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Changes in Conducting Data Protection Risk Assessment: Before and After GDPR implementation
Get PDFBased on Article 35 of the EU (European Union) General Data Protection Regu-
lation, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) is necessary whenever there
is a possibility of a high privacy and data protection risk to individuals caused by
a new project under development. A similar process to DPIA had been previously
known as Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). We are investigating here to find out if
GDPR and DPIA specifically as its privacy risk assessment tool have resolved the
challenges privacy practitioners were previously facing in implementing PIA. To do
so, our methodology is based on comparison and thematic analysis on two sets of
focus groups we held with privacy professionals back in January 2018 (four months
before GDPR came into effect) and then in November 2019 (18 months after GDPR
implementatio
Peer mentoring in the Placement experience search: Enhancing learning journeys across discipline boundaries
No full textWithin the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media at De Montfort University students seeking a year-long Placement participate in peer mentoring, enhancing the learning journey of individuals acting in the role of mentee and mentor, and operating across discipline boundaries. Supporting and empowering Placement searchers, mentoring presents an opportunity to learn from peers who have previously experienced the process, successfully securing an innovative Placement year.
The scheme delivers benefits to the mentee and mentor (Hayman et al., 2022). Mentees are supported with practical tips and advice, guidance and encouragement, whilst mentors benefit through developing leadership, mentoring and communication skills, enhancing reflection to further articulate their Placement experience (Proctor, 2012).
Echoing engagement with Placements across the Faculty's three schools, in 2022 the majority of mentors come from the School of Computer Science and Informatics (CSI) (55%), followed by Engineering and Sustainable Development (ESD) (36%), and then Leicester Media School (LMS) (9%). The 2022 mentees are also predominantly from CSI (76%), followed by LMS (18%), then ESD (6%). The mentor and mentee relationship crosses discipline boundaries, providing additional benefits to the learning experience by learning from the experiences and questions of those in different subject areas. Mentoring beyond discipline boundaries invites creative problem solving, active listening, and coaching.
Placement returner mentors are self-selecting following a call for volunteers. Mentors support mentees to explore Placement options, develop contacts with employers, and identify suitable resources and industry links. Mentors give advice, respond to questions, share thoughts and reflections, help the mentee to develop their own aims and goals, and provide motivation, support and role-modelling.
For mentees, developing an effective working relationship with a mentor enhances networking, communication and cooperation skills that will be valuable in the Placement experience and beyond. Mentees set goals around their Placement and career aspirations, regularly reviewing progress in search of a Placement.
The mentoring relationship is set within a code of conduct framework based on confidentiality, valuing each member of the partnership, mutual trust and respect. Reflecting on the experience, mentees are positive about the useful advice, support and encouragement received. Mentees appreciate that mentors respond to queries and questions in a timely manner, and many pairs meet weekly to maintain regular engagement. Feedback recognises the positive impact on embracing the search for, and securing, a Placement.
This presentation will introduce this approach, inspiring colleagues to extend peer mentoring applications across discipline boundaries for the benefit of all participants
Practical Consequences of Quality Views in Assessing Software Quality
Get PDFopen access articleThe authors’ previously published research delved into the theory of software product
quality modelling, model views, concepts, and terminologies. They also analysed this specific field
from the point of view of uncertainty, and possible descriptions based on fuzzy set theory and fuzzy
logic. Laying a theoretical foundation was necessary; however, software professionals need a more
tangible and practical approach for their everyday work. Consequently, the authors devote this paper
to filling in this gap; it aims to illustrate how to interpret and utilise the previous findings, including
the established taxonomy of the software product quality models. The developed fuzzy model’s
simplification is also presented with a Generalized Additive Model approximation. The paper does
not require any formal knowledge of uncertainty computations and reasoning under uncertainty,
nor does it need a deep understanding of quality modelling in terms of terminology, concepts, and
meta-models, which were necessary to prepare the taxonomy and relevance ranking. The paper
investigates how to determine the validity of statements based on a given software product quality
model; moreover, it considers how to tailor and adjust quality models to the particular project’s needs.
