194 research outputs found

    Cataloguing the internet: CATRIONA feasibility study : report to the British Library Research & Development Department

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    The idea of a distributed catalogue of Internet resources integrated with standard Z39.50 library system OPAC interfaces (and hence with retrieval of information on hard copy resources) is already practical at a basic level. Geac's Z39.50 GUI OPAC client. GeoPac, can search remote Z39.50 OPACs, retrieve USMARC records with URLs in 856$u, respond by loading a viewer like Mosaic or Netscape, and utilise it to retrieve and display the remotely held electronic resources on the local workstation. A range of Z39.50 OPACs can be searched server by server, making a basic-level distributed catalogue of Internet resources feasible. At least one other Z39.50 client, Dynix Horizon is close to having similar capabilities. Significant further development and investigation is nevertheless required. A proposed demonstrator project - based around Scottish University Libraries and the BUBL Subject Tree initiative, but sufficiently 'open' to encompass other sites and approaches - is both feasible and essential, and would provide a focus for Z39.50 developments in the UK. Z39.50 clients and associated Z39.50 OPACs describing resources could become preferred network navigation tools with other specific NIDR client types (WWW, gopher, WAIS, others) loaded as required. Library involvement is essential to sustainable Internet cataloguing initiatives

    HIT4HYPOS Continuous Glucose Monitoring Data Analysis:The Effects of High-Intensity Interval Training on Hypoglycemia in People With Type 1 Diabetes and Impaired Awareness of Hypoglycemia

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    Aims:To assess the impact of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) on hypoglycemia frequency and duration in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) with impaired awareness of hypoglycemia (IAH).Methods:Post hoc analysis of four weeks of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data from HIT4HYPOS; a parallel-group study comparing HIIT + CGM versus no exercise + CGM in 18 participants with T1D and IAH.Results:When compared with those participating individuals not exercising, HIIT did not increase total hypoglycemia frequency, THypo(L1) 1.44 [1.00-2.77]% versus 2.53 [1.46-4.23]%; P = .335, THypo(L2) 0.25 [0.09-0.37]% versus 0.45 [0.20-0.78]%; P = .146, HIIT + CGM versus CGM, respectively, rate (EventPerWeekHypo 5.30 [3.35-8.27] #/week vs 7.45 [3.54-10.81] #/week, P = .340) or duration (DurationHypo 33.33 [27.60-39.10] minutes vs 39.56 [31.00-48.38] minutes; P = .219, HIIT + CGM vs CGM, respectively). There was a reduction in nocturnal hypoglycemia in those who carried out HIIT, THypo(L1) 0.50 [0.13-0.97]% versus 2.45 [0.77-4.74]%; P = .076; THypo(L2) 0.00 [0.00-0.03]% versus 0.49 [0.13-0.74]%; P = .006, HIIT + CGM versus CGM, respectively.Conclusions/interpretation:Based on CGM data collected from a real-world study of four weeks of HIIT versus no exercise in individuals with T1D and IAH, we conclude that HIIT does not increase hypoglycemia, and in fact reduces exposure to nocturnal hypoglycemia

    Building Quality Assurance into Metadata Creation: an Analysis based on the Learning Objects and e-Prints Communities of Practice

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    This paper challenges some of the assumptions underlying the metadata creation process in the context of two communities of practice, based around learning object repositories and open e-Print archives. The importance of quality assurance for metadata creation is discussed and evidence from the literature, from the practical experiences of repositories and archives, and from related research and practices within other communities is presented. Issues for debate and further investigation are identified, formulated as a series of key research questions. Although there is much work to be done in the area of quality assurance for metadata creation, this paper represents an important first step towards a fuller understanding of the subject.

    Thinking the Feminist Vegetal Turn in the Shadow of Douglas-Firs: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands

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    This is an interview with Catriona Sandilands, an environmental literary critic and ecocultural scholar whose work brings together questions of ecology, gender and sexuality, and multispecies biopolitics. She coined the term queer ecologies to describe and intervene in the manifold intersections running between sexuality, nature, and power in contemporary ecological conversations. The concept has made a powerful contribution to feminist and queer environmental scholarship, and to the larger environmental humanities. An intuitive gardener as well as plant scholar, she writes about plants in a unique way that pairs wonder about botanical materiality and evolutionary history with a concern about the biopolitical mechanisms that govern both vegetal and other, nonhuman and human, forms of life. Cate is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999) as well as over 80 essays, reviews, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. She edited, with Bruce Erickson, the much-celebrated scholarly volume Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010); her edited collection of creative writing Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times will be published in September, 2019. Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka caught up with Cate on Galiano Island, BC, to discuss the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us

