Not Quite Free? Irish Postcoloniality and the Career of Pat O'Callaghan

This paper explores the career of the Irish Olympian Pat O'Callaghan. He won successive hammer-throwing titles in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics as a representative of the independent Irish state. The paper argues that in these Olympics, O'Callaghan can be considered as representing a postcolonial state, in line with much scholarship on other aspects of Irish culture. However, the Irish later fell into a dispute with the International Amateur Athletics Federation and the International Olympic Committee, which were largely steered by the British in dealing with contentious issues over the Irish border, and the Irish were thus effectively banned from the 1936 games. The paper concludes with a discussion over the nature of postcolonial identities in sport, and the complexities around the issue in relation to the constant mediation over what national identities mean within the context of rule-making by international sporting bodies.     

The Visual in Sport History: Approaches,Methodologies and Sources

Historians of sport now increasingly accept that visual inquiry offers another dimension to social and cultural research into sport and its history. It is complex and its boundaries are rapidly evolving. This overview offers a justification for placing more emphasis on visual approaches and an introduction to the study and interpretation of visual culture in relation to the history of sport. It stresses the importance of adopting a critical approach and the need to be reflective about that critique. An ever-widening range of visual data are now being explored; so, this paper begins with a brief survey of sources that potentially offer rich returns, from film and photographs to posters and paintings or standards and statues. It next provides a critical assessment at an introductory level of some of the more important methodologies now emerging to help interpret these. This can be no more than a personal choice, given their sheer variety and interdisciplinary nature, and the reality that many historians of sport adopt a mixture of methods and approaches. Approaches covered include content analysis, iconography and iconology, semiology, psychoanalysis, discourse analysis, and reception and audience studies. Examples of recent studies of visual studies are used to illustrate the discussion.     

Core-shell hydrogel beads with extracellular matrix for tumor spheroid formation

Creating multicellular tumor spheroids is critical for characterizing anticancer treatments since they may provide a better model of the tumor than conventional monolayer culture. Moreover, tumor cell interaction with the extracellular matrix can determine cell organization and behavior. In this work, a microfluidic system was used to form cell-laden core-shell beads which incorporate elements of the extracellular matrix and support the formation of multicellular spheroids. The bead core (comprising a mixture of alginate, collagen, and reconstituted basement membrane, with gelation by temperature control) and shell (comprising alginate hydrogel, with gelation by ionic crosslinking) were simultaneously formed through flow focusing using a cooled flow path into the microfluidic chip. During droplet gelation, the alginate acts as a fast-gelling shell which aids in preventing droplet coalescence and in maintaining spherical droplet geometry during the slower gelation of the collagen and reconstituted basement membrane components as the beads warm up. After droplet gelation, the encapsulated MCF-7 cells proliferated to form uniform spheroids when the beads contained all three components: alginate, collagen, and reconstituted basement membrane. The dose-dependent response of the MCF-7 cell tumor spheroids to two anticancer drugs, docetaxel and tamoxifen, was compared to conventional monolayer culture.     

Are Letter Detection and Proofreading Tasks Equivalent?

When readers search for misspellings in a proofreading task or for a letter in a letter detection task, they are more likely to omit function words than content words. However, with misspelled words, previous findings for the letter detection task were mixed. In two experiments, the authors tested the functional equivalence of both tasks. Results reveal similar patterns of omissions for both search tasks when misspellings were produced by substituting one letter for another: There were more omissions for function words than for content words. However, when two letters were transposed, differences between the two tasks emerged. It is possible to conclude that letter detection and proofreading are based on common cognitive processes but the nature of the target can modulate the effects. Results are interpreted in light of the attentional disengagement model and the guidance organization model of the missing-letter effect.     

Integrating Creative Thinking Skills Pedagogies into a Higher Education Visual Arts Course

Although there has been increasing international emphasis on creativity in education, many creativity training programmes have focused on enhancing students' creative thinking skills with few studies on how these skills can be integrated into the teaching of subject disciplines. As a member of a Community of Practice project that ran from spring 2021 to summer 2022 at my university, I worked with ten university teachers from multiple disciplines to develop and implement instructional strategies to foster students' creative thinking skills. The paper documented the development, implementation and evaluation of creative thinking skills teaching strategies for a higher education course in visual arts. Both the development of the teaching strategies and the measurement of the impact on student learning have undergone vigorous research procedures and made reference to the existing literature. The effectiveness of the activities was assessed using multiple methods including the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, a self-report inventory, and a focus group interview. The results indicated the new learning activities enhanced students' creative thinking skills. They also showed that creativity can be developed through teaching while revealing that playfulness, freedom and structure, group interactions, and problem-solving activities are beneficial for the development of creative thinking skills. Readers may better understand the different ways in which creative thinking skills instruction materials can be developed and incorporated into teaching of visual arts by making reference to the strategies suggested and the process of development in the paper.     

Creating value in ecosystems: Crossing the chasm between knowledge and business ecosystems

Policy makers take initiatives to stimulate knowledge ecosystems in technology hotspots. It is implicitly assumed that these ecosystems will lead to value networks through which the participating companies can realize a competitive advantage. Value networks refer to business ecosystems where the value proposition is offered by a group of companies which are mutually complementary. The strategy literature suggests that business ecosystems lead to competitive advantages for each of the partners in the ecosystem. Based on a unique hand-collected database of 138 innovative start-ups in the region of Flanders, we analyze the knowledge and business ecosystem and the financial support network. We find that the knowledge ecosystem is well structured and concentrated around a number of central actors while the business ecosystem is almost non-existent at the local level. Further, we find that the financial support network is almost 100% publicly backed and fails to bridge the knowledge and business ecosystem. The implications for policy makers who tend to focus on the development of local ecosystems are discussed.     

Enabling integrated knowledge acquisition and management in health care teams

Basing treatment, policy and planning decisions on the best available research knowledge remains a central principle in modern health care around the world, yet many health professionals find acquiring and managing published research knowledge challenging. In this paper, we report on a Soft Systems Methodology-based collaborative action research initiative with a specialist mental health service from the United Kingdom's National Health Service. Our objective was to design and implement improvements to their knowledge acquisition and management activities in order to facilitate sustained and effective evidence-based practices. We report on both the factors found to impede effective research knowledge acquisition and management and the development of more integrated knowledge management processes designed to improve the situation.