The Power of Light Zine 1 - Why do things change? - an epistemically insightful way to explore the nature of science and research at Diamond Light Source, UK

In the STFC funded Epistemic Insight Initiative project, The Power of Light, a series of resources have been designed informed by co-creation activities, pilot lessons, and workshops that involved children in schools and with their families in community spaces. Through this project with Diamond, we brought into classrooms and community spaces how light can be used to help investigate the world around us, address real-world problems and inform our thinking about Big Questions. The resources we develop support teachers' and their students' sense of agency when exploring 'how knowledge works' and how knowledge is built through different disciplines (including the natural sciences, the arts, and the humanities). This 'zine', with its focus on how scientists have been working with historians and archaeologists to preserve the Mary Rose (Henry the Eighth's favourite ship that was sunk in the Solent in England's southern coast), has been developed through co-creative activities involving research scientists at Diamond Light Source (UK), academics, primary school teachers, STEM ambassadors, and Diamond's public engagement team. Zines use an appealing combination of text and images to create a concise comic-like narrative format to generate enthusiasm about a particular area of interest - the series of zines designed for this project focuses on research taking place at the Diamond facility. The Diamond Light Source facility houses a synchrotron which is used to conduct research in a variety of applied fields of science and technology. This zine is designed to be accessible to ages 8+, and works well with a short animation (available in both Zenodo and on the Epistemic Insight You Tube channel) that has been created with additional funding from STFC. Teaching notes are available for this zine, with guidance and activity sheets to support working with the Power of Light resources. This zine explores these discussion questions: 1) What are examples of changes we can observe? 2) What helps us to know more about the things around us? 3) What might we use to help us observe changes

Forum: The eusociality continuum

Eusocial societies are traditionally characterized by a reproductive division of labor, an overlap of generations, and cooperative care of the breeders' young. Eusociality was once thought to occur only in termites, ants, and some bee and wasp species, but striking evolutionary convergences have recently become apparent between the societies of these insects and those of cooperatively breeding birds and mammals. These parallels have blurred distinctions between cooperative breeding and eusociality, leading to calls for either drastically restricting or expanding usage of these terms. We favor the latter approach. Cooperative breeding and eusociality are not discrete phenomena, but rather form a continuum of fundamentally similar social systems whose main differences lie in the distribution of lifetime reproductive success among group members. Therefore we propose to array vertebrate and invertebrate cooperative breeders along a common axis, representing a standardized measure of reproductive variance, and to drop such (loaded) terms as "primitive” and "advanced” eusociality. The terminology we propose unites all occurrences of alloparental helping of kin under a single theoretical umbrella (e.g., Hamilton's rule). Thus, cooperatively breeding vertebrates can be regarded as eusocial, just as eusocial invertebrates are cooperative breeders. We believe this integrated approach will foster potentially revealing cross-taxon comparisons, which are essential to understanding social evolution in birds, mammals, and insect

Identifying enablers and barriers to individually tailored prescribing: a survey of healthcare professionals in the UK.

BACKGROUND: Many people now take multiple medications on a long-term basis to manage health conditions. Optimising the benefit of such polypharmacy requires tailoring of medicines use to the needs and circumstances of individuals. However, professionals report barriers to achieving this in practice. In this study, we examined health professionals' perceptions of enablers and barriers to delivering individually tailored prescribing. METHODS: Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) informed an on-line survey of health professionals' views of enablers and barriers to implementation of Individually Tailored Prescribing (ITP) of medicines. Links to the survey were sent out through known professional networks using a convenience/snowball sampling approach. Survey questions sought to identify perceptions of supports/barriers for ITP within the four domains of work described by NPT: sense making, engagement, action and monitoring. Analysis followed the framework approach developed in our previous work. RESULTS: Four hundred and nineteen responses were included in the final analysis (67.3% female, 32.7% male; 52.7% nurse prescribers, 19.8% pharmacists and 21.8% GPs). Almost half (44.9%) were experienced practitioners (16+ years in practice); around one third reported already routinely offering ITP to their patients. GPs were the group least likely to recognise this as consistent usual practice. Findings revealed general support for the principles of ITP but significant variation and inconsistency in understanding and implementation in practice. Our findings reveal four key implications for practice: the need to raise understanding of ITP as a legitimate part of professional practice; to prioritise the work of ITP within the range of individual professional activity; to improve the consistency of training and support for interpretive practice; and to review the impact of formal and informal monitoring processes on practice. CONCLUSION: The findings will inform the ongoing development of our new complex intervention (PRIME Prescribing) to support the individual tailoring of medicines needed to address problematic polypharmacy

