1,661 research outputs found
Audiences' willingness to participate in Welsh-language media
No full textPhDContemporary media audiences expect to be able to interact with content, but in a minority language context, audience participation presents challenges related to audiences’ linguistic confidence. This thesis focuses on Wales, where media producers have suggested that audiences are often reluctant to interact with broadcast and online content in Welsh. To begin to understand this unwillingness, and how it might be overcome, the concept of willingness to participate (WTP) is coined as an extension of willingness to communicate (McCroskey & Baer 1985).
First, interviews with producers are analysed qualitatively to identify potential influences on audiences’ WTP. The analysis aims to assess the relative importance of various factors: audiences’ feelings of apprehension, self-perceived competence, language background and Welsh language ability, as well as the modality of participation (oral/written) and the level of demand placed on the audience.
Second, a questionnaire is designed and administered to 358 Welsh speakers, to examine audiences’ perceptions of different opportunities to participate in media content. A path model of WTP is proposed and tested using quantitative data from the survey. The results support the hypothesis that audiences’ apprehension and self-perceived competence predict WTP and that audience response varies according to the media context. While audiences’ Welsh language skills are important in explaining their WTP, other aspects of language background, such as Welsh language acquisition context, are found to be less important.
Third, the survey sample is grouped according to common patterns of WTP, to test whether the above effects are consistent across the population or whether different ‘types’ of audience exist. Using a combination of cluster analysis and thematic analysis of audience comments, four types of audience are proposed and described in detail. Finally, implications for sociolinguistic theory, language maintenance and media production practice are considered and recommendations made.Arts and Humanities Research Counci
Multisite pain and self-reported falls in older people:Systematic review and meta-analysis
No full text Background: Multisite pain and falls are common in older people, and isolated studies have identified multisite pain as a potential falls risk factor. This study aims to synthesise published literature to further explore the relationship between multisite pain and falls and to quantify associated risks. Methods: Bibliographic databases were searched from inception to December 2017. Studies of community-dwelling adults aged 50 years and older with a multisite pain measurement and a falls outcome were included. Two reviewers screened articles, undertook quality assessment and extracted data. Random-effects meta-analysis was used to pool the effect estimate (odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95%CI)). Heterogeneity was assessed by I 2 ; sensitivity analyses used adjusted risk estimates and exclusively longitudinal studies. Results: The search identified 49,577 articles, 3145 underwent abstract review, 22 articles were included in the systematic review and 18 were included in the meta-analysis. The unadjusted pooled OR of 1.82 (95%CI 1.55-2.13), demonstrating that those reporting multisite pain are at increased risk of falls, is supported by the adjusted pooled OR of 1.56 (95%CI 1.39-1.74). Multisite pain predicts future falls risk (OR = 1.74 (95%CI 1.57-1.93)). For high-quality studies, those reporting multisite pain have double the odds of a future fall compared to their pain-free counterparts. Conclusion: Multisite pain is associated with an increased future falls risk in community-dwelling older people. Increasing public awareness of multisite pain as a falls risk factor and advising health and social care professionals to identify older people with multisite pain to signpost accordingly will enable timely falls prevention strategies to be implemented. </p
Investigating multisite pain as a predictor of self-reported falls and falls requiring health care use in an older population:A prospective cohort study
