Government Advisory Groups Research Articles

Generative artificial intelligence usage by researchers at work: Effects of gender, career stage, type of workplace, and perceived barriers

The integration of generative artificial intelligence technology into research environments has become increasingly common in recent years, representing a significant shift in the way researchers approach their work. This paper seeks to explore the factors underlying the frequency of use of generative AI amongst researchers in their professional environments. As survey data may be influenced by a bias towards scientists interested in AI, potentially skewing the results towards the perspectives of these researchers, this study uses a regression model to isolate the impact of specific factors such as gender, career stage, type of workplace, and perceived barriers to using AI technology on the frequency of use of generative AI. It also controls for other relevant variables such as direct involvement in AI research or development, collaboration with AI companies, geographic location, and scientific discipline. Our results show that researchers who face barriers to AI adoption experience an 11 % increase in tool use, while those who cite insufficient training resources experience an 8 % decrease. Female researchers experience a 7 % decrease in AI tool usage compared to men, while advanced career researchers experience a significant 19 % decrease. Researchers associated with government advisory groups are 45 % more likely to use AI tools frequently than those in government roles. Researchers in for-profit companies show an increase of 19 %, while those in medical research institutions and hospitals show an increase of 16 % and 15 %, respectively. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms driving the use of generative AI tools amongst researchers, with valuable implications for both academia and industry.

Visualising vapours

Abstract The case study describes the process of designing an interactive visualisation tool to help people understand the likelihood of Covid-19 transmission in different situations. This visualisation was created as part of a 13 month long collaborative project between scientific experts from a UK government advisory group, and a multimedia team at The BMJ (British Medical Journal). The data underpinning the graphic was collected from 27 experts via a knowledge elicitation study. It includes discussion of lessons learned about collecting and visualising uncertain data, and the benefits of user testing.

The Centenary on Screen: Transnational Productions of the Easter Rising

The Centenary on Screen:Transnational Productions of the Easter Rising Stephen Joyce (bio) In the run-up to 2016 there was a curious parallel between debates among historians about how to represent the Easter Rising and debates in film studies on ways to control representations of Ireland in a transnational medium. Historiographic debates demonstrated a strong appetite for narratives that eschewed nationalistic celebrations and looked beyond the Irish state to embrace fresh perspectives. The government's Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations declared in its initial statement that the commemorative program should "not only address the key events in Ireland but also enhance the understanding of the wider United Kingdom, European, and world context in which they took place" (Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations). This statement aligns with recent trends in Irish historical studies, with Enda Delaney and Fearghal McGarry asking in the introduction to a special issue on the Irish Revolution in a global context, "To what extent is it necessary to understand revolutionary change within a global as well as nation-state framework?" (6). Yet the field of Irish-media studies has long struggled with the converse problem, namely, that the dominant representations of Ireland on screen have traditionally come from global media giants based in the United States and the United Kingdom, with the Irish nation-state struggling to make any impact given the lack of resources available to compete with Hollywood. As Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill observed in their seminal Cinema and Ireland (1987), "Ireland's peripheral (and ex-colonial) status has not simply hampered the possibilities for a native film industry but, in its absence, has also made possible a set of cinematic representations which have tended to sustain a sense of cultural inferiority" (xi). Thus, rather than the historiographic challenge of trying to integrate global perspectives into national histories, Irish media have typically struggled [End Page 87] to inject national perspectives into a global medium. The commemorations of 1916 on screen thus represent an intriguing intersection of historiographic and media discourses regarding how and by whom narratives about Ireland should be constructed on screen. This article will examine these issues in relation to the three major new productions on the Easter Rising aired by Ireland's national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) in the months before the centenary: the five-part drama series Rebellion from 3 to 31 January 2016, the three-part American documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion from 10 to 24 February 2016, and finally the British-Irish co-production The Enemy Files on 21 March 2016. How should we interpret the significant participation of foreign media in defining a crucial moment in Ireland's national identity? Is this an example of Ireland's traditional inability to determine its own image on screen, or a demonstration of a new, more transnational approach to understanding Irish history? Before examining these questions and their underlying assumptions, I will first introduce the three productions in more detail. The first to be announced, on 31 March 2015, was the three-part documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion, an initiative of the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. The first episode establishes the local context in Ireland as well as the Rising's connections with the United States and the Irish diaspora. The second looks at the events of Easter Week, while the final episode studies the Rising's impact both in Ireland and internationally. The documentary had a sizable budget of $3 million and a voiceover by Hollywood star Liam Neeson, and received screenings and broadcasts in over sixty countries worldwide. In many ways the documentary sought to present the definitive account of the Rising; reviewing it for the Irish Times, Bernice Harrison wrote, "Filmmaker Bríona Nic Dhiarmada appears to be declaring that while the TV schedules are cluttered with commemorative programming, all you need to know about the Rising is here." Although it was praised for its narrative sweep and excellent use of documentary footage, many Irish viewers felt that the documentary had little new to say. As Pat Stacey commented in a review for the Irish Independent, "For Irish viewers … our familiarity with the material meant this...

