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Relationships influencing organisational culture in men’s elite football clubs in Norway
Get PDFThis paper examines the relationships within and outside organisations that have the leverage to influence culture in the context of men’s elite football clubs in Norway. Participants from three clubs held positions as Performance Director (n=2), sport psychology practitioner (n = 3), and physiotherapist (n = 2) and participated in semi-structured interviews focusing on the relationships, tensions, and dynamic organisational forces in their respective clubs. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we developed two overarching themes showing (1) Organisational cultures in time frames and (2) Relationships among stakeholders influencing organisational culture. Developing these themes indicated that an organisational culture is not only a point of arrival, but also a point of departure for future activities. Hence, those charged with organisational culture work must maintain awareness of the influence of a club’s history and how it influences dynamic tensions with stakeholders within and outside clubs. It is also critical that cultural practitioners are mindful of players’ and staffs’ individual journeys, which influence how they self-organise into fluid and temporary subgroups. The findings can sharpen our understanding of working with culture in elite football by emphasising other sources of culture besides leaders’ attempts at controlling or steering it in their preferred way. Using the findings provided in this study can help practitioners recognise organisational tensions or slippage towards cultural problems before they lead to traumatic organisational crises
Effects of simulated motion frequency related to road quality on the welfare and recovery of transported largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides)
Get PDFFarmed fish are commonly transported between various facilities by road vehicles, resulting in inevitable exposure to uncontrolled and oscillatory movements, likely exacerbated by poor road conditions. The effect of road quality on livestock has been studied during live transport, but research into the impact of motion has been rarely examined with fish. This study investigated the effects of different motion frequencies related to road quality on the welfare and recovery of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides). Three motion frequencies were examined in this study using a non-transported control, a simulated “rough” transport treatment, and a simulated “smooth” transport treatment. Live transport was carried out for 3 h using a motion simulation platform with a movement frequency of 1.0 and 1.8 Hz for the smooth and rough treatment, respectively. Control fish were kept in static tanks for the same duration to obtain basal physiology, behaviour, and flesh quality. Water parameters were measured before and immediately after simulated transport in all groups. Behavioural, physiological, and muscle parameters were measured before simulated transport, as well as 0 h and 24 h post-transport. Total ammonia nitrogen levels increased in all treatments over time (p < 0.001), with significantly higher values observed in transported groups. Non-transported fish displayed increased biting (p = 0.025), chasing (p = 0.010), and threatening (p = 0.003) behaviour over time, suggesting potential fasting and confinement stress. During the post-transport period, a significant main effect of treatment and timepoint on freezing and thigmotaxis behaviour was found, with an increase in these behaviours over time and significantly higher levels between control and smooth transported groups. Nevertheless, aggressive behaviours were affected only by timepoint, with an increase observed between 0 h and 24 h post-transport. Neither plasma biochemical indicators nor flesh quality differed between treatments, while a significant effect of timepoint was found for plasma glucose (p = 0.045), plasma lactate (p = 0.021), and muscle pH (p < 0.001). Our study consequently did not find rough transport to impact fish physiology and flesh quality more than smooth transport, but behavioural results suggest there was a strong combined effect of fasting, exposure to a novel environment, and confinement over time. Future research would be valuable to study these effects on the welfare of transported bass, allowing for a longer recovery time and the use of potential mitigation options such as environmental enrichment
Patterns of declining zooplankton energy in the northeast Atlantic as an indicator for marine survival of Atlantic salmon
Get PDFReturn rates of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) from the sea to European rivers have declined in recent decades. The first months at sea are critical for growth and survival; recent evidence suggests that reduced food availability may be a contributory factor to the observed declines. Here, zooplankton abundance data are used to derive a measure of prey energy available to forage fish prey of salmon during early marine migration. This zooplankton prey energy has significantly and dramatically declined over much of the northeast Atlantic, and specifically within key salmon migration domains, over the past 60 years. Marine return rates from a set of southern European populations are found to exhibit clustering not entirely predictable from geographical proximity. Variability in grouped return rates from these populations is correlated with zooplankton energy on a range of scales, demonstrating the potential use of zooplankton energy as an indicator of salmon marine survival. Comparison with environmental variables derived from ocean model reanalysis data suggests zooplankton energy is regulated by a combination of climate change impacts on ecosystem productivity and multi-decadal variability in water mass influence along the migration routes
