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Imagining and Experiencing Hospitality During Study Abroad
No full textPrior to study abroad, students have certain imaginings about their stay, and these may contrast with their experiences abroad. This article considers how these imaginings and experiences are linked to various understandings of hospitality, language, and culture. The study is based on qualitative data which is examined through a pragmatic approach, featuring narrative analysis and a critical realist commentary. Findings challenge simplistic understandings of ‘hospitality’ and the ‘guest-host binary’ by suggesting a broader notion of the ‘linguistic host’. This allows an appreciation of how the decisions of a language student shape as well as respond to the host environment
Older adult risk classification for anticholinergics (ORCA): a Delphi panel-validated scale
No full textBackgroundDrugs with anticholinergic properties (DAP) are widely prescribed in older adults for various medical conditions. However, their cumulative anticholinergic burden is associated with adverse outcomes, including cognitive decline, falls and hospitalisations. Anticholinergic scales vary significantly, complicating their interpretation and application into clinical practice and research. Recent systematic reviews provide an overview of existing scales, however often lack the clinical perspective of healthcare professionals. To address this gap, we developed the older adult risk classification for anticholinergics (ORCA) scale, incorporating both evidence and expert clinical judgement.MethodsA preliminary drug list was derived from the most comprehensive systematic review. A two-round Delphi process was conducted with 14 clinicians from nine European countries with substantial expertise in geriatric medicines and clinical pharmacology. Each round consisted of two phases in which experts rated the anticholinergic burden of drugs using a four-point Likert scale. Additional drugs and anticholinergic burden scales could be proposed at any point. Consensus was defined using the Lynn method.ResultsA total of 233 drugs were assessed. Experts classified 17 drugs as having no anticholinergic properties, 115 as low, 31 as moderate and 65 as high burden. The majority of included DAP were central nervous system drugs, particularly antipsychotics and antidepressants. Five drugs did not reach consensus.ConclusionThe ORCA scale is a clinically informed, evidence-based classification of DAP tailored for older adults. It offers a standardised tool to support clinicians, pharmacists and researchers in assessing anticholinergic burden, enhancing prescribing safety and guiding therapeutic decision-making in this vulnerable population
Open-access Occupational therapy practice in the time of genocide: an indigenous Palestinian perspective on the current situation in Gaza
Get PDFThe ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza has exacerbated pre-existing occupational injustices faced by the Palestinian population, affecting healthcare systems, including occupational therapy education, research, and services. This experience report examines the multifaceted barriers hindering occupational therapy education, practice, and research in Gaza and the West Bank. It highlights the impact of the trauma of the loss of life, destroyed infrastructure, human-made starvation and resource scarcity, displacement, and safety risks on occupational therapists, educationalists, and clients alike. With the historic impact of colonisation, ethnic cleansing, siege and wars, and the ongoing injustices deeply affecting the lives of the 2.5 million Gazans, the majority of whom are displaced, the challenges are systemic and urgent. The report draws on lived experiences and grassroots responses to propose actionable, culturally humble, and practice-informed strategies to rebuild and enhance occupational therapy education, services, and research, emphasizing the need for international solidarity and collaboration, innovative solutions, and resilience-building initiatives. These include strengthening local occupational therapy programs, expanding community-led rehabilitation, developing accessible online professional development tools, and co-producing context-specific knowledge. It calls for global action to uphold Palestinians' rights and occupational justice as a pathway toward collective healing and empowerment
Equality DanceSport doing transgender inclusivity in the United Kingdom: Cultural cisgenderism and transgender experiences
Get PDFIn this article, cultural cisgenderism is adopted to investigate Equality DanceSport, a sporting context emerging out of an LGBT+ community.1 The study questions the extent to which Equality DanceSport enforces regulations and practices which promote trans-inclusivity. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory approach, I conducted autoethnography and 35 semi-structured interviews with LGBT+ dancers representing diverse genders and sexualities. I examined the discourses shaping the recent revision of Equality DanceSport competition rules in the United Kingdom and the experiences of transgender dancers in the competitive arena. Findings suggest that despite challenging some cis and heteronormative practices in mainstream DanceSport spaces, essentialist notions of sex and gender continue to feed into the shaping of Equality DanceSport's competition rules. These notions are hinged on debates around fairness and inclusivity and inform the constitution of a binary sex category in the competition rules. Transgender dancers face several challenges within the binary sex system, tending to cope through identity compromise. Such a strategy contributes to transgender erasure and invisibility. Overall, this paper provides a critical understanding of trans-inclusivity in an LGBT+ sporting space in the United Kingdom. It highlights the complexity of achieving inclusivity and calls for a critical interrogation which does not conflate LGB with the T when investigating the inclusivity of LGBT+ sporting contexts. The paper concludes with a proposal for radical regulatory and policy changes that question the epistemological understandings of sex and gender and celebrate other values in competitive sports which de-emphasise the focus on winning
Strategic public value(s) governance: A systematic literature review and framework for analysis
Get PDFThis article offers evidence‐based understanding of public value creation in multi‐actor collaborations by presenting the results of a systematic literature review of empirical studies published within the public administration field. Specifically, it focuses on two primary research questions: How do multi‐actor collaborations generate public value(s)? What types of public value(s) are created by these collaborative endeavors? Our results shed light on 12 strategic governance components for enacting public value(s) governance (PVsG) in multi‐actor collaborations, including six key public values to be considered for discerning and assessing processes of public value generation. We contribute to theory and practice by providing a unifying framework to PVsG which updates the public value strategic triangle combining Moore's managerial action‐focused approach with Bozeman's policy or societally oriented public values approach
An Attention‐Driven Hybrid Deep Neural Network for Enhanced Heart Disease Classification