Leading with local solutions to keep Yarrabah safe: a grounded theory study of an Aboriginal community-controlled health organisation\u2019s response to COVID-19

BackgroundPandemics such as COVID-19 are a serious public health risk for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, yet primary healthcare systems are not well resourced to respond to such urgent events. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a federal government advisory group recommended a rapid, tailored Indigenous response to prevent predicted high morbidity and mortality rates. This paper examines the efforts of one ACCHO, which in the absence of dedicated funding, pivoted its operations in response to COVID-19. Gurriny Yealamucka Health Service (Gurriny) is the only primary healthcare service in the discrete Indigenous community of Yarrabah, Far North Queensland.MethodsThe research was conducted at the request of the Chief Executive Officer of Gurriny. Using grounded theory methods, thirteen Gurriny staff and five Yarrabah and government leaders and community members were interviewed, transcripts of these interviews and 59 documents were imported into NVIVO-12 and coded, and key concepts were compared, organised into higher order constructs, then structured into a theoretical framework.ResultsGurriny responded to COVID-19 by leading with local solutions to keep Yarrabah safe. Four key strategies were implemented: managing the health service operations, realigning services, educating and supporting community, and working across agencies. These strategies were enabled or hindered by five conditions: the governance and leadership capacity of Gurriny, relying on the health taskforce, locking the door, “copping it”, and (not) having resources. A year after the first case was experienced in Australia and on the eve of vaccine rollout to Indigenous communities, there have been no COVID-19 cases in Yarrabah.DiscussionThe success of the locally led, holistic, comprehensive and culturally safe response of Gurriny suggests that such tailored place-based approaches to pandemics (and other health issues) are appropriate, but require dedicated resourcing. Key challenges were the fragmented and rapidly changing government processes, poorly coordinated communication and resource allocation channels, and bottlenecks in hierarchical funding approval processes.ConclusionsThe COVID-19 response in Yarrabah demonstrates the need for governance reform towards greater resourcing and support for local decision making by Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations.

Piecing together the Inuit food security policy puzzle in Nunatsiavut, Labrador (Canada): protocol for a scoping review

IntroductionInuit Nunangat is the Inuit homeland in Canada. It is comprised of four Inuit regions. Inuit residing in these areas experience greater social and economic inequities than the general Canadian...

Unwelcome advice?

By doing more than defense, Jason hopes it will live on as an elite government advisory group.

Managing Antimicrobial Resistance in Food Production: Conflicts of interest and politics in the development of public health policy

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health concern and is associated with the over- or inappropriate use of antimicrobials in both humans and agriculture. While there has been recognition of this problem on the part of agricultural and public health authorities, there has nonetheless been significant difficulty in translating policy recommendations into practical guidelines. In this paper, we examine the process of public health policy development in Quebec agriculture, with a focus on the case of pork production and the role of food animal veterinarians in policy making.We argue that a tendency to employ strictly techno-scientific risk analyses of antimicrobial use ignores the fundamental social, economic and political realities of key stakeholders and so limits the applicability of policy recommendations developed by government advisory groups. In particular, we suggest that veterinarians’ personal and professional interests, and their ethical norms of practice, are key factors to both the problem of and the solution to the current over-reliance on antimicrobials in food production.

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

This article reviews the research agenda of the Scottish Government's Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism and what it has added to our understanding of sectarianism in Scotland. It takes a broad overview of the research, and the issues it seeks to impact upon. Sectarianism, it concludes, is about the hard politics of difference, and requires Scotland to confront who we are and who we would like to become.

