Search

Forgotten, concealed histories can return with a vengeance to haunt the imagination of a nation. This article explores the seldom-discussed history of the abduction, long-term imprisonment and falsified burial of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from Edinburgh by allies of her estranged husband, and then slowly transported to St Kilda where she spent the following nine years. It is a tale upon which James Boswell commented when he toured Scotland with Samuel Johnson, and which, in the wake of Boswell's commentary, entered the Gothic imaginary, first through the romances of Ann Radcliffe. Although marital imprisonment was sadly all too widespread during the eighteenth century, with numerous sources to choose from, the history of Lady Grange, blocked for four decades after her death, returned to haunt the pages of romances and periodical articles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After examining what James Boswell wrote about Lady Grange, the article focuses on two romances of Ann Radcliffe, her 1789 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and her 1790 A Sicilian Romance. The article then looks at William Erskine's 1798 Epistle from Lady Grange and concludes by reflecting upon the unblocking of the story in the nineteenth-century periodical press.

Introduction:\ud Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is difficult to diagnose. An accurate blood biomarker could prompt specialist referral or be deployed in future screening. In earlier retrospective studies, SOMAscan proteomics (Somalogic, Boulder, CO) and fibulin-3 seemed highly accurate, but SOMAscan has not been validated prospectively and subsequent fibulin-3 data have been contradictory.\ud \ud Methods:\ud A multicenter prospective observational study was performed in 22 centers, generating a large intention-to-diagnose cohort. Blood sampling, processing, and diagnostic assessment were standardized, including a 1-year follow-up. Plasma fibulin-3 was measured using two enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (CloudClone [used in previous studies] and BosterBio, Pleasanton, CA). Serum proteomics was measured using the SOMAscan assay. Diagnostic performance (sensitivity at 95% specificity, area under the curve [AUC]) was benchmarked against serum mesothelin (Mesomark, Fujirebio Diagnostics, Malvern, PA). Biomarkers were correlated against primary tumor volume, inflammatory markers, and asbestos exposure.\ud \ud Results:\ud A total of 638 patients with suspected pleural malignancy (SPM) and 110 asbestos-exposed controls (AECs) were recruited. SOMAscan reliably differentiated MPM from AECs (75% sensitivity, 88.2% specificity, validation cohort AUC 0.855) but was not useful in patients with differentiating non-MPM SPM. Fibulin-3 (by BosterBio after failed CloudClone validation) revealed 7.4% and 11.9% sensitivity at 95% specificity in MPM versus non-MPM SPM and AECs, respectively (associated AUCs 0.611 [0.557–0.664], p = 0.0015) and 0.516 [0.443–0.589], p = 0.671), both inferior to mesothelin. SOMAscan proteins correlated with inflammatory markers but not with asbestos exposure. Neither biomarker correlated with tumor volume.\ud \ud Conclusions:\ud SOMAscan may prove useful as a future screening test for MPM in asbestos-exposed persons. Neither fibulin-3 nor SOMAscan should be used for diagnosis or pathway stratification.

Objective: EMS use of lights and sirens has long been employed in EMS systems, despite an increased risk of motor vehicle collisions associated with their use. The specific aims of this study were ...

The Czech Republic spa industry has deep historical roots and traditions. This links to cultural and social life, high quality care and treatments. This research examines the challenges of the spa ...

Noninvasive ventilation (NIV), including bilevel positive airway pressure and continuous positive airway pressure, is a safe and important therapeutic option in the management of prehospital respiratory distress. NAEMSP recommends:NIV should be used in the management of prehospital patients with respiratory failure, such as those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and pulmonary edema.NIV is a safe intervention for use by Emergency Medical Technicians.Medical directors must assure adequate training in NIV, including appropriate patient selection, NIV system operation, administration of adjunctive medications, and assessment of clinical response.Medical directors must implement quality assessment and improvement programs to assure optimal application of and outcomes from NIV.Novel NIV methods such as high-flow nasal cannula and helmet ventilation may have a role in prehospital care.

Research supervision is the highest level of teaching for academics. Yet, in many cases, academics are allocated supervision without any formal training. For many supervisors, their supervision approach will be a mirror of what they have experienced themselves at post-graduate levels. Many supervisors consider that this form of teaching is stressful and onerous due to the responsibility placed on it by the Higher Education Institution and the student ultimately. What can be done to support supervisors in their supervisory journey? There is a void in the academic literature on research supervision with scant aids available to the supervisor (Cullen, 2009). Brew and Boud (1995) outline the importance of instructor knowledge; however, supervisors only gain extensive supervisory experience over the years. The aim of this study is to better understand the supervisory process. Data was gathered from 12 lecturers engaged in supervision across various disciplines. Findings indicate that supervisors need to adopt and continually change to differing circumstances and different student personalities while supervising. It is essential that formal supervisory training be provided for all supervisors. The findings from this evaluation are novel and will be beneficial to research supervisors across various disciplines. Keywords: Research Supervision, Multi-Disciplinary, Reflection.

