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A new age of leadership in academia: Need for change and innovation during COVID-19
© The Author(s) 2025.The aim of this study is to explore the role of academic leadership and adaptive leadership on organizational readiness for change. During times of pandemic, adaptive leadership has emerged as a vital leadership discipline along with academic leadership due to uncertainty and sensitivity of situation. In addition, demand of innovative behavior has also increased over the years particularly during Covid-19. The study has been carried out in Higher Education Institutions of Pakistan where the data was collected from deans, directors and head of departments in two phases. Quantitative research strategy was opted for the study. Survey research design was followed to respond objectives of the study. The purpose behind the selection of senior academicians is to draw empirical results from the perspective of all the heads of their relevant departments. The data was collected from seven public sector universities across Pakistan. About 251 responses were found valid. Covariance based SEM was used to analyze the data. Analysis reveals a positive and direct relationship between academic and adaptive leadership and organizational readiness for change and similar results were found by placing innovative behavior as a mediator leading to the acceptance of all developed hypotheses. This study is unique in nature and has implications for leaders in academia in terms of unleashing the potential toward uncertain situation in higher education institutions. Study’s major limitation include less representation of the Pakistan as whole country as it included Punjab province only for data collection.Unfunde
Sputum induction and its diagnostic applications in inflammatory airway disorders: A review
© 2023 Goncalves and Eze.Sputum induction is a technique that covers the induction and the subsequent processing of the expectorate primarily for the analysis of cells and different inflammatory biomarkers present in the airways to further understand the pathophysiology of different inflammatory respiratory disorders such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as well as the diagnosis of lung diseases such as lung cancer, tuberculosis, and Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia. It is a non-invasive, safe, cost-effective, and reliable technique reported to exhibit a high success rate. However, due to being technically demanding and time-consuming and having the need of employing trained staff, this technique is only used in restricted research centres and in limited centres of clinical use. When the sputum is collected after induction, the primary goal is to obtain a differential cell count and evaluate the molecular biomarkers of airway inflammation such as eosinophil cationic protein, eosinophil-derived neurotoxin, major basic protein, tryptase, cytokine production [e.g., interleukin (IL)-5], albumin, and fibrinogen. In addition, cytospins from the processed sputum are used for immunocytochemical staining of cellular products such as EG-2 reactive protein, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, tumour necrosis factor alpha, and IL-8 that play significant roles in understanding the pathophysiology of inflammatory airway diseases. Nowadays, this technique can be further used by performing an additional analysis such as flow cytometry and in situ hybridisation on the sputum supernatant to investigate more the immune response and pathophysiological process of such various respiratory diseases. In addition, the application of sputum fluid phase to assess the biomarkers could be used more routinely in pathological laboratories for diagnosing lung cancer, COPD, and asthma as well as for monitoring lung cancer progression and asthma and COPD treatment, allowing for early detection and a better treatment provided by the clinicians.Unfunde
Drawing and installation on the British Peak District: Self, environment and a mobile working kit
This text reports about my practice-based doctoral research project exploring the question ‘How can the relationships between self and the outdoor environment of Bakestonedale Moor manifest in a creative arts practice from drawing and installation?’. I have developed a drawing and installation practice as the bearer and expression of my relationship with the outdoor places of the British Peak District in the vicinity of Pott Shrigley. This led to the development of the ‘mobile working kit’, a collection of modules fashioned from paper, string, wood and fabric, which I use to make drawings and mark the land with sculptural additions. My outdoor art-making events may only last a few hours but I later exhibit its artefacts as indoor art displays complemented by photographs and videos from the outdoor sites. I provide descriptions of two drawing activities outdoors, first, using a three-dimensional fence-like paper sculpture as a drawing surface and, second, drawing on a ground-based paper platform. These examples of art-making are then contextualized in reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity where material changes in the world are understood to occur in co-constitutional negotiation of all active components. I use this concept and Barad’s understanding of performativity to describe process in art-making and in geological, meteorological and biological changes outdoors. I then relate these positions to current performance drawing in reference to the role of the artist and how the arts practice determines her connection to the outdoor environment.N/