    ROTOЯ Review

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    The ROTOЯ partnership between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield was established in 2011. ROTOЯ I and II was a programme of eight exhibitions and accompanying events that commenced in 2012 and was completed in 2013. ROTOЯ continues into 2014 and the programme for 2015 and 2016 is already firmly underway. In brief, the aim of ROTOЯ is to improve the cultural vitality of Kirklees, expand audiences, and provide new ways for people to engage with and understand academic research in contemporary art and design. Why ROTOЯ , Why Now? As Vice Chancellors position their institutions’ identities and future trajectories in context to national and international league tables, Professor John Goddard1 proposes the notion of the ‘civic’ university as a ‘place embedded’ institution; one that is committed to ‘place making’ and which recognises its responsibility to engaging with the public. The civic university has deep institutional connections to different social, cultural and economic spheres within its locality and beyond. A fundamental question for both the university sector and cultural organisations alike, including local authority, is how the many different articulations of public engagement and cultural leadership which exist can be brought together to form one coherent, common language. It is critical that we reach out and engage the community so we can participate in local issues, impact upon society, help to forge well-being and maintain a robust cultural economy. Within the lexicon of public centered objectives sits the Arts Council England’s strategic goals, and those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in particular its current Cultural Value initiative. What these developments reveal is that art and design education and professional practice, its projected oeuvre as well as its relationship to cultural life and public funding, is now challenged with having to comprehensively audit its usefulness in financially austere times. It was in the wake of these concerns coming to light, and of the 2010 Government Spending Review that ROTOЯ was conceived. These issues and the discussions surrounding them are not completely new. Research into the social benefits of the arts, for both the individual and the community, was championed by the Community Arts Movement in the 1960s. During the 1980s and ‘90s, John Myerscough and Janet Wolff, amongst others, provided significant debate on the role and value of the arts in the public domain. What these discussions demonstrated was a growing concern that the cultural sector could not, and should not, be understood in terms of economic benefit alone. Thankfully, the value of the relationships between art, education, culture and society is now recognised as being far more complex than the reductive quantification of their market and GDP benefits. Writing in ‘Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)’, Ernesto Pujol proposes:‘…it is absolutely crucial that art schools consider their institutional role in support of democracy. The history of creative expression is linked to the history of freedom. There is a link between the state of artistic expression and the state of democracy.’ When we were approached by Huddersfield Art Gallery to work collaboratively on an exhibition programme that could showcase academic staff research, one of our first concerns was to ask the question, how can we really contribute to cultural leadership within the town?’ The many soundbite examples of public engagement that we might underline within our annual reports or website news are one thing, but what really makes a difference to a town’s cultural identity, and what affects people in their daily lives? With these questions in mind we sought a distinctive programme within the muncipal gallery space, that would introduce academic research in art, design and architecture beyond the university in innovative ways

    Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder diagnosis and counselling

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    The Foetal Alcohol Syndrome has long gone unrecognised and undiagnosed in Australia. In the last few years of the 21st Century (2010-14) health practitioners are finally seeking ways of diagnosing the effects of alcohol in pregnancy on the next generation. The author offers a power point presentation which gives guidance on making an accurate diagnosis

    Family policy and gender-role attitudes in Germany - A quantitative analysis of the relationship between public policy and public opinion

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    Title: Family policy and gender-role attitudes in Germany Author: Catriona Hansbauer Supervisor: Prof. Björn Halleröd Semester: Spring 2015 Using data from the 1991-2012 German General Social Survey, this thesis examines the relationship between family policy reform and gender-role attitudes among different socio-demographic groups in Germany. The research question is: What is the relationship between family policy reform and changing attitudes toward gender roles? More specifically the thesis ask: What is the directionality of the interaction between policy change and mass preferences and to what extent does social class matter in this relationship? Based on previous research it is argued that the attitudes of the upper class play a more important role compared to the attitudes of the lower and middle class. The empirical analysis shows that, overall, gender-role attitudes have become less traditional in Germany since the beginning of the 1990s. It is also shown that the majority of the policy reforms have created more incentives for mothers to re-enter the labour force. However, the empirical results do not allow any conclusions about the directionality of the relationship between policy change and attitudes, since the attitudinal change has been constant over the observed period of time. Moreover, there is no clear evidence that upper class attitudes have been more important for policy-makers than the attitudes of the lower and the middle class

    Thinking the Feminist Vegetal Turn in the Shadow of Douglas-firs: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands

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    Catriona Sandilands is an environmental literary critic and ecocultural scholar whose work brings together questions of ecology, gender, and sexuality, and multispecies biopolitics. She coined the term queer ecologies to describe and intervene in the manifold intersections running between sexuality, nature, and power in contemporary ecological conversations. The concept has made a powerful contribution to feminist and queer environmental scholarship, and to the larger environmental humanities. An intuitive gardener as well as plant scholar, she writes about plants in a unique way that pairs wonder about botanical materiality and evolutionary history with a concern about the biopolitical mechanisms that govern both vegetal and other, nonhuman and human, forms of life. Cate is a professor of environmental studies at York University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999) as well as over eighty essays, reviews, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. She edited, with Bruce Erickson, the much-celebrated scholarly volume Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010); her edited collection of creative writing Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times was published in September 2019. Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka caught up with Cate on Galiano Island, British Columbia, to discuss the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us.</p

