Customers' perspectives on the impact of the Pathways to Work Condition Management Programme on their health, wellbeing and vocational activity

Aims: Pathways to Work is a UK initiative aimed at supporting customers on incapacity benefits to return to work. This qualitative study complements previous evaluations of Pathways to Work by exploring customers’ perceptions of the impact of the Condition Management Programme (CMP) offered to claimants with long-term health conditions. Methods: 39 customers took part in focus groups held at the seven sites where Pathways was originally piloted. The main focus of the discussions was on perceptions of the ways in which participation had impacted on health, well-being and return to work. The discussions were audio-recorded and fully transcribed for analysis using a text analysis framework to enable the development and refinement of categories and overarching patterns in the data. Results: Perceived impacts on health and wellbeing included a more positive outlook, social contact, changed perceptions of conditions and improvements in health. Some customers also reported an increase in their vocational activity and others felt ready to embark on new activities. Factors associated with positive outcomes included the extent and quality of contact with CMP staff and practical advice about condition management. Factors impeding positive employment outcomes related mainly to obstacles to returning to work. Conclusions: The results indicated that CMP can assist customers to learn about and manage their health conditions and increase their vocational activity, and that CMP therefore provides a promising means of enabling people with long-term health conditions to regain a fulfilling, productive life

Calder's Violin: real-time notation and performance through musically expressive algorithms

Notation is a central issue in modern western music. Composers have often sought ways of expanding and refining the functionality of notation and, in doing so, have re-shaped the music that they were originally aiming to describe. Other musical traditions have very different uses for notation; some have no use for it at all; each approach creates contrasting musical experiences. The role that electronics and computers have played in music has also influenced the nature and function of notation. More traditional 'live' notation of note/pitch- based music generated algorithmically has proved particularly problematic: musical notation is itself a very complex subject. Composers and technologists have instead used libraries of images, algorithms for the pre- generation of material or simplified notations that can be used as the basis of more improvisatory performances. This paper presents work involving the live presentation of 'traditionally precise' music notation created through algorithmically generated material. This notation can then be performed by a human musician alongside computer-generated diffused sound or other 'real' musicians. Technologies used include the SuperCollider audio programming environment and the INScore notation project with the Open Sound Control protocol used to communicate between them. As well as providing a fascinating musical experience, the process highlights a number of issues concerning performance practice, instrumental technique, rehearsal, time and timing, as well as the nature of notation itself and its relationship to improvisation

User: Reflections on the narrativization of self within social networking sites: A presentation and discussion of the processes involved in the development of a creative work-in-progress

This article explores the subject of narrative and self within social media contexts through a presentation and discussion of the project and processes involved in the development of creative writing work-in-progress. The activity has taken place over an eighteen-month period from February 2009–September 2010 with support from the National Lottery Fund through Arts Council East, Arc Digital, CODE and the new writing development scheme Gold Dust. The work undertaken so far consists of the completion of a novel manuscript entitled User and preliminary investigations into how elements of the novel could be extended online. The work aims to be a dual platform in both subject and form; offering a traditionally authored text about where our online and offline worlds intersect as well as a meaningful intertextual digital experience that invites readers to respond to the work in critical and creative ways

FIAEs in famous faces are mediated by type of processing

An important question regarding face aftereffects is whether it is based on face-specific or lower-level mechanisms. One method for addressing this is to explore how adaptation in upright or inverted, photographic positive or negative faces transfers to test stimuli that are either upright or inverted and normal or negated. A series of studies are reported in which this is tested using a typical face identity aftereffect paradigm in unfamiliar and famous faces. Results showed that aftereffects were strongest when the adaptor matched the test stimuli. In addition, aftereffects did not transfer from upright adaptors to inverted test images, but did transfer from inverted adaptors to upright test images in famous faces. However, in unfamiliar faces, a different pattern was observed. The results are interpreted in terms of how identity adaptation interacts with low-level adaptation and highlight differences in the representation of famous and unfamiliar faces

The Still Life of Things: Intermediality and Digital Spectatorship

Critical discussions of Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher have often noted the film’s tendency to suspend narrative movement in moments of tableau vivant, and its frequent mise-en-abime framings, both of which self-consciously mimic the look of paintings and photographs. Such techniques confirm film’s profound affinities with the so-called ‘static’ media of painting and photography, but also foreground what Laura Mulvey calls the ‘fundamental, and irreconcilable, opposition between stillness and movement’ that defines filmic materiality and distinguishes it from other visual arts (2006: 67). This chapter engages with some of these questions in relation to Ratcatcher’s DVD format, to look in particular at the stills gallery feature. The DVD format brings another form of visibility to the film’s wider narrative and aesthetic interest in stillness as the still-moving binary inherent in celluloid is displaced onto, and remediated by, the electronic screen. Drawing from debates about intermediality and digital spectatorship, this chapter considers how the stills gallery participates in Ratcatcher’s questioning of aesthetic polarities, challenging divisions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. In tadem, it considers in particular the ways in which the distinctive textual properties and features of DVD – such as interactivity, electronic displays, stills galleries, commentaries, ‘making of’ featurettes, short films, and so forth – may be said to transform the experience of spectatorship and its spatial and temporal framing. By foregrounding and embracing the material hybridity and intermedial potential of both still and moving images, Ratcatcher points toward the emergence of what Laura Mulvey, D.N. Rodowick (2007), and other scholars have identified as a new ontology in which, to quote Mulvey, ‘ambivalence, impurity and uncertainty displace […] traditional oppositions’ (2006: 12). More specifically, I argue that the stills gallery feature insists on an experience of the uncanny that is given renewed importance in an era of digital spectatorship

