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Viaggiare nel Medioevo: in cammino con pellegrini, cavalieri e strane crature
No full textUn caleidoscopico viaggio nel mondo medievale. Un libro che, come nei Racconti di Canterbury, ci restituisce l'immaginifico e il prosaico del viaggio al tempo del Medioevo, con gli occhi di pellegrini, commercianti, spie e santi, da ovest a est, passando per Costantinopoli, Gerusalemme, Etiopia e Cina. Dagli animati bazar di Tabriz alla misteriosa isola di Caldihe, dove si diceva che le pecore crescessero sugli alberi, dalla Via della Seta alle escursioni per le strade di Istanbul e Gerusalemme, Anthony Bale fa rivivere il Medioevo, invitando il lettore a esplorare un mondo costellato di miracoli, meraviglie e luoghi un tempo famosi e oggi dimenticati. Come una vera guida turistica, il libro offre anche consigli su frasi utili, dove alloggiare e mangiare, e su come evitare briganti, malattie e altri pericoli della strada. Servendosi di cronache dell'epoca mai tradotte prima e provenienti dai luoghi più disparati, tra cui Turchia, Islanda, Armenia, Indonesia, Nord Africa e Russia, "Viaggiare nel Medioevo" è una sorta di atlante vivente che rende indistinti i confini tra luoghi reali e immaginari e offre al lettore uno spaccato vivido e indimenticabile del mondo medievale
How does a living animal come to be from semen? The puzzles of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals II 1-3
Get PDFThis essay will detail Aristotle’s articulation of the challenge of explaining how the male causes a new living being and the role that a comparison to ‘automata’ plays in solving it. These artefacts are markedly different from his usual craft analogies, possessing moving parts, interconnected by the transmission of power or force. By analysing automata we gain a better understanding not only of the relationship between agency and soul but of the way in which potentially living materials from the female parent must be complementary and interact in the processes of animal generation
Open, more democratic or better at hiding? Two decades of local government transparency in the UK
Get PDFLocal government has long been the site of experiments and innovation in transparency. Since the 1990s waves of reforms have sought to open up local government in Britain, from the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act in the 2000s to Open Data in the 2010s.
This paper looks across the evidence to see how well these new transparency tools have worked, who is using them and why. It then moves to analyse what impact the changes have had on local government, in line with hopes of campaigners and fears of (some) politicians. Have reforms succeeded in making local government more open, more accountable and more participative, and in what situations? Or have they, as some claim, simply driven decision making into other arenas, and made local bodies ‘better at hiding’? Finally, how does transparency sit with the fragmented and disjointed landscape of local politics today, from outsourcing and devolution to financial crisis
Caribbean and West African seamen in a Welsh port, 1871–1939: the Seamen’s Boarding House and the growth and development of settlement in Cardiff
Get PDFBook synopsis: Interest in race and ethnicity research in Wales has grown apace in the last decade, opening up wider debates about the nature, focus and content of what collectively is called Welsh Studies. Across a range of disciplines, we are witnessing not only a ‘global turn’ placing Wales more substantively within a plethora of global interconnections, but also a ‘decolonial turn’ that involves the questioning of disciplinary traditions and knowledge production, and highlighting the colonial legacy that shapes academic pursuits. In the present text, we explore the development of Welsh Studies through the lens of race/ethnicity. Contributors from history, heritage studies, literature, film, policy, social and cultural studies offer case analyses adopting new perspectives, theoretical routes and methodological innovations, with the aim of illustrating aspects of the decolonising of knowledge production
The last resort: reducing avoidable employee harm by improving the application of the disciplinary policy and process
Get PDFIntroduction: There is growing evidence within the healthcare sector that employee investigations can harm individuals involved in the process, an organization’s culture and the delivery of its services.
Methods: This paper details an intervention developed by an NHS Wales organization to reduce the number of its employee investigations through an organization-wide focus that promoted a ‘last resort’ approach and introduced the concept of ‘avoidable employee harm’. A range of associated improvement initiatives were developed to support behavior change among those responsible for determining whether an employee investigation should be initiated.
Results: Over a 13-month period, organizational records showed an annual reduction of 71% in investigation cases post-intervention, resulting in an estimated 3,308 sickness days averted annually and total estimated annual savings of £738,133 (based on direct savings and costs averted). This indicates that the organization has started to embrace the “last resort” approach to using employee investigations to address work place issues. The programme was supported with training for those responsible for commissioning and leading the organization’s employee investigations. Analysis of survey data from those who attended training workshops to support the programme indicated that participants showed an increased awareness of the employee investigation process post-workshop and an understanding of the concept of avoidable employee harm.
