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Social Influence in Australian University Institutional Eating: A Qualitative Content Analysis
Get PDFINTRODUCTION: Social influence has been recognised as a primary determinant of eating behaviour, and an effective behavioural change mechanism. Institutional settings offer a conducive environment for eating behaviour research, and few have examined multiple social influences interacting within an Australian institutional eating setting. Responding to calls to improve the use and reporting of theory within social marketing research, this study aimed to explore which social influences within the Consumer Socialisation Theory (CST) were evident in an institutional eating environment, to determine if the use of the CST could advance theory use within social marketing and behavioural change research. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews (n = 16) were conducted with students residing in university college accommodation with provided meals. A deductive content analysis method was used to identify the CST social influences of interaction, modelling, social norms and reinforcement. RESULTS: All theory defined social influences were evident. While all four social influences were present, participants identified interaction, modelling and social norms as having a greater influence within this context. The CST was successfully applied and helped to identify the different social influences within this study. CONCLUSIONS: These findings show that not all social influences were relevant within this setting. SO WHAT?: This study informs future research and interventions by indicating the social influences that exist within an Australian university institutional context, and therefore which may be used to change eating behaviour. Additionally, it provides evidence for the successful use of the CST as a theory to identify social influences and inform intervention development and planning.Full Tex
Rule-Guided Graph Neural Networks for Explainable Knowledge Graph Reasoning
No full textThe connections between symbolic rules and neural networks have been explored in various directions, including rule mining through neural networks and rule-based explanation for neural networks. These approaches allow symbolic rules to be extracted from neural network models, which offers explainability to the models. However, the plausibility of the extracted rules is rarely analysed. In this paper, we show that the confidence degrees of extracted rules are generally not high, and we propose a new family of Graph Neural Networks that can be trained with the guidance of rules. Hence, the inference of our model simulates the rule reasoning. Moreover, rules with high confidence degrees can be extracted from the trained model that aligns with the inference of the model, which verifies the effectiveness of the rule guidance. Experimental evaluation of knowledge graph reasoning tasks further demonstrates the effectiveness of our model.No Full Tex
Flavonoids Identified in Terminalia spp. Inhibit Gastrointestinal Pathogens and Potentiate Conventional Antibiotics via Efflux Pump Inhibition
Get PDFThe genus Terminalia has a long history of use in traditional medicine to treat various diseases, including bacterial infections. We previously reported a metabolomic analysis using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry of selected Australian Terminalia spp. and highlighted numerous flavonoids that may contribute to the antimicrobial activities of those plants. This study examines the antibacterial activities of fifteen flavonoids found in Terminalia spp. against a range of gastrointestinal pathogens using broth dilution assays. Flavonoids were also combined with six different classes of conventional antibiotics to investigate interactions. The efflux pump inhibitory activity of the flavonoid was evaluated using ethidium bromide accumulation and efflux assays. Toxicities were assessed via human dermal fibroblast cell line assays. Fisetin, hispidulin, isoorientin, orientin, rutin, and vitexin showed noteworthy growth inhibitory activity (MIC values 62.5–250 µg/mL). Isoorientin and orientin were most potent against Bacillus cereus and Alcaligenes faecalis, displaying MIC values of 62.5 µg/mL against both bacteria. All flavonoids except genistein, isorhamnetin, kaempferol, luteolin, taxifolin, and vitexin were nontoxic in human dermal fibroblast (HDF) cell proliferation assays. When individual flavonoids were combined with selected antibiotics, some potentiated the activity of these antibiotics. Two synergistic, eighteen additive and thirty-one non-interactive interactions were observed. The synergistic interactions were all observed in combination with orientin. Notably, orientin exhibited efflux pump inhibitory effects at concentrations from 15.26 µg/mL to 125 µg/mL. The findings reported herein indicate that the selected flavonoids have the potential for addressing bacterial antibiotic resistance and highlight the need for further study.Full Tex
The regulation and practice of midwifery prescribing around the world: A scoping review of regulations and literature
Get PDFBackground
The authority to prescribe medications has been extended to midwives in many countries. Understanding how midwifery prescribing is used, whether it is effective, and how it is regulated can inform the development of midwifery prescribing.