Skin deep: female flesh in UK live art since 1999

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Pharmacological Isolation of Experimental Models of Drug-resistant Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cell Line

Drug resistance is one of the major challenges facing the success of chemotherapy against human hepatocarcinoma (HCC) as well as other types of cancer. Studies with cell lines can serve as initial screening for agents that could modulate drug resistance. Development of a good experimental model of drug-resistant cells is a prerequisite for the success of such cellular studies; but could be laborious and generally time-consuming. Additionally, the high mortality rate associated with advanced HCC calls for a probe into the mechanism of resistance by developing experimental model that mimics clinical method of its treatment. Consequently, we have reported a simplified method of selection of drug-resistant hepatocarcinoma cells from human hepatocellular carcinoma (HEPG2) cell line using pharmacologic agents, cisplatin (CDDP) and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). HEPG2 cell line was incubated for 24 hours with different concentrations of CDDP (0 - 20 μM) or 5-FU (0 - 100 μM). Cell viability was assayed by CCK-8 (Cell Counting Kit) analysis, and the inhibitory concentrations (IC50) for CDDP and 5-FU were established by dose-dependent cytotoxicity curves. The IC50(s) were confirmed by flow cytometric analysis of cell death due to CDDP or 5-FU. Clinical method of treatment was imitated by treating the parental HEPG2 cell line in pulse, at the optimal concentration of either CDDP or 5-FU for 4 to 6 hours. Induction was repeated 6 times, whilst allowing the cells to attain at least 70% confluence between intervals of induction. The resultant drug-resistant sublines, (HEPG2CR) and (HEPG2FR) were found to be stable after over 3 months of drug withdrawal and maintenance in drug-free medium. This was done with the views of establishing a simple, efficient and direct protocol for the development of good cellular models for the study of drug resistance in liver cancer, with possible application in other cancer types

’Thou’s let oot thy-sel’ fro’ unner th’ sto’an’: the narrative environment of Yallery Brown

One of the most challenging tasks facing a writer or storyteller seeking to explain his or her creative process is to address the lack of a critical vocabulary in which to express a writer’s rather than a reader’s, critic’s or teacher’s point of view. As Michael Rosen noted in his PhD thesis, trying to represent the writer’s point of view puts one in contention with the most respected theorists and critics: "According to some I am dead (Barthes). To others whatever I intend is irrelevant (Wimsatt and Beardsley). And to yet others, the whole task is pointless because whatever I think that my writing-language is signifying, it is not (Saussure, Derrida); and anyway, in the final instance it's only the reader who knows what's written (Fish)." In this paper I trace the development of my re-telling of the Lincolnshire folk tale, ‘Yallery Brown’, and how the processes of researching and adapting it for performance as a chamber opera, and subsequently for solo storytelling, helped shape the printed versions published by Scholastic and Ginn. I also present the idea of a ‘narrative environment’, a term I’m appropriating from interior design, and extending Henry James’s notion of the ‘house of fiction, to imagine a fantasy, multi-dimensional space in which stories are re-configured, re-interpreted and re-combined with other whole stories, fragments of stories, poems, songs, images, objects - part of a symbiosis which is not simply self-replicating but dynamically evolving

Different bioindicators measured at different spatial scales vary in their response to agricultural intensity

Ecologically, potential bioindicator taxa operate at different scales within agricultural ecosystems, and thereby provide a means to investigate the influence of changing management practice on biological diversity at different scales within the agro-ecosystem. Surveys of grassland plant species at field level, parasitoid Hymenoptera at the field and farm scale, and bird populations and habitats at farm scale were carried out on 119 grass-based farms across three regions in the Republic of Ireland. In addition, habitat richness and aquatic macroinvertebrates were quantified at landscape scale. Agricultural intensity on the surveyed farms was quantified by mean farm stocking rate, calculated as livestock units per ha (LU/ha), and generalised linear mixed models used to evaluate relationships between stocking rate and the incidence of chosen bioindicator groups. Field scale bioindicators (plant species richness and parasitoid taxon richness and abundance) were negatively associated with mean farm stocking rate. Over much of its observed range, mean farm stocking rate was positively associated with total bird species richness and abundance, and the species richness and abundance of farmland bird indicator species recorded in the winter season. However, these relationships were quadratic, and above a relatively high upper limit of 2.5–3.5 LU/ha, further increase in farm stocking rate had a negative influence. Results demonstrate that different bioindicators measured at different spatial scales vary in their response to agricultural intensity. The lack of a consistent bioindicator response to farm stocking rate suggests that within predominantly farmed regions, maximising biodiversity requires a careful targeting and monitoring with bioindicator taxa that are informative of influences at relevant operational scales. The insights provided may then be much more informative for the design and implementation of agri-environment measures that maximise biodiversity within farmed landscapes

Functional and Structural MRI Studies on Impulsiveness: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorders

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