The paper also describes how to apply different software product quality models for different quality
views to take advantage of the automation potential offered for the measurement and assessment of
source code quality. Furthermore, frequent pitfalls are illustrated with their corresponding resolutions,
including an unmeasured quality property that is found to be important and needs to be included in
the measurement and assessment process
Critical assessment of the bonded single lap joint exposed to cyclic tensile loading
Get PDFopen access articleSingle shear or single lap joints are the most prevalent type of adhesive joints used in advanced engineering applications, where they are exposed to fatigue loadings in their services. Although their mechanical performances under static loading have been investigated extensively, the studies related to the fatigue performances were limited. For that purpose, single lap joint's (SLJ's) reaction to fatigue tensile loading was studied by varying the adherend thickness (3 mm to 6 mm) and fatigue load (3250 N to 1500 N). ABAQUS/Standard was used to create its advanced FE model. To represent the progressive damage in the adhesive layer, the fatigue damage model via the Paris Law, which links the rate of the crack expansion to the strain energy release rate (SERR), was integrated into the cohesive zone model having a bi-linear traction–separation characteristics. The model was written in a UMAT subroutine. The developed model was vali-dated using experimental data from the literature. The crack initiation cycle (Ni), the failure cycle (Nf), the fatigue load limit, the strain energy release rate, the crack propagation rate, and varia-tion of stress components with their dependency to design parameters were investigated in depth. It was found that the service life of the SLJs with thicker adherends was more responsive to the amount of stress applied. When exposed to lesser loads, the SLJs' life span changed more noticeably
Infertility, reproductive timing and ‘cure’ in families affected by Turner Syndrome
Get PDFOpen access article
This work was supported by a Mildred Blaxter Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness.This article discusses the influence of a chromosome condition affecting women’s reproductive capacity, Turner Syndrome (TS), on affected women’s social timing, examining the strategic decisions that are made within families in relation to reproduction, to navigate these disruptions. Based on photo elicitation interviews with 19 women with TS and 11 mothers of girls with TS in the UK, it presents findings from an under-researched topic, TS and reproductive choices.
In a social context where motherhood is not only desirable, but expected (Suppes, 2020), the social imaginary of infertility anticipates a future of unhappiness and rejection, an undesirable condition that should be avoided. Accordingly, mothers of girls with TS often expect that their daughter will want to have children. Infertility diagnosed in childhood has a distinctive impact on reproductive timing, as future options may be anticipated for years. This article uses the concept of ‘crip time’ (Kafer, 2013) to explore how women with TS and mothers of girls with TS experience temporal misfitting based on a childhood diagnosis of infertility, and manage, resist and re-frame this to minimise stigma. The ‘curative imaginary’ (Kafer, 2013), a social norm where disabled people are expected to desire a cure for their condition, is used as an analogy for infertility, describing how mothers of
girls with TS respond to social pressure to plan for their daughter’s reproductive future.
These findings may be useful both for families navigating childhood infertility and practitioners who support them. This article demonstrates the cross-disciplinary potential of applying disability studies concepts to the context of infertility and chronic illness, where concepts shed new light on the dimensions of timing and anticipation in this context, improving our understanding of the lived experience of women with TS, and how they view and use reproductive technologies
The power of cross-sector collaboration to enhance embedding mental wellbeing
No full textSector-wide open educational resources (OERs) to enhance embedding mental wellbeing in the curriculum (EMW) were core to a QAA Collaborative Enhancement project led by National Teaching Fellow (NTF) & Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) winner, Zoë Allman. Seven Higher Education (HE) providers and a students’ union sought to improve understanding of EMW and develop a suite of OERs, supporting colleagues across the sector in their endeavours to embed mental wellbeing
Examining the focus on embedding mental wellbeing during a period of institution-wide delivery mode transformation
No full textRecording of the presentation: https://youtu.be/L1QYOV0MkW8
Recording available via: https://digitaleducation.lincoln.ac.uk/events/digied-horizons/recorded-sessions/De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester is undergoing a significant change project to transition delivery of academic programmes to an intensive block model approach, a model that enables students to focus on studying one module at a time. Alongside ensuring delivery of a high-quality student experience in this new delivery model is the University’s ongoing focus on an institution-wide approach to Embedding Mental Wellbeing (EMW) underpinned by the University’s HealthyDMU philosophy, recognising that mental wellbeing is relevant to all members of the university community (Hughes and Spanner, 2019). This philosophy is informed by a social model of wellbeing, in which a student’s experience of mental wellbeing is directly related to their environment and experiences, based on the five ways to wellbeing (Aked, Marks, Cordon & Thompson, 2008). De Montfort University endeavours to embed this philosophy throughout the curriculum to reduce barriers to wellbeing, facilitating student success, establishing pro-active approaches to mental wellbeing and a providing a health promoting environment.
