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Accept or challenge? Exploring the experiences of pre-service teachers from minoritised groups
Get PDFThe shortage of teachers from Black, Asian and minoritised groups is well documented. Over the past decade, a body of research has confirmed that discrimination and inequality is a factor in the recruitment of teachers from Black, Asian and minoritised groups in England. Drawing on findings from the 2017 Runnymede Trust Report, which highlighted Bristol's lack of racial diversity within the teaching community, this paper explores the experiences of a group of pre-service teachers on university teacher education routes who are minoritised within the general teaching population. The identified lack of diversity in the teacher workforce extends beyond race to other aspects of identity and representation in the classroom and is mirrored in teacher education. A series of focus group interviews were conducted across a 9-month period. Results are presented as vignettes to capture the voice of minoritised participants. The findings have implications for the recruitment and retention of a diverse teacher workforce, as well as highlighting the need to ensure a sense of belonging for all pre-service teachers entering the teaching community. This paper proposes a model relating to the analysis of critical incidents, which aims to inform future research into how pre-service teachers respond to critical incidents regarding their identity. This model seeks to clarify tensions in the diverse lived experiences of pre-service teachers and helps to explore the importance of context
Designing, implementing and testing an intervention of affective intelligent agents in nursing virtual reality teaching simulations - A qualitative study
Get PDFEmotions play an important role in human-computer interaction, but there is limited research on affective and emotional virtual agent design in the area of teaching simulations for healthcare provision. The purpose of this work is twofold: firstly, to describe the process for designing affective intelligent agents that are engaged in automated communications such as person to computer conversations, and secondly to test a bespoke prototype digital intervention which implements such agents. The presented study tests two distinct virtual learning environments, one of which was enhanced with affective virtual patients, with nine 3rd year nursing students specialising in mental health, during their professional practice stage. All (100%) of the participants reported that, when using the enhanced scenario, they experienced a more realistic representation of carer/patient interaction; better recognition of the patients' feelings; recognition and assessment of emotions; a better realisation of how feelings can affect patients' emotional state and how they could better empathise with the patients
Development and testing of immersive virtual reality environment for safe unmanned aerial vehicle usage in construction scenarios
Get PDFRobotics and autonomous systems are increasingly being used on construction sites to complete tasks and complement human effort. One such autonomous system is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), although their wrong use could be potentially hazardous to humans and the environment. Given its relative novelty in construction, there remains a dearth of knowledge about safety risks associated with their use as well as knowledge on skills and protocols for their safe operation. With construction being one of the most dangerous and accident-prone sectors, there is even more impetus to develop UAV safety competence. In this study, we explore the application of immersive virtual reality (VR) use for purposes of safety training pertaining to the use of UAVs in construction scenarios. Whereas, previous studies, focussed on effectiveness of VR as a tool for training individuals on UAV operations and safety risks in general, this study evaluates its effectiveness across distinctive themes of safety in order to compare its effectiveness in different domains of UAV safety. The study adopts design science for development of bespoke UAV safety training tool in VR using Building Information Modelling (BIM) and game engine-driven virtual prototyping. The immersive training tool was then applied in an experiment of participants (n = 100) with (n = 50) constituting a control group using more traditional training methods and a series of pre/post-test assessments. The findings confirmed the relative superiority of VR training over traditional methods, improving performance and retention by up to 22 % on average. The immersive VR was found to be most effective on participants retention of knowledge in general flight preparation, air traffic documentation, visibility management and warning signals. Further usability tests were performed on all participants (n = 100) revealing general presence and positive attitudes towards VR based UAV safety training when compared to traditional training. From a practice perspective this research proofs the effectiveness of a VR approach as more cost effective and safe approach to UAV training for both academia and practice with added advantage of being more realistic simulation of the UAV risk scenarios
Evaluation of frameworks that combine evolution and learning to design robots in complex morphological spaces
