Research update

In this article we provide a brief update on some of the research papers and reports published in 2014 on career development, examining in particular some issues related to equality and employment, career adaptability and self-efficacy in career decision making. The research findings are presented and discussed with careers practitioners in mind. We also consider the validity of the findings and their relevance to careers practitioners

The D2N2 employability framework: Employers and schools supporting young people's routes to work

The D2N2 Employability Framework provides the methodology by which we can significantly improve the employability and life skills of our young people regardless of academic ability or which career pathway they chose to take. Collectively schools, colleges, training providers, wealth creating companies, social enterprises and the public sector have a duty to ensure that we give our young people the best chances in gaining employment and at the same time addressing the skills needs of employers within our area

Mapping Qualifications Frameworks across APEC Economies

This report on qualification frameworks was undertaken for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Human Resources Development Working Group (HRDWG) Education Network Subgroup (EDNET). The project aimed to facilitate increased transparency and reliability of information about qualification frameworks across the APEC region, share knowledge and skills and identify future areas of collaboration. A qualifications framework is an instrument for classifying qualifications according to a set of criteria for levels of learning outcomes. Considerable benefits are expected of national qualification frameworks (NQFs). If backed by a good system of quality assurance, they can support the development of workers’ skills, facilitate educational and labour market mobility, and help improve the access of individuals to higher and different levels of education and training over their lives. Education and training providers and authorities are able to design more consistent and linked qualifications when descriptors of qualifications are developed within NQFs. Employers benefit in their recruitment and training of staff when they can understand and have confidence in qualifications. The international recognition of an economy’s qualifications can be enhanced by the transparency of qualifications to which an NQF can contribute. This report is based on desktop analysis of qualification frameworks, contacts made by members of the project team and on a survey of APEC member economies carried out in the project

Further education sector governors as ethnographers: five case studies

This paper considers how governors in the English Further Education and Skills (FE) sector examined their practice as ethnographers. The paper locates both FE governance and ethnography within the challenges of the performative and Panoptic environments facing English education. In doing so, the paper explores how the informants’ mobilisation of ethnographic methods revealed a novel lens on both governance and the role of ethnographer. Employing Grounded Theory, the paper considers how the participants negotiated philosophical questions regarding evidence, objectivity and truth. The paper suggests that despite the deep-seated complexities inherent in conducting ethnography in performative contexts, the participants generated data which painted a unique and revealing picture upon their practice as governor and researcher

Concert recording 2016-04-19a

[Track 01]. Canzon duodecimi toni / Giovanni Gabrieli -- [Track 02]. Divertissement. Andante - allegro ; [Track 03]. Allegro vivace ; [Track 04]. Andante / Emile Bernard -- [Track 05]. March for military music in F major, Yorck march WoO 18 / Ludwig van Beethoven -- [Track 06]. Sept danses. Le jeu de la poupée ; [Track 07]. Funérailles de la poupée ; [Track 08]. La présentation des petits amis ; [Track 09]. Variation de Paul ; [Track 10]. Pas de deux entre Sophie et Paul ; [Track 11]. La goûter ; [Track 12]. Danse des filets à papillons / Jean Françaix

Prevention of haematoma progression by tranexamic acid in intracerebral haemorrhage patients with and without spot sign on admission scan: a statistical analysis plan of a pre-specified sub-study of the TICH-2 trial

Objective We present the statistical analysis plan of a prespecified Tranexamic Acid for Hyperacute Primary Intracerebral Haemorrhage (TICH)-2 sub-study aiming to investigate, if tranexamic acid has a different effect in intracerebral haemorrhage patients with the spot sign on admission compared to spot sign negative patients. The TICH-2 trial recruited above 2000 participants with intracerebral haemorrhage arriving in hospital within 8 h after symptom onset. They were included irrespective of radiological signs of on-going haematoma expansion. Participants were randomised to tranexamic acid versus matching placebo. In this subgroup analysis, we will include all participants in TICH-2 with a computed tomography angiography on admission allowing adjudication of the participants’ spot sign status. Results Primary outcome will be the ability of tranexamic acid to limit absolute haematoma volume on computed tomography at 24 h (± 12 h) after randomisation among spot sign positive and spot sign negative participants, respectively. Within all outcome measures, the effect of tranexamic acid in spot sign positive/negative participants will be compared using tests of interaction. This sub-study will investigate the important clinical hypothesis that spot sign positive patients might benefit more from administration of tranexamic acid compared to spot sign negative patients

Oral high dose ascorbic acid treatment for one year in young CMT1A patients: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>High dose oral ascorbic acid substantially improved myelination and locomotor function in a Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 1A mouse model. A phase II study was warranted to investigate whether high dose ascorbic acid also has such a substantial effect on myelination in Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 1A patients and whether this treatment is safe.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Patients below age 25 years were randomly assigned to receive placebo or ascorbic acid (one gram twice daily) in a double-blind fashion during one year. The primary outcome measure was the change over time in motor nerve conduction velocity of the median nerve. Secondary outcome measures included changes in minimal F response latencies, compound muscle action potential amplitude, muscle strength, sensory function, Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathy score, and disability.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There were no significant differences between the six placebo-treated (median age 16 years, range 13 to 24) and the five ascorbic acid-treated (19, 14 to 24) patients in change in motor nerve conduction velocity of the median nerve (mean difference ascorbic acid as opposed to placebo treatment of 1.3 m/s, confidence interval -0.3 to 3.0 m/s, <it>P </it>= 0.11) or in change of any of the secondary outcome measures over time. One patient in the ascorbic acid group developed a skin rash, which led to discontinuation of the study medication.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Oral high dose ascorbic acid for one year did not improve myelination of the median nerve in young Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 1A patients. Treatment was relatively safe.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN56968278, ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00271635.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe