• COVID-19
• Publicationsclose
• 2019-2023close
• Book close
• English close
• PURE Aarhus University close
• Theses@asb close
• COVID-19 close

The purpose of this report is to outline the evaluation and comparison approach and the knowledge obtained through a detailed data collection process, in order to examine the implementation and application of the Half Double Methodology (HDM) at Forsvarsministeriets Material- og Indkøbsstyrelse (FMI), as well as compare and contrast pilot and reference projects. State-owned FMI is the Danish Ministry of Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organization (English abbreviation: DALO), and thus a unit under the Ministry of Defence and the Danish public sector. It is likely that the Half Double Methodology has had a positive impact on FMI and their team collaboration. The procurement process is faster, which especially is evident in pilot case 3, but also the initial versions of pilot case 1 and 2. However, here, the cases were subject to external conditions which increased the duration. FMI experiences satisfaction from stakeholders involved in the procurement. This satisfaction is also present in most of the team members engaging with the methodology. Hence overall, integrating the Half Double Methodology in FMI’s team collaboration is perceived as a success in FMI and continues to be applied. However, there is still room for improvements in the procurement process and team configuration. This relates to the application of HDM, but also other constraints in FMI, which is related to a lack of resources to develop interdisciplinary teams, as well as challenges from covid-19 restrictions. The purpose of this report is to outline the evaluation and comparison approach and the knowledge obtained through a detailed data collection process, in order to examine the implementation and application of the Half Double Methodology (HDM) at Forsvarsministeriets Material- og Indkøbsstyrelse (FMI), as well as compare and contrast pilot and reference projects. State-owned FMI is the Danish Ministry of Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organization (English abbreviation: DALO), and thus a unit under the Ministry of Defence and the Danish public sector. It is likely that the Half Double Methodology has had a positive impact on FMI and their team collaboration. The procurement process is faster, which especially is evident in pilot case 3, but also the initial versions of pilot case 1 and 2. However, here, the cases were subject to external conditions which increased the duration. FMI experiences satisfaction from stakeholders involved in the procurement. This satisfaction is also present in most of the team members engaging with the methodology. Hence overall, integrating the Half Double Methodology in FMI’s team collaboration is perceived as a success in FMI and continues to be applied. However, there is still room for improvements in the procurement process and team configuration. This relates to the application of HDM, but also other constraints in FMI, which is related to a lack of resources to develop interdisciplinary teams, as well as challenges from covid-19 restrictions.

Scintilla 23 turns our attention to the creative impulses that shaped Henry’s thinking and were shaped by him. Peter Pike opens this issue with a fascinating discussion of the legacy of Vaughan’s attention to the ‘slightest things’, a poetic concentration that carries ‘a charge which has contributed to the grace of subsequent writing in English’. Reading Vaughan’s, ‘Thou that know’st for whom I mourn’, Pike traces a similar poetic attention through later poets including John Clare, Edward Thomas, Ted Hughes, and Kathleen Jamie. Donald Dickson examines Henry Vaughan as a scholarly editor, sleuthing the patristic, classical, and contemporary sources that Henry had at his disposal or where he might have had access to them. Examining the sketchy records from libraries and their users in the seventeenth century, Dickson explores how much can be gleaned from this surprisingly rich, if challenging intellectual environment. It is likely, Dickson asserts, that Vaughan had a surprising number of his sources in his own personal library, a point consistent with what was known to be his considerable collection of medical texts. It also seems that Vaughan improved ‘his school boy’ Greek and German as he matured, giving us a much stronger picture of the poet-physician’s intellectual life. Holly Nelson extends our view of Vaughan, examining the transcontinental reception in 19th-century North America. Vaughan’s poetry, having almost disappeared from a reading public in the 18th century, seems to have met a need in the moralistic religious American culture of the 19th. The need was often quite removed from Vaughan’s context. His political undertones were frequently erased, his spiritual specificity universalised and sentimentalised. Commenting on the end of ‘As time one day by me did pass’, Nelson notes, ‘One can imagine voracious consumers of Charles Dickens’s novels in Britain and America (devastated by the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop) sentimentalizing and universalizing the substance of Vaughan’s pilcrowed poems, rather than focusing on the historical reality of war and death that contributed to the elegiac idiom of such lines’. Yet, it was such readers who paved the way for those who would engage more fully with the Silurist’s work, like Louise Imogen Guiney whose unfinished research would provide the basis for F.E. Hutchinson’s 20th-century reappraisal. Tony Brown expands an abiding interest of Scintilla into the life and poetry of R.S. Thomas, unfolding the story of his artistic wife, Elsi, and crediting her as a significant influence, training and inspiring him in a life of ‘looking’, deeply, at the world around him. Brown shows examples of Elsi’s ‘looking’, not least her looking at her husband, carefully transposed to the paper through her drawings. These images juxtapose and illustrate Thomas’s poems, and the two give us a sense of their creative marriage over so many years. Jeremy Hooker gives us a personal insight into his own writing process, particularly his experience involved in writing prose poems over the years. Hooker ties the prose poem to the practice of keeping a daily journal; he sees the act of bringing those two forms together as a movement toward self-knowledge for the poet. In this act, the poet’s text becomes a kind of ‘quarry’ that the poet pursues and forms into a ‘made thing’ or a ‘shape in words.’ Scintilla continues to offer a space for contemporary poetry written in necessarily complex dialogue with the tradition of the Vaughan brothers. In doing so, we bring together, once more, established writers and new voices. One such new voice is American poet Emily Crispino, a graduate student in archival science with an interest in the life and writings of the Vaughan brothers. Her sparkling poem ‘For Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’ is included in this issue. Crispino’s poem and the rest of the work chosen for this issue were not only written before the advent of COVID-19 but also selected before this point too, and the poems now seem like missives from another world. As with all good poetry that prompts thought, however, they speak to us from another time and do so with relevance for the challenging circumstances in which we look to make sense of things unutterable and unmatched. Crispino speaks of the ‘whisper of bodies split and knit, / of spirits magnetized / by nature’s flame and firmament’. At a time of social distancing, we have all been split but are learning to knit anew, in new ways. Andrew Neilson’s poem ‘The Week’s Remains’ celebrates the end-of-the-week drink as a chance to take stock. The poem asks: ‘How long can luck last?’. With ‘an eye applied to a telescope lens’ we can stare down the vista of all possible disasters and count our blessings even as we acknowledge the suffering of others. Now, in the midst of one such disaster, an end-of-the-week drink with friends and colleagues might seem a far-off event for many. As a result, we’re likely to turn inward. Shanta Acharya’s ghazal ‘In Silence’ assures us, however, that we will find that ‘love’s a patch of green that flowers in silence – / a shade that shelters you in times of crises, / a place you keep returning to in silence.’