Get PDFJointly optimising both the body and brain of a robot is known to be a challenging task, especially when attempting to evolve designs in simulation that will subsequently be built in the real world. To address this, it is increasingly common to combine evolution with a learning algorithm that can either improve the inherited controllers of new offspring to fine tune them to the new body design or learn them from scratch. In this paper an approach is proposed in which a robot is specified indirectly by two compositional pattern producing networks (CPPN) encoded in a single genome, one which encodes the brain and the other the body. The body part of the genome is evolved using an evolutionary algorithm (EA), with an individual learning algorithm (also an EA) applied to the inherited controller to improve it. The goal of this paper is to determine how to utilise the results of learning process most effectively to improve task performance of the robot. Specifically, three variants are investigated: (1) evolution of the body+controller only; (2) a learning algorithm is applied to the inherited controller with the learned fitness assigned to the genome; (3) learning is applied and the genome is updated with the learned controller, as well as being assigned the learned fitness. Experiments are performed in three different scenarios chosen to favour different bodies and locomotion patterns. It is shown that better performance can be obtained using learning but only if the learned controller is inherited by the offspring
Heuristic and swarm intelligence algorithms for work-life balance problem
No full textEmployee satisfaction significantly influences the success of business. This emphasises on the importance of employees managing their work, family and personal lives to maintain their physical and mental well-being. This is especially crucial in health-care sector, where physical and mental well-being directly affects the quality of out-coming services provided. Work-life balance, defined as the challenge of striking a reasonable equilibrium between work, family, and personal life, is gaining more attention. However, many studies do not adequately consider employee preferences when addressing this issue. This study introduces a mathematical model for work-life balance problem prioritising the worker preferences focusing on healthcare workers as a special case where personnel preferences are integrated into decision-making. The model has been comparatively solved with population-based algorithms for optimising weekly personnel schedules in order to make them more suitable for work-life balance. The population-based heuristic algorithms used for optimising the schedules are swarm intelligence algorithms; namely ant colony and particle swarm optimisation algorithms. The proposed approach allows the employees to opt their working hours and periods in the work-place, flexibly. We demonstrated with comparative analysis that the produced results with swarm intelligence algorithms evidently outperform one of the state-of-art works done with genetic algorithms, which proves the strength of the proposed problem solvers
Early experiences of parents of children with craniofacial microsomia
Get PDFObjective: To describe the early health care experiences of parents of children with craniofacial microsomia (CFM), a congenital diagnosis often identified at birth. Design: Qualitative descriptive. Setting: Homes of participants. Participants: Parents of 28 children with CFM from across the United States. Methods: We interviewed participants (27 mothers individually and one mother and father together) via telephone or teleconference and used reflexive thematic analysis to derive themes that represented early health care experiences of parents of children with CFM. Results: Participants’ narratives included detailed recounting of their birth and early care experiences. We identified two overarching themes. The first overarching theme, Stressors, included four subthemes that represented difficulties related to emotional reactions and negative experiences with health care providers. The second overarching theme, Finding Strength, included four subthemes that represented participants’ positive adjustment to stressors through independent information seeking about CFM, adaptive coping, positive experiences with health care providers, and drawing on external supports. Conclusion: Participants often described early experiences as challenging. Findings have implications for improving early care, including increasing open and supportive communication by health care professionals, expanding access to CFM information, screening for mental health concerns among parents, strengthening coping among parents, and linking families to resources such as reliable online CFM information and early intervention programs
GoibhniUWE: A lightweight and modular container-based cyber range
Get PDFCyberattacks are rapidly evolving both in terms of techniques and frequency, from low-level attacks through to sophisticated Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). There is a need to consider how testbed environments such as cyber ranges can be readily deployed to improve the examination of attack characteristics, as well as the assessment of defences. Whilst cyber ranges are not new, they can often be computationally expensive, require an extensive setup and configuration, or may not provide full support for areas such as logging or ongoing learning. In this paper, we propose GoibhniUWE, a container-based cyber range that provides a flexible platform for investigating the full lifecycle of a cyberattack. Adopting a modular approach, users can seamlessly switch out existing, containerised vulnerable services and deploying multiple different services at once, allowing for the creation of complex and realistic deployments. The range is fully instrumented with logging capabilities from a variety of sources including Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), service logging, and network traffic captures. