163 research outputs found
Moderation in all things: International comparisons of governance quality
No full textsponsorship: The author is from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. At various points the author has drawn on material from two projects he has been involved in over the past few years: EUROPAIR (2000-2004), which looked at performance management in executive agencies in four European countries, and CADS (2006-2008), which examined the development trajectories of performance measurement systems in healthcare in the Netherlands and the UK. Both projects were team efforts and both were supported by grants from the UK Economic and Social Research Council. For details of EUROPAIR, see Pollitt (2006b). For details of CADS, see Pollitt et al. (2010). The author is also grateful to a number of colleagues for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, including Frank Bannister, Colin Talbot, Wouter van Dooren, Steven van Roosbroek and Steven van de Walle. (UK Economic and Social Research Council)status: Publishe
Women in politics
No full textFarai Chideya, commentator, NPR, and author, The Color of our Future: Race in the 21st Century and Katha Pollitt, Columnist, The Nation and author, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories on the impact of race and gender on the 2008 election
Women in politics
No full textFarai Chideya, commentator, NPR, and author, The Color of our Future: Race in the 21st Century and Katha Pollitt, Columnist, The Nation and author, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories on the impact of race and gender on the 2008 election
Author Correction:Climate–carbon cycle uncertainties and the Paris Agreement
No full textIn the version of this Article originally published, H. Pollit’s name was incorrectly listed as H. E. Pollit (H.E.P.) throughout the paper, this has been corrected to H. Pollitt (H.P.) in the online versions of this Article
Race, gender, and the transformation of American politics
No full textFarai Chideya, Susan Faludi, Katha Pollitt, and Dina Titus discuss \u27Race, Gender, and the Transformation of American Politics.\u27 Chideya is a multimedia journalist who has worked in print, television, and online. Her latest book is Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters. She currently hosts NPR\u27s \u27News and Notes.\u27 Faludi is the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, examines the post-9/11 outpouring in the media, popular culture, and political life. A regular columnist for The Nation, Pollitt\u27s writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper\u27s, Ms., and The New York Times, among other venues. Her volume of personal essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, just appeared in paperback. Titus, the event moderator, has taught American and Nevada government in the Department of Political Science at UNLV for 30 years. She was recently elected to the U.S. Congress as the representative for Nevada\u27s third congressional district
Race, gender, and the transformation of American politics
No full textFarai Chideya, Susan Faludi, Katha Pollitt, and Dina Titus discuss \u27Race, Gender, and the Transformation of American Politics.\u27 Chideya is a multimedia journalist who has worked in print, television, and online. Her latest book is Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters. She currently hosts NPR\u27s \u27News and Notes.\u27 Faludi is the author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man and Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, examines the post-9/11 outpouring in the media, popular culture, and political life. A regular columnist for The Nation, Pollitt\u27s writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper\u27s, Ms., and The New York Times, among other venues. Her volume of personal essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, just appeared in paperback. Titus, the event moderator, has taught American and Nevada government in the Department of Political Science at UNLV for 30 years. She was recently elected to the U.S. Congress as the representative for Nevada\u27s third congressional district
Understanding factors associated with the translation of cardiovascular research: A multinational case study approach
No full textThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Funders of health research increasingly seek to understand how best to allocate resources in order to achieve maximum value from their funding. We built an international consortium and developed a multinational case study approach to assess benefits arising from health research. We used that to facilitate analysis of factors in the production of research that might be associated with translating research findings into wider impacts, and the complexities involved. Methods: We built on the Payback Framework and expanded its application through conducting co-ordinated case studies on the payback from cardiovascular and stroke research in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. We selected a stratified random sample of projects from leading medical research funders. We devised a series of innovative steps to: minimize the effect of researcher bias; rate the level of impacts identified in the case studies; and interrogate case study narratives to identify factors that correlated with achieving high or low levels of impact. Results: Twenty-nine detailed case studies produced many and diverse impacts. Over the 15 to 20 years examined, basic biomedical research has a greater impact than clinical research in terms of academic impacts such as knowledge production and research capacity building. Clinical research has greater levels of wider impact on health policies, practice, and generating health gains. There was no correlation between knowledge production and wider impacts. We identified various factors