Chemistry teachers’ perspectives and understanding in integrating sustainability into teaching: the case of Chile
Get PDFSustainability issues are a problem in Chile because of the policies of the present and previous governments. Chile has a neo-liberal model for development and many ecological problems, which involve social and environmental injustices and an overvalue of economic growth for development. Building on the three pillars model of sustainability of interconnections among the environment, society and economy, this research aims to find out how Chilean chemistry teachers understand sustainability and its integration into teaching chemistry. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with ten teachers and an attempt to highlight teachers’ voices about what is possible to do and the impacts of connecting chemistry education and sustainability in the context of a country with a free-market approach to development, such as Chile. Findings indicate that teachers focus on using resources and environmental protection when explaining sustainability and do not relate it to political and economic implications. Teachers confirmed that sustainability integration into education promotes paramount values for living in society and foundational skills for citizenship education, such as critical thinking skills. Nevertheless, teachers focused only on personal actions and attitudes toward sustainability
Semantically-Informed Graph Neural Networks for Irony Detection in Turkish
No full textSocial media plays an important role in expressing the thoughts and sentiments of users. Irony is a way of stating a sentiment about something by expressing the opposite of the intended literal meaning. Irony detection is a recent emerging task in low-resource languages, although other tasks related to sentiment, such as sentiment analysis and emotion detection, have been widely tackled. In this study, we investigate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for irony detection in Turkish, a low-resource language in sentiment-related tasks. We incorporate semantic information into the GNNs using the Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA) framework. Extensive experimental results and in-depth analysis show that our models outperform state-of-the-art irony detection models in Turkish. Our UCCA-GAT (UCCA-Graph Attention Network) model achieves an F\textsubscript{1}-score of 94.85% (7.362% gain over the state-of-the-art) on the Turkish-Irony-Dataset and an accuracy of 72.82% (4.39% gain over the state-of-the-art) on the IronyTR Dataset. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of the proposed models to understand their limitations.\footnote{The code will be publicly available after acceptance
Thinking about the future in older age
Get PDFOlder age is often conceptualised as a stage of life in which the future is considered to be less relevant than the past. This is reflected in literature that emphasises the importance of the past in later life but overlooks the significance of the future. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analysing narratives that older people write about the future. We do this through secondary analysis of diary entries written by older respondents to the British Mass Observation Project in 1988, in response to a directive about time. The aim of our analysis was to develop conceptual understandings of the relationship between older age and future time. Our thematic analysis identified four main orientations that respondents had towards the future: dreading the future; time running out; taking one day at a time; thinking beyond finitude. Underpinning all of these was a reluctance to contemplate and plan for changes in physical and cognitive health and future care needs, a finding echoed in more recent research. Drawing on critical time perspectives that foreground the fluid, complex and social nature of time, we suggest that reluctance to acknowledge and plan for the future in later life reflects conceptualisations of the future as unpredictable and inseparable from past and present temporalities. This contrasts with more instrumentalist ageing discourses that imply the future can be ‘managed’ from the present. We conclude by calling for a greater repertoire of how we imagine and narrate the future in later life
What services are currently provided to people with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction in the UK, and what are their components? A protocol for a scoping literature review
Get PDFAims Heart failure (HF) with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is increasing in incidence and is increasingly the most common HF diagnosis. Patients with HFpEF are often excluded from specialist HF services, which has negative impacts on their healthcare experiences and health-related outcomes. As emerging evidence-based treatments are being incorporated into clinical guidelines, it is timely to focus on the management of this phenotype. This review aims to explore literature around care provision for HFpEF in the UK, to characterize and assess HFpEF care pathways against current standards, and to generate evidence to create an optimized framework of care. Methods and results A scoping review of the evidence from six databases will be performed, alongside a search of grey literature search and consultation with relevant experts. Given the expected heterogeneity, multiple lines of synthesis are anticipated. Data analysis will follow best practice guidelines for the synthesizing methodologies selected. Patient and public representatives will assist with analysis and in identifying priority components for HFpEF clinical services. Conclusion This scoping literature review will enable an in-depth examination of the current health service provision for those with HFpEF in the UK. Synthesis of key components of services and illumination of challenges and barriers will inform current and future practice. There is a long history of specialist HF care in the UK, including seminal work on nurse-led care. Therefore, evidence derived from this review will likely be useful to HF services across Europe. The proposed combination of the search across both peer-reviewed literature and grey literature, combined with patient and public involvement, will identify the key components of a framework of care for those with HFpEF. Registration This scoping review protocol was published on the public Open Science Framework platform (no registration reference provided) and can be accessed at: https://osf.io/5gufq/
