Digitizing other markets:lessons from the Bush Internet of Island Melanesia

Digital markets are regularly equated with digital capitalism. However, markets are also central features of longstanding other economic systems, such as the bush markets of Malaita, Solomon Islands, where saltwater and bush people have traded with each other for at least seven hundred years, if not longer. This article interrogates the digitization of this bush market system based on classically-conceived long-term ethnographic fieldwork that aims to develop a better empirical understanding of possibilities for diverse economic systems and markets in the digital age. We identify continuities between Solomon Islands-centric Facebook ‘buy and sell’ groups and bush markets and demonstrate how these continuities strengthen other economic systems and values in the country. Despite their avid use of Facebook, Solomon Islanders are able to resist the industrial-capitalism embedded in platform design and to reaffirm social networks and a broader reciprocal moral economy.</p

An Ethnography of Deletion:Materializing Transcience in Solomon Islands Digital Cultures

This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all things. The object biography of mobile phones, including MicroSD cards, typically short, fits into a broader historical pattern of everyday engagements with materializations of transience in the Lau Lagoon. Three types of visual media are exemplary in this regard: sand, ancestral material cultures and digital visual media (photographs and videos). Ultimately, Lau experiences of transience in their visual media are located in their visual technological history and the choices they make about which materials to maintain or dispose of

UK medical students' perceptions, attitudes, and interest toward medical leadership and clinician managers

Background: We aimed to determine UK medical students’ perceptions and attitudes and interest toward medical leadership and clinician managers. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted during the academic year 2015–2016. An online questionnaire was distributed to 2,349 final-year students from 10 UK medical schools. Participants were asked to complete a 5-point Likert scale on their current perceptions, attitudes, and interest toward medical leadership and clinician managers. They were also asked to self-rate their leadership competences set by the Medical Leadership Competency Framework and to rate the quality of management and leadership training they received from their medical school. Results: In total, we received 114 complete responses. Only 7.9% of respondents were in agreement (strongly agree or agree) when asked whether they felt they were well informed about what a managerial position in medicine entails. When asked whether clinicians should influence managerial decisions within a clinical setting, 94.7% of respondents were in agreement with the statement. About 85% of respondents were in agreement that it is important for clinicians to have managerial or leadership responsibilities, with 63.2% of students in agreement that they would have liked more management or leadership training during medical school. Over half the respondents rated their management and leadership training they received during medical school as “very poor” or “poor” (54.4%). Conclusion: Our study suggests that UK medical students have an appetite for management and leadership training and appreciate its importance but feel that the training they are receiving is poor. This suggests that there is a gap between the demand for management and leadership training and the quality of training supplied by UK medical schools

Interactive computer-based interventions for sexual health promotion (Protocol)

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Digitizing Other Economies:A Critical Review

Contemporary hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, agriculturalists and, on a much smaller scale, feudalists are threatened continuously by dominant (post-)industrial, often capitalist, economies. The latter perpetually seek to dominate the former through colonialism and development, violent resource extraction, and the more insidious effects of environmental change. Multidisciplinary research on digital economic transformations postulates that the global spread of digital technologies—designed largely by and for industrial capitalists’ needs and values—accelerates these domination processes. This research on data colonialism or digital capitalism has generated extensive, valuable insights into how technological designs constrain users’ choices. However, there is one major blind spot: Empirically, this research has engaged, primarily, with ‘inter-capitalist struggles’ focusing on contexts dominated by industrial-capitalist and, occasionally, industrial-command and mixed-market economic systems and values. Contemporary other economies and inter economic struggles are largely missing, even though, especially ethnographic, research has demonstrated the resilience of other economic systems and values in response to various industrial and industrial-capitalist colonization and domination attempts

Are library teaching and research services broken? Understand the academic journey for better service design

Do we really understand what academics need from libraries today? Can understanding and empathising with the academic experience challenge library assumptions about teaching and research services? UTS Library investigated these questions through a year-long project. Using a design-thinking project methodology, empathy mapping and human-centred practices, the project team was able to delve into the world of the UTS academic: gaining a comprehensive understanding of the academic’s goals, behaviours, motivations and pain points around conducting teaching and research activities. The resulting insights present new opportunities for service design and delivery in an academic library context. UTS Library staff now have a suite of tools, including persona profiles and journey maps, that provide clarity and understanding on a multitude of factors affecting academics such as how they manage time pressures and why they choose to sacrifice career progression. These tools will help staff to align library services with the goals and motivations of academics in a more nuanced way, improving the journey of academics and grounding their positive experiences in a library context. Learn more about the project approach, the suite of tools created as well as the final insights and opportunities identified and discover how this kind of research allows us to authentically connect with academics and reshape the teaching and research services delivered by academic libraries with the client at the centre

