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Translation of non-technical skills and attitudes to practice after undergraduate interprofessional simulation training
No full textIntroduction: We aimed to determine the extent to which non-technical skills and attitudes acquired during undergraduate interprofessional simulation in an Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) course translated into clinical work.
Methods: Following ACLS simulation training for final-year nursing and medical students, we conducted a 1-year follow-up survey, when graduates were in clinical practice. We used the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS - higher scores indicate better attitudes to interprofessional practice), and nine contextual questions with prompts for free-form comments. RIPLS scores underwent repeated-measures between-groups (nurses vs doctors) analysis at three timepoints (pre-course, post-course and 1-year).
Results: Forty-two surveys (58% response) were received, demonstrating translation of non-technical skills and attitudes to clinical practice, including insights into the skills and roles of others, the importance of communication, and improved perceptions of preparedness for clinical work. However, RIPLS scores for doctors decreased significantly upon beginning clinical work, while scores for nurses continued to increase, demonstrating a significant interaction effect (reduction of 5.7 points to 75.7 versus an increase of 1.3 points to 78.1 respectively – ANOVA, F(2,76)=5.827, p=0.004). Responses to contextual questions suggested that reductions in RIPLS scores for doctors were due to a realisation that dealing with emergency life support was only a small part of their practice. However, the prevailing work cultures of nurses and doctors in the workplace may also play a part.
Conclusion: We demonstrated the translation of non-technical skills and attitudes acquired in undergraduate simulation to the clinical workplace. However, results are tempered for junior doctors beginning practice.</jats:p
Degenerate Diffusion for Elliptic Operators
No full textWe study operators of the form A = mB on a bounded open subset Ω of R^d, where B is a second order elliptic operator in divergence form with real bounded measurable coefficients and m: Ω → (0,∞) is a measurable function with 1/m
∈ L1,loc(Ω). We study natural extensions of A to Lp-spaces
Ethics Committees and Ethical Considerations: What Works Methodologically or for a Community
No full textThis article presents an abridged kōrero (conversation) between Professor Sandy O’Sullivan (Wiradjuri), Associate Professor Sean Sturm (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te
Wairoa [Ngāti Rakaipaaka]), Moana Murray (Ngāpuhi) and Dr Ampersand Pasley (Ngāti Pākehā). Initiating this kōrero, Pasley raises the question of how we do our academic work in ways that are meaningful to us. Amidst their responses, Sturm notes the indeterminacy of the ethical status of research processes outside of relations. Understandably, given the ongoing non-innocence of education, O’Sullivan denotes a certain reticence around trusting academics’ and ethics committees’ capacity to enact ethical research responsibilities. Likewise, Murray describes a wariness around how institutions often use the very mechanisms designed to protect Indigenous communities to avoid their own accountability. Drawing on examples from academic and museological spaces, the three Indigenous scholars speak to the strategies they employ to operate within these Westernised institutions. While Pasley plays a predominantly facilitatory role, reflecting the need to prioritise Indigenous voices in the decolonisation of academia, they gesture towards similar patterns of disenfranchisement found in the colonialities of disability and gender that pervade higher education. In response to the matter of balancing caution and indeterminacy, Sturm, Murray and Pasley
round off this collated kōrero with a series of reflections, acknowledging that the materialisation of this kōrero amidst the academic colonialities speaks to the abiding
possibility of radical, fruitful difference
Informal Digital Learning of English in Asian English as a Foreign Language Contexts: A Thematic Review
No full textResearch on informal digital learning of English (IDLE) has proliferated in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) over the past decade, due largely to the status of English as a global language and the increasing accessibility of digital technologies among students of the digital native generation. In this article, we report the results of a thematic review we conducted of 49 empirical studies on IDLE in Asian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts during the years 2014–2024. In this review, we first clarify the conceptual orientations of the IDLE scholarship in a changing world shaped by globalization and technological innovations. We then present three major research strands that Asian TESOL researchers and practitioners should attend to: how IDLE serves as a new individual difference variable in second language development; how language teachers perceive and prepare for pedagogically integrating IDLE; and how unequal IDLE practices reinforce issues of the digital divide. By mapping out the terrain of informal digital learning of English in Asian EFL contexts, we point out the pedagogical implications and future investigations that can create conditions for empowering and enabling Asian students to become self-directed and productive informal language learners in a rapidly changing digital world
Next POI Recommendation Using Higher-Order Travel Patterns
No full textWith the rapid development of location-based social networks (LBSNs) and the growing
scale of user check-in data, the next POI recommendation has become a key technology
for enhancing user experience and increasing service provider value. However, traditional
methods have shown limited performance in capturing collaborative relationships between
user check-in sequences. The graph-based model, while capable of modeling such relationships,
struggles to effectively extract higher-order information from check-in sequences.
