The place of sperm DNA fragmentation testing in current day fertility management

In this debate article, I am going to set out the case that sperm DNA fragmentation testing is essential in current day fertility management because-
• Our current semen analysis testing is unfit for purpose
• Sperm DNA damage testing has strong associations with every fertility check point
• Sperm DNA damage testing has strong associations with miscarriage
• Sperm DNA testing can explain ‘unexplained’ infertility
• There are reasons why sperm with poor DNA are successful in ICSI
• There are no non-invasive sperm function tests that provide the same information
• We need to take a fresh look at the ‘evidence’ against sperm DNA testing
• We have no reason to wait. There are benefits for clinics and couples alike.

Preferences for a third-trimester ultrasound scan in a low-risk obstetric population: a discrete choice experiment

Objective: Establish maternal preferences for a third-trimester ultrasound scan in a healthy, low-risk pregnant population.

Design: Cross-sectional study incorporating a discrete choice experiment.

Setting: A large, urban maternity hospital in Northern Ireland.

Participants: One hundred and forty-six women in their second trimester of pregnancy.

Methods: A discrete choice experiment was designed to elicit preferences for four attributes of a third-trimester ultrasound scan: health-care professional conducting the scan, detection rate for abnormal foetal growth, provision of non-medical information, cost. Additional data collected included age, marital status, socio-economic status, obstetric history, pregnancy-specific stress levels, perceived health and whether pregnancy was planned. Analysis was undertaken using a mixed logit model with interaction effects.

Main outcome measures: Women's preferences for, and trade-offs between, the attributes of a hypothetical scan and indirect willingness-to-pay estimates.

Results: Women had significant positive preference for higher rate of detection, lower cost and provision of non-medical information, with no significant value placed on scan operator. Interaction effects revealed subgroups that valued the scan most: women experiencing their first pregnancy, women reporting higher levels of stress, an adverse obstetric history and older women.

Conclusions: Women were able to trade on aspects of care and place relative importance on clinical, non-clinical outcomes and processes of service delivery, thus highlighting the potential of using health utilities in the development of services from a clinical, economic and social perspective. Specifically, maternal preferences exhibited provide valuable information for designing a randomized trial of effectiveness and insight for clinical and policy decision makers to inform woman-centred care.

A shared care model pilot for palliative home care in a rural area:Impact on symptoms, distress, and place of death

Context: Shared care models integrating family physician services with interdisciplinary palliative care specialist teams are critical to improve access to quality palliative home care and address multiple domains of end-of-life issues and needs. Objectives: To examine the impact of a shared care pilot program on the primary outcomes of symptom severity and emotional distress (patient and family separately) over time and, secondarily, the concordance between patient preferences and place of death. Methods: An inception cohort of patients (n = 95) with advanced, progressive disease, expected to die within six months, were recruited from three rural family physician group practices (21 physicians) and followed prospectively until death or pilot end. Serial measurement of symptoms, emotional distress (patient and family), and preferences for place of death was performed, with analysis of changes in distress outcomes assessed using t-tests and general linear models. Results: Symptoms trended toward improvement, with a significant reduction in anxiety from baseline to 14 days noted. Symptom and emotional distress were maintained below high severity (7-10), and a high rate of home death compared with population norms was observed. Conclusion: Future controlled studies are needed to examine outcomes for shared care models with comparison groups. Shared care models build on family physician capacity and as such are promising in the development of palliative home care programs to improve access to quality palliative home care and foster health system integration. © 2011 U.S. Cancer Pain Relief Committee. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Digital Exposure of English Place-names (DEEP)

Place-names are a fundamental concept in all academic collections: everything happens somewhere. Contemporary place-names are comprehensively represented in digital gazetteer and geospatial web services such as GeoNames. However, despite millions of pounds of investment by JISC and other agencies in historical online resources in recent years, there is currently no equivalent for historic place-names. This project will digitize the entire 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Names (SEPN), the ultimate authority on historic place-names in England, and make its 4 million forms available.

JISC Workshop Report: E-Research Resources, Tools and Methods for Historic Place Name Analysis

A substantial amount of the 'critical mass' of digital data available to scholarship contains place-names, and it is now recognised that spatial and temporal data points, including place-names, are a vital part of the e-research infrastructure that supports the use, re-use and advanced analysis of data using ICT tools and methods. Place-names can also be linked semantically to contribute to the web of data, and to enrich content through linking existing data, and identifying new collections for digitization to strategically enhance existing digital collections. However, existing e-projects rely on modern gazetteers limiting them to the modern and the near-contemporary. This workshop explored how to further integrate the wealth of historical place-name scholarship, and the resulting digital resources generated within UK academia, so enabling integration of local knowledge over much longer periods.

‘5 ways to say your prayers’:The Art and Architecture of Curating People, Place and Creativity in a Post-Conflict Context. The Shed, Galway, Ireland 18th June – 23rd July 2013 Includes: 1. Co-Curation of Exhibition with Peter Mutschler, Director of PS² and 2. Morrow’s individual work as part of the exhibition, entitled ‘Departures & Arrivals: Academic Interactions with the Activities, Artists and Archive of PS² ’

This exhibition profiles the curatorial approach of PS² and the work of creative practitioners who have practiced alongside and with the organisation. PS² is a Belfast-based, voluntary arts organisation that initiates projects inside and outside its project space. It seeks to develop a socio-spatial practice that responds to the post-conflict context of Northern Ireland, with particular focus on active intervention and social interaction between local people, creative practitioners, multidisciplinary groups and theorists.
Morrow has collaborated with PS² since its inception in 2005, acting as curatorial advisor specifically on the projects that occur outside PS² . She regards her involvement as a parallel action to her pedagogical explorations within architectural education.