Protocol for the ADDITION-Plus study: a randomised controlled trial of an individually-tailored behaviour change intervention among people with recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes under intensive UK general practice care

Background: The increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes poses both clinical and public health challenges. Cost-effective approaches to prevent progression of the disease in primary care are needed. Evidence suggests that intensive multifactorial interventions including medication and behaviour change can significantly reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality among patients with established type 2 diabetes, and that patient education in self-management can improve short-term outcomes. However, existing studies cannot isolate the effects of behavioural interventions promoting self-care from other aspects of intensive primary care management. The ADDITION-Plus trial was designed to address these issues among recently diagnosed patients in primary care over one year. Methods/Design: ADDITION-Plus is an explanatory randomised controlled trial of a facilitator-led, theory-based behaviour change intervention tailored to individuals with recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes. 34 practices in the East Anglia region participated. 478 patients with diabetes were individually randomised to receive (i) intensive treatment alone (n = 239), or (ii) intensive treatment plus the facilitator-led individual behaviour change intervention (n = 239). Facilitators taught patients key skills to facilitate change and maintenance of key behaviours (physical activity, dietary change, medication adherence and smoking), including goal setting, action planning, self-monitoring and building habits. The intervention was delivered over one year at the participant's surgery and included a one-hour introductory meeting followed by six 30-minute meetings and four brief telephone calls. Primary endpoints are physical activity energy expenditure (assessed by individually calibrated heart rate monitoring and movement sensing), change in objectively measured dietary intake (plasma vitamin C), medication adherence (plasma drug levels), and smoking status (plasma cotinine levels) at one year. We will undertake an intention-to-treat analysis of the effect of the intervention on these measures, an assessment of cost-effectiveness, and analyse predictors of behaviour change in the cohort. Discussion: The ADDITION-Plus trial will establish the medium-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of adding an externally facilitated intervention tailored to support change in multiple behaviours among intensively-treated individuals with recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes in primary care. Results will inform policy recommendations concerning the management of patients early in the course of diabetes. Findings will also improve understanding of the factors influencing change in multiple behaviours, and their association with health outcomes

Rural media studies:making the case for a new subfield

It is time for a rural turn in media studies. Media studies are deeply imbricated in urban life. It is where most universities are located. It is where many media scholars live and work. Media workers, too, predominately exist in the urban – at least for now. Embedded in these urban settings, media studies have too often focused on urban perspectives and considered rural dimensions largely from a ‘divides’ perspective, wherein the rural has somehow less than the urban; or media studies have treated the rural as seemingly utopic areas evoking the idyllic and romantic where city dwellers travel or the wild is preserved. But the rural is more than that. Key works on media in the rural do exist but the field lacks articulation. This article is a step towards addressing this weakness. Drawing on examples from three rural areas, those of Europe, Central Asia and Oceania, this article shows how rural media studies have the capacity to question ‘common sense’ assumption in media research and to demonstrate the complexities of contemporary mediascapes. The problems we see include issues of mediated representation and perception, issues of communication and the myriad of societal challenges that come, in particular, with digital transformations.</p

An Ethnographic Study of the State in Rural Solomon Islands (Lau, North Malaita): A Quest for Autonomy in Global Dependencies

This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Solomon Islands capital, Honiara (four months), and in the rural Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province (eight months). It examines how the Solomon Islands state, marked by a recent history of civil conflict and foreign military intervention, becomes visible in the everyday lives of rural and, to a lesser degree, urban non-elites; and how this visibility affects non-elite perceptions of the state as legitimate, dominant governing system. Non-elites are defined as those Solomon Islanders who often have only completed some primary/secondary education, whose first and primary language is their vernacular, and whose affluence is defined by their reliance on slash-and-burn agriculture, non-industrial fishing and micro-economic activities. Theoretically, this thesis draws on literature that defines the state through its ability to become invisible in everyday routines in such a way that state legitimacy and dominance as governing system are rarely questioned, and if they are only during temporary disruptions. I propose that to understand to what extent and how the Solomon Islands state is integrated into everyday routines it is necessary to focus on mundane encounters with the state, its infrastructures and representatives as well as available alternatives; and to do so by prioritizing the perspective of the non-elites rather than the perspective of the disciplining state and state-focused members of (an urban) civil society. The Solomon Islands case is ideally suited for such an analysis because in this historically, linguistically and culturally diverse country the centralized state has been found to continuously struggle with diverging local conceptualizations of government and governance. My findings highlight that the Solomon Islands state has failed to become integrated into daily routines. Instead it is nearly continuously visible as a disruptive force. As a result non-elites continue to defy state-based unification and instead seek relative autonomy from the state by emphasizing the dominance and legitimacy of village-centric governance. This quest for autonomy is, however, increasingly curtailed by dependency on foreign foods and goods, and therein by a dependency on the state as primary globally-recognized legitimate mediator of economic relations