Towards equity? Advancing rural consideration in flood risk management
© 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Flood Risk Management published by Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Flood risk management (FRM) in England and Wales predominantly follows a utilitarian approach guided by cost–benefit analysis, with a corresponding focus on urban areas. This approach has been criticised for being unjust, as it neglects vulnerabilities that cannot be readily monetised, resulting in some of the most vulnerable flood‐affected communities being excluded from FRM provision. This issue is especially pronounced in rural areas. Ironically, rural communities are often overlooked despite many contributing to the protection of urban settlements. In response to increasing research on social injustices in FRM and policy calls for more equitable approaches, greater consideration of rural flooding is required. Using the River Severn catchment as a case study, this paper employs a questionnaire survey of 176 rural residents to gather perspectives on their engagement with FRM agencies. Their responses were then discussed with FRM organisations active in the region through interviews. The combined perspectives of rural communities and FRM organisations reveal challenges and opportunities for achieving just consideration of rural areas in FRM. The findings emphasise the need for a more inclusive approach to FRM in the River Severn catchment and offer valuable lessons for other rural areas in the United Kingdom and beyond.Unfunde
Editorial: Public affairs and communicating coronavirus vaccine risk: The role of government in maintaining public trust
EditorialUnfunde
The effect of multiplayer game modes on inter-player data for player experience modelling
© 2025 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Research into social compliance, emotional contagion and behavioural synchronicity shows promise for various avenues of work concerning human-computer interaction, and a wider understanding of emotion. Despite their relevance, few studies have applied findings from these domains to player experience modelling in a multiplayer game, in itself having applications in entertainment, education and healthcare. Further to this, of the little work making use of inter-player data to model aspects of player experience, none considers the differences that may be found across common multiplayer game modes. This work therefore makes use of data collected across players in a series of common multiplayer game modes, considering the utility of inter-player data for predictive modelling using artificial neural networks in each. Results suggest that approaches modelling measures of players' experiences in terms of discrete emotion intensities are best made using their own facial expressions in nearly all circumstances, but past this, facial expression data from team based and competitive game modes shows the greatest promise. Considering the additional data separations available to team-based gameplay, we find that data collected from players on an opposing team shows greater utility for prediction of target player experience than data collected from a player on the same team. Regarding this, we make suggestions for the most applicable avenues for future research into the utilisation of inter-player data for emotional modelling.Unfunde
Adapting scenario planning to create an expectation for surprises: Going beyond probability and plausibility in risk assessment
© 2025 The Author(s). Risk Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Risk Analysis.The need for risk assessments to take full account of uncertainty by going beyond probability and creating an expectation for surprises has recently been highlighted in this journal. This paper sets out an adaptation to the Intuitive Logics (IL) scenario-planning method that assists risk assessors to achieve this aim. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this adaptation through a controlled experiment. The controlled experiment took the form of a simulated IL scenario-planning exercise in which individuals assigned values representative of extreme outcomes to sets of simple and more complex clusters of driving forces under three experimental conditions representing alternative uncertainty expressions (‘probable’, ‘plausible’, and ‘surprising’). The values assigned in the ‘probable’ and ‘plausible’ conditions were not significantly different from each other. However, the ‘surprising’ condition resulted in the assignment of more extreme values than either of the other two conditions. The complexity of a set of clustered driving had no effect. A follow-up analysis showed that participants interpreted the words ‘probable’ and ‘plausible’ similarly. This is problematic for scenario methods like IL, which are claimed to stretch consideration of the future’s potential extremity beyond what it would be using probability by instead employing plausibility. Yet, if participants interpret ‘probable’ and ‘plausible’ similarly, then using plausibility instead of probability will not stretch their thinking as desired. By adapting IL in the simple way this paper outlines, scenario planning can assist risk assessors to go beyond both probability and plausibility, thereby taking fuller account of uncertainty and improving anticipation of surprises.The project was jointly funded by the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies’ (SAMS) and the British Academy of Management's (BAM) Research and Capacity Building Grant Scheme.Article published Gold OA. AAM removed and archived and VoR uploaded to CR 19/09/202
