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Responding to Brexit through a song: “this country”, professional sport, seamless boarders and working in Europe
Get PDFAs a European citizen I have enjoyed great freedom working and travelling across the European Union since I was in my early 20s. During this time I have made strong, lasting friendships with many people but not least in France, Sweden, and Portugal. Following the ‘Brexit’ referendum, many of these friends asked, ‘Why leave?’ ‘What is happening to the UK?’ I had no answers and also found it difficult to convey in words the mixture of sadness, disappointment, disillusion, anger, and frustration that I felt. Qualitative researchers are often drawn to arts-based methodologies when words fail us. Here, I draw on a song to help communicate a complex and emotional landscape which includes how a refugee crisis, an influx of asylum seekers, and immigration conflicts in 2015 seemed to create a groundswell of fear and contribute to a ‘leave’ vote being registered by 51.9% of those who completed the ballot form
Hhumann X at LSO St Luke's [LIVE ALBUM]
No full textLive album of the performance of Hhumann X at LSO St Luke's on the 20th of October 2018
Factors that shape a hotel company’s risk appetite
Get PDFDespite a growing scholarly interest in risk management within the field of hospitality, risk appetite, which plays a key role in effective risk management, has not yet received wider attention. This paper contributes to our understanding of risk appetite by exploring the factors that influence risk appetite in a hotel company context. Through in-depth interviewing with risk appetite experts and corporate-level hotel executives, we identified two sets of factors (‘primary’ and secondary’) that influence a hotel company’s risk appetite. Although, at corporate level, these factors do not differ from other industry contexts, they can be used by managers in the hotel sector as a starting point to understand drivers and inhibitors of their companies’ risk appetite while researchers can use them as a basis to develop descriptive or predictive models of a hotel company’s risk appetite
The impact of after-school programme on student achievement: empirical evidence from the ASA education programme in Bangladesh
Get PDFThis study examines the effectiveness of an after-school tutoring programme that was implemented throughout Bangladesh. The exam results for three distinct classes (Bengali, English and Mathematics) were collected over three consecutive periods during 2015. The total sample of 1353 students was separated into a treatment group of 900 students that were enrolled in the programme, and a control group of 453 students that were not enrolled in the programme. Using a difference-in-difference setup, the results show that the treatment group significantly improved their grades over time compared to the control group. This difference was found to be significant for all three classes and ranged from 2.3 percentage points in English to 3.4 percentage points in Mathematics. To check the robustness of this finding, student-fixed effects were included that control for any time-invariant differences between individual students and the results remained unchanged. The overall results indicate that the after-school tutoring programme had a significant and positive effect on the school performance of students
A cross-sectional study to explore intimate partner violence and barriers to empowerment of women in Armenia
Get PDFBackground: Intimate partner violence is a major problem worldwide and it is one of the most social issues in Armenia. Empowerment is one of the important factors that helps women to break the cycle of violence by their husband/partner. The aim of this research is to explore the impact of intimate partner violence on empowerment of Armenian women of reproductive age group.
Methods: This cross-sectional study used data Armenia Demography and Health Survey Data 2015-16. A total 6116 women were selected from 8749 households both at urban and rural places of Armenia for interview using multistage cluster sampling technique. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 24.
Results: The respondents aged between 35-49 years are more likely to face violence compared to other age group (p<0.00). The respondents who have no decision-making power, about 89% of them are experiencing intimate partner violence, whereas only 11% are facing intimate partner violence among those who have decision-making power (p<0.00). The logistic regression analysis reveals that age of the respondents, number of children in the households, wealth index, and empowerment status are significantly associated with intimate partner violence.