The act of writing letters, rehearsing scenes that precede a calamitous event, can in itself become a form of valuable catharsis. This essay explores the ways in which Mary Shelley’s correspondence rehearses the scenes of her tragic circumstances as much to herself as to her addressee, and investigates how letters became to her a way in which she tested the contours of her grief, replaying the scenes and spaces that came before and after the death of Percy Shelley. Always intrigued by the forms and shortcomings of correspondence, Mary Shelley tested her views on letter-writing both in her frequent correspondence and in her fiction. Her letters and literature, I argue, work in close symbiosis, illustrating everywhere how they inform and converse with each other, from Frankenstein (1818) through to the grief-laden The Last Man (1826) and beyond.

This study has addressed and identified the problems in managing the existing emergency supply chain of Bangladesh in all phases of operation in terms of the primary drivers of the supply chain. It has also attempted to conceptualize and suggest an effective emergency supply chain. In this context, a thorough field investigation in several districts was conducted among the employees of the organizations sharing common information with similar protocols and implications (interoperable). Information was collected from the employees of all the participating organizations involved in disaster management through a semi-structured questionnaire based survey. The respondents addressed and illustrated several interconnected reasons which are inhibiting proper forecasting, procurement, storage, identification of affected people, and distribution. The respondents pointed out that the mismatching of objectives in the different organizations resulted in non-interoperability among the participating organizations. These issues are related to the malfunctioning of management with multidimensional organizational conflicts. Reflecting those issues, an emergency supply chain for disaster management is proposed in this study.

The main objective of this study is to develop the scale items of consumers’ attitudes toward Facebook advertisements and to theorize consumers’ attitudinal behaviour. To undertake this study, a research assistant was appointed, who is also an active member of Facebook, to introduce a message about the product Samsung Tab S, and to pass it to other members of their network. From this experiment, different members of their network participated in generating, passing, and receiving messages to develop a preliminary structured perception which was converted to generate scale items to measure attitude. Then an independent empirical study was conducted among members of a social network to verify and validate these scale items and their underlying constructs. From the findings in this study, it is identified that attitudes toward social network advertisement, i.e., any effort to communicate messages about products among network members, who are also consumers of different products, is formed and persuaded by hedonic motivation (HM), source derogation (SD), self-concept (SC), message informality (MI), and experiential messages (EM).

This essay takes a close look at the way Alain Mabanckou positions himself vis-à-vis discipline and market by way of his negotiations of a range of terms—French, francophone, postcolonial, and world literature—and the ways that such disciplinarity and appeal might be generated in his first major novel, Blue White Red. How Mabanckou picks his way through these intercalating terms speaks to the appeal and centrality of his work in a world literature canon. The authors argue that Mabanckou quite consciously and effectively makes use of the figures of allegory and parable from a distinctly biblical context, mapping the permutations and vicissitudes of his protagonist's rise and fall in fortunes to the life and narrative of Saint Paul—primarily his conversion and his epistolary interventions in the shape of a universal(ized) Christianity. The authors ground this Pauline allegory in Alain Badiou's own mobilization of Saint Paul as the engineer and emissary of a certain kind of antiphilosophical intervention. This parallel thereby foregrounds the liminality of the transnational African emigrant and his or her struggles with identity, citizenship, economics, and esteem in the novelistic form, which is read as a complex cautionary tale about the erosion and challenges to those transnational aspirations of success and seamless transnational citizenship. In this manner, Blue White Red disempowers narratives that blindly valorize emigration, and the text serves as a kind of epistle to those whose aspirations require self-conscious blindness to the complexities and hurdles to effortless movement across borders in the globalized economy.

This novel research pivoted around a collaborative cyclical learning experience between businesses in a City Centre scape and a local Higher Education Institution. This concept provided for a dual aspect to learning; third level MBA students in parallel with business operatives in a City. The students were tasked with addressing a business problem in cooperation with City Hall and to write a ‘service charter for this city’, while being assessed for progression for their MBA. This Collaborative experiential learning (Kolb, & Kolb, 2017) centred on a group of 22 MBA students while they interacted with 20 businesses in a European City to research, develop and write a service charter. Details of the development of the charter per se are not dealt with in this paper, just the experience of its development by the students and business alike. Finding novel ways to assess third level students is always a challenge for Higher Education Institutions. Imagine the opportunity of being placed at the fulcrum of learning and business development through a dual aspect collaborative learning challenge and experiential learning. An experimental approach was afforded to MBA level 9 students when they were tasked with writing a ‘Service Charter ‘for their City – while in parallel, being assessed through ‘problem solving’ for 5 ECTS credits with the third level partner. The dual aspect of learning and co-creation between businesses and college began when the students sought to solve a problem for City businesses and find a solution to their problem and reflect on it, and the second, when a recommendation came from the research that the businesses needed to undertake further training in order to implement the plan of the final City Service Charter.

