Browne, employability and the rhetoric of choice: student as producer and the sustainability of HE

This paper presents a critical reflection of the rhetoric of choice offered in the current system of HE. The theoretical foundation of the discussion draws on the work of Bauman (2007) as a support for a critical stance on the implementation of the recent reviews of HE, for instance by Browne (2010) and Dearing (1997). The concept and agenda of the student as ‘producer’, versus the student as consumer or even student as commodity, are further evaluated in the context of the ‘free’ market and the apparent 'industrialisation’ of HE, which has arguably brought graduate ‘employability’ to centre stage. The work goes on to discuss how student choice of course appears to go beyond judgments about potential job prospects. Along with this, it is argued that the values espoused by consumerism may well have a detrimental effect on the way that students develop the types of skills that employers say they want. Counteracting this, the student as producer is investigated as a means by which students become active producers of themselves as enterprising citizens, which also has benefit in respect of their future employability

Character-Level Language Modeling with Deeper Self-Attention

LSTMs and other RNN variants have shown strong performance on character-level language modeling. These models are typically trained using truncated backpropagation through time, and it is common to assume that their success stems from their ability to remember long-term contexts. In this paper, we show that a deep (64-layer) transformer model with fixed context outperforms RNN variants by a large margin, achieving state of the art on two popular benchmarks: 1.13 bits per character on text8 and 1.06 on enwik8. To get good results at this depth, we show that it is important to add auxiliary losses, both at intermediate network layers and intermediate sequence positions.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Review of cannabis use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

The health effects of cannabis use may not always be seen as a high priority for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. However, the impact of cannabis use on physical and mental health can have significant consequences. It is known that the use of high potency cannabis has increased over the last two decades, with a corresponding increased risk to health. In particular, young people are at increased risk of experiencing harms to mental health. Physical harms to health include effects on the respiratory system, cardiovascular system, an increased risk of cancer, and in-utero effects from maternal use. The review notes concern that in countries where there has been commercialisation of cannabis use, there has been an increase in the rate and use of high potency products. While generalising findings about cannabis use for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is problematic due to limited data, high rates of cannabis use have been found in some remote communities. The review highlights the protective factors that reduce harms from cannabis use and suggests future directions for a collaborative approach to addressing cannabis related harms in communities. This review is part of a suite of knowledge exchange products that includes a summary, a video, and a fact sheet

Using systems thinking in patient safety: a case study on medicines management

Systems thinking is used as a way of understanding behaviours and actions in complex healthcare organisations. An important premise of the concept is that every action in a system causes a reaction elsewhere in that system. These reactions can lead to unintended consequences, sometimes long after the original action, and so are not always attributed to them. This article applies systems thinking to a medicines management case study, to highlight how quality-improvement practitioners can use the approach to underpin planning and implementation of patient-safety initiatives. The case study is specific to transcribing in children's hospices, but the strategies can be applied to other areas. The article explains that, while root cause analysis tools are useful for identifying the cause of, and possible solutions to, problems, they need to be considered carefully in terms of unintended consequences, and how the system into which the solution is implemented can be affected by the change. Analysis of problems using a systems-thinking approach can help practitioners to develop robust and well informed business cases to present to decision makers

Findings from a mixed methods study of an interprofessional faculty development program

Forty faculty members from eight schools participated in a year-long National Faculty Development Program (NFDP) conducted in 2012–2013, aimed at developing faculty knowledge and skills for interprofessional education (IPE). The NFDP included two live conferences. Between conferences, faculty teams implemented self-selected IPE projects at their home institutions and participated in coaching and peer-support conference calls. This paper describes program outcomes. A mixed methods approach was adopted. Data were gathered through online surveys and semi-structured interviews. The study explored whether faculty were satisfied with the program, believed the program was effective in developing knowledge and skills in designing, implementing, and evaluating IPE, and planned to continue newly-implemented IPE and faculty development (FD). Peer support and networking were two of the greatest perceived benefits. Further, this multi-institutional program appears to have facilitated early organizational change by bringing greater contextual understanding to assumptions made at the local level that in turn could influence hidden curricula and networking. These findings may guide program planning for future FD to support IPE

