006 cohort of First-Time-in-College students from all 23 community colleges in Virginia. The goal was to examine the persistence of these students to the fall 2007 semester and the success of these students in their first college-level mathematics course. The main predictor variable was whether the first mathematics course taken was a developmental or college-level course. Other main predictor variables examined were the age, gender, and race and ethnicity of the student. Race and ethnicity was broken into the categories White, Black, and Other. Interaction variables were created to determine if age, race and ethnicity, or gender moderates the effects of developmental status for both persistence and success in the first college level mathematics course, and a model was created using all main and interaction predictor variables to determine to what extent each variable accounts for persistence and success. It was found that neither gender nor race and ethnicity moderates developmental status for either persistence or success, but age moderates both success and persistence. Developmental courses are more effective for traditionally aged students and developmental courses are positively related to the persistence of non-traditionally aged students and negatively related to the persistence of traditionally aged students. The predictor variables developmental status, age, race and ethnicity, and gender are all significantly related to both the success and persistence of students. The effect of developmental status on both success and persistence is weak. Non-developmental status, female, non-traditionally aged, and non-Black race and ethnicity are all positively related to the success of students in their first college-level mathematics course. Non-developmental status, female, traditionally aged, non-White and non-Black race and ethnicities are all positively related to the fall-to-fall persistence of students

The Body Action and Posture Coding System (BAP): Development and Reliability

Several methods are available for coding body movement in nonverbal behavior research, but there is no consensus on a reliable coding system that can be used for the study of emotion expression. Adopting an integrative approach, we developed a new method, the body action and posture coding system, for the time-aligned micro description of body movement on an anatomical level (different articulations of body parts), a form level (direction and orientation of movement), and a functional level (communicative and self-regulatory functions). We applied the system to a new corpus of acted emotion portrayals, examined its comprehensiveness and demonstrated intercoder reliability at three levels: (a) occurrence, (b) temporal precision, and (c) segmentation. We discuss issues for further validation and propose some research application

Metalinguistic Awareness of Multilingual First Graders: An Exploratory Study

This study, which utilized a modified metalinguistic awareness test adopted from Dita’s (2009), probed on young children’s metalinguistic awareness in identifying syntactic errors; determining sounds and the use of phonological segments; and explaining a word on their own by describing its appearance or its functions in English, Filipino, and Cebuano. This study attempted to elucidate young children’s readiness to take on more difficult linguistic tasks in the succeeding academic levels. Since the children’s level of metalinguistic awareness is average, this study recommends that schools are encouraged to provide strategies and lessons that would enhance learners’ metalinguistic awareness, most especially in terms of language arbitrariness in English and Filipino; and since there is significant difference in all three languages in all tests, parents and teachers should ensure that the pupils achieve full proficiency in all three languages by providing rich experiences equally in these languages

The GANIL magnet

http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/AccelConf/c78/papers/a-15.pdfInternational audienc