Posts filed under ‘innovation’
Science: You Decide
I’m currently doing a research degree through Australian National University’s Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
I’m looking at how deliberative democracy could play a role in science policy in Australia.
I’m holding some events to gather data for my research. If you’re in Adelaide or Canberra you might like to attend.
Sustainability and Environment
In many ways, ‘sustainability’ is the buzz word for a new millennium. As finite resources run low, levels of production and consumption increase. And while trends show that we are making the effort to live greener lives, the problem of pollution has not gone away, with the UK dumping more household waste into landfill than any other EU country. This books defines sustainability, outlines sustainability challenges and explores some possible solutions.
The information in this book comes from a wide range of sources and includes government reports and statistics, newspaper reports, features, magazine articles and surveys, literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
You can read more about this book on the publisher’s website; you can buy it there, or on Amazon.
Editor: Cobi Smith and Lisa Firth
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
ISBN: 978 1 86168 419 6
Published: January 2008
Media Issues
Today’s media is a growing and changing industry. Technology is developing and becoming more interactive, key players in the media have to make changes to keep up. Our taste for entertainment gives rise to debates about the quality of broadcasts and publications. Meanwhile discussions about freedom of the press continue, sparked by issues like celebrity privacy and freedom of information.
The information in this book comes from a wide range of sources including government reports and statistics, newspaper features, magazine articles, surveys and literature from lobby groups and charitable organisations.
You can read more about this book on the publisher’s website; you can buy it there, or on Amazon.
Editors: Cobi Smith and Sophie Crewdson
Publisher: Independence Educational Publishers
ISBN: 978 1 86168 408 0
Published: September 2007
Antimalarials ‘give children an edge’ at school
Preventative malaria treatment could improve schoolchildren’s performance in endemic areas, a study suggests.
The research was presented at the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine’s conference in London, United Kingdom, last week (14 September).
Benson Estambale, director of the Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, investigated whether giving preventative antimalarial drugs to primary schoolchildren improved their educational performance.
More than 6000 students from 30 schools in the Bondo district of West Kenya were administered antimalarial drugs three times in 2005–2006.
“[Preventative treatment] is very much recommended for pregnant women and has been tried in infants and young children, but nothing had been done in children over five years of age,” Estambale said.
“We found that quite a number of people wanted to have their children treated for malaria, because they said that malaria was causing a lot of absenteeism in school and the children were coming home when they had fever.”
Treatment cut the students’ risk of malaria parasite infection by more than a third, as well as reducing anaemia. Researchers found that treated children performed better in cognitive tests and also did slightly better in school exams.
Previous studies of malaria-infected regions indicate that up to 50 per cent of all preventable absenteeism in schools is due to malaria, and the research team found that a number of people wanted to have their children treated for malaria because of absenteeism, Estambale told delegates.
Estembale said the Kenyan Ministry of Education had expressed interest in the study and the researchers hope it could lead to the introduction of routine preventative therapy for schoolchildren, as the government has done with de-worming.
“De-worming has become official policy in the country and school health programs are now de-worming the children twice in a year to remove all the intestinal worms that could impact negatively on children’s performance in schools,” Estambale said.
Nick White, head of tropical medicine at Mahidol University in Thailand and a WHO advisor, said the results were exciting but future research should further examine the exact relationship between drug efficacy and educational performance, and whether the findings applied in other malaria-affected regions.
Nick White, head of tropical medicine at Mahidol University in Thailand and a WHO advisor, said the results were exciting but future research should further examine the exact relationship between drug efficacy and educational performance, and whether the findings applied in other malaria-affected regions.
Further studies are planned for Kenya and Senegal, but Estambale also hopes to hear from other potential partners.
“We would like to get partnerships even in Asia as well as South America, because children are children, and we know that in malaria-endemic areas, although quite a number of them are semi-immune, they continue having malaria impacting negatively on educational performance,” he said.
Read this story on the Science and Development Network.
How to get more women in science, engineering and technology
Entrepreneurial women in science, engineering and technology in the East of England talk about what they think needs to happen to get more women in these industries.
This podcast is part of a series. You can listen to this episode, or read the transcript.
