34028 research outputs found
Sort by
Online Violence Against Women – A Contemporary Assessment of the Adequacy of the Online Safety Response
No full textThis chapter argues that to assess the adequacy of the current regulatory responses, the key question is whether or not there has been a sufficient response to online violence against women (OVAW). It explores the increasing recognition that online forms of violence are receiving, sounding a cautionary note about the expectations we can have of any regulatory framework before outlining some selective developments in the legal and policy landscape at regional and national levels surrounding OVAW to illustrate the shifting ecosystem before evaluating whether we are in a realistic place to combat online and digital forms of violence against women and whether we have realistic hopes of developing a regulatory framework suited to doing so. This chapter offers a contemporary assessment of the (in)adequacy of the regulatory responses concerning online safety and their applicability to OVAW to date. </p
Substituting sitting with standing and walking in free-living conditions improves daily glucose concentrations in South Asian adults living with overweight/obesity
No full textBackground: Controlled laboratory studies have demonstrated that breaking up sitting can reduce postprandial glucose in South Asian adults. This study examined the effects of substituting sitting with standing and walking on interstitial glucose in South Asian individuals under free-living conditions. Methods: South Asian adults (n=14 [50% male];body mass index 26.5 ± 0.8 kg·m-2) aged 41±3 years completed two, 4-day regimens in a counter-balanced order: (1) SIT (restrict walking and standing to ≤1-h/day each) and (2) SITless (substitute ≥5-h/day of sitting with ≥3-h of standing and ≥2-h of walking, and interrupt sitting every 30-min). Interstitial glucose was measured using Flash glucose monitoring. Sitting and physical activity were measured using an activPAL3. Outcomes were compared between regimens using linear mixed models. Results: Interstitial glucose net incremental area under the curve (iAUC) for waking hours was lower by -9.2 mmol.L-1 .16 h-1 (95% Confidence Interval [CI]: -18.1, -0.3) in SITless than SIT (p=0.04), while lunch postprandial glucose iAUC was significantly lower by -1.0 mmol.L-1.2 h-1 (95% CI: -1.8, 0.2) in SITless (p=0.02). There were no significant differences in other 24-h or 16-h glucose metrics (p≥0.06). Compared to SIT, sitting was lower by -3.6 h/day (95% CI: -4.9, -2.3) in SITless (pp≤0.01). Conclusions: Substituting sitting with standing and walking under free-living conditions can be used to effectively attenuate glycaemia during waking hours, but not across 24-h, in South Asian adults.</p
A Stretched Polar Vortex and North American and Eastern Asian Cold-Air Events during January/February 2025
No full text During mid-January through February 2025 the low-level stratospheric polar vortex (LSPV) at 100 mb extended from North America across the pole to east-central Asia, a stretched pattern, coinciding with a period of extended cold weather on both continents. The LSPV, and its associated tropospheric blocking projections, were a main organizing feature. Weather events were mostly contained in the tropospheric west-east wave guide. For the United States (US), cold conditions occurred in a corridor that includes Illinois, through Mississippi and Virginia. During the second half of January, a 500 mb ridge-trough was set up off the west coast of California, driving cold temperatures into the southeastern US, with record snow in New Orleans. During early February there were cold events in Korea and Eastern Asia; an intermediate timing between cold air outbreaks in the US. The end of February saw a second US cold air outbreak. Although the stretched LSPV at 100 mb had a one and a half month duration extending over the subarctic, mid-tropospheric weather events were of shorter duration in both the US and Eastern Asia. The troughing at 100 mb in the stretched LSPV pattern coincided with event-based barotropic atmospheric troughing response at lower levels. Tropospheric weather events can coexist with the LSPV and thus contribute to sub-seasonal forecasting. </p
Experiences of UK general practice trainees undertaking workplace-based assessment who received a developmental outcome at their annual review of competency progression
No full text Background:
Workplace-Based Assessment (WPBA) forms part of the integrated assessment system for UK General Practice (GP) licencing. An Annual Review of Competence Progression (ARCP) panel evaluates either satisfactory progress or requirement for development of specific capabilities. We aimed to explore GP trainees’ experiences of undertaking WPBA when failing to progress by receiving a ‘developmental’ outcome 2 or 3.