No full textHeart disease continues to be a primary cause of mortality globally, highlighting the critical necessity for efficient early prediction and classification techniques. This study presents a new hybrid model attention-based CNN-Bi-LSTM that integrates the SMOTE with an attention-driven improved convolutional neural network-recurrent neural network architecture to improve the classification of heart sounds, especially from imbalanced datasets. Heart sounds are difficult to classify because of their complex acoustic properties and the variability of their characteristics across frequency and temporal domains. The proposed model utilises an advanced CNN to effectively extract global and local features, in conjunction with a bidirectional long short-term memory network to improve the architecture by capturing contextual information from both preceding and subsequent time sequences. The incorporation of spatial attention within the CNN and temporal attention in the RNN enables the model to concentrate on the most pertinent audio segments. To address the challenges presented by imbalanced and noisy datasets that may impede the efficacy of deep learning algorithms, our model employs SMOTE to improve data representation. The hybrid model outperformed popular models such as CNN, LSTM and CNN-LSTM, achieving a classification accuracy of more than 97% on the PCG and PASCAL heart sound datasets. The findings demonstrate the model's reliability as an initial evaluation tool in clinical settings, thereby improving support for cardiovascular disease diagnosis
Multiple identities in franchising
Get PDFThe extant literature on organizational identification has explored the existence and interactions between different levels of identification that individuals may hold within the same organization. Such research has tended to focus on nested groups within the organization, and employee settings rather than contexts where there are multiple organization claims. In this paper we explore identification in a specific organizational setting, that of franchising and its network of quasi-independent entrepreneurs. More specifically we focus on multi-brand franchisees, that is franchisees who belong to more than one franchise system, and thus have more than one ‘master’. We propose that franchisees may experience multiple levels of identification that are unique to franchising, and examine the antecedents and organizational outcomes for two forms of identification - franchisor and franchisee network identification. Both forms of identification are found to be positively related to the organizational affective commitment of franchisees, which in turn, shows a positive effect on franchisees’ performance and a negative effect on their intentions to leave the system. We respond to calls to empirically explore the interactive effects of multiple identification, and find that divergences in franchisee network and franchisor identification negatively impact affective commitment
Automated generation of deployment descriptors for managing microservices-based applications in the cloud to edge continuum
Get PDFWith the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices collecting large amounts of data at the edges of the network, a new generation of hyper-distributed applications is emerging, spanning cloud, fog, and edge computing resources. The automated deployment and management of such applications requires orchestration tools that take a deployment descriptor (e.g. Kubernetes manifest, Helm chart or TOSCA) as input, and deploy and manage the execution of applications at run-time. While most deployment descriptors are prepared by a single person or organisation at one specific time, there are notable scenarios where such descriptors need to be created collaboratively by different roles or organisations, and at different times of the application’s life cycle. An example of this scenario is the modular development of digital twins, composed of the basic building blocks of data, model and algorithm. Each of these building blocks can be created independently from each other, by different individuals or companies, at different times. The challenge here is to compose and build a deployment descriptor from these individual components automatically. This paper presents a novel solution to automate the collaborative composition and generation of deployment descriptors for distributed applications within the cloud-to-edge continuum. The implemented solution has been prototyped in over 25 industrial use cases within the DIGITbrain project, one of which is described in the paper as a representative example
Impact of Climate Variability on Maize Yield Under Different Climate Change Scenarios in Southern India: A Panel Data Approach
Get PDFThe changes in frequency and intensity of rainfall, variation in temperature, increasing extreme weather events, and rising greenhouse gas emissions can together have a varying impact on food grain production, which then leads to significant impacts on food security in the future. The purpose of this study is to quantify how maize productivity might be affected due to climate change in Southern India. The present study examines how the projected changes to the northeast monsoon will affect maize yield in Tamil Nadu during the rabi season, which spans from September to December, by using a three-step methodology. Firstly, global climate models that accurately represent the large-scale features of the mean monsoon were chosen. Secondly, baseline and future climate data were extracted from the selected global models and the baseline data were compared with observations. Thirdly, the panel data regression model was fitted with the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) observed climate data to generate the baseline coefficients and projected the maize production using future climate data generated from the global climate model. The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) of RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 were used from two global climate model outputs, namely GFDL_CM3 and HadGEM2_CC, to predict the climate change variability on maize yields during the middle (2021–2050) and the end (2071–2100) of this century. The maize yield is predicted to increase by 3 to 5.47 per cent during the mid-century period and it varies from 7.25 to 14.53 per cent during the end of the century for the medium- (RCP4.5) and high-emission (RCP8.5) climate change scenarios. The maize grain yield increasing during the future periods indicated that the increase in rainfall and temperature during winter in Southern India reduced the possibility of a negative impact of temperature on the maize yield
The Poetry of Physics: From a Quark to a Quasar
No full textThe Poetry of Physics explores the intersection of science and art, blending the intricate beauty of physics with the evocative power of poetry. This unique work takes readers on a journey through the physical world, from the delicate patterns of living organisms to the vast reaches of the cosmos.Structured in four sections – living physics, environmental physics, celestial physics, and a guide on writing your own poems – this book offers both scientific insights and poetic reflections, providing a richer understanding of both fields. The final section provides practical guidance on crafting your own physics-inspired poetry, encouraging active participation in this tradition of blending scientific and artistic inquiry.Ideal for those who appreciate both science and the arts, whether they are physicists, aspiring poets, or curious minds seeking to explore the world and our place within it
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