No full textOlder people are continuing to fall despite fall prevention guidelines targeting known falls' risk factors. Multisite pain is a potential novel falls' risk factor requiring further exploration. This study hypothesises that: (1) an increasing number of pain sites and widespread pain predicts self-reported falls and falls recorded in primary and secondary healthcare records; (2) those relationships are independent of known falls' risk factors and putative confounders. This prospective cohort study linked data from self-completed questionnaires, primary care electronic health records, secondary care admission statistics and national mortality data. Between 2002-2005, self-completion questionnaires were mailed to community-dwelling individuals aged 50 years and older registered with one of eight general practices in North Staffordshire, UK(n = 26,129) yielding 18,497 respondents. 11,375 respondents entered the study; 4386 completed six year follow-up. Self-reported falls were extracted from three and six year follow-up questionnaires. Falls requiring healthcare were extracted from routinely collected primary and secondary healthcare data. Increasing number of pain sites increased odds of future 3 year (odds ratio 1.12 (95% confidence interval: 1.01-1.24)) and 6 year self-reported fall (odds ratio 1.02 (1.00-1.03)) and increased hazard of future fall requiring primary healthcare (hazard ratio 1.01 (1.00-1.03)). The presence of widespread pain increased odds of future 3 year (odds ratio 1.27 (0.92-1.75)) and 6 year fall (odds ratio 1.43(1.06-1.95)) and increased hazard of future fall requiring primary healthcare (hazard ratio 1.27(0.98-1.65)). Multisite pain was not associated with future fall requiring secondary care admission. Multisite pain must be included as a falls' risk factor in guidelines to ensure clinicians identify their older patients at risk of falls and employ timely implementation of current falls prevention strategies.</p
Mapping the Discipline of the Olympic Games An Author-Cocitation Analysis
No full textThe authors conducted an author cocitation analysis on prominent authors writing about the Olympics during the 1990s. Author cocitation is an established bibliometric technique that can be used to measure the relative similarities of topics written about by the cited authors. This enables a visual representation of the “intellectual space” of the discipline, in this case the Olympics, to be created for the period under review. So core and peripheral research areas are identified, along with their major contributors. The representation appears as a two-dimensional cluster-enhanced map. Subject expertise was then applied to the results to place labels on the generated clusters of authors and their topics
Summarising evidence of associations of COVID-19 with a future diagnosis of inflammatory rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases: a rapid review
No full textMusculoskeletal symptoms are commonly reported following acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It is unclear whether those with musculoskeletal symptoms subsequently develop inflammatory rheumatic musculoskeletal disease (iRMD). This review seeks to identify evidence for an association between acute COVID-19 and subsequent iRMD diagnosis. A rapid review of the literature using a systematic search of Medline, EMBASE and two COVID-19 databases was undertaken until August 2022. Case studies, case series, cross-sectional, case-control, and cohort studies reporting patients with an incident iRMD following COVID-19 were included. Title and abstract screening were conducted by one reviewer, and full text screening by two reviewers. Data extraction and quality appraisal were by one reviewer, with a second verifying. Study-type specific critical appraisal tools were used. Results were narratively synthesised. 80 studies were included (69 case reports, 10 case series and 1 cross-sectional study). Commonly reported iRMDs were ‘reactive arthropathies’ (studies=47), ‘inflammatory arthropathies unspecified’ (studies=18), rheumatoid arthritis (studies=12) and lupus erythematosus (studies=11). The cross-sectional study reported 37% of those with COVID-19 developed ‘post-covid arthritis.’ Time from diagnosis of COVID-19 to iRMD presentation ranged from 0-120 days. Several mechanisms were proposed to explain the association between COVID-19 and iRMD development: auto-immune processes, aberrant inflammatory responses, colonisation of joint spaces, direct damage from the SARS-CoV2 virus and genetic predisposition. The level of evidence of the studies included in this review was low, and the quality generally poor. Prospective observational studies are required to confirm associations and likely impact of post COVID-19 iRMDs at a population level
Golden-Mean and Secret Sharing Matroids
No full textMaximum-sized results are an important part of matroid theory, and results
currently exist for various classes of matroids. Archer conjectured that the
maximum-sized golden-mean matroids fall into three distinct classes, as op-
posed to the one class of all current results. We will prove a partial result
that we hope will lead to a full proof.