Methods:
We used a qualitative design employing Systematic Grounded Theory and semistructured interviews. A purposive sample of GP trainees was recruited, at different stages of training and with varying demographic characteristics, who had a previous ARCP developmental outcome. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed, facilitated by NVivo 14.
Results:
We interviewed 20 GP trainees during 2024 who received a developmental outcome between 2020 and 2023. We identified five themes: ‘potential for early intervention’, included personalised support and better information provision; ‘perceptions of how WPBA reflected trainee performance’ including perceptions of the validity and reliability of WPBA and need for fair, trustworthy and transparent processes to reduce unfair discrimination; ‘communication difficulties’ arose in relation to culture, language and reflection for some study participants; ‘relationships with peers and educational setting’ were felt to affect performance; and some participants experienced negative ‘effects on wellbeing’.
Conclusion:
Suggestions aimed at supporting and overcoming potential challenges to undertaking WPBA during GP training, including personalised support, reviewing fairness of assessments, addressing communication and cultural barriers, enhancing training environments, fostering positive relationships, and mitigating negative wellbeing impacts, some of which were already in place, with others requiring development. </p
Incorporating Feminist Practices Into Psychological Science—The Why, the What and the How
No full textThis perspective piece provides an access point for why researchers should incorporate feminist approaches in psychological science, what feminist approaches could look like and how researchers can start incorporating them into their own work. In answering the why, what and how of feminist practices, we strive to make working in a feminist way more legible and accessible, with the ultimate aim of cultivating a more comprehensive understanding of human psychology from diverse perspectives.</p
The Stockholm Declaration at Sea: Influences on the Content and Context of the Law of the Sea
No full textThe process of treaty interpretation focuses on the reading of texts and so provides limited scope to understand fully how instruments like the 1972 Stockholm Declaration can inform the content of specific legal obligations. However, this is not the whole picture. A review of the genealogy of key law-of-the-sea instruments reveals the varying influence of Stockholm on the contemporary law of the sea. Beyond its more obvious influence on the protection of the marine environment, subtle yet important sematic and cultural influences can be detected in areas such as the human/environment nexus, differential commitments, stewardship, and integrated planning. As the integration of the law of the sea with other fields of law deepens, it is harder to ignore these influences. Understanding these influences gives us an important sense of trajectory in the development of legal norms and the longer-term value of including progressive ideas within legal instruments. The process of treaty interpretation focuses on the reading of texts and so provides limited scope to understand fully how instruments like the 1972 Stockholm Declaration can inform the content of specific legal obligations. However, this is not the whole picture. A review of the genealogy of key law-of-the-sea instruments reveals the varying influence of Stockholm on the contemporary law of the sea. Beyond its more obvious influence on the protection of the marine environment, subtle yet important sematic and cultural influences can be detected in areas such as the human/environment nexus, differential commitments, stewardship, and integrated planning. As the integration of the law of the sea with other fields of law deepens, it is harder to ignore these influences. Understanding these influences gives us an important sense of trajectory in the development of legal norms and the longer-term value of including progressive ideas within legal instruments. </p
DaGAM-Trans: Dual graph attention module-based transformer for offline signature forgery detection
No full textObjective: The detection of signature forgeries is a critical challenge in domains such as forensic investigations, financial security, and biometric authentication. This study aims to improve the offline detection of signature forgery, especially in cases of skilled forgeries where traditional methods relying on handcrafted features and statistical models often fail to distinguish between genuine and forged signatures. Material and Methods: To address these limitations, we propose DaGAM-Trans, a Dual Attention Graph Attention Module-based Transformer model that integrates Graph Attention Networks (GAT) with a Transformer backbone. The Transformer architecture plays a key role in modeling global contextual dependencies across the entire signature image, enabling the system to capture long-range structural information crucial for distinguishing genuine signatures from skilled forgeries. The architecture comprises a Graph Attention Module (GAM) to capture spatial dependencies using multi-head graph attention and graph convolution layers, and a Channel Attention Module (CAM) to amplify discriminative features and suppress irrelevant information. Additionally, a Graph Multi-Scale Adaptive Pooling (GMSAPool) layer is introduced to optimize feature aggregation by preserving salient details and reducing redundancy. The model is evaluated on four publicly available signature datasets: SigComp2011, BHSig260, CEDAR, and UTSig, within a cross-language verification setting. Results: DaGAM-Trans demonstrates superior performance across all datasets. Notably, it achieves 100% accuracy on the CEDAR dataset, with a False Acceptance Rate (FAR) as low as 0.001 and an Equal Error Rate (EER) reduced to 9.5%. Comparative experiments confirm that DaGAM-Trans outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, FAR, FRR, and EER. Visualization through attention maps further validates the model's capacity to localize and highlight discriminative regions in signature images. Conclusion: The proposed DaGAM-Trans model effectively enhances offline signature forgery detection by leveraging dual attention mechanisms and adaptive graph-based pooling. Its outstanding performance, especially in reducing error rates and handling cross-linguistic signature variability, demonstrates its robustness and applicability for real-world biometric and forensic authentication tasks.</p
Nutribloods Novel synthetic lepidopteran haemolymphs for understanding insect–microbe nutritional interactions in vitro
No full textUnderstanding the role of nutrients in microbial population dynamics relies on a sound appreciation of their nutritional environment and how this may vary in different habitats.
