How does one voluntary organisation engage with multiple stakeholder views of effectiveness?

The literature on effectiveness and multiple constituency theory is explored as background to a consideration of the many interpretations of effectiveness existing amongst stakeholders of one organisation. A case study is used to examine how stakeholders judge effectiveness and the process by which their different perspectives are incorporated in the shaping and constant updating of a core view of effectiveness. The management strategies adopted in handling this process are explored, and some elements identified which may provide initial steps towards a management theory

Why are there still so few men within Early Years in primary schools: views from male trainee teachers and male leaders?

One of the challenges facing the Early Years (EY) sector is how to encourage more male practitioners to counterbalance a largely feminised workforce. Using case studies of male trainees at different stages of their primary undergraduate Initial Teacher Training course at one university, we attempt to consider data why there is underrepresentation of men within the leadership strata in EY settings. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted with the male sample groups and male leaders in primary schools to gain an overview regarding gender stereotyping. Our findings suggest that male trainees enjoy working in the EY sector, but they need mentoring by strong leaders to help them overcome the perceived contextual barriers of male stereotypes in that setting. In conclusion, we consider some of these barriers of stereotypes, attitudes, values, beliefs existing and the actions needed in addressing such stereotypes if a long-lasting change is to happen

Challenges of developing pedagogy through diversity and equity within the new Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum

A commitment to diversity and equity principles through social justice lies at the heart of many Early Years' practitioners working practices. However, the term social justice is complex, and this complexity manifests itself through its multiple meanings, in different cultural contexts. This paper investigates how diversity and equity are linked through an understanding of social justice within the new Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum. It also explores how diversity and equity is promoted through the Early Years curriculum and what remain the potential challenges practitioners. Interviews in multi-cultural and mono-cultural primary schools with Early Years age phases were conducted. The findings showed that the principles of social justice through diversity and equity was interpreted differently in each Early Years setting, which is unsurprising given the complicated nature of its meaning. The multi-cultural schools appear to use a greater variety of activities to embed social justice principles that involved their diverse communities more to enrich the curriculum in contrast to the mono-cultural schools. In mono-cultural schools however, practitioners had to be more creative in promoting diversity and equity given the smaller proportion of their diverse pupil and staff population

The comic, not the comedy: effect of joke-origin-induced expectancy on cognitive humour.

Objectives: The present set of experiments examined whether humour expectancy (determined by the joke teller) impacts the humour evaluation of jokes. Design: Across four experiments, participants rated jokes purportedly delivered via celebrity comedians or celebrity non-comedians. The effect of joke-origin was further examined across variables of prior joke rating (high/low) and type of joke (incongruity/nonsense). The dependent variable was humour rating (0-100). Method: Four-hundred and thirty-four Coventry University Psychology undergraduates participated and were given a series of jokes to rate that were purportedly delivered by celebrity comedians or celebrity non-comedians. Results: Ratings of the same jokes were found to be significantly higher when purportedly delivered by comedians compared to non-comedian (Experiment 1). These effects were replicated with a repeated measures design with comedian and non-comedians matched upon prior like-ability ratings (Experiment 2). Furthermore, these effects were robust across jokes previously rated as funny/unfunny and across both incongruity/nonsense joke types (Experiment 3). However, this effect is removed if the name of the celebrity is obscured (Experiment 4). Conclusion: These experiments demonstrate that cognitive humour ratings are influenced by the origin of the joke, wherein knowledge of that celebrity determines expectancy of humour. This effect is contingent on the name of the joke-teller being presented, suggesting that a schema of that individual is activated with expectancy driven by past experiences of that individual

Analytic Model for Quadruped Locomotion Task-Space Planning

Despite the extensive presence of the legged locomotion in animals, it is extremely challenging to be reproduced with robots. Legged locomotion is an dynamic task which benefits from a planning that takes advantage of the gravitational pull on the system. However, the computational cost of such optimization rapidly increases with the complexity of kinematic structures, rendering impossible real-time deployment in unstructured environments. This paper proposes a simplified method that can generate desired centre of mass and feet trajectory for quadrupeds. The model describes a quadruped as two bipeds connected via their centres of mass, and it is based on the extension of an algebraic bipedal model that uses the topology of the gravitational attractor to describe bipedal locomotion strategies. The results show that the model generates trajectories that agrees with previous studies. The model will be deployed in the future as seed solution for whole-body trajectory optimization in the attempt to reduce the computational cost and obtain real-time planning of complex action in challenging environments.Comment: Accepted to be Published in 2019, 41th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), Berlin German

X-ray laser pulses at the Fourier transform limit

The temporal output of a Ni-like Ag x-ray laser of wavelength 13.9 nm has been recorded using a streak camera with ultrashort (700 fs) temporal resolution. We present a model to calculate the degree of coherence and Fourier transform limit of x-ray laser pulses produced by amplified spontaneous emission and relate the results from the model to previous interferometric measurements of the coherence length of the same Ni-like Ag x-ray laser and our measured duration of temporal output. Our modeling shows that the interferometer and streak camera results are consistent and close to the Fourier transform limit at longer gain medium lengths

Health economics education in undergraduate medical training : introducing the health economics education (HEe) website

In the UK, the General Medical Council clearly stipulates that upon completion of training, medical students should be able to discuss the principles underlying the development of health and health service policy, including issues relating to health economics. In response, researchers from the UK and other countries have called for a need to incorporate health economics training into the undergraduate medical curricula. The Health Economics education website was developed to encourage and support teaching and learning in health economics for medical students. It was designed to function both as a forum for teachers of health economics to communicate and to share resources and also to provide instantaneous access to supporting literature and teaching materials on health economics. The website provides a range of free online material that can be used by both health economists and non-health economists to teach the basic principles of the discipline. The Health Economics education website is the only online education resource that exists for teaching health economics to medical undergraduate students and it provides teachers of health economics with a range of comprehensive basic and advanced teaching materials that are freely available. This article presents the website as a tool to encourage the incorporation of health economics training into the undergraduate medical curricula

The Effects of Statistical Multiplicity of Infection on Virus Quantification and Infectivity Assays

Many biological assays are employed in virology to quantify parameters of interest. Two such classes of assays, virus quantification assays (VQA) and infectivity assays (IA), aim to estimate the number of viruses present in a solution, and the ability of a viral strain to successfully infect a host cell, respectively. VQAs operate at extremely dilute concentrations and results can be subject to stochastic variability in virus-cell interactions. At the other extreme, high viral particle concentrations are used in IAs, resulting in large numbers of viruses infecting each cell, enough for measurable change in total transcription activity. Furthermore, host cells can be infected at any concentration regime by multiple particles, resulting in a statistical multiplicity of infection (SMOI) and yielding potentially significant variability in the assay signal and parameter estimates. We develop probabilistic models for SMOI at low and high viral particle concentration limits and apply them to the plaque (VQA), endpoint dilution (VQA), and luciferase reporter (IA) assays. A web-based tool implementing our models and analysis is also developed and presented. We test our proposed new methods for inferring experimental parameters from data using numerical simulations and show improvement on existing procedures in all limits.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl