The contribution of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to understanding and promoting the interests of young people making the transition from care to adulthood

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) acknowledges that young people without parental care are entitled to special support and assistance from the State. In detailing their expectations, the UN Committee have issued Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children which recognise that State parties have a number of responsibilities towards care leavers. The paper explores how the UNCRC reporting process, and guidelines from the Committee outlining how States should promote the rights of young people making the transition from care to adulthood, can be used as an instrument to track global patterns of change in policy and practice. Content analysis of State Party Reports and Concluding Observations from 15 countries reveals that to date there has been limited engagement with understanding and promoting the needs of this group in the reporting process; although where a government is committed to developing legislation and practice then this does find its way into their national reports. Data supplied by affiliates of the International Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood from Care (INTRAC) reveals that national concerns, political ideology, public awareness, attitudes and knowledge of the vulnerability of care leavers influence service responses to protect and promote the rights of this group and the attention afforded to such issues in reports to the Committee. Findings also suggest that global governance is not simply a matter of top down influence. Future work on both promoting and monitoring of the impact of the UNCRC needs to recognise that what is in play is the management of a complex global/national dynamic with all its uneven development, levels of influence and with a range of institutional actors involved.

Encouraging and equipping students to engage critically with science in the news: what can we learn from the literature?

Many educational reforms have as one of their key goals the promotion of scientific literacy and they encourage engagement with science in the news as one aspect of this. The research indicates teachers using the news do so for a variety of reasons, sometimes with tangential links to the promotion of scientific literacy. Demonstrating the relevance of science to the world beyond the classroom or making links to socio-scientific issues and promoting discussion on ethical dilemmas are all seen as potential reasons for engaging with science–related news. However, media related issues are often not addressed. Increasingly the need for a more comprehensive approach, including, for example, teaching about media awareness in the context of science reporting, is highlighted. The steady growth of literature describing the use of science-related news along with research studies charting students’ responses to science news media has stimulated discussion and study of pedagogical issues and prompted this review. Key literature relevant to students’ engagement with science-related news reports has been contextualised and reviewed to identify core issues for teachers, teacher educators and curriculum planners. These are listed under the headings of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, the implications are considered and directions for further research suggested.

Students' awareness of and attitudes to AIDS

Students' attitudes to and knowledge and awareness of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) was assessed by questionnaire. The recent information campaign reached a high proportion of the sample of 1063 students and television was the most memorable medium. Students were generally aware that AIDS was not associated with social contact but there was confusion about the risk of infection from donating or receiving blood, with 17.9% of blood donors now less willing to donate blood. Most of the students were aware that the condom reduces the risk of spread of AIDS sexually but there was no indication of widespread condom usage among the 399 students who admitted they were sexually active; 39.1% of this group used condoms alone or with other protection. Almost half the sample (47.6%) would like to have the opportunity to have their blood tested for the AIDS virus; 96 students would prefer this to be at a clinic and 59 of them would not wish their family doctor to know the result. A high proportion of the sample considered that AIDS victims should be cared for at home or in a special hospice.

Resource utilization and cost analyses of home-based palliative care service provision:The Niagara West End-of-Life Shared-Care Project

Background: Increasing emphasis is being placed on the economics of health care service delivery - including home-based palliative care. Aim: This paper analyzes resource utilization and costs of a shared-care demonstration project in rural Ontario (Canada) from the public health care system's perspective. Design: To provide enhanced end-of-life care, the shared-care approach ensured exchange of expertise and knowledge and coordination of services in line with the understood goals of care. Resource utilization and costs were tracked over the 15 month study period from January 2005 to March 2006. Results: Of the 95 study participants (average age 71 years), 83 had a cancer diagnosis (87%); the non-cancer diagnoses (12 patients, 13%) included mainly advanced heart diseases and COPD. Community Care Access Centre and Enhanced Palliative Care Team-based homemaking and specialized nursing services were the most frequented offerings, followed by equipment/transportation services and palliative care consults for pain and symptom management. Total costs for all patient-related services (in 2007 CAN) were 1,625,658.07 - or 17,112.19 per patient/117.95 per patient day. Conclusion: While higher than expenditures previously reported for a cancer-only population in an urban Ontario setting, the costs were still within the parameters of the US Medicare Hospice Benefits, on a par with the per diem funding assigned for long-term care homes and lower than both average alternate level of care and hospital costs within the Province of Ontario. The study results may assist service planners in the appropriate allocation of resources and service packaging to meet the complex needs of palliative care populations. © 2012 The Author(s).