Morrow's personal contribution to the Exhibition aimed to:
-interrogate PS² spatial projects
-contextualise PS² curatorial practice
-open up the analytical framework and extend to similar local practices

The Shed, Galway, Ireland is a joint Galway City Arts and Harbour Company venture. The exhibition subsequently travelled to DarcSpace Gallery, Dublin (Sept 2013).

An Ethical Production of Place:A Case for Economy in Architectural Design

Architects typically interpret Heidegger to mean that dwelling in the Black Forest, was more authentic than living in an industrialised society however we cannot turn back the clock so we are confronted with the reality of modernisation. Since the Second World War production has shifted from material to immaterial assets. Increasingly place is believed to offer resistance to this fluidity, but this belief can conversely be viewed as expressing a sublimated anxiety about our role in the world – the need to create buildings that are self-consciously contextual suggests that we may no longer be rooted in material places, but in immaterial relations.
This issue has been pondered by David Harvey in his paper From Place to Space and Back Again where he argues that the role of place in legitimising identity is ultimately a political process, as the interpretation of its meaning is dependent on whose interpretation it is. Doreen Massey has found that different classes of people are more or less mobile and that mobility is related to class and education rather than to nationality or geography. These thinkers point to a different set of questions than the usual space/place divide – how can we begin to address the economic mediation of spatial production to develop an ethical production of place? Part of the answer is provided by the French architectural practice Lacaton Vassal in their book Plus. They ask themselves how to produce more space for the same cost so that people can enjoy a better quality of life. Another French practitioner, Patrick Bouchain, has argued that architect’s fees should be inversely proportional to the amount of material resources that they consume. These approaches use economics as a starting point for generating architectural form and point to more ethical possibilities for architectural practice

Exchange Place

Novel

Hemostatic alterations with exercise conditioning in NIDDM

Various parameters of coagulation and fibrinolysis were measured in 13 men (aged 54 +/- 3 yr) with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) before and after 12-14 wk of exercise training. Subjects exercised for 30 min 3 times/wk at 70% of maximum O2 consumption (VO2max). Training increased VO2max by 12.5% but did not alter body weight, relative body fat, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, or high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Slight downward trends were apparent for fasting glucose and insulin, but glycosylated hemoglobin was unchanged. There were no changes in coagulation parameters of plasminogen, hematocrit, or alpha 2-antiplasmin. Plasma fibrinogen (303 +/- 24.2 vs. 256 +/- 12.3 mg/dl) and fibronectin (380 +/- 41.9 vs. 301 +/- 22.2 micrograms/ml) were significantly reduced (P less than 0.02) by exercise conditioning. Three assays of fibrinolytic activity (tissue plasminogen activator, euglobulin lysis time, and an isotopic measure of fibrinolysis) confirmed that neither basal fibrinolysis nor the fibrinolytic responses to venous occlusion and maximal exercise were significantly altered. Exercise conditioning may have antithrombotic effects in NIDDM by reducing plasma fibrinogen and fibronectin. Although the significance of the fall in fibronectin awaits further studies, the reduction in plasma fibrinogen gives a rationale for the use of exercise training in men with NIDDM.

Exploring consumer's preferences for farmed sea bream

Sea bream (Sparus aurata) production plays a significant part in Italian aquaculture, contributing to almost 18% of national pisciculture sales revenue. In recent years, Italian firms faced higher competition from countries with lower production costs. This prompted responses toward both cost reduction and product differentiation. The objective of this study was to investigate the preferences of Italian consumers for sea bream from fish farms, with a focus on aspects of product differentiation as gleaned from the analysis of the market situation: price, product origin, type and place of fish farming, and, in particular, type of feed. Data were collected with a consumers’ survey using personal interviews conducted on a questionnaire that included a choice experiment. Consumer preferences were analyzed with choice models based on stated preference data. The models made it possible to evaluate the potential of products with different combinations of attributes for which there is currently no market information available. In particular, the country of origin emerged as an important element of consumer choice, and to a lesser degree, organic certification and fish farming in marine cages also play a relevant role and may command a price premium.

Food miles or carbon emissions? Exploring labeling preference for food transport footprint with a stated choice study

The ecological footprint of food transport can be communicated using carbon dioxide emissions (CO2 label) or by providing information about both the length of time and the mileage travelled (food miles label). We use stated choice data to estimate conventional unobserved taste heterogeneity models and extend them to a specification that also addresses attribute nonattendance. The implied posterior distributions of the marginal willingness to pay values are compared graphically and are used in validation regressions. We find strong bimodality of taste distribution as the emerging feature, with different groups of subjects having low and high valuations for these labels. The best fitting model shows that CO2 and food miles valuations are much correlated. CO2 valuations can be high even for those respondents expressing low valuations for food miles. However, the reverse is not true. Taken together, the results suggest that consumers tend to value the CO2 label at least as much and sometimes more than the food miles label.