60419 research outputs found
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New considerations about Chiari-like malformation, syringomyelia and their management
No full textBackground: Chiari-like malformation (CM) is a developmental condition, characterised by a conformational change and overcrowding of the brain and cranial cervical spinal cord. CM-associated pain (CM-P) and syringomyelia are increasingly being diagnosed, due to the rising popularity of predisposed brachycephalic breeds and the availability of MRI in veterinary practices
Job search behavior explained through perceived tolerance for workplace incivility, cynicism and income level: A moderated mediation model
No full textThis study aims to propose and examine a research model that explores how income level can moderate the mediating relationship between organizational tolerance workplace incivility and job search behavior through employee cynicism within the hotel industry. As such, the theoretical framework and non-western study context are each a novel consideration. Data were collected from 331 employees of 5-star hotels within Jordan, whereby structural equation modeling was adopted to test the relationships between constructs. The analysis revealed that when employees perceive a high level of organizational tolerance for workplace incivility, they reinforce cynical beliefs and increase their job search behavior. Results provide empirical support for income moderating the indirect relationships (via employee cynicism) between organization workplace incivility and job search behavior. This relationship is stronger among employees with lower levels of income. Practical implications concerning ways to improve managers' knowledge of workplace incivility and more operational ways of handling conflict are discussed
Transdisciplinarity within the academic engineering literature
No full textDespite increased discourse around transdisciplinary (TD) research, there is a perception it has received less attention within engineering. This is
significant if, as generally accepted, TD increases the societal value of research.
This paper benchmarks TD engineering research against the broader TD literature, addressing the question: How do the characteristics of the academic
engineering TD literature compare to the TD academic literature in general?
We analyse the chronology, source journals, and text of papers referencing TD
within their abstract and compare this to papers that fall within the engineering
subject area. The conclusions find that TD research is limited generally, and
within engineering specifically. Historically, TD research focuses on sustainability challenges, a persistent trend within the general literature. Within
engineering research, the focus of TD is wider and addresses operational and ‘grand challenge’ problems. TD remains poorly defined and future work should
focus on clarifying meaning within the engineering discipline
Don't scrap the waste: the need for broader system boundaries in bioplastic food packaging life-cycle assessment - a critical review
No full textRepresentations of the National Health Service (NHS) in UK print media
No full textGenerating negative news coverage of state welfare provision has been identified as a
strategy designed to create public support for radical policies aimed to reduce such provision.
To date, research of this kind has focused on scandals and crises. However, little is known
about the complex relationship between media representations of specific events, and those of
media representations in the lead up to these events, what we refer to as periphery
representations. Employing a content and frame analysis, this paper analyses the frequency
and intensity of peripheral representations of the National Health Service (NHS) in the
British print media for one week a month before and for one week during three key events in
recent NHS history: the official consultation period for the Health and Social Care Act
(2012); the publication of Five-Year Forward View, and the first Junior Doctor Strike. This
article finds that negative NHS representations in articles that are peripheral to particular
topical issues of controversy evidence fluctuations, amplifications and intensities across time
periods, depending on the particular context. The paper concludes by arguing that repetition
of negative themes in news helps to build a sensibility of ‘inadequacy’ of vital services. We
hope that this focus on the ways in which amplifications and de-amplifications in negative
intensity of peripheral NHS representations across time and content, helps to contribute to
debate about the complex interplay between public health services, media representation and
policy consent
epcAware: A Game-based, Energy, Performance and Cost Efficient Resource Management Technique for Multi-access Edge Computing
No full textInternet of Things (IoT) is producing an extraordinary volume of data daily, and it is possible that the data may become useless while on its way to the cloud, due to long distances. Fog/edge computing is a new model for analysing and acting on time-sensitive data, adjacent to where it is produced. Further, cloud services provided by large companies such as Google, can also be localised to improve response time and service agility. This is accomplished through deploying small-scale datacentres in various locations, where needed in proximity of users; and connected to a centralised cloud that establish a multi-access edge computing (MEC). The MEC setup involves three parties, i.e. service-providers (IaaS), application-providers (SaaS), network-providers (NaaS); which might have different goals, therefore, making resource management difficult. Unlike existing literature, we consider resource management with-respect-to all parties; and suggest game-theoretic resource management techniques to minimise infrastructure energy consumption and costs while ensuring applications' performance. Our empirical evaluation, using Google's workload traces, suggests that our approach could reduce up to 11.95% energy consumption, and ~17.86% user costs with negligible loss in performance. Moreover, IaaS can reduce up-to 20.27% energy bills and NaaS can increase their costs-savings up-to 18.52% as compared to other methods
Adaptation and preliminary testing of the registered nursing forecasting (RN4CAST) nurse survey for use in the ambulatory chemotherapy setting
No full textPurpose
This study aimed to adapt the Registered Nurse Forecast (RN4CAST) nurse survey making it appropriate to assess the working environments of ambulatory chemotherapy nurses, specifically focusing on care left undone.
Method
A two-phase approach was used. Firstly, cognitive interviews were conducted to adapt role specific sections of the RN4CAST nurses survey. The interviews were analysed to assess comprehension, retrieval, judgement and response processes to create the RN4CAST-chemotherapy assessment tool (CAT) survey. Secondly, a single centre feasibility study was undertaken to assess acceptability of the RN4CAST-C AT survey in an ambulatory chemotherapy setting. Results of the feasibility study were analysed using descriptive statistics and compared with routinely collected patient experience data.