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we deploy the GoibhniUWE range under multiple conditions to simulate various vulnerable environments, reporting on and comparing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. We simulate complex attacks which span multiple services and networks, with logging at multiple levels, modelling an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) and their associated Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs). We find that even under continuous, active, and targeted deployment, GoibhniUWE averaged a CPU usage of less than 50%, in an environment using four single-core processors, and memory usage of less than 4.5 GB
Multi-vulnerability analysis for seismic risk management in historic city centres: an application to the historic city centre of La Serena, Chile
Get PDFA comprehensive understanding of the elements at risk, through the identification of the main hazards, level of exposure and different dimensions of the vulnerability of the communities, is an essential step toward the definition and adoption of more effective risk reduction strategies. Historic urban centres have received special attention in the assessment of damage and physical vulnerability to earthquakes, but it is well known that vulnerability also depends on the social and demographic characteristics of communities. This paper discusses the application of a holistic approach aimed at assessing the seismic vulnerability of historic urban centres by considering their physical and social dimensions. Two index-based methodologies are presented, and the data are analyzed using the CENSUS block as the unit of study, which is scarcely present in the literature. The results of both indices are crossed through a matrix, which allows the classification of the blocks in five levels of priority and are mapped using a Geographic Information System tool. The Historic city centre of La Serena, one of the oldest in Chile, was selected as a case study. This historic city centre still preserves historic buildings of raw earth of diverse architectural typologies widely distributed throughout the country, which makes it relevant, not only by itself but as a model that can be replicated and extrapolated to other historic centres of similar constructive characteristics
The perfect bail-in: Financing without banks using peer-to-peer lending
Get PDFWe explore the potential outcomes for financial stability when using peer-to-peer lenders to finance economic activity. Combining Random Regression Forests, a machine-learning process, with an agent-based model, we perform simulations on artificial economies with various degrees of adoption of peer-to-peer lending. We find that as peer-to-peer lenders proliferate, there is increased financial instability, lower GDP and higher unemployment. On the other hand, peer-to-peer lending increases the total volume of loans given out but demonstrates a preference towards consumer loans (over corporate loans), which has a negative effect in the long run. Finally, introducing peer-to-peer lenders increases the access of the unbanked to services which conventional banking is not able to offer within the extant regulatory framework. Our results can help policymakers as they address the issue of regulation in the peer-to-peer finance industry
EULAR recommendations for the non-pharmacological management of systemic lupus erythematosus and systemic sclerosis
Get PDFObjective: To develop evidence-based recommendations for the non-pharmacological management of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and systemic sclerosis (SSc). Methods: A task force comprising 7 rheumatologists, 15 other healthcare professionals and 3 patients was established. Following a systematic literature review performed to inform the recommendations, statements were formulated, discussed during online meetings and graded based on risk of bias assessment, level of evidence (LoE) and strength of recommendation (SoR; scale A-D, A comprising consistent LoE 1 studies, D comprising LoE 4 or inconsistent studies), following the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology standard operating procedure. Level of agreement (LoA; scale 0-10, 0 denoting complete disagreement, 10 denoting complete agreement) was determined for each statement through online voting. Results: Four overarching principles and 12 recommendations were developed. These concerned common and disease-specific aspects of non-pharmacological management. SoR ranged from A to D. The mean LoA with the overarching principles and recommendations ranged from 8.4 to 9.7. Briefly, non-pharmacological management of SLE and SSc should be tailored, person-centred and participatory. It is not intended to preclude but rather complement pharmacotherapy. Patients should be offered education and support for physical exercise, smoking cessation and avoidance of cold exposure. Photoprotection and psychosocial interventions are important for SLE patients, while mouth and hand exercises are important in SSc. Conclusions: The recommendations will guide healthcare professionals and patients towards a holistic and personalised management of SLE and SSc. Research and educational agendas were developed to address needs towards a higher evidence level, enhancement of clinician-patient communication and improved outcomes