Discussion: The programme is congruent with the Healthy Healthcare concept, as the study illustrates how its practices and processes have a beneficial impact on staff, as well as potentially on patients. This study highlights wider issues for consideration, including the: (1) the role of Human Resources (HR), (2) taking a multi-disciplinary approach, (3) culture and practice, (4) the responsibility of the wider HR profession
Household debt, self-insurance, and subjective medical expenses risk
Get PDFI examine the effect of medical expenses risk on debt. If individuals expect a medical expenses shock to be short-lived, it is rational to borrow to pay for medical bills and smooth consumption. By contrast, a persistent shock should decrease borrowing as loan repayments will be costly to make if future medical costs are also higher. I estimate changes to subjective forecasts of future medical expenses and debt in the months leading up to Medicare eligibility, as well as upper bounds for the effect of new information on debt for Medicare enrollees. The results indicate that there is a negligible negative effect on borrowing of lifetime medical expenses risk, but potentially a substantial positive effect of transitory medical expenses shocks, which partially accounts for the positive relationship between forecast medical expenses risk and debt in the data
Digital transformation in public-private collaborations: The success of humanitarian supply chain operations
Get PDFRecent years have seen the extensive use of big data analytics, related technological infrastructure, and machine learning applications for digital transformation. The resource dependency related to data-driven applications elicits public-private collaborations (PPCs) between governments and private or non-government organizations (NGOs) for value creation. Such collaborations are effective for the success of humanitarian supply chain operations (HSCOs), particularly in the event of large-scale disasters. By building on resource dependence theory (RDT), our study explores the links between digital transformation, PPCs, and HSCO success. Using structural equation modeling on data collected from 224 key decision-makers and experts, we found that digital transformation mediates the relationship between private-NGO collaborations and HSCO success while host government support moderates it. Our study thus makes an original contribution to RDT and the emerging domains of contemporary digital and data-driven applications in HSCO. The implications and future research directions arising from this study are also discussed in this research paper
Bombing Gaza isn't fighting sexual violence
Get PDFAs the human catastrophe in Gaza deepens, Israel and its allies are mobilizing evidence of sexual violence committed by members of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups on October 7 to justify continued military action. When the Security Council failed to pass a resolution demanding a ceasefire on December 8, Israel government spokesperson Eylon Levy tweeted: “Thank you to the United States of America for vetoing a UN Security Council resolution designed to keep Hamas’ rapist regime in power.” In the wake of its case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide Levy accused South Africa of complicity with a “rapist regime.
Burnout and fear of COVID-19 among medical students in Japan: impact of infection history, gender, and social support
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic caused significant changes in
medical students' lives and study methods, with online
learning replacing in-person classes and limited
opportunities for clinical practice. However, there are few
studies about burnout and fear of COVID-19 among medical
students, especially in East Asia, and a need for research
investigating the impact of gender, a history of COVID-19
infection, and social support. In March 2022, we conducted a
cross-sectional web-based survey of 4th/5th year medical
students who completed a clinical clerkship in Japan. Our
survey included the Japan Burnout Scale (JBS, range 5-85,
comprising of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and
reduced personal accomplishment), fear of COVID-19 scale
(range, 1-4), gender, school year, COVID-19 history,
household composition, online education use, and financial
burden. There were 343 respondents and 42.4% were
women. Multivariable adjusted linear regression analyses
showed that students with a COVID-19 infection history had
significantly higher overall burnout, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment, and lower fear of COVID�19. Students with low social support (living alone and greater
financial burden) had higher overall burnout, emotional
exhaustion, and depersonalization. Gender had no significant
effect on burnout (mean JBS among women was 38.6 versus
39.3 among men). Gender significantly predicted fear of
COVID-19, with women scoring higher (1.60 versus 1.50).
The findings of the present study have implications that
medical schools should provide pastoral care for their
students according to students’ circumstances, especially
those who live alone, have a high financial burden, and/or
were infected with COVID-19
Increasing Crossref Data Reusability With Format Experiments
No full textEvery year, Crossref releases a full public data file of all of our metadata. This is partly a commitment to POSI and partly just what we do. We want the community to re-use our metadata and to find interesting ends to which they can be put!
However, we have also recognized, for some time, that 170GB of compressed .tar.gz files, spread over 27,000 items, is not the easiest of formats with which to work. For instance, there’s no indexing capacity on these files, meaning that it is virtually impossible simply to pull out the record for a DOI. Decompressing the .tar.gz files takes a good three hours or more even on high-end hardware, without any additional processing.
To that end, the Crossref Labs team has been experimenting with different formats for trial release that might allow us to reach broader audiences, including those who have not previously worked with our metadata files. The two new formats, alongside the existing data file format, with which we have been experimenting, are JSON lines and SQLite
Data sources:
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