Knowledge work: Gender-blind or gender-biased?

Knowledge-intensive firms (KIFs) have been the subject of growing interest from researchers. However, investigations into the comparative experiences of men and women in KIFs remain sparse, and little is known about women's participation in the processes of innovation and knowledge exchange and combination that are core features of KIFs. The article reports on the findings of a study in the UK and Ireland involving 498 male and female knowledge workers in KIFs. Despite equal levels of qualification and experience, women are more likely to be in lower status and less secure jobs. They also predominantly occupy roles featuring less variety and autonomy than men and, despite comparable levels of knowledge exchange and combination, are less likely to be in a position to translate this into the innovative work behaviours necessary for career advancement. The findings suggest that women's experiences of and participation in knowledge processes within KIFs differ fundamentally from men's. © The Author(s) 2012.

Transgressing Contemporary Boundaries:The Narrator as True Custodian of Cultural Knowledge in Ulster Society

Historically in Gaelic culture, the bard was greatly valued and admired as an important and integral part of society. Travelled, schooled and specifically trained in their art, the bard helped ensure identity and reassurance for Gaelic families by grounding them both temporarily and spatially into their landscape. Entrusted with the duty and responsibility of recording place and event, the bards worked without writing and by transgressing man-made boundaries, travelled throughout the land weaving their histories into the very fabric of society.

Now no longer with us, we find ourselves without the distinguished chronicler to undertake this duty. Yet the responsibility of the Gaelic bard is one still shared by all artists today; to facilitate memory and identity, whether good or bad. Many Ulster writers, by happenstance and geography have found themselves located in a place of painful histories. An immediate difficulty for those local writers becomes manifest by being intrinsically implicated into those histories – whilst having first-hand knowledge and comprehension beyond that of the outsider, the local writer is automatically damned by association and relationship, thereby tarnishing their voice in comparison to the perceived impartiality of others.
Some writers however have successfully sought ways to escape this limitation and have worked in ways that can transgress the restrictions of prejudgement. John Hewitt, by purposely becoming a self-imposed tourist was able to distance himself to write impartially about the past, recognising that ’the place without its ghosts is a barren place.’1 In ‘The Colony’,2 tradition, peoples and mapping of the land are all narrated by Hewitt in a similar way to the Gaelic bardic topographic poems of Sean O'Dubhagain and Giolla Na Naomh O'Huidhrin3 in compiling a rich cultural atlas.

Similarly the Belfast poet and novelist Ciaran Carson also writes and records the city from an intermediary position; that of translator. Mediating between reader and aisling,4 Carson himself takes the reader on a journey into name, meaning, time and place, focusing primarily on the city of Belfast, familiar in name but impenetrable in depth to most.

Furthermore, this once-forgotten tradition to chronicle is now being continued by the new breed of Irish crime writers where the likes of Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty can, by way of the crime novel, accurately record contemporary society. Thus, ghost estates, listed buildings, archaeological digs, street and city have all provided setting and subject matter for recent novels. Moreover by choosing the ‘outsider from within’ as their chief protagonist, whether detective or criminal, each author is able to transgress the boundaries of prejudice and preconception that hinder genuine understanding and knowledge.

Looking in turn at the Gaelic bard, the twentieth century Ulster poet and the new breed of Irish crime writer, the authors will outline the real value of the narrator, by being able to act as cultural transgressor beyond the seeming and alleged as the true chronicler in society, and then with specific reference to city and countryside in Ireland, as a valuable custodian of knowledge in architecture and place.

Keywords
Architecture, Crime Fiction, Cultural Atlas, Place, Poetry.

1 From ‘The Bloody Brae’, a one act play written by John Hewitt in the 1930’s.
2 Hewitt, J. (1968) published in Collected Poems 1932-67. London:McGibbon & Kee.
3 Lengthy and detailed medieval Gaelic poems composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries first edited by John O'Donovan in 1862 for the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society in Dublin.
4 The aisling is the Irish song or poem genre when the poet is visited by their muse in a daydream or dream-vision state.