The effect of exercise‐induced muscle damage on lower limb side cut biomechanics and task achievement in male and female team sport athletes
© 2025 The Author(s). European Journal of Sport Science published by Wiley-VCH GmbH on behalf of European College of Sport Science.The effect of exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD) on three-dimensional side cut biomechanics and task achievement were assessed in 16 team sport athletes (eight males and eight females) who completed 45° side cuts before and 48 h after multidirectional running. Angular displacement and joint moments of the hip and knee, and GRF impulse (IGRF) during five successful trials of a 45° side cut, were collected using a 3D motion capture system and force platform at both timepoints. At 48 h, participants had more knee internal rotation (p = 0.009), knee abduction ROM (p = 0.002), lower peak knee extensor moment (p = 0.001) and a higher hip-knee extensor ratio moment (p = 0.020). Large increases in IGRF at 48 h in females (d; ± 95% CI: 1.4; ± 1.4, p = 0.037) suggest a less effective deceleration capacity. Whilst EIMD had no effect on side cut task achievement and sagittal kinematics, EIMD caused participants to shift the extensor demands away from the knee and towards the hip to decelerate the body. Practitioners should be mindful of potential increases in frontal and transverse motions at the knee for athletes with EIMD, which might have implications for strategies to reduce injury risk.Unfunde
Monastic avoidance: Piety and ambivalence in pre-2016 Turkey
© The Author 2025The version of record of this article, first published in [Contemporary Islam], is available online at Publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11562-025-00589-wSince the failed coup attempt in 2016, much academic attention has been devoted to the shadowy and now defunct political alliance between the AKP and the Hizmet community. Yet this scholarship only considers Hizmet as the level of its leadership and overlooks the core followers of Fethullah Gülen—mostly hard-working provincial schoolteachers and administrators. How did these individuals experience the movement’s controversial political dimensions (which were public for some years in advance of 2016) and make sense of it in the context of their daily lives of piety and hard work? In this paper, I present retrospective ethnographic observations from fieldwork undertaken in a Hizmet community in Turkey between 2013 and 2015 and argue for their relevance in understanding the community’s trajectory up to and including the present day. Specifically, I observe a tension in the lives of individuals who were committed to ethical Muslim living but were also implicated—if only through association with Fethullah Gülen—in Hizmet’s pre-2016 political agenda. Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam concerning the place of moral ambivalence in Muslim lives provide a starting point (Schielke 2010, Schielke and Debevec 2012, Fadil and Fernando 2015), whereafter I analyse Hizmet as a monastic community and argue that monastic practises allowed my interlocutors to balance competing empirical realities and maintain ethical coherence in their daily lives. I use the term ‘monastic avoidance’ to explain how Hizmet affiliates embedded themselves in tight-knit communities of piety in order to deflect their complicity in larger politico-religious projects that were associated with deception and illegality.The ethnographic phase of research was made possible through funding from the John Templeton Foundation, grant ID 38749, administered by the University of Bristol (2013–2015)
Prevalence of perceived discrimination and associations with mental health inequalities in the UK during 2019–2020: A cross-sectional study
© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.Experiencing discrimination is associated with poorer mental health and the demographic patterning of discrimination may explain social inequalities in mental health. The present research examined prevalence of perceived discrimination in the UK and associations with social inequalities in mental health. Data were taken from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (n = 32,003). Population subgroups (sex, age, ethnicity, health, religiousness, income, education, and occupation), perceived personal discrimination (personal experience) and perceived belonging to a discriminated group (identified as belonging to a group discriminated against in this country), and probable mental health problems (GHQ-12 assessed, cut off 4+) were reported on in 2019/2020. Nineteen percent of participants perceived personal discrimination in the last year, 9% perceived belonging to a discriminated group, and 22% had probable mental health problems. There were significant inequalities in both perceived discrimination and mental health. Being a younger adult, of mixed ethnicity, having health problems, having a university degree, and being unemployed increased risk of mental health problems and these associations were partially explained by perceived discrimination being more common among these groups. Perceived discrimination is common among UK adults, but prevalence differs by population subgroup. Perceived discrimination may contribute to social inequalities in mental health.This work forms part of the first author's PhD, and is supported by the ESRC NWSSDTP case studentship [grant number: ES/P000665/1]