Purpose: Many transition economies are former socialist planned economies and have undergone market reforms of their financial sector to signal their transition towards democracy. However, governments in these countries have been reluctant to relinquish the pre-existing controls on economy and have adopted nuanced and sophisticated approaches to retain control. In such context, scholars may find it challenging to investigate the role played by the state in the success or failure of attempted market reforms. This work investigates the different forms of state-induced accounting controls that may preserve the status quo within the economy during transition, using Myanmar as an example. Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopted a longitudinal qualitative research method aiming to reveal the very processes and mechanisms used by the banks and their evolution over time. This method is in accordance with the historical institutionalist perspective that we have applied within this research. Findings: The authors found that the Myanmar government embarked on the privatisation of their financial sector from 1990 to 2016 as a major public sector reform initiative. Under the guise of market reforms, it used both state-led and market-led controls to emulate and retain the socialist banking model where banks are used to fund the immediate government's budget deficits. This created a series of intended and unintended consequences, resulting in the ultimate failure of the government's market reforms. Research limitations/implications: Previously, research on public sector management accounting in emerging economies was not relying consistently on using theory. The relative limited theorisation led to gaps when attempting to understand and explain the opaque forms of state control mechanisms in transition economies. By applying historical institutionalist perspective, and a more theory-driven, reflective approach to the interpretation of the data collected, we have provided a deeper insight and understanding on how different forms of state controls can emerge, adapt and persist in transition economies such as Myanmar. Practical implications: The authors demonstrated that though the state may have implemented market reforms to signal regimes change, this does not necessarily mean that the government has relinquished their control on the economy. The state could take a more sophisticated, covert approach towards state controls leading to both intended and unintended consequences. Thus, even if the state's preferences change, the decisions cannot be easily reversed, as path-dependent state controls may have become pervasive affecting any further institutional and policy developments. Thus, the authors suggest that governments in both transition and developed economies should be cautious when enacting regulations on corporate control. Originality/value: In this paper, the authors have applied a historical institutional perspective in our analysis instead of the more widely used sociological, institutionalist approach. This allowed authors to harness rich longitudinal data indicating that market reforms and their success or failure should be examined as an ongoing process rather than a completed action. This is especially important in transition economies where the state may be unwilling to renounce the existing controls on the industry and may resort to more opaque forms of state control, eventually obstructing the intended reforms.

Ubiquitous computing technology, sensor networks, and ambient intelligence have initiated the birth of pervasive health. While successful in many environments, in healthcare, monitoring technologies have been known to cause undesirable effects, such as increases in stress in patients being observed. To date, the use of this monitoring technology and its effect on human behaviour have not been thoroughly investigated, meaning future system designs may result in (preventable) undesirable effects. Pervasive healthcare’s envisioned deep intertwining with the patient’s day-to-day care, makes patient’s socio-cultural values a fundamental consideration. In this paper, we present a semiotics-oriented approach for analysing factors, identified in the literature and believed to influence patient’s behaviour, from both physical and social perspectives to aid the design of socially aware and patient-centric ubiquitous monitoring environments that are successfully adopted and used whilst aiding the incorporation of social aspects of pervasive technologies in the design.

The article considers current teachers’ participation in educational research in England and whether Stenhouse’s perception that such involvement was necessary to stall the political undermining of democratic teacher professionalism has been addressed. Stenhouse instigated the emergence of the teacher-as-researcher movement, whereby teachers engaged with a process that created knowledge and practice. From 1979, when the Conservative Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, the increasing dominance of globalised knowledge economies turned knowledge away from being a process into a product. Teacher and student education became controlled and consumed by increasingly competitive educational institutions. Learning became aimed at assuring the attainment of higher grades to increase the country’s economic growth and profit, leading to democratic teacher professionalism being undermined. However, contemporary research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has indicated that teacher professionalism should involve teachers in conducting classroom-based individual or collaborative research. In addition, a recent academic inquiry by the British Education Research Association has con-cluded that teachers as researchers, in both literate and practical terms, will have a positive impact on learner outcomes by developing an education system that has the internal capacity to direct its own progress. At the same time, the Department for Education in England commissioned a two-year study to assess progress towards an evidence-informed teaching system. Taking a systematic literature approach, the present article considers the extent to which current teacher education and practice encourage teacher research as a form of developing pedagogical practice, in other words, praxis, in order to re-establish democratic teacher professionalism in Eng-land. It also explores whether there are alternative practices to create the same, or a similar, outcome.

The directional arrangement of cells has crucial effect in tissue engineering fields such as wound healing and scar repair. Studies have shown that continuous nanostructures have directional regulatory effect on cells, but whether discontinuous nanostructures have the same regulatory effect on cells is also worthy of further study. Here, a series of discontinuous platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs) patterned on the surface of PDMS (PtNPs-PDMS&Glass) and glass (PtNPs-Glass) substrates were developed to investigate the effect on bEnd.3 cell durotaxis. The laser interference lithography and nanotransfer printing method were employed to fabricate the substrates. It was found that about 80% cells orderly arranged on the PtNPs-PDMS&Glass substrate, but only 20% cells orderly arrangement on the PtNPs-Glass substrate, and the number of cells on the PtNPs-PDMS&Glass substrate was five times more than that on the PDMS coated glass substrate (PDMS&Glass). The results suggested that patterning PtNPs on the PDMS substrate not only provided the topographical guidance for cells just like continuous nanostructures, but also promoted cell adhesion and growth. In addition, an improved whole cell coupling model was used to investigate and explain the cell durotaxis from the perspective of mechanism. These findings show the possibility of discontinuous nanostructures in regulating cell arrangement, and offer a useful method for the design of biological functional substrate, as well as help to understand the mechanism of cell durotaxis.