In the second part of this thesis, we look at secret sharing matroids, with a
particular emphasis on the class of group-induced p-representable matroids,
as introduced by Matúš. We give new proofs for results of Matúš', relating
to M(K₄), F₇ and F⁻₇. We show that the techniques used do not extend
in some natural ways, and pose some unanswered questions relating to the
structure of secret sharing matroids
"Not just supporting but leading": the involvement of the women of the South Wales coalfield in the 1984-85 Miners' Strike
No full textThe 1984-85 miners’ strike dramatically changed the face of the South Wales Valleys. This dissertation will show that the women’s groups that played such a crucial supportive role in it were not the homogenous entity that has often been portrayed. They shared some comparable features with similar groups in English pit villages but there were also qualitative differences between the South Wales groups and their English counterparts and between the different Welsh groups themselves. There is evidence of tensions between the Welsh groups and disputes with the communities they were trying to assist, as well as clashes with local miners’ lodges and the South Wales NUM. At the same time women’s support groups, various in structure and purpose but united in the aim of supporting the miners, challenged and shifted the balance of established gender roles
The miners’ strike evokes warm memories of communities bonding together to fight for their survival. This thesis investigates in detail the women involved in support groups to discover what impact their involvement made on their lives afterwards. Their role is contextualised by the long-standing tradition of Welsh women’s involvement in popular politics and industrial disputes; however, not all women discovered a new confidence arising from their involvement. But others did and for them this self-belief survived the strike and, in some cases, permanently altered their own lives. The activities of the women’s support groups confirmed changes in the social role of women that had been occurring since the 1960s in the coalfield communities of South Wales, and thereby contributed to a revision of the traditional notion of ‘communities’ which were changed by the very process of being defended
Victoria K, Delphine Seyrig et moi ou La petite chaise jaune : un matrimoine en conversion d’archives
No full textLe texte lauréat du Prix RFI Théâtre (2019) Victoria K, Delphine Seyrig et moi ou La petite chaise jaune (2021) de Valérie Cachard s’inscrit dans la mouvance de la « littérature hors du livre » (Rosenthal et Ruffel, 2010 : 4), où l’auteur·trice légitime la réception de son texte à travers une performance narrative. Après avoir interrogé la nature et le bien-fondé des archives intimes de Victoria K, lettres extraites de son journal intime abandonné dans sa maison, l’article s’intéresse aux allers-retours entre la fiction et le réel fictionnel qui systématisent une mémoire solidaire de la guerre civile en apparence fragmentaire. La performance du texte à Beyrouth par la dramaturge et son acolyte artistique Hadi Deaibes tend à éroder les dimensions sociopolitiques de l’archivage au profit d’une hybridation des identités scéniques. Cette contribution, coécrite par Noha Nemer et son amie de longue date Valérie Cachard, propose une réflexion sur l’expropriation discursive, esthétique et scénique d’une littérature intimiste.The award-winning text of the RFI Theater Prize (2019), Victoria K, Delphine Seyrig et moi ou La petite chaise jaune (2021) by Valérie Cachard, falls within the trend of “literature beyond the book” (“littérature hors du livre”; Rosenthal and Ruffel, 2010: 4), where the author legitimizes the reception of their text through a narrative performance. After questioning the nature and validity of the intimate archives of Victoria K – letters taken from her diary left behind in her house – the article focuses on the back-and-forth between fiction and fictional reality, which creates a cohesive memory of the seemingly fragmented civil war. The text’s performance in Beirut by the playwright and her artistic collaborator Hadi Deaibes tends to erode the sociopolitical dimensions of archiving in favor of a hybridization of stage identities. This contribution, co-written by Noha Nemer and her long-time friend Valérie Cachard, offers a reflection on the discursive, aesthetic, and scenic expropriation of intimate literature
On Maximum-Sized Golden-Mean Matroids
No full textA rank-r simple matroid is maximum-sized in a class if it has the largest number of elements out of all simple rank-r matroids in that class. Maximum-sized matroids have been classified for various classes of matroids: regular (Heller, 1957); dyadic (Kung and Oxley, 1988-90); k-regular (Semple, 1998); near-regular and sixth-root-of-unity (Oxley, Vertigan, and Whittle, 1998).
Golden-mean matroids are matroids that are representable over the golden-mean partial field. Equivalently, a golden-mean matroid is a matroid that is representable over GF(4) and GF(5).
Archer conjectured that there are three families of maximum-sized golden-mean matroids. This means that a proof of Archer’s conjecture is likely to be significantly more complex than the proofs of existing maximum-sized characterisations, as they all have only one family.
In this thesis, we consider the four following subclasses of golden-mean matroids: those that are lifts of regular matroids, those that are lifts of nearregular matroids, those that are golden-mean-graphic, and those that have a spanning clique. We close each of these classes under minors, and prove that Archer’s conjecture holds in each of them.
It is anticipated that the last of our theorems will lead to a proof of Archer’s conjecture for golden-mean matroids of sufficiently high rank
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