Covid-19, a corona virus, has maintained its momentum in spreading among communities. In this context of social crisis, this study seeks to identify the reasons for the partial failure to fulfill the intended goal of lockdown, and to formulate an inclusive behavioral model reflecting comprehensive human behavior and social psychology. In order to answer the research questions, this study has conducted extensive interviews among individuals who were targets of the lockdown system. From this exploratory and qualitative investigation, researchers have recognized four paradigms as the key to understanding human behavior and social psychology in violating lockdown as a social isolation system during this period of crisis. The identified parameters depicting social behavior are: Derogation and Argument (SDA), Tangible Need and Deficiency (TND), Intangible Desire and Expectancy (IDE), and Evaluation of Benefit and Loss (UBL). Finally, as a comprehensive guideline, a grounded theory of the social behavior ‘paradigm for lockdown violation (PLV)’ is explored as the reason for the violation of the social system.

The relatively ignored ‘dark side’ of reward management is explored here: its under-researched and under-reported unintended and negative outcomes. Informed by a sociologically-derived three-part frame of reference (Vaughan 1999), we consider the dark-side phenomena inherent in normative reward management approaches. While the need to address methodological barriers to relevant empirical research is factored in, the chapter concludes with seven suggested investigative propositions.

I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand, (Asian Proverb). The context of this research is the examinination of teaching practice through the lens of ‘microteaching’, thus affording the opportunity to reflect on and evaluate one’s personal delivery with the view to instigating better actions for practice in the future. This study specifically contributes to a novel critical enhancement of level 9 teaching delivery where the cohort are adult learners. The focus of this evaluation on current practices is to establish where improvements could be made to teaching delivery through the direct scrutiny of peers. Reflection on the feedback and on the sessions was reviewed and recommendations were embraced and operationalised. The empirical data was gathered through three peer review microteaching sessions that were recorded and where feedback was given after each session. The microteaching was repeated once a month over a 3-month interval process. Feedback from the sessions was analysed and recommendations for practice were developed. These recommendations will be considered, and relevant resultant changes will be made to improve future practice at level 9. It is envisaged that the findings of this research will better inform the author, the academic plan, and the faculty for future teaching practice. Keywords: Microteaching, Instructor Evaluation, Reflection.

Any reader invited to imagine a Gothic novel set in Spain during the Romantic period may be forgiven for picturing lascivious priests, helpless male and female victims, and a harsh, impassive Spanish Inquisition which revels in meting out spectacular punishment to those characters who transgress its strictly encoded Catholic laws. But as this essay argues, representations of Spain in the popular Gothic novel during the Romantic period were more complex than this initial picture suggests due to evolving military alliances and further travel in Spain during this period.

This paper examines ‘Enquiry Based Learning’ (EBL) as an engagement strategy for assessment at ‘taught masters’ level 9. The master students in question are adult learners in full time employment and the empirical data was gathered from these students. First, an outline of the key features of EBL is presented and, from there, an investigation of how it is viewed when applied to a specific problem statement by the masters students. EBL creates a memorable atmosphere in the classroom and encourages deep learning (Ramsden, 1992). EBL also encourages active learning, which is more enjoyable for the students (Eison, 2010), especially adults – offering more control (Whowell, 2006). Learning should not be passive or a spectator sport; students learn most effectively by active engagement (Karmas, 2006), with an interesting project, hence, the use of EBL. It is vital that we move beyond a conceptualisation of education as the simple acquisition of knowledge to one which equally emphasises, nurtures and assesses innovation and expertise in the utilisation and application of knowledge, (Boland, 2010). The findings of this research are relevant and important as they inform practice and feed into future programme reviews when considering the inclusion of EBL for assessment.

Consumers are increasingly discerning about food choices. This research explores the attitudes of Irish consumers to local and artisan food products, and, in particular, if they would consider the supermarket environment as a location of choice for the purchase of these foods. This research applied a quantitative methodology to address the research question. 126,110 supermarket customers were contacted through an Irish supermarket loyalty data base, which resulted in 14,646 completed responses. This rich data allowed the researchers access to the attitude of Ireland’s consumers to speciality local food products, normally absent from the supermarket shelf. 98.8% of respondents would like to be able to purchase local food products in a supermarket, and 76% of respondents expect to pay either less than, or the same price for local food products, as they do for other similar standard foods. This research will be of direct benefit to parties involved with the grocery retail sector in Ireland.