    Collecting metadata from institutional repositories

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    The purpose of this article is to review metadata issues identified in recent research carried out in Scotland on services based on metadata aggregation via OAI-PMH, and to examine the role of collection-level description in managing ingest to harvested repositories, subsequent harvesting by secondary aggregators, and the contextualisation of institutional and aggregated repositories in the wider information retrieval environment. The paper reviews the output of several projects involving institutional repositories and collection-level description in Scotland. Collection-level description is a useful tool for aggregator services, but further work is required to accommodate information about the manipulation of metadata sets. Communities need to consider how best to incorporate structured collection information within the OAI-PMH for their specific purposes. The paper shows the importance of recent developments in collection description metadata for implementors of OAI-PMH services, building on the simple placeholders for such metadata allowed by the protocol

    High Intensity Interval Training As A Novel Treatment For Impaired Awareness Of Hypoglycaemia In People With Type 1 Diabetes (Hit4hypos):a randomised parallel-group study

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    Aims/hypothesis: Impaired awareness of hypoglycaemia (IAH) in type 1 diabetes may develop through a process referred to as habituation. Consistent with this, a single bout of high intensity interval exercise as a novel stress stimulus improves counterregulatory responses (CRR) to next-day hypoglycaemia, referred to as dishabituation. This longitudinal pilot study investigated whether 4 weeks of high intensity interval training (HIIT) has sustained effects on counterregulatory and symptom responses to hypoglycaemia in adults with type 1 diabetes and IAH.Methods: HIT4HYPOS was a single-centre, randomised, parallel-group study. Participants were identified using the Scottish Diabetes Research Network (SDRN) and from diabetes outpatient clinics in NHS Tayside, UK. The study took place at the Clinical Research Centre, Ninewells Hospital and Medical School, Dundee, UK. Participants were aged 18–55 years with type 1 diabetes of at least 5 years’ duration and HbA 1c levels &lt;75 mmol/mol (&lt;9%). They had IAH confirmed by a Gold score ≥4, modified Clarke score ≥4 or Dose Adjustment For Normal Eating [DAFNE] hypoglycaemia awareness rating of 2 or 3, and/or evidence of recurrent hypoglycaemia on flash glucose monitoring. Participants were randomly allocated using a web-based system to either 4 weeks of real-time continuous glucose monitoring (RT-CGM) or RT-CGM+HIIT. Participants and investigators were not masked to group assignment. The HIIT programme was performed for 20 min on a stationary exercise bike three times a week. Hyperinsulinaemic–hypoglycaemic (2.5 mmol/l) clamp studies with assessment of symptoms, hormones and cognitive function were performed at baseline and after 4 weeks of the study intervention. The predefined primary outcome was the difference in hypoglycaemia-induced adrenaline (epinephrine) responses from baseline following RT-CGM or RT-CGM+HIIT.Results: Eighteen participants (nine men and nine women) with type 1 diabetes (median [IQR] duration 27 [18.75–32] years) and IAH were included, with nine participants randomised to each group. Data from all study participants were included in the analysis. During the 4 week intervention there were no significant mean (SEM) differences between RT-CGM and RT-CGM+HIIT in exposure to level 1 (28 [7] vs 22 [4] episodes, p=0.45) or level 2 (9 [3] vs 4 [1] episodes, p=0.29) hypoglycaemia. The CGM-derived mean glucose level, SD of glucose and glucose management indicator (GMI) did not differ between groups. During the hyperinsulinaemic–hypoglycaemic clamp studies, mean (SEM) change from baseline was greater for the noradrenergic responses (RT-CGM vs RT-CGM+HIIT: −988 [447] vs 514 [732] pmol/l, p=0.02) but not the adrenergic responses (–298 [687] vs 1130 [747] pmol/l, p=0.11) in those participants who had undergone RT-CGM+HIIT. There was a benefit of RT-CGM+HIIT for mean (SEM) change from baseline in the glucagon CRR to hypoglycaemia (RT-CGM vs RT-CGM+HIIT: 1 [4] vs 16 [6] ng/l, p=0.01). Consistent with the hormone response, the mean (SEM) symptomatic response to hypoglycaemia (adjusted for baseline) was greater following RT-CGM+HIIT (RT-CGM vs RT-CGM+HIIT: −4 [2] vs 0 [2], p&lt;0.05).Conclusions/interpretation: In this pilot clinical trial in people with type 1 diabetes and IAH, we found continuing benefits of HIIT for overall hormonal and symptomatic CRR to subsequent hypoglycaemia. Our findings also suggest that HIIT may improve the glucagon response to insulin-induced hypoglycaemia.Trial registration: ISRCTN15373978. Funding: Sir George Alberti Fellowship from Diabetes UK (CMF) and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].</p
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