Using scenarios to explore UK upland futures

Uplands around the world are facing significant social, economic and environmental changes, and decision-makers need to better understand what the future may hold if they are to adapt and maintain upland goods and services. This paper draws together all major research comprising eight studies that have used scenarios to describe possible futures for UK uplands. The paper evaluates which scenarios are perceived by stakeholders to be most likely and desirable, and assesses the benefits and drawbacks of the scenario methods used in UK uplands to date. Stakeholders agreed that the most desirable and likely scenario would be a continuation of hill farming (albeit at reduced levels) based on cross-compliance with environmental measures. The least desirable scenario is a withdrawal of government financial support for hill farming. Although this was deemed by stakeholders to be the least likely scenario, the loss of government support warrants close attention due to its potential implications for the local economy. Stakeholders noted that the environmental implications of this scenario are much less clear-cut. As such, there is an urgent need to understand the full implications of this scenario, so that upland stakeholders can adequately prepare, and policy-makers can better evaluate the likely implications of different policy options. The paper concludes that in future, upland scenario research needs to: (1) better integrate in-depth and representative participation from stakeholders during both scenario development and evaluation; and (2) make more effective use of visualisation techniques and simulation models

Validity Arguments for Diagnostic Assessment Using Automated Writing Evaluation

Two examples demonstrate an argument-based approach to validation of diagnostic assessment using automated writing evaluation (AWE). Criterion ®, was developed by Educational Testing Service to analyze students’ papers grammatically, providing sentence-level error feedback. An interpretive argument was developed for its use as part of the diagnostic assessment process in undergraduate university English for academic purposes (EAP) classes. The Intelligent Academic Discourse Evaluator (IADE) was developed for use in graduate EAP university classes, where the goal was to help students improve their discipline-specific writing. The validation for each was designed to support claims about the intended purposes of the assessments. We present the interpretive argument for each and show some of the data that have been gathered as backing for the respective validity arguments, which include the range of inferences that one would make in claiming validity of the interpretations, uses, and consequences of diagnostic AWE-based assessments

Linguistic Analysis of Requirements of a Space Project and Their Conformity with the Recommendations Proposed by a Controlled Natural Language

International audienceWe propose a linguistic analysis of requirements written in French for a project carried out by the French National Space Agency (CNES). The aim is to determine to what extent they conform to some of the rules laid down in INCOSE, a recent guide for writing requirements, with a focus on the notion of sentence " comprehensibility ". Although CNES engineers are not obliged to follow any Controlled Natural Language, we believe that language regularities are likely to emerge from this task, mainly due to the writers' experience. As a first step, we use natural language processing tools to identify sentences that do not comply with INCOSE rules. We further review these sentences to understand why the recommendations cannot (or should not) always be applied when specifying large-scale projects, and how they could be improved. This paper presents a corpus linguistics approach applied to the melioration of requirements writing. We propose a linguistic diagnosis of the way requirements are written in a space project by comparing these requirements with a guide for writing specifications (a controlled natural language). Initial results obtained from this analysis suggest that guides for writing specifications are not fully adapted to the real writing process: they are sometimes too constraining, and sometimes insufficiently so. In the medium term, the aim is to propose another guide based on the spontaneous regularities observed in requirements. The paper comprises two parts. In the first one (see section 2), we present the context of our study and the tool-assisted method used for making the diagnosis. In the second one (see section 3), we describe and discuss our preliminary results

Supervision and Scholarly Writing: Writing to Learn - Learning to Write

This paper describes an action research project on postgraduate students’ scholarly writing in which I employed reflective approaches to examine and enhance my postgraduate supervisory practice. My reflections on three distinct cycles of supervision illustrate a shift in thinking about scholarly writing and an evolving understanding of how to support postgraduate students’ writing. These understandings provide the foundation for a future-oriented fourth cycle of supervisory practice, which is characterised by three principles, namely the empowerment of students as writers, the technological context of contemporary writing, and ethical issues in writing