Although recent advances in hypergraph-based research offer new directions for obtaining
higher-order information, existing hypergraph-based methods often perform poorly on
datasets with smaller data volumes. To address these challenges, this study proposes a
Higher-Order and Global Information Fusion Model. This model leverages two-hop subsequences
in user check-in data to uncover higher-order relationships between sequences
while preserving the ability to model global user check-in patterns. Specifically, the proposed
model extracts two-hop subsequences from user check-in sequences to construct a
higher-order graph, capturing frequent and periodic patterns in user behaviors. Simultaneously,
inspired by the concept of global trajectory flow graphs, the model captures
POI transition patterns from a global perspective by modeling users’ movements between
POIs. Building on this foundation, the model integrates key spatio-temporal information,
including user preferences, POI categories, and check-in times. By effectively combining
local and global representations of POIs and incorporating rich spatio-temporal context,
the model demonstrates high accuracy on real-world datasets, especially in cold-start scenarios.
Our experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of combining
higher-order relationships derived from two-hop subsequences with global POI transition
patterns captured by the trajectory flow graph, highlighting their importance in next
POI recommendation tasks. This study provides new insights and valuable references to
more comprehensively characterize user mobility behaviors and develop advanced POI
recommendation models
Evaluating Seasonal Weather Risks on Cereal Yield Distributions in Southern India
No full textClimate change poses significant threats to Indian agriculture, markedly through its impact on crop yields. While most existing research focuses on climate-sensitive crops like rice, relatively climate-resilient cereals such as sorghum, maize and finger and pearl millets have received less attention. This study uses district-level data from four southern states over 26 years to conduct a moment-based analysis of the effects of various climatic and non-climatic factors on these crop yields. The research offers nuanced insights into how different weather patterns influence crop yields, yield variability (risk) and downside yield risks. The study disaggregates climate variables into seasonal effects, showing that winter maximum temperatures positively affect the yields of maize and sorghum but negatively impact rice. In contrast, summer maximum temperatures generally reduce yields across all crops except finger millet, which thrives due to its heat tolerance. Monsoon rainfall boosts the yields of pearl millet, although excessive rainfall during the monsoon season increases downside risks for maize and rice. Evapotranspiration shows mixed effects, while wind speed tends to negatively affect yields, especially during the summer and monsoon seasons. Additionally, the study finds that excessive irrigation can harm rainfed crops like maize and pearl millet, while technological advancements such as HYV seeds and fertilisers positively impact yields. These findings underscore the urgent need to promote climate-resilient crop varieties, restructure irrigation subsidies and provide targeted support to smallholder farmers to enhance food security in the face of increasingly erratic seasonal conditions
Perceived Accessibility for Women: First-Mile Trips to Transit-Oriented Developments
No full textFirst- and last-mile trips significantly influence public transport ridership. This study contributes to the understanding of perceived accessibility for women in first-mile trips by considering intersectionality of land use diversity and first-mile mode choices. Trips to 12 transit-oriented development (ToD) stations across Auckland city, New Zealand, were analyzed. An equity perspective is considered by selecting ToD sites with varying land-use diversity index scores and distances traveled. Around 500 public transport riders responded to an online survey and the sample closely represents Auckland’s population. Data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis to determine the perceived accessibility and perceived personal security scores of women in comparison with men. Findings provide statistically significant evidence of gendered differences in access to ToDs. Women are more likely to walk to ToD stations than men and they are more likely to walk within a distance of 1 km (~0.62 mi). High-intensity land use positively influences women’s perception of ease of accessing stations. This suggests women’s restricted access to cars, and highlights that walkable ToDs are more beneficial for women. Overall, findings highlight the need for disaggregated data to incorporate a gendered perspective in the design of inclusive public transport systems. As more cities develop strategies to increase ridership, it is crucial to examine travel patterns through a gender equity lens to ensure the travel needs of women are considered, particularly those who are often marginalized
It’s not easy being Green. Am I a (hu)(wo)Man, or am I a Muppet? Social Justice, Performance Practice and Ecology