Results
The cognitive interviews (n = 6) resulted in important amendments to the RN4CAST- CAT. Response rate to the feasibility study was acceptable at 57% (n = 12) and item completion rate was good (on average only 1 response missing per item). On average nurses looked after nine patients per shift, administered seven chemotherapy treatments and worked an hour and 10 min over their contracted time. Main areas of care left undone were related to verbal communication with patients and assessing patient comorbidities and toxicities.
Conclusions
We were able to adapt the RN4CAST to make it suitable for use in the ambulatory chemotherapy setting. Our study offers preliminary evidence that the RN4CAST-CAT and methodology are feasible and acceptable within the ambulatory chemotherapy setting. Larger scale testing is now required and if validated the RN4CAST-CAT has the potential to provide useful insights into the impact of nursing workload on staff experience, patient care and outcomes on ambulatory chemotherapy settings.</p
The effectiveness of online cause-related marketing message framing on hotel brand evaluation.
No full textWith increasing competition in hospitality and tourism companies, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been suggested as a strategy for generating goodwill and enhancing reputation among customers. As one of the marketing tools for implementing CSR, Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) – which directly links product sales to the support of a charity – has also become an important focus of attention in the hotel industry. Although CRM can generate positive impacts on business (e.g., financial benefit, improved brand evaluation), it can also backfire when consumers perceive that the hotel is using it mainly for its own benefit (i.e., profit motivation). Furthermore, if the hotel has a poor reputation, consumers would become more suspicious of a hotel’s involvement in social causes. That is, consumers will attribute more strongly a hotel’s self-serving motives (vs. public-serving) to CRM campaigns of less reputable hotels, suspecting that the hotels use the initiatives largely as a tactic to improve their reputation. In this sense, hotels have to consider strategies to introduce their CRM messages properly, and how to convey the hotel’s social motivation in order for the CRM to be effective in eliciting positive responses. In spite of the evidence that the potential risks of consumers’ scepticism could lead to negative outcomes, there is a paucity of research explaining how to communicate CRM effectively with a consideration of perceived brand reputation. Therefore, this study aims to examine the interaction effect between advertising message framing (promotion-framed vs. prevention-framed) strategy and brand reputation (high vs. low) on consumers’ brand evaluation (brand attitude, word-of-mouth, purchase intention) in the context of CRM in the hotel industry.
Employing a multiple quantitative methods approach with two experimental studies, data were collected through a survey-based experiment (Study I: self-reported measures) and a laboratory experiment (Study II: psychophysiological measures). Study I examined the moderating role of brand reputation as well as consumer-related factors (processing fluency, social cause attitude, perceived fit) to illustrate how the relationship between message framing and brand reputation can be explained. The experiment was executed online with 248 UK-based participants. As emotional arousal or engagement with advertisements has been proven to be an effective tool for social initiatives, Study II examined the impact of consumers’ emotional responses during an exposure to CRM advertisements, thereby complementing Study I’s findings. Using physiological measurements of automatic emotional reactions through biosensors (eye-tracking, facial expression, skin conductance), the data collection and analysis were facilitated by the iMotions software platform. A total 67 UK-based respondents were involved.
This study found evidence that consumers prefer more prevention-framed messages (vs. promotion-framed) in CRM from hotels with a less reputable brand. That is, hotels with low reputation should point out the importance of avoiding a threat or danger in their charitable advertisements. This study extends prior research on the relative persuasiveness of message framing, revealing that the two types of CRM message strategies evoked by advertising lead to different attitude and behavioural changes. Additionally, focusing on the role of brand reputation and emotions, the current study contributes to knowledge on how hotels can mitigate the potential negative implications of CRM by choosing the right communication content
An experiment in comedy and murder : exploring relationships between satire, parody and genre.
No full textThis thesis seeks to understand the relationship between satire, parody and genre. The project is based on the principle that satire is a mode of rhetorical discourse that uses parody to distinguish itself from other modes, as well as perpetrate a specific socio-political message. Whereas, genre is a type of literature that is defined by distinct codes. A novel was written to test these principles and to discover if a genre can be changed by the inclusion of satire. Two genres were included in this novel, one that traditionally contains a satiric purpose (campus fiction) and one that does not (crime fiction). The satirical message used in the novel focuses on the barriers that marginalised groups face when participating in higher education, which is included in the campus fiction stream of the novel. The crime fiction stream features a man-eating monster. The novel is entitled The Life and Times of a Doctoral Thesis
Discriminative block-diagonal covariance descriptors for image set classification
No full textImage set classification has recently received much attention due to its various applications in pattern recognition and computer vision. To compare and match image sets, the major challenges are to devise an effective and efficient representation and to define a measure of similarity between image sets. In this paper, we propose a method for representing image sets based on block-diagonal Covariance Descriptors (CovDs). In particular, the proposed image set representation is in the form of non-singular covariance matrices, also known as Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, that lie on Riemannian manifold. By dividing each image of an image set into square blocks of the same size, we compute the corresponding block CovDs instead of the global one. Taking the relative discriminative power of these block CovDs into account, a block-diagonal SPD matrix can be constructed to achieve a better discriminative capability. We extend the proposed approach to work with bidirectional CovDs and achieve a further boost in performance. The resulting block-diagonal SPD matrices combined with Riemannian metrics are shown to provide a powerful basis for image set classification. We perform an extensive evaluation on four datasets for several image set classification tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method
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