Spatial and Temporal Changes in Soil Organic Carbon Assessment using an Integrated Geostatistical and Compositional Data Analysis Approach

The Irish and UK governments, along with other countries, have made a commitment to limit the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by reducing emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. This can be achieved (in part) through increasing the sequestration of CO2 from the atmosphere including monitoring the amount stored in vegetation and soils. A large proportion of soil carbon is held within peat due to the relatively high carbon density of peat and organic-rich soils. This is particularly important for a country such as Ireland, where some 16% of the land surface is covered by peat. For Northern Ireland, it has been estimated that the total amount of carbon stored in vegetation is 4.4Mt compared to 386Mt stored within peat and soils. As a result it has become increasingly important to measure and monitor changes in stores of carbon in soils. The conservation and restoration of peat covered areas, although ongoing for many years, has become increasingly important. This is summed up in current EU policy outlined by the European Commission (2012) which seeks to assess the relative contributions of the different inputs and outputs of organic carbon and organic matter to and from soil. Results are presented from the EU-funded Tellus Border Soil Carbon Project (2011 to 2013) which aimed to improve current estimates of carbon in soil and peat across Northern Ireland and the bordering counties of the Republic of Ireland.
Historical reports and previous surveys provide baseline data. To monitor change in peat depth and soil organic carbon, these historical data are integrated with more recently acquired airborne geophysical (radiometric) data and ground-based geochemical data generated by two surveys, the Tellus Project (2004-2007: covering Northern Ireland) and the EU-funded Tellus Border project (2011-2013) covering the six bordering counties of the Republic of Ireland, Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth. The concept being applied is that saturated organic-rich soil and peat attenuate gamma-radiation from underlying soils and rocks. This research uses the degree of spatial correlation (coregionalization) between peat depth, soil organic carbon (SOC) and the attenuation of the radiometric signal to update a limited sampling regime of ground-based measurements with remotely acquired data. To comply with the compositional nature of the SOC data (perturbations of loss on ignition [LOI] data), a compositional data analysis approach is investigated. Contemporaneous ground-based measurements allow corroboration for the updated mapped outputs. This provides a methodology that can be used to improve estimates of soil carbon with minimal impact to sensitive habitats (like peat bogs), but with maximum output of data and knowledge.

Service user perspectives on palliative care education for health and social care professionals supporting people with learning disabilities

Background and objectives
Evidence from European and American studies indicates limited referrals of people with learning (intellectual) disabilities to palliative care services. Although professionals’ perceptions of their training needs in this area have been studied, the perceptions of people with learning disabilities and family carers are not known. This study aimed to elicit the views of people with learning disabilities, and their family carers concerning palliative care, to inform healthcare professional education and training.

Methods
A qualitative, exploratory design was used. A total of 17 people with learning disabilities were recruited to two focus groups which took place within an advocacy network. Additionally, three family carers of someone with a learning disability, requiring palliative care, and two family carers who had been bereaved recently were also interviewed.

Results
Combined data identified the perceived learning needs for healthcare professionals. Three subthemes emerged: ‘information and preparation’, ‘provision of care’ and ‘family-centred care’.

Conclusions
This study shows that people with learning disabilities can have conversations about death and dying, and their preferred end-of-life care, but require information that they can understand. They also need to have people around familiar to them and with them. Healthcare professionals require skills and knowledge to effectively provide palliative care for people with learning disabilities and should also work in partnership with their family carers who have expertise from their long-term caring role. These findings have implications for educators and clinicians.

Global Production, CSR and Human Rights: The Courts of Public Opinion and the Social License to Operate

This paper takes at its starting point the responsibility placed upon corporations by the United Nations’ Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework as elaborated upon by the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to respect human rights. The overt pragmatism and knowledge of the complex business relationships that are embedded in global production led John Ruggie, the author of the Framework, to adopt a structure for the relationship between human rights and business that built on the existing practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). His intention was that these practices should be developed to embrace respect for human rights by exhorting corporations to move from “the era of declaratory CSR” to showing a demonstrable policy commitment to respect for human rights. The prime motivation for corporations to do this was, according to Ruggie, because the responsibility to respect was one that would be guarded and judged by the “courts of public opinion” as part of the social expectations imposed upon corporations or to put it another way as a condition of a corporation’s social license to operate.
This article sets out the background context to the Framework and examines the structures that it puts forward. In its third and final section the article looks at how the Framework requires a corporation’s social license to be assembled and how and by whom that social license will be judged. The success or failure of the Framework in persuading corporations to respect human rights is tied to whether “the courts of public opinion” can use their “naming and shaming power” effectively.