No full textThis creative practice-led masters thesis explores performance-based interventions in community and public spaces. Two ecological and social-justice-oriented performance art practices are central to this research. The Enrolment Aunties (2023) investigates engagement in democratic processes, while Urban Tumbleweed (2022 - 2024) addresses the environmental impact of soft plastics. A Muppetological methodology emerged as a playful and accessible framework, utilising joy, nonsense, and puppetry-inspired approaches to facilitate spontaneous, inclusive engagement with diverse community members in their familiar urban settings. Findings demonstrate that friendly, non-partisan interactions, framed through performative and participatory methods, can effectively promote civic awareness and action. Additionally, the research uncovers the vibrant agency of the tumbleweed as a metaphorical and material entity, reimagining soft plastics as both a pollutant and a symbol of post-human agency. This reframing can be seen to align with post-humanist perspectives, inviting a reconsideration of human and non-human relationships in environmental and social contexts. Implications of this research extend to ecological art discourse, suggesting that playful, community-centred strategies can inspire democratic participation and collective reflection on environmental challenges. The integration of performative joy and ecological critique is proposed as a pathway for artists and activists to reimagine civic and environmental futures through the Muppetological Creative Practice lens
Dusty Origin Stories of Arts Therapy in Aotearoa, New Zealand
No full textThrough engaging with creative practices and new materialist theory, this post-qualitative research aims to trace the history and origin stories of arts therapy in Aotearoa, New Zealand. As a twofold approach, I engage with origin stories from the early practitioners in this country and the stories from my Scottish genealogical lineage. I work with the notion that our professional and genealogical ancestors inform our professional identities and metabolise this through my experiences as a first-generation Pākehā immigrant therapist and educator. By merging theory and methodology, I explore the question, what does it mean to be a professional arts therapist in Aotearoa? Diverse but interconnected creative inquiries are performed as maps and lines in response to this question, taking inspiration from cartography. Methodologically, I engage in critical autoethnography and genealogy, memory work with early practitioners, poetic inquiry, and weaving practices. Theoretically, I am guided by Karen Barad’s scholarship on quantum entanglements through Jacques Derrida’s work on hauntology. Through these theories, I create a poetic and allegorical metaphor of dust, which I position as the performativity of quantum hauntology. Like dust particles, our histories and origin stories are always present in atmospheric and residual ways, and we absorb and enact this dust through our engagement with the world as therapists and educators. This work considers that if we are unfolding as professionals within cultural, genealogical, political, material, ecological, and linguistic matters, then conceptualising our professional identities needs to move beyond a static
human-centric definition towards a position that our identities are always entangled with our ancestral ghosts. Furthermore, while our origin stories are embodied in our individual bodies, they are also accessible in the collective professional bodies we are part of as practitioners, as domains of
entanglements. As therapists and educators in Aotearoa, we are responsible for learning about who and where we came from and how these stories inform our practices. As ethically responsive practitioners, we can then share these stories with those in our lineage so that collectively, we can grow and move forward well and become good ancestors for the future
3D Left Ventricular Reconstruction from 2D Echocardiograms for Reliable Volume Estimation
No full textVolume quantification is an important step in the clinical assessment of left ventricular function using echocardiography. Current guidelines recommend the use of the biplane method, which is known to significantly underestimate cavity volumes. We explored the use of the Efficient Pix2Vox network to reconstruct 3D geometries from standard 2D echocardiographic views, from which volumes could be directly computed. Reconstruction performance was evaluated and compared to data derived from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging. The DICE score was 0.856 ± 0.043 for end-diastolic geometries and 0.800 ± 0.052 for end-systolic geometries. Using CMR as the reference, the intraclass correlation coefficient for the proposed 3D reconstruction method compared to the conventional biplane method was greater for end-diastolic volume (0.860 [0.69, 0.94] versus 0.836 [0.21, 0.95], respectively), but not for end-systolic volume nor ejection fraction. Furthermore, reductions in absolute and proportional biases were observed for both end-diastolic and end-systolic volumes. This study demonstrates the potential of reconstructing 3D cardiac geometries from 2D echocardiograms for more reliable volumetric assessment