Aim
To describe regulatory standards for midwifery prescribing in high-income English-speaking countries and identify insights from research regarding midwife prescribing.
Methods
A scoping review using the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Literature searches targeted 1. Grey literature relating to professional standards, regulations, and / or legislation regarding midwifery prescribing in selected high-income countries; 2. Peer-reviewed empirical research regarding midwifery prescribing.
Findings
In some jurisdictions, educational preparation for midwifery prescribing is completed in the primary midwifery degree, with all midwives having prescribing authority; in others, a separate course provides the entry point for a subset of the midwifery workforce. Models of midwifery prescribing have moved to more autonomous prescribing over time.
Midwives used their prescribing authority in diverse ways. No research directly examined safety and effectiveness. However, approaches expected to produce safe and effective prescribing were demonstrated. Access to care was improved when independent midwifery prescribing was available.
Discussion
Midwifery prescribing is well embedded around the world but has not been as comprehensively evaluated as other forms of non-medical prescribing. Non-medical prescribing by other health professionals has expanded over time, with evidence of better outcomes compared to medical prescribing. Barriers to midwifery prescribing reflect those impacting other non-medical prescribers.
Conclusion
Addressing barriers to midwifery prescribing offers an effective means to enhance maternity care provision.Full Tex
Exploring the intersection of food literacy and consumer research: A review, conceptualisation, and agenda for sustainability-focused research
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of consumer food literacy competency as global food experiences were disrupted from individual to systemic levels. Consumer food illiteracy also acts as a barrier to achieve optimal health and sustainability. This study examined what is known about the intersectionality of food literacy and consumer research through a hybrid systematic review encompassing bibliometric and content analysis. Peer-reviewed journal publications (N = 301) meeting the inclusion criteria were analysed to consider citation, geolocational, research area, co-word, and time-phase content strategies employing VOSViewer, Microsoft Excel, and Leximancer software. Examination of the knowledge base of food literacy-consumer research reveals exponential growth in publication rates. The multidisciplinary intellectual structure of the field spans 53 diverse research areas, including consumer food label use, food consumption and choices, sustainability, health, education, skills and knowledge, social media, food security, and COVID-19 research topics. The time-phase analysis reveals that: 1) the intellectual structure of food literacy-consumer research increased in complexity over time, providing a deeper understanding of food literacy; 2) food literacy education is central to food literacy competency to encourage optimal public health and sustainability behaviours; and 3) food literacy competency can be supported through technology (social media and mobile apps) and food literacy measurement. Four propositions are presented to advance food literacy education, technology, research, and policy development. The culmination of the study is the development of the proposed Consumer Food Literacy Knowledge Model, which frames future sustainability-focused food literacy research lenses.Full Tex
Renewable energy as post-mining land use
No full textA baseline assessment of post-mining land use (PMLU) in Queensland concluded that in the Bowen Basin and Surat Basin, renewable energy produced by solar and wind had vast potential, but the pathway to implementation was not clear. This project aimed at examining how renewable energy projects could be set up on a mining lease, rather than adjacent to it or as an ancillary later use for post-relinquishment land, and be accepted as a productive post-mining land use by regulators and stakeholders. A thorough review of the legal instruments and approval processes demonstrated that if a mine were to nominate renewable energy as PMLU, it would need to embark on a complex and potentially lengthy approval process. There are four pathways, depending on the land tenure. For all pathways, numerous approvals are required and there is no entity coordinating them, at either Federal or State level. It can be argued that the difficulties inherent in obtaining the approvals via each pathway mean that no pathway holds a viable option to have a renewable energy facility as a PMLU, as opposed to a use that is ancillary to a PMLU and independent of the previous mining activity.
