Statistical characterisation of bio-aerosol background in an urban environment

In this paper we statistically characterise the bio-aerosol background in an urban environment. To do this we measure concentration levels of naturally occurring microbiological material in the atmosphere over a two month period. Naturally occurring bioaerosols can be considered as noise, as they mask the presence of signals coming from biological material of interest (such as an intentionally released biological agent). Analysis of this 'biobackground' was undertaken in the 1-10 um size range and a 3-9% contribution was found to be biological in origin - values which are in good agreement with other studies reported in the literature. A model based on the physics of turbulent mixing and dispersion was developed and validated against this analysis. The Gamma distribution (the basis of our model) is shown to comply with the scaling laws of the concentration moments of our data, which enables us to universally characterise both biological and non-biological material in the atmosphere. An application of this model is proposed to build a framework for the development of novel algorithms for bio-aerosol detection and rapid characterisation.Comment: 14 Pages, 8 Figure

An intervention modelling experiment to change GP's intentions to implement evidence-based practice : using theory-based interventions to promote GP management of upper respiratory tract infection without prescribing antibiotics #2

Background: Psychological theories of behaviour may provide a framework to guide the design of interventions to change professional behaviour. Behaviour change interventions, designed using psychological theory and targeting important motivational beliefs, were experimentally evaluated for effects on the behavioural intention and simulated behaviour of GPs in the management of uncomplicated upper respiratory tract infection (URTI). Methods: The design was a 2 × 2 factorial randomised controlled trial. A postal questionnaire was developed based on three theories of human behaviour: Theory of Planned Behaviour; Social Cognitive Theory and Operant Learning Theory. The beliefs and attitudes of GPs regarding the management of URTI without antibiotics and rates of prescribing on eight patient scenarios were measured at baseline and post-intervention. Two theory-based interventions, a "graded task" with "action planning" and a "persuasive communication", were incorporated into the post-intervention questionnaire. Trial groups were compared using co-variate analyses. Results: Post-intervention questionnaires were returned for 340/397 (86%) GPs who responded to the baseline survey. Each intervention had a significant effect on its targeted behavioural belief: compared to those not receiving the intervention GPs completing Intervention 1 reported stronger self-efficacy scores (Beta = 1.41, 95% CI: 0.64 to 2.25) and GPs completing Intervention 2 had more positive anticipated consequences scores (Beta = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.46 to 1.98). Intervention 2 had a significant effect on intention (Beta = 0.90, 95% CI = 0.41 to 1.38) and simulated behaviour (Beta = 0.47, 95% CI = 0.19 to 0.74). Conclusion: GPs' intended management of URTI was significantly influenced by their confidence in their ability to manage URTI without antibiotics and the consequences they anticipated as a result of doing so. Two targeted behaviour change interventions differentially affected these beliefs. One intervention also significantly enhanced GPs' intentions not to prescribe antibiotics for URTI and resulted in lower rates of prescribing on patient scenarios compared to a control group. The theoretical frameworks utilised provide a scientific rationale for understanding how and why the interventions had these effects, improving the reproducibility and generalisability of these findings and offering a sound basis for an intervention in a "real world" trial. Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT00376142This study is funded by the European Commission Research Directorate as part of a multi-partner program: Research Based Education and Quality Improvement (ReBEQI): A Framework and tools to develop effective quality improvement programs in European healthcare. (Proposal No: QLRT-2001-00657)

‘We’ve got a few who don’t go to PE’: Learning support assistant and special educational needs coordinator views on inclusion in physical education in England

Britain’s 1981 Education Act stimulated a partial migration of pupils from special to mainstream schools. The onus has since been on teachers to meet the needs and capitalise on the capabilities of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in mainstream school settings. The research analysed learning support assistant (LSA) and special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) views on inclusion in physical education (PE). Individual interviews were conducted with 12 LSAs and 12 SENCOs working in mainstream schools in North-West England. Open, axial and selective coding was performed on interview transcripts to identify reoccurring themes. The research found that SENCOs and LSAs considered PE to be an inclusive subject, the conceptualisation of which was left to them. However, developing PE provision that met the needs and optimised the capabilities of pupils with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and supporting pupils with SEND during team games and competitive sports, were identified as key challenges to inclusion in PE. This may be of concern to some educationalists given that these types of curriculum activities have recently been repositioned at the heart of PE in England. A key challenge for all those involved in educating pupils with SEND in PE, especially teachers and LSAs, is to plan and teach team games and competitive sports in ways that meet the needs of and stretch all pupils, in particular those with ASD