Silencing an essential gene involved in infestation and digestion in grain aphid through plant‐mediated RNA interference generates aphid‐resistant wheat plants

Letter to the edito

Development of the Barriers to Error Disclosure Assessment Tool

OBJECTIVES: An interprofessional group of health colleges' faculty created and piloted the Barriers to Error Disclosure Assessment tool as an instrument to measure barriers to medical error disclosure among health care providers. METHODS: A review of the literature guided the creation of items describing influences on the decision to disclose a medical error. Local and national experts in error disclosure used a modified Delphi process to gain consensus on the items included in the pilot. After receiving university institutional review board approval, researchers distributed the tool to a convenience sample of physicians (n = 19), pharmacists (n = 20), and nurses (n = 20) from an academic medical center. Means and SDs were used to describe the sample. Intraclass correlation coefficients were used to examine test-retest correspondence between the continuous items on the scale. Factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to determine factor loadings and examine internal consistency reliability. Cronbach α coefficients were calculated during initial and subsequent administrations to assess test-retest reliability. RESULTS: After omitting 2 items with intraclass correlation coefficient of less than 0.40, intraclass correlation coefficients ranged from 0.43 to 0.70, indicating fair to good test-retest correspondence between the continuous items on the final draft. Factor analysis revealed the following factors during the initial administration: confidence and knowledge barriers, institutional barriers, psychological barriers, and financial concern barriers to medical error disclosure. α Coefficients of 0.85 to 0.93 at time 1 and 0.82 to 0.95 at time 2 supported test-retest reliability. CONCLUSIONS: The final version of the 31-item tool can be used to measure perceptions about abilities for disclosing, impressions regarding institutional policies and climate, and specific barriers that inhibit disclosure by health care providers. Preliminary evidence supports the tool's validity and reliability for measuring disclosure variables

Wangkiny Yirra “Speaking Up” project: First Nations women and children with disability and their experiences of family and domestic violence

First Nations women and children with disability are at greater risk of family and domestic violence (FDV) and its consequences than their non-Indigenous peers. A recent report (Ringland et al., 2022) found that First Nations women with disability had the highest rates of victimisation of any group, with 34.4% recorded as being victims of crime. Despite this, the voices of First Nations people are largely missing from disability research in Australia (Dew et al., 2019). The purpose of this research was to engage with First Nations women and children and key stakeholders in Western Australia to: gain an understanding of their experiences of FDV, identify factors they believe open them up to the risk of harm, document their observations and experiences of barriers and/or enablers to seeking assistance and support, obtain their views on what works in currently available programs, and make recommendations for future culturally safe prevention and protection programs. Key findings: Research focus on experiences of FDV of First Nations women and children with disability appears to be growing, but is still limited within the broader body of research focused on First Nations women and children and FDV. First Nations people, wherever located, are significantly more likely than non-Indigenous people to be confronted with a range of barriers to service access, diagnosis and service delivery. Current strategies for prevention and support for First Nations women and children involved with the justice and child protection systems are demonstrably inadequate and harmful and must be reformed

"For me, the anorexia is just a symptom, and the cause is the autism” – Investigating restrictive eating disorders in autistic women

Autistic women are overrepresented among people in treatment for Anorexia Nervosa (AN). The current study aimed to: (1) better understand how AN develops and persists in autistic individuals from the perspective of autistic women, parents and healthcare professionals; (2) derive a theoretical model of restrictive eating difficulties in autism. We conducted 44 semi-structured interviews and used Thematic Analysis to identify patterns of meaning across the data. Themes related to sensory sensitivities, social interaction and relationships, sense of self and identity, difficulties with emotions, thinking styles, and a need for control and predictability. We developed a model of potential autism-specific mechanisms underlying restrictive eating difficulties. This study generated novel insights, which have the potential to inform treatment adaptations following empirical testing