This report is the first in a short series of WARCnet papers which aim to provide feedback on an internal datathon conducted by Working Group 2 of the WARCnet project. It explores the creation of transnational merged datasets and corpora, based on seed lists, derived data and metadata provided by several web archiving institutions. The report highlights our first explorations of specially curated COVID web archives, in order to prepare an in-depth exploration of the issues, challenges, limitations and opportunities afforded by these heterogeneous datasets. This report is the first in a short series of WARCnet papers which aim to provide feedback on an internal datathon conducted by Working Group 2 of the WARCnet project. It explores the creation of transnational merged datasets and corpora, based on seed lists, derived data and metadata provided by several web archiving institutions. The report highlights our first explorations of specially curated COVID web archives, in order to prepare an in-depth exploration of the issues, challenges, limitations and opportunities afforded by these heterogeneous datasets.

In the edited collection Time Out: Global Perspectives on Sport and the Covid-19 Lockdown, practitioners and international scholars explore the impact of the global Covid-19 health pandemic on sport from a global perspective. It is part of a two-volume Covid-19 and Sport series that tackles the effects of the global lockdown on sport during March and April 2020, when restrictions were at their most severe and the human toll at its peak in many countries. The chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the immediate consequences of the Covid-19 lockdown on sport. This book presents a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives in a total of twenty individual chapters, organized around three main themes. The first section explores the reactions of international stakeholders within the global sport system to the pandemic. In section two, the authors focus on the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on sporting participants within an international context, including effects on both elite athletes and leisure sport participants. The final section includes the impacts on and reactions of individual sports.

Spiders are common arthropod predators living in most habitats of the world, and due to their plasticity in exploitation of resources, different species may have wide distribution ranges that cover different habitat types. While most species live solitarily, some spider species have independently evolved a permanently social lifestyle where all group members cooperate in colony tasks such as prey capture and brood care. Spiders harbour microbial communities, which may vary among individual hosts (or host groups), and which could be important for shaping phenotypic responses to the local environment. In this thesis, I study ecological interactions within spider species, and between spiders and their local environment and their microbial communities. The thesis aims to understand adaptive responses that enable persistence in different environments and the occupation of new niches.The first chapter explores the organization of spider groups in relation to task differentiation, especially the link between task differentiation, personality, metabolism and reproductive state. The study found some (but limited) evidence indicating that personality, metabolic rate or reproductive status could explain task differentiation in the social spider Stegodyphus mimosarum.The second chapter investigates the role of intolerance towards conspecifics in dispersal decisions and group cohesion both in a temporary and a permanently social Stegodyphus species. Intolerance towards conspecifics is not the cause of dispersal, but rather develops after dispersal to maintain a solitary lifestyle in the temporary social species Stegodyphus lineatus. Intolerance is lost in the social species Stegodyphus sarasinorum, suggesting that this trait is redundant in permanently social species, because they do not interact with competing groups.The third chapter examined the interaction between social spiders and the host plants on which they build their communal nests. The study suggests that Stegodyphus dumicola spiders build their nests preferentially on specific plant species, including host plants with protective spines, and the preferred host plants are associated with improved survival.The fourth chapter investigated at the mode of transmission of bacterial symbionts in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola, using a combination of life cycle analysis and experimental cross-fostering of offspring. Bacterial symbionts are transmitted across generations by a mixed mode of transmission involving regurgitation feeding by both mothers and non-reproducing female helpers. In the adult state, social transmission governs homogenization of microbiome composition among group-members.The fifth chapter tested whether ecological drift could cause variation in microbiome composition among groups in a social host species Stegodyphus dumicola. The results suggest that stochastic divergence in host-group microbiomes can arise during the process of group formation by individual founders, which could explain the existence of among-group variation in microbiome composition in the wild.My studies were interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed fieldwork (Chapter 6) and caused me to initiate a new study system (Chapter 7). Chapter 6 explores three-way associations between host plants, the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola and their microbial symbionts, to investigate whether plant host microbiomes or their chemical compounds are beneficial or transmitted to social spiders. This project is ongoing, and preliminary results on the microbiome of host plants and spider nests are presented. In the last chapter, I conducted research on the possible effects of urbanization on microbiome composition and diet of the solitary Garden spider Araneus diadematus, to explore whether the microbiome might be involved in occupation of urban areas. This project is ongoing, and preliminary results are presented.