This presentation examines the need to continually focus on the HealthyDMU philosophy, particularly during a period of significant change that will “inevitably bring about anxieties” (Jones, 2022), with the introduction of the block delivery model across the curriculum. Examples will be provided of how student and staff mental wellbeing is being supported, and how the changing delivery method presents opportunities for different ways of incorporating EMW in the curriculum
A Distributed Scheme for Voltage and Frequency Control and Power Sharing in Inverter-Based Microgrids
Get PDFThe file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Grid-forming inverter-based autonomous microgrids present new operational challenges as the stabilizing rotational inertia of synchronous machines is absent. The design of efficient control policies for grid-forming inverters is, however, a nontrivial problem where multiple performance objectives need to be satisfied, including voltage/frequency regulation, current limiting capabilities, and active power sharing and a scalable operation. We propose, in this article, a novel control architecture for frequency and voltage control, which allows current limitation via an inner loop, active power sharing via a distributed secondary control policy, and scalability by satisfying a passivity property. In particular, the frequency controller employs the inverter output current and angle to provide an angle droop-like policy, which improves its stability properties. This also allows us to incorporate a secondary control policy for which we provide an analytical stability result, which takes line conductances into account (in contrast to the lossless line assumptions in the literature). The distinctive feature of the voltage control scheme is that it has a double-loop structure that uses the dc voltage in the feedback control policy to implement a power-balancing strategy to improve performance. The performance of the control policy is illustrated via simulations with detailed nonlinear models in a realistic setting
The protective effects of flavonoids and carotenoids against diabetic complications—A review of in vivo evidence
Get PDFopen access articleDiabetes mellitus is a chronic metabolic disorder caused either by inadequate insulin secretion, impaired insulin function, or both. Uncontrolled diabetes is characterized by hyperglycemia which over time leads to fatal damage to both macro-and microvascular systems, causing complications such as cardiovascular diseases, retinopathy and nephropathy. Diabetes management is conventionally delivered through modifications of diet and lifestyle and pharmacological treatment, using antidiabetic drugs, and ultimately insulin injections. However, the side effects and financial cost of medications often reduce patient compliance to
treatment, negatively affecting their health outcomes. Natural phytochemicals from edible plants such as fruits and vegetables (F&V) and medicinal herbs have drawn a growing interest as potential therapeutic agents for treating diabetes and
preventing the onset and progression of diabetic complications. Flavonoids, the most abundant polyphenols in the human diet, have shown antidiabetic effects in numerous in vitro and preclinical studies. The underlying mechanisms have been
linked to their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory activities.
Carotenoids, another major group of dietary phytochemicals, have also shown antidiabetic potential in recent in vitro and in vivo experimental models, possibly through a mechanism of action similar to that of flavonoids. However, scientific evidence on the efficacy of these phytochemicals in treating diabetes or preventing the onset and progression of its complications in clinical settings is scarce, which delays the translation of animal study evidence to human applications and also limits the knowledge on their modes of actions in diabetes management. This review is aimed to highlight the potential roles of flavonoids and carotenoids in preventing or ameliorating diabetes-related complications based on in vivo study evidence, i.e., an array of preclinical animal studies and human intervention trials.
The current general consensus of the underlying mechanisms of action exerted by both groups of phytochemicals is that their anti-inflammatory action is key. However, other potential mechanisms of action are considered. In total, 50 in vivo studies were selected for a review after a comprehensive database search via PubMed and ScienceDirect from January 2002 to August 2022. The key words used for analysis are type-2 diabetes (T2DM), diabetic complications, flavonoids, carotenoids, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, mechanisms of prevention and amelioration, animal studies and human interventions