Overconfidence, sexual health awareness and sexual health risk among young female users of sexual health clinics

This study explored the patterning of young people’s sexual health competence, and how this relates to sexual health outcomes. A survey of 381 young people attending two sexual health clinics in Northern Ireland was carried out between 2009 and 2010. Latent profile analysis of self-rated decision making, self-rated sexual health knowledge, and knowledge of sexually transmitted disease questionnaire scores was used to determine typologies of sexual health competence. Analysis revealed three categories of sexual health competence and explored their association with other behaviours and social characteristics. Young people’s subjective opinion of their sexual health competency, when not matched with a corresponding knowledge of sexual health, could place people at an increased risk of poor sexual health outcomes. Greater levels of peer pressure to have sex and early sexual debut were associated with poorer sexual health knowledge. This finding warrants further investigation, as the importance of self-perceived competence for sexual health screening and education programmes are considerable.

Partial shoeprint retrieval using multiple point-of-interest detectors and SIFT descriptors

Shoeprint evidence collected from crime scenes can play an important role in forensic investigations. Usually, the analysis of shoeprints is carried out manually and is based on human expertise and knowledge. As well as being error prone, such a manual process can also be time consuming; thus affecting the usability and suitability of shoeprint evidence in a court of law. Thus, an automatic system for classification and retrieval of shoeprints has the potential to be a valuable tool. This paper presents a solution for the automatic retrieval of shoeprints which is considerably more robust than existing solutions in the presence of geometric distortions such as scale, rotation and scale distortions. It addresses the issue of classifying partial shoeprints in the presence of rotation, scale and noise distortions and relies on the use of two local point-of-interest detectors whose matching scores are combined. In this work, multiscale Harris and Hessian detectors are used to select corners and blob-like structures in a scale-space representation for scale invariance, while Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor is employed to achieve rotation invariance. The proposed technique is based on combining the matching scores of the two detectors at the score level. Our evaluation has shown that it outperforms both detectors in most of our extended experiments when retrieving partial shoeprints with geometric distortions, and is clearly better than similar work published in the literature. We also demonstrate improved performance in the face of wear and tear. As matter of fact, whilst the proposed work outperforms similar algorithms in the literature, it is shown that achieving good retrieval performance is not constrained by acquiring a full print from a scene of crime as a partial print can still be used to attain comparable retrieval results to those of using the full print. This gives crime investigators more flexibility is choosing the parts of a print to search for in a database of footwear.

How individual participant data meta-analyses have influenced trial design, conduct, and analysis

OBJECTIVES: To demonstrate how individual participant data (IPD) meta-analyses have impacted directly on the design and conduct of trials and highlight other advantages IPD might offer.

STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: Potential examples of the impact of IPD meta-analyses on trials were identified at an international workshop, attended by individuals with experience in the conduct of IPD meta-analyses and knowledge of trials in their respective clinical areas. Experts in the field who did not attend were asked to provide any further examples. We then examined relevant trial protocols, publications, and Web sites to verify the impacts of the IPD meta-analyses. A subgroup of workshop attendees sought further examples and identified other aspects of trial design and conduct that may inform IPD meta-analyses.

RESULTS: We identified 52 examples of IPD meta-analyses thought to have had a direct impact on the design or conduct of trials. After screening relevant trial protocols and publications, we identified 28 instances where IPD meta-analyses had clearly impacted on trials. They have influenced the selection of comparators and participants, sample size calculations, analysis and interpretation of subsequent trials, and the conduct and analysis of ongoing trials, sometimes in ways that would not possible with systematic reviews of aggregate data. We identified additional potential ways that IPD meta-analyses could be used to influence trials.

CONCLUSIONS: IPD meta-analysis could be better used to inform the design, conduct, analysis, and interpretation of trials.

4.11(EC) Report new instrumentation and field measuring technology for tidal currents

One of the challenges the tidal power industry faces, is the requirement of cost effective, reliable but highly accurate acquisition of flow data. Different methods are required , applications range over different spatial and temporal scales. This report assembles in the first sections, theoretical background information on acoustic Doppler Velocimetry and RADAR measurements. The use of existing expertise in field tests of marine vehicles is discussed next, followed by a discussion of issues relating to recreating field conditions in laboratory environments. The last three sections present practical applications of various methods performed in field conditions. While progress has been made over the last years, this overview highlights the challenges in full scale field measurements and knowledge gaps in the industry.