The potential for implementing renewable energy projects on mine sites was tested by applying a multi-criteria analysis to land use data collated from three case study sites. Several financial indicators of solar and wind farms were calculated. Results indicated that wind farms were unlikely to be suitable on a single mine, despite generating financial returns, as the extent of disturbed land available is not sufficient to support installation of several wind turbines. Several mines would need to collaborate to install a utility-scale wind farm. Conversely, solar farms are suitable on a single mine, but their financial returns are uncertain.
The project showed that there was a requirement to engage with regulators to discuss how regulatory frameworks could be updated to encourage adoption of renewable energy as post-mining land use, and to consider closure completion criteria adapted to the installation of renewable energy facilities, particularly in relation to landform design intent. In addition, the availability of financial schemes to support installation of solar plants should be investigated.No Full Tex
Circular RNAs in neurological conditions – computational identification, functional validation, and potential clinical applications
No full textNon-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have gained significant attention in recent years due to advancements in biotechnology, particularly high-throughput total RNA sequencing. These developments have led to new understandings of non-coding biology, revealing that approximately 80% of non-coding regions in the genome possesses biochemical functionality. Among ncRNAs, circular RNAs (circRNAs), first identified in 1976, have emerged as a prominent research field. CircRNAs are abundant in most human cell types, evolutionary conserved, highly stable, and formed by back-splicing events which generate covalently closed ends. Notably, circRNAs exhibit high expression levels in neural tissue and perform diverse biochemical functions, including acting as molecular sponges for microRNAs, interacting with RNA-binding proteins to regulate their availability and activity, modulating transcription and splicing, and even translating into functional peptides in some cases. Recent advancements in computational and experimental methods have enhanced our ability to identify and validate circRNAs, providing valuable insights into their biological roles. This review focuses on recent developments in circRNA research as they related to neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions. We also explore their potential applications in clinical diagnostics, therapeutics, and future research directions. CircRNAs remain a relatively underexplored area of non-coding biology, particularly in the context of neurological disorders. However, emerging evidence supports their role as critical players in the etiology and molecular mechanisms of conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. These findings suggest that circRNAs may provide a novel framework contributing to the molecular dysfunctions underpinning these complex neurological conditions.Full Tex
Attractive and repulsive terms in multi-filament dispersion interactions
No full textFilamentary objects such as nano-wires, nanotubes and DNA are of current interest in physics, nanoscience, chemistry, biology and medicine. They can interact via strong, exceptionally long-ranged many-object van der Waals (vdW, dispersion) forces, causing them to cluster into multi-object bundles. We analyse their vdW interactions perturbatively, predicting N-object vdW energy contributions that alternate in sign with increasing N. Our findings are confirmed here via the first detailed analysis of a 4-cylinder vdW model. We also provide novel insights permitting these tendencies to be understood simply in terms of electronic screening and anti-screening. Our results suggest that a non-perturbative calculation will be required for reliable prediction of dispersion interactions in these ubiquitous systems.Full Tex
Graph positive-unlabeled learning via Bootstrapping Label Disambiguation
No full textGraph positive-unlabeled learning is an important task that tries to learn binary classification models from only positive and unlabeled (PU) nodes. While state-of-the-art methods focus on training graph neural networks, they frequently rely on weak objective functions derived solely from a given class prior probability or inferred exclusively from the graph structure, leading their performance significantly lags behind that of fully labeled counterparts. In this paper, we fill this gap by treating unlabeled nodes as samples ambiguously labeled as both positive and negative, and by introducing a learning method called Bootstrap Label Disambiguation (BLD), which progressively resolves label ambiguities during the training of binary classifiers. BLD comprises a node representation learning module via bootstrapping and a novel central region-based label disambiguation strategy. The learning module leverages both previous representations and the derived positive centriod as targets to train positive-aligned representations, eliminating the need for a prior. Consequently, the disambiguation strategy constructs a central-region to identify ambiguous nodes and steadily transforms them into effective supervision. Extensive experiments on a range of real-world datasets show that our BLD method significantly outperforms existing approaches and in many cases even surpasses fully labeled classification models. The source code is available at https://github.com/yunyun85/BLD.No Full Tex