The effective subsidence capacity concept: How to assure that subsidence in the Wadden Sea remains within defined limits?

AbstractSubsidence caused by extraction of hydrocarbons and solution salt mining is a sensitive issue in the Netherlands. An extensive legal, technical and organisational framework is in place to ensure a high probability that such subsidence will stay within predefined limits. The key question is: how much subsidence is acceptable and at which rate? And: how can it be reliably assured that (future) subsidence will stay within these limits?To address the issue for the Wadden Sea area, the concept of ‘effective subsidence capacity’ is used. To determine the ‘effective subsidence capacity’, the maximum volumetric rate of relative sea-level rise, that can be accommodated in the long term, without environmental harm, is established first. The volume of sediment that can be transported and deposited by nature into the tidal basin where the subsidence is expected, ultimately determines this ‘limit of acceptable average subsidence rate’. The capability of the tidal basins to ‘capture’ sediment over the lunar cycle period of 18.6 years is the overall rate-determining step. Effective subsidence capacity is then the maximum average subsidence rate available for planning of human activities. It is obtained by subtracting the subsidence volume rate ‘consumed’ by natural relative subsidence in the area (sealevel rise plus natural shallow compaction) from the total long-term acceptable subsidence volume rate limit.In the operational procedure for mining companies, six-years-average expectation values of subsidence rates are used to calculate the maximum allowable production rates. This is done under the provision that production will be reduced or halted if the expected or actual subsidence rate (natural + man induced) is likely to exceed the limit of acceptable subsidence. Monitoring and management schemes ensure that predicted (6-year average) and actual (18.6-year average) subsidence rates stay within the limit of acceptable subsidence rate and that no damage is caused to the protected nature. A GPS based early warning system is used for early detection of unexpected behaviour. In support of SSM (State Supervision of Mines, the government regulator), TNO-AGE (an independent government advisory group) applies an independent Bayesian statistical analysis of all data, as they become available, to calculate the probability of scenario's under which future subsidence will exceed the defined limits. It is external to the operator's annual measurement and control loop and ensures that preventive actions can be taken in time in case such scenarios emerge.Regular communication keeps the authorities and the general public informed on the use of the effective subsidence capacity to demonstrate that the actual average subsidence rate stays strictly within the defined bounds and that, from a scientific point of view, there is no reasonable doubt that damage to the tidal system will not occur now or in the future.

Medical accuracy in sexuality education: ideology and the scientific process.

Recently, many states have implemented requirements for scientific or medical accuracy in sexuality education and HIV prevention programs. Although seemingly uncontroversial, these requirements respond to the increasing injection of ideology into sexuality education, as represented by abstinence-only programs. I describe the process by which health professionals and government advisory groups within the United States reach scientific consensus and review the legal requirements and definitions for medical accuracy. Key elements of this scientific process include the weight of scientific evidence, the importance of scientific theory, peer review, and recognition by mainstream scientific and health organizations. I propose a concise definition of medical accuracy that may be useful to policymakers, health educators, and other health practitioners.

Changing Attitudes toward Worksharing: Evidence from Quebec

This paper evaluates five recent experiences of worksharing in Quebec since 1994: Bell Canada, Alcan, Scott Paper, Sico, and the Ministere de l'environnement et de la faune. Based on survey evidence showing that desired work hours tend to approximate actual work hours, previous studies have raised doubts about the likelihood of successful worksharing initiatives. However, in the cases we have studied, participation rates in voluntary worksharing programs were high, especially where workers' sacrifice (lost wages) was not great and where workers had privious experience with reduced and flexible worktime. Worksharing initiatives were less successful when they were mandatory. The programs studied point to the importance of labour-supply responses in policy design. Governments have a role to play in designing policy that makes worksharing more attractive to workers and then changes their attitudes toward it. Our findings are consistent with the recommendations of the federal government's Advisory Group on Working Time.

The Stockpiling and Rationing of Scientific Manpower

The December issue of the Bulletin contained proposals on the mobilization of scientists, prepared by several government advisory groups. The following recommendations on this subject come from Professor Smyth, formerly chairman of the Physics Department at Princeton University, now the one scientist-member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.