Selective deforestation and exposure of African wildlife to bat-borne viruses
Get PDFProposed mechanisms of zoonotic virus spillover often posit that wildlife transmission and amplification precede human outbreaks. Between 2006 and 2012, the palm Raphia farinifera, a rich source of dietary minerals for wildlife, was nearly extirpated from Budongo Forest, Uganda. Since then, chimpanzees, black-and-white colobus, and red duiker were observed feeding on bat guano, a behavior not previously observed. Here we show that guano consumption may be a response to dietary mineral scarcity and may expose wildlife to bat-borne viruses. Videos from 2017–2019 recorded 839 instances of guano consumption by the aforementioned species. Nutritional analysis of the guano revealed high concentrations of sodium, potassium, magnesium and phosphorus. Metagenomic analyses of the guano identified 27 eukaryotic viruses, including a novel betacoronavirus. Our findings illustrate how “upstream” drivers such as socioeconomics and resource extraction can initiate elaborate chains of causation, ultimately increasing virus spillover risk
Editorial: Recent advances in multimodal artificial intelligence for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and prevention
Get PDFFirst paragraph: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained huge attention in computer-aided decision-making in the healthcare domain. Many novel AI methods have been developed for disease diagnosis and prognosis which may support in the prevention of disease. Most diseases can be cured early and managed better if timely diagnosis is made. The AI models can aid clinical diagnosis; thus, they make the processes more efficient by reducing the workload of physicians, nurses, radiologists, and others. However, the majority of AI methods rely on the use of single-modality data. For example, brain tumor detection uses brain MRI, skin lesion detection uses skin pathology images, and lung cancer detection uses lung CT or x-ray imaging (1). Single-modality AI models lack the much-needed integration of complex features available from different modality data, such as electronic health records (EHR), unstructured clinical notes, and different medical imaging modalities– otherwise form the backbone of clinical decision-making
How could 20-minute neighbourhoods impact health and health inequalities? A policy scoping review
Get PDFBackground ‘Twenty-minute neighbourhoods’ (or variations, such as 15-minute cities) are receiving increasing policy attention with anticipated impacts on population health (inequalities) outcomes alongside sustainability improvements. Yet, factors contributing to possible health impacts are not well understood. This scoping review aimed to identify proposed and evidenced pathways to health (inequality) outcomes from international policy plans. Methods We first identified relevant academic literature, searching Scopus, (Ovid) Medline and Embase databases. A second search aimed to identify local or national planning or policy documents on government websites and related organisations. We followed a snowball search strategy to retrieve examples identified from the academic literature search and from the C40 cities network. These policy documents were our primary target for extraction, and we extracted and analysed by individual place. Pathways to health and health inequality outcomes identified in these documents were inductively coded thematically. We used Sankey diagrams to visually aggregate the thematic codes for each place relating to pathways to health outcomes and social determinants (mechanisms). Results In total, 36 places across 17 countries were included, described across 96 academic articles, policy plans and reports. While different health improvement outcomes were included as a goal in nearly all policy plans, most frequently references were to health in general rather than specific health outcomes. Pathways to health were discussed in numerous policy plans across three overarching themes: proximity, place redesign, and environmental action. Proximity pathways were most frequently outlined as the means to achieve health outcomes, with active travel acting through increased physical activity/reduced obesity as the most frequent individual pathway. However, few plans specified what would actually be implemented in practice to achieve the increased proximity to services. Health inequalities were only mentioned by six places specifically, although nearly half of all places mentioned broader inequality aims (e.g., poverty reduction). Possible unintended consequences to health inequalities also received some attention, for example through displacement of residents. Discussion Pathways to assumed health (inequality) outcomes require better specification and evidence. Health inequalities are particularly under-explored, and scenario modelling might provide a means to explore the dynamic aspects necessary to examine these important outcomes pre-implementation
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