“Sunlust” or heatwave? Impacts of future heat exposure in city destinations
Get PDFIn the early days of global mass tourism, Gray (1970) suggested that tourist motivations are either driven by “wanderlust” or “sunlust”. The search for warmer climates underpins both and a significant body of work established tourists’ preferences for higher temperatures, sunshine, and less rain (e.g. Falk, 2014; Scott et al., 2016). Theoretical research is validated by most destinations’ tourism statistics that show visitation peaks in summer. However, the increased occurrence of extreme heatwaves is affecting traditional travel patterns, including increasing changes for winter tourism. Prominent examples of heat-related attraction closures (e.g. Acropolis, Athens), event cancellations (e.g. Pitch Music and Arts Festival or Melbourne Open, Australia), and deaths (e.g. Hajj, Mecca) have made headlines around the world.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2022) concluded that human-caused climate change has increased both the frequency and intensity of heatwaves with future warming exacerbating this hazard. Urban environments are particularly exposed due to the heat island effect (Yadav et al., 2023); yet they are heavily frequented by tourists during the hottest months of the year. Tourists are particularly at risk of heat-related illness (HRI) and mortality because they are less familiar with the local conditions, frequently not acclimatized, are physically active during the hottest time of day and may be more difficult to reach with heat warnings (TPCC, 2023). Similarly, tourism workers are affected by extreme heat conditions, raising important questions about how to support vulnerable groups (Rastegar & Becken, 2024). Extreme heat exacerbates justice challenges, as the intersection of vulnerability and climate risks disproportionately burdens those with fewer resources and less capacity to adapt (Parsons et al., 2024). Hence, identifying the types of climate adaptation strategies that can assist in combating extreme heat in just ways is paramount.
This research focuses on changing heat exposure of city tourism. It provides an assessment of future heat risk days and heat exposure for three cities, namely Sydney, Melbourne and Jakarta. Two climate scenarios are examined, including a low emission pathway consistent with achieving the Paris Climate Agreement targets (RCP 2.6) and a high emission pathway representative of where countries fail to achieve current emission reduction policy targets (RCP 8.5). Two critical heat risk thresholds are examined (both using humidex that incorporates daily temperature and relative humidity). The first is the tourist discomfort threshold (>31C), which the majority of international tourists surveyed perceived as unacceptably hot for city tourism (Scott et al., 2016). The second is a dangerous physiological threshold for HRI (>38C), a point between deadly and non-deadly conditions (Mora et al., 2017) and worker productivity is negatively affected (Levi et al., 2018).
The findings show that HRI exposure for tourists and tourism workers is increasing in Sydney and Melbourne and is already at dangerous levels all year in Jakarta. The number of annual heat discomfort days (humidex exceeding 31C) increases from 22 to 25 days in Melbourne and from 45 to 55 days in Sydney between the 1950s and the present (2015–2025) (Figure 1). By the 2050s, heat discomfort days are projected to further increase to 46 in Melbourne and 108 in Sydney in a high emissions scenario (RCP 8.5). The number of days over 38 C could reach 14 and 45 in Melbourne and Sydney, respectively. For Jakarta, the number of days beyond the HRI threshold in 2050 is 365; it is already at 364 days.
Figure 1 Evolving destination heat risk in Melbourne and Sydney.
The findings reveal significant risks from heat; yet very little research has considered differentiated exposures and vulnerabilities by those involved in city tourism, and the wider socio-economic systems they are embedded in (Figure 2). Risk awareness and adaptive capacity to reduce vulnerability are not equally advanced amongst different tourist and worker populations. With a focus on sports events, research highlighted significant health impacts related to heat exposure, although the focus is typically on athletes and not spectators (Mason et al., 2024). As city destinations plan for the future, they will have to consider carefully what adaptation measures need to be put in place to reduce heat-related risks.Full Tex