associated with high impact. Interaction between researchers and practitioners and the public is associated with achieving high academic impact and translation into wider impacts, as is basic research conducted with a clinical focus. Strategic thinking by clinical researchers, in terms of thinking through pathways by which research could potentially be translated into practice, is associated with high wider impact. Finally, we identified the complexity of factors behind research translation that can arise in a single case. Conclusions: We can systematically assess research impacts and use the findings to promote translation. Research funders can justify funding research of diverse types, but they should not assume academic impacts are proxies for wider impacts. They should encourage researchers to consider pathways towards impact and engage potential research users in research processes. © 2014 Wooding et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.RAND Europe and HERG, with subsequent funding from the NHFA, the HSFC and the CIHR. This research was also partially supported by the Policy Research Programme in the English Department of Health
Telomere length and outcome of treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis in a gold mining community
No full textTelomere length (TL) is a marker of ageing and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is an early marker of inflammation caused by oxidative stress. We determined TL and mtDNA content among active pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) patients to assess if these cellular biomarkers differed between artisanal miners and non-miners, and to assess if they were predictive of treatment outcome. We conducted a prospective cohort study from August 2018 to May 2019 involving newly diagnosed PTB patients at three outpatient TB clinics in a rural Democratic Republic of Congo. We measured relative TL and mtDNA content in peripheral blood leukocytes (at inclusion) via qPCR and assessed their association with PTB treatment outcome. We included 129 patients (85 miners and 44 non-miners) with PTB (median age 40 years; range 5–71 years, 22% HIV-coinfected). For each increase in year and HIV-coinfection, TL shortened by − 0.85% (− 0.19 to − 0.52) (p ≤ 0.0001) and − 14% (− 28.22 to − 1.79) (p = 0.02) respectively. Independent of these covariates, patients with longer TL were more likely to have successful TB treatment [adjusted hazard ratio; 95% CI 1.27 for a doubling of leucocyte telomere length at baseline; 1.05–1.44] than patients with a shorter TL. Blood mtDNA content was not predictive for PTB outcome. For a given chronological age, PTB patients with longer telomeres at time of diagnosis were more likely to have successful PTB treatment outcome.sponsorship: P.D.M.C. K was fellow of the Fonds Marc Vervenne of the KU Leuven (Belgium) and he is supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)-Fogarty Postdoctoral Fellowship: Grant no. 1D43TW010937-01A1. D.S.M is a FWO postdoc, with funding number: FWO Grant 12X9620N. Fieldwork has been supported by the KU Leuven Alumni Association and the University of Antwerp-USOS via the CEGEMI of the Catholic University of Bukavu. The costs of measuring Telomere length and mtDNA were covered by a grant of the European Research Council (ENVIRONAGE). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of the report. The corresponding author had full access to all the study data and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. (US National Institutes of Health (NIH)-Fogarty Postdoctoral Fellowship|1D43TW010937-01A1, FWO|12X9620N, European Research Council (ENVIRONAGE), John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences|D43TW010937, John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences|R25TW011217, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences|UL1TR001863)status: Publishe
Sole depth and weight-bearing characteristics of the palmar surface of the feet of feral horses and domestic Thoroughbreds
No full textObjective:\ud
To determine solar load-bearing structures in the feet of feral horses and investigate morphological characteristics of the sole in feral horses and domestic Thoroughbreds.\ud
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Sample:\ud
Forelimbs from cadavers of 70 feral horses and 20 domestic Thoroughbreds in Australia.\ud
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Procedures:\ud
Left forefeet were obtained from 3 feral horse populations from habitats of soft substrate (SS [n = 10 horses]), hard substrate (HS [10]), and a combination of SS and HS (10) and loaded in vitro. Pressure distribution was measured with a pressure plate. Sole depth was measured at 12 points across the solar plane in feet obtained from feral horses from SS (n = 20 horses) and HS (20) habitats and domestic Thoroughbreds (20).\ud
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Results:\ud
Feet of feral horses from HS habitats loaded the periphery of the sole and hoof wall on a flat surface. Feral horses from HS or SS habitats had greater mean sole depth than did domestic Thoroughbreds. Sole depth was greatest peripherally and was correlated with the loading pattern.\ud
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Conclusions and Clinical Relevance:\ud
The peripheral aspect of the sole in the feet of feral horses had a load-bearing function. Because of the robust nature of the tissue architecture, the hoof capsule of feral horses may be less flexible than that of typical domestic horses. The application of narrow-web horseshoes may not take full advantage of the load-bearing and force-dissipating properties of the peripheral aspect of the sole. Further studies are required to understand the effects of biomechanical stimulation on the adaptive responses of equine feet.\ud
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