Exploring Language Assessment and Testing offers a straightforward and accessible introduction that starts from real-world experiences and uses practical examples to introduce the reader to the academic field of language assessment and testing. Extensively updated, with additional features such as reader tasks (with extensive commentaries from the author), a glossary of key terms and an annotated further reading section, this second edition provides coverage of recent theoretical and technological developments and explores specific purposes for assessment. Including concrete models and examples to guide readers into the relevant literature, this book also offers practical guidance for educators and researchers on designing, developing and using assessments. Providing an inclusive and impartial survey of both classroom-based assessment by teachers and larger-scale testing, this is an indispensable introduction for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students studying Language Education, Applied Linguistics and Language Assessment.

No study has investigated the current state and potential impact of using infectious disease management systems in the Gulf Region. In this paper, we aim to investigatethe current published literature to identify the studies and the potential impact of these technologies on improving infectious disease management. This study reviews the published papers (1975-2014) using a systematic approach. This entails searchingpeer-reviewed articles in both English (PubMed, Web of Science, and IEEE Xplorer) and Arabic (Al Manhal, Mandumah, and AskZad) electronic databases using the following terms: "infectious diseases", "e-health", "infectious diseases management systems", and country name. We analysed 96 English articles and 68 Arabic articles. No studies met the inclusion criteria. In conclusion, there is a need to conduct extensive research in this region, such as designing asystem based on the needs of infectious patients as well as relevant social phenomena.

The fast growing markets of smart health monitoring devices and mobile applications provide opportunities for common citizens to have capability for understanding and managing their own health situations. However, there are many challenges for data engineering and knowledge discovery research to enable efficient extraction of knowledge from data that is collected from heterogonous devices and applications with big volumes and velocity. This paper presents research that initially started with the EC MyHealthAvatar project and is under continual improvement following the project's completion. The major contribution of the work is a comprehensive big data and semantic knowledge discovery framework which integrates data from varied data resources. The framework applies hybrid database architecture of NoSQL and RDF repositories with introductions for semantic oriented data mining and knowledge lifting algorithms. The activity stream data is collected through Kafka's big data processing component. The motivation of the research is to enhance the knowledge management, discovery capabilities and efficiency to support further accurate health risk analysis and lifestyle summarisation.

Complementary feeding practices and adherence to health recommendations are influenced by a range of different and often interrelating factors such as socio-economic and cultural factors. However, the factors underlying these associations are often complex with less awareness of how complementary feeding approaches vary across the UK’s diverse population. This paper describes a qualitative investigation undertaken in a deprived and culturally diverse community in the UK which aimed to explore parents’ knowledge, beliefs and practices of complementary feeding. One hundred and ten mothers and fathers, self-identified as being White British, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Black African/Caribbean or Polish took part in twenty-four focus group discussions, organised by age group, sex and ethnicity. The findings revealed that most parents initiated complementary feeding before the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 6 months. Early initiation was strongly influenced by breast feeding practices alongside the extent to which parents believed that their usual milk; that is, breastmilk or formula was fulfilling their infants' nutritional needs. The composition of diet and parents' approach to complementary feeding was closely aligned to traditional cultural practices; however, some contradictions were noted. The findings also acknowledge the pertinent role of the father in influencing the dietary practices of the wider household. Learning about both the common and unique cultural feeding attitudes and practices held by parents may help us to tailor healthy complementary feeding advice in the context of increasing diversity in the United Kingdom.

Most healthcare and health research organizations published their health knowledge on the web through HTML or semantic presentations nowadays e.g. UK National Health Service website. Especially, the HTML contents contain valuable information about the individual health condition and graph knowledge presents the semantics of words in the contents. This paper focuses on combining these two for extracting causality knowledge. Understanding causality relations is one of the crucial tasks to support building an Artificial Intelligent (AI) enabled healthcare system. Unlike other raw data sources used by AI processes, the causality semantic dataset is generated in this paper, which is believed to be more efficient and transparent for supporting AI tasks. Currently, neural network-based deep learning processes found themselves in a hard position to explain the prediction outputs, which is majorly because of lacking knowledge-based probability analysis. Dynamic probability analysis based on causality modeling is a new research area that not only can model the knowledge in a machine-understandable way but also can create causal probability relations inside the knowledge. To achieve this, a causal probability generation framework is proposed in this paper that extends the current Description Logic (DL), applies semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach, and calculates runtime causal probabilities according to the given input conditions. The framework can be easily implemented using existing programming standards. The experimental evaluations extract 383 common disease conditions from the UK NHS (the National Health Service) and enable automatically linked 418 condition terms from the DBpedia dataset.