Conclusion: Intimate partner violence has significant impact on the empowerment of women in Armenia. This study revealed that women with no empowerment are more likely to experience intimate partner violence compared to those women who are empowered in Armenian society
Exploring the dynamic nature of second language listeners’ perceived fluency: a mixed‐methods approach
Get PDFDespite the status of English as the Lingua Franca of the world (Seidlhofer, 2011) and the growing number of L2 users (Pennycook, 2017), researchers have mostly investigated L2- accented English based on native speakers’ perceptions. In particular, a number of previous studies have looked at native English speakers’ perceptions of fluency (e.g., Bosker, Pinget, Quené, Sanders, & de Jong, 2013). Only a limited number of studies have examined L2 speakers’ perceptions of the same phenomenon (for a rare exception, see Rossiter, 2009). Therefore, we know very little about how L2 users conceptualize fluency, and what their subjective conceptualizations of fluency are. Thus, the current study took the first step to investigate the factors affecting L2 users’ intuitive perceptions of L2 fluency using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design
The influence of content and device awareness on QoE for medical video streaming over small cells: subjective and objective quality evaluations
No full textSmall cell networks are expected to be an integral part of future 5G networks in order to meet the increasingly high user demands for traffic volume, frequency efficiency, and energy and cost reductions. Small cell networks can play an important role in enhancing the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) in mobile health (m-health) applications, and in particular, in medical video streaming. This paper presents content-aware and device-aware medical Quality of Experience evaluations in terms of subjective (e.g. MOS) and objective (e.g. PSNR and SSIM) quality metrics obtained over small cell networks. Furthermore, we address the following two main research questions: (1) How significant is ultrasound video content type in determining medical QoE? (2) How much of a role does the display device play in medical experts’ diagnostic experience? The former is answered through the content classification of ultrasound video sequences based on their spatio-temporal features and validating their significance through medical experts’ subjective ratings. The latter is answered by conducting a subjective experiment of the ultrasound video sequences across multiple devices, ranging in screen size and resolution
Exercise and pregnancy: information for practice nurses
Get PDFIt has long been recognised that regular physical activity and exercise enhance both physical and psychological wellbeing. The benefits of physical activity throughout the lifespan of an individual cannot be underestimated and it is no less important when a woman is planning to become pregnant or is pregnant. The World Health Organisation (WHO) (2010) note that physical inactivity is the fourth leading risk factors for global mortality and is attributed to 6% of deaths globally. This article explores the guidance for physical activity for the general population and how it then relates to the guidance available for women who are pregnant. This article considers some of the key benefits to a range of common physical activities that pregnant women may undertake. It also explores some of the information that practice nurses should be aware of and how physical activity may impact on several long-term health conditions such as asthma, diabetes and obesity.
Key points
• Physical activity at any stage of the lifespan should be encouraged but physical activity in pregnancy is important for a variety of maternal and fetal health benefits
• Practice nurses should be aware of the long-term health benefits of physical activity, be able to discuss these with patients and signpost them to useful resources
• Practice nurses should be aware of any contraindications to physical activity in pregnancy
• Practice nurses play a vital role in the monitoring and surveillance of some life-long health conditions that also affect pregnant wome
A privacy‐preserving framework for smart context‐aware healthcare applications
Get PDFInternet of things (IoT) is a disruptive paradigm with wide ranging applications including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation and retail. Within healthcare, smart connected wearable devices are widely used to achieve improved wellbeing, quality of life and security of citizens. Such connected devices generate significant amount of data containing sensitive information about patient requiring adequate protection and privacy assurance. Unauthorized access to an individual’s private data constitutes a breach of privacy leading to catastrophic outcomes for an individuals personal and professional life. Furthermore, breach of privacy may also lead to financial loss to the governing body such as those proposed as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. Furthermore, while mobility afforded by smart devices enables ease of monitoring, portability and pervasive processing, it also introduces challenges with respect to scalability, reliability and context-awareness for its applications. This paper is focused on privacy preservation within smart context-aware healthcare with a special emphasis on privacy assurance challenges within the Electronic Transfer of Prescription (ETP). To this extent, we present a case for a comprehensive, coherent, and dynamic privacypreserving system for smart healthcare to protect sensitive user data. Based on a thorough analysis of existing privacy preservation models we propose an enhancement for the widely used Salford model to achieve privacy preservation against masquerading and impersonation threats. The proposed model therefore improves privacy assurance for cutting edge IoT applications such as smart healthcare whilst addressing unique challenges with respect to context-aware mobility of such applications
Pilot study: measuring attitudes toward ramp resource management — the influence of national culture
No full textRamp resource management (RRM) is a highly flight-safety-relevant, but to date widely overlooked, part of the air transportation system. Organizational, national, professional, and safety cultures play an important role in setting up resource management and training. This pilot study evaluates the influence of national culture on attitudes toward RRM, based on Geert Hofstede’s Values Survey Module. A slightly adapted version of this survey module was distributed to ramp personnel in Germany and national cultural indices were generated. A one-way analysis of variance revealed that, while some influence of national culture in RRM could be concluded, the majority of the results were not statistically significant (critical p-value , 0.05). In spite of the broad acceptance of the influence of national culture on crew resource management, the results could indicate weaknesses in current cultural values survey tools. Clearly, this pilot study indicates that further research in the field of RRM and culture is needed for a reliable evaluation of current RRM and training methods