Optimising planned medical education strategies to develop learners' person-centredness: a realist review

Context: Person-centeredness is a stated aim for medical education; however, studies suggest this is not being achieved. There is a gap in our understanding of how, why and in what circumstances medical education interventions that aim to develop person-centredness are successful. Methods: A realist review was conducted with a search of Medline, Embase, HMIC and ERIC databases and the grey literature using the terms ‘medical education’ and ‘person-centred’ and related synonyms. Studies that involved a planned educational intervention in medical education with data on outcomes related to person-centredness were included. The analysis focused on how and why different educational strategies interact with biomedical learner perspectives to trigger mechanisms that may or may not lead to a change in perspective towards person-centredness. Results: Sixty-one papers representing fifty-three interventions were included in the final synthesis. Nine context–intervention–mechanism–outcome configuration (CIMOc) statements generated from the data synthesis make up our refined programme theory. Where educational interventions focused on communication skills learning or experiences without person-centred theory, learners experienced dissonance with their biomedical perspective which they resolved by minimising the importance of the learning, resulting in perspective endurance. Where educational interventions applied person-centred theory to meaningful experiences and included support for sense making, learners understood the relevance of person-centeredness and felt able to process their responses to learning, resulting in perspective transformation towards person-centredness. Conclusion: Our findings offer explanations as to why communication skills-based interventions may be insufficient to develop learners' person-centredness. Integrating experiential person-centred learning with theory on why person-centredness matters to clinical practice and enabling learners to make sense of their responses to learning, may support perspective transformation towards person-centredness. Our findings offer programme and policymakers testable theory to inform the development of medical education strategies that aim to support person-centredness

Psychometric Evaluation and Design of Patient-Centered Communication Measures for Cancer Care Settings

Objective To evaluate the psychometric properties of questions that assess patient perceptions of patient-provider communication and design measures of patient-centered communication (PCC). Methods Participants (adults with colon or rectal cancer living in North Carolina) completed a survey at 2 to 3 months post-diagnosis. The survey included 87 questions in six PCC Functions: Exchanging Information, Fostering Health Relationships, Making Decisions, Responding to Emotions, Enabling Patient Self-Management, and Managing Uncertainty. For each Function we conducted factor analyses, item response theory modeling, and tests for differential item functioning, and assessed reliability and construct validity. Results Participants included 501 respondents; 46% had a high school education or less. Reliability within each Function ranged from 0.90 to 0.96. The PCC-Ca-36 (36-question survey; reliability=0.94) and PCC-Ca-6 (6-question survey; reliability=0.92) measures differentiated between individuals with poor and good health (i.e., known-groups validity) and were highly correlated with the HINTS communication scale (i.e., convergent validity). Conclusion This study provides theory-grounded PCC measures found to be reliable and valid in colorectal cancer patients in North Carolina. Future work should evaluate measure validity over time and in other cancer populations. Practice implications The PCC-Ca-36 and PCC-Ca-6 measures may be used for surveillance, intervention research, and quality improvement initiatives

Continuum Surface Energy from a Lattice Model

We investigate connections between the continuum and atomistic descriptions of deformable crystals, using certain interesting results from number theory. The energy of a deformed crystal is calculated in the context of a lattice model with general binary interactions in two dimensions. A new bond counting approach is used, which reduces the problem to the lattice point problem of number theory. The main contribution is an explicit formula for the surface energy density as a function of the deformation gradient and boundary normal. The result is valid for a large class of domains, including faceted (polygonal) shapes and regions with piecewise smooth boundaries.Comment: V. 1: 10 pages, no fig's. V 2: 23 pages, no figures. Misprints corrected. Section 3 added, (new results). Intro expanded, refs added.V 3: 26 pages. Abstract changed. Section 2 split into 2. Section (4) added material. V 4, 28 pages, Intro rewritten. Changes in Sec.5 (presentation only). Refs added.V 5,intro changed V.6 address reviewer's comment