Medical Students' views of a career in Geriatric Medicine; Multi-Centre Qualitative Analysis

Medical students frequently have negative preconceptions of a career in Geriatric Medicine. In ta qualitative analysis of the free text from 789 response from Medical students in Scotland and Northern Ireland, we show that clinical attachment seffectively challenge negative student views and more positive statements about future careers in Geriatric Medicine emerged at the end of the attachment.

Enacting National Concerns: Accounts of the 2002 Golden Jubilee

Although the study of national identity in social psychology has examined the various ways in which the national group is ‘imagined’, little attention has been paid to the many collective national commemorations, celebrations and rituals of state assumed to unite the nation. This is surprising given the number of celebrations and commemorations which fill the calendars of modern nations
throughout the world and which are assumed by social scientists to play some part in the reproduction of the national community. Taking the British Royal Golden Jubilee celebrations of 2002, the present study examines how understandings of Anglo-British national identity are manifest in conversational
interviews during and after these events. In line with previous examinations of Anglo-Britishness, our respondents typically resisted imagining the national community as a homogenous whole and distanced themselves from depictions of the Jubilee as a nationalistic event. Support for the Jubilee was contingent upon the event being apolitical and inclusive.We suggest that such collective
national events could potentially facilitate ways of imagining the national community in terms of diversity and inclusivity rather than homogeneity and exclusivity.

Rewarding Merit in Judicial Appointments?: A research project undertaken by the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast for the Northern Ireland Judicial Appointments Commission

This research involved carrying out an online survey using a number of vignettes/scenarios to explore understandings and attitudes to judicial appointments. This sort of survey is relatively novel in this context and provided a useful way of understanding how a range of factors such as merit and seniority, career paths and connections, as well as gender and visibility, are perceived as operating within the appointments system. The research also involved a series of focus group interviews with a number of individuals with various professional backgrounds and at different levels of seniority. These, and a limited number of individual interviews, afforded an opportunity to explore more closely some of the themes arising from the scenarios as well as a chance to look in some depth at some of the views and concerns of a range of members of the legal professions.

Building upon the previous research project, this work was less concerned with revisiting earlier themes and more interested in exploring how the idea of “merit” as a governing factor in judicial appointment is seen as working in practice, and whether it is perceived as being most likely to be found within particular career profiles. We also investigated issues such as the possible development of formal and informal pathways to a judicial career and practical problems such as how an applicant might become known to the senior judiciary, and the importance of this. Overall our interest was primarily in developing an understanding of how gender is perceived to operate in the appointments process and how any barriers to recruiting women, particularly to the senior judiciary, could be further broken down.

Autonomic management of non-functional concerns in distributed & parallel application programming

An approach to the management of non-functional concerns in massively parallel and/or distributed architectures that marries parallel programming patterns with autonomic computing is presented. The necessity and suitability of the adoption of autonomic techniques are evidenced. Issues arising in the implementation of autonomic managers taking care of multiple concerns and of coordination among hierarchies of such autonomic managers are discussed. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

LIBERO:A framework for autonomic management of multiple non-functional concerns

We describe a lightweight prototype framework (LIBERO) designed for experimentation with behavioural skeletons-components implementing a well-known parallelism exploitation pattern and a rule-based autonomic manager taking care of some non-functional feature related to pattern computation. LIBERO supports multiple autonomic managers within the same behavioural skeleton, each taking care of a different non-functional concern. We introduce LIBERO-built on plain Java and JBoss-and discuss how multiple managers may be coordinated to achieve a common goal using a two-phase coordination protocol developed in earlier work. We present experimental results that demonstrate how the prototype may be used to investigate autonomic management of multiple, independent concerns. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.