For microbial pathogens and commensals, this can be especially challenging because the microbe may share nutritional resources with its host. Here we design a series of 20 synthetic cell-free haemolymphs (nutribloods) that mimic haemolymph nutrient profiles of caterpillars fed on one of 20 chemically defined diets that vary in their protein: carbohydrate (P:C) ratio and caloric density. Using these, we are able to simulate the range of nutritional conditions that insect blood pathogens might face, providing a model system for understanding the role of nutrition in microbial growth. We tested this using the entomopathogen, Xenorhabdus nematophila, a Gram-negative extracellular bacterium of insect hosts. This revealed that whilst bacterial fitness peaked in nutriblood nutrient space that was high in carbohydrates and low in proteins, levels of amino acids in the nutribloods also appear to be an important driving force for bacterial growth. Using synthetic haemolymphs that had average levels of all nutrients other than carbohydrate, protein or amino acids, we also established that bacterial growth is generally enhanced
by carbohydrates and amino acids but reduced by proteins. Here, we have established a tractable model system for examining the role that nutrition plays in the growth of an entomopathogenic bacterium. In future work, this model host–pathogen system can be used to test a range of nutritionally driven processes, including competition during coinfection and interactions with the host microbiome, as well as comparative studies of other entomopathogens.</p
Community Engagement in Net Zero Initiatives A Pathway to Sustainable Development
No full text Community engagement involves incorporating the aspirations, concerns, needs, and values of citizens at all levels, empowering communities to drive change. Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens at the relevant level (Principle 10, Rio Declaration 1992). Public participation is essential for sustainable development and good governance. In the context of marketing, studies have shown that community engagement can positively influence brand attitude (McAlexander et al., 2002; Algesheimer et al., 2005). Recognizing this impact, the paper underscores the crucial role of community engagement in the success of net zero projects initiated by for-profit organizations, positioning these efforts as integral to their marketing strategies. It analyzes The Green Planet AR Experience case study within Vella-Brodrick’s model of community engagement levels (2017), to better understand the conditions and role of community engagement in building effective public participatory net zero projects. Additionally, it highlights the essential role of embodied cognition, which allows participants to formulate knowledge about net zero initiatives based on their perceptual experiences. </p
Lonely me, lonely you: dancing towards post-pandemic social reintegration
No full textThe following article offers a conceptual foundation for a larger, ongoing investigation into creative dance as an intervention for loneliness among adults in the United Kingdom. Through an analysis of current literature, this article situates loneliness as a public health urgency and highlights the risks borne of, and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The cyclical nature of adult loneliness, and the emotional and physical consequences of prolonged loneliness are highlighted in relation to increased mental health challenges among adults in the United Kingdom. Creative dance practice is presented as a catalyst for fostering meaningful social connections and belongingness, and therefore a strategy for addressing loneliness. Through collaborative and emotionally enriching activities, creative dance is suggested as a means to bridge the gap between perceived and desired social opportunities. This reconceptualisation offers an alternative to traditional public health and educational strategies and advocates for a community based approach which prioritises ongoing social engagement.</p