Intervention and revision: Expertise and interaction in text mediation

Many EAL (English as an Additional Language) scholars enlist text mediators’ support when faced with the challenges of writing for international publication. However, the contributions these individuals are able to make in improving scientific manuscripts remains unclear, especially when language professionals such as English teachers do this work. In this article, we explore this topic by examining how three mediators employed their very different expertise and brought different processes to bear on the same discussion section of a medical manuscript written by a novice scholar in China. We find that successfully mediated texts are often the result of an interplay between the mediator’s expertise and the relationship between the participants. Our findings contradict those of previous studies that question the role of English teachers in this process and have the potential to inform both text mediation practices and revision studies

Nuclear receptors in vascular biology

Nuclear receptors sense a wide range of steroids and hormones (estrogens, progesterone, androgens, glucocorticoid, and mineralocorticoid), vitamins (A and D), lipid metabolites, carbohydrates, and xenobiotics. In response to these diverse but critically important mediators, nuclear receptors regulate the homeostatic control of lipids, carbohydrate, cholesterol, and xenobiotic drug metabolism, inflammation, cell differentiation and development, including vascular development. The nuclear receptor family is one of the most important groups of signaling molecules in the body and as such represent some of the most important established and emerging clinical and therapeutic targets. This review will highlight some of the recent trends in nuclear receptor biology related to vascular biology

The social cognition of medical knowledge, with special reference to childhood epilepsy

This paper arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analysed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The paper argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically, in terms of the knowledge which they produce, transmit and reproduce

Evaluation of the combination of the dual m-TORC1/2 inhibitor vistusertib (AZD2014) and paclitaxel in ovarian cancer models.

Activation of the PI3K/mTOR pathway has been shown to be correlated with resistance to chemotherapy in ovarian cancer. We aimed to investigate the effects of combining inhibition of mTORC1 and 2 using the mTOR kinase inhibitor vistusertib (AZD2014) with paclitaxel in in vitro and in vivo ovarian cancer models. The combination of vistusertib and paclitaxel on cell growth was additive in a majority of cell lines in the panel (n = 12) studied. A cisplatin- resistant model (A2780Cis) was studied in vitro and in vivo. We demonstrated inhibition of mTORC1 and mTORC2 by vistusertib and the combination by showing reduction in p-S6 and p-AKT levels, respectively. In the A2780CisR xenograft model compared to control, there was a significant reduction in tumor volumes (p = 0.03) caused by the combination and not paclitaxel or vistusertib alone. In vivo, we observed a significant increase in apoptosis (cleaved PARP measured by immunohistochemistry; p = 0.0003). Decreases in phospholipid and bioenergetic metabolites were studied using magnetic resonance spectroscopy and significant changes in phosphocholine (p = 0.01), and ATP (p = 0.04) were seen in tumors treated with the combination when compared to vehicle-control. Based on this data, a clinical trial evaluating the combination of paclitaxel and vistusertib has been initiated (NCT02193633). Interestingly, treatment of ovarian cancer patients with paclitaxel caused an increase in p-AKT levels in platelet-rich plasma and it was possible to abrogate this increase with the co-treatment with vistusertib in 4/5 patients: we believe this combination will benefit patients with ovarian cancer

National belonging post‐referendum: Britons living in other EU Member States respond to “Brexit”

Following the EU Referendum, this paper tracks how pro‐Remain British migrants living in other EU Member States expressed a sense of shame and dislocation in relation to their national identity. Developed from a survey of 909 British nationals living in other EU Member States, it hopes to make a timely intervention into wider debates about privileged migration, Britishness, citizenship and belonging. First, it outlines a new articulation of the “bad Britain” discourse among emigrants, who saw the UK as increasingly characterised by xenophobia and insularity. Second, it seeks to understand how their national identity and sense of belonging was being renegotiated post‐referendum through a lens attentive to the cultural politics of emotion and innocence as an operation of whiteness

"Being in a Knowledge Space": information behaviour of cult media fan communities

This article describes the first two parts of a three-stage study investigating the information behaviour of fans and fan communities, focusing on fans of cult media. A literature analysis shows that information practices are an inherent and major part of fan activities, and that fans are practitioners of new forms of information consumption and production, showing sophisticated activities of information organisation and dissemination. A subsequent Delphi study, taking the novel form of a 'serious leisure' Delphi, in which the participants are not experts in the usual sense, identifies three aspects of fan information behaviour of particular interest beyond the fan context: information gatekeeping; classifying and tagging; and entrepreneurship and economic activity