A pilot telephone intervention to increase uptake of breast cancer screening in socially deprived areas in Scotland (TELBRECS):study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND Breast cancer accounts for almost 30% of all cancers and is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women in Scotland. Screening is key to early detection. The Scottish Breast Screening Programme is a nationwide, free at point of delivery screening service, to which all women aged between 50 and 70 years are invited to attend every 3 years. Currently over three-quarters of invited women regularly attend screening. However, women from more deprived areas are much less likely to attend: for example in the 3 years from 2010-2012 only 63% of women in the most deprived area attended the East of Scotland Breast Screening programme versus 81% in the least deprived. Research has suggested that reminders (telephone or letter) and brief, personalised interventions addressing barriers to attendance may be helpful in increasing uptake in low-income women. METHODS/DESIGN We will employ a brief telephone reminder and support intervention, whose purpose is to elicit and address any mistaken beliefs women have about breast screening, with the aim that the perceived benefits of screening come to outweigh any perceived barriers for individuals. We will test whether this intervention, plus a simple anticipated regret manipulation, will lead to an increase in the uptake of breast cancer screening amongst low-income women who have failed to attend a first appointment, in a randomised controlled trial with 600 women. Participants will be randomly allocated to one of four treatment arms i.e. 1) Letter reminder (i.e. Treatment as usual: CONTROL); 2) Telephone reminder (TEL), 3) Telephone reminder plus telephone support (TEL-SUPP) and 4) Telephone reminder plus support plus AR (TEL-SUPP-AR). The primary outcome will be attendance at breast screening within 3 months of the reminder letter. DISCUSSION If this simple telephone support intervention (with or without AR intervention) leads to a significant increase in breast screening attendance, this would represent a rare example of a theoretically-driven, relatively simple psychological intervention that could result in earlier detection of breast cancer amongst an under-served group of lower socio-economic women. TRIAL REGISTRATION Current Controlled trials: ISRCTN06039270. Registered 16th January 2014

'They never pass me the ball’: exposing ableism through the leisure experiences of disabled children, young people and their families.

In this paper, we explore the participation of disabled children, young people and their families in leisure activities. Drawing on the accounts of disabled children, young people and their parents and carers, we reflect on the leisure spaces that they access and record some of their experiences within them. Using the concept of ‘ableism’ (Campbell 2009) we interrogate the data gathered as part a two-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES – 062-23-1138) (http//www.rihsc.mmu.ac.uk/postblairproject/):‘Does every child matter, Post-Blair: the interconnections of disabled childhoods'. By doing so we identify some of the inherent and embedded discriminations in favour of those children and young people who are perceived to be ‘able’ that simultaneously work to exclude the young 'kinds of people' (Hacking 2007), categorised as 'disabled', and their families from leisure facilities and opportunities. We suggest that currently, disabled families and children occupy a mix of ‘mainstream', ‘segregated’ and ‘separate’ leisure spaces. We discuss the impact of occupying these spaces and ask: What do the experiences of accessing leisure by disabled children, young people and their families reveal about the processes and practices of ableism? To what extent are children and families required to 'pass'as'normal enough' to gain access to leisure spaces? To what extent are ‘segregated’ leisure opportunities regulated and produced by a kind of ‘diagnostic apartheid’ (Campbell 2008a: 155)? What is the role and value of 'separate' leisure activities? </p

Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Associations between Household Food Security and Child Anthropometry at Ages 5 and 8 Years in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam

En: Journal of Nutrition, No. 145, pp. 1924-1933. doi:10.3945/jn.115.210229Background: Poor childhood nutritional status has lifetime effects and food insecurity is associated with dietary practices that can impair nutritional status. Objectives: We assessed concurrent and subsequent associations between food insecurity and height-for-age z scores (HAZs) and body mass index–for-age z scores (BMI-Zs); evaluated associations with transitory and chronic food insecurity; and tested whether dietary diversity mediates associations between food insecurity and nutritional status. Methods: We used data from the Young Lives younger cohort composed of children in Ethiopia (n = 1757), India (n =1825), Peru (n = 1844), and Vietnam (n = 1828) recruited in 2002 (round 1) at ;1 y old, with subsequent data collection at 5 y in 2006 (round 2) and 8 y in 2009 (round 3). Results: Children from food-insecure households had significantly lower HAZs in all countries at 5 y (Ethiopia, 20.33; India, 20.53; Peru, 20.31; and Vietnam, 20.68 HAZ; all P < 0.001), although results were attenuated after controlling for potential confounders (Ethiopia, 20.21; India, 20.32; Peru, 20.14; and Vietnam, 20.27 HAZ; P < 0.01). Age 5 y food insecurity predicted the age 8 y HAZ, but did not add predictive power beyond HAZ at age 5 y in Ethiopia, India, or Peru. Age 5 y food insecurity predicted the age 8 y BMI-Z even after controlling for the 5 y BMI-Z, although associations were not significant after the inclusion of additional confounding variables (Ethiopia, P = 0.12; India, P = 0.29; Peru, P = 0.16; and Vietnam, P = 0.51). Chronically food-insecure households had significantly lower HAZs than households that were consistently food-secure, although BMI-Zs did not differ by chronic food-insecurity status. Dietary diversity mediated 18.8–30.5% of the association between food security and anthropometry in Vietnam, but mediated to a lesser degree (8.4–19.3%) in other countries. Conclusions: In 4 countries, food insecurity at 5 y of age was associated with both HAZ and BMI-Z at age 8 y, although the association was attenuated after adjusting for other household factors and anthropometry at age 5 y, and remained significant only for the HAZ in Vietnam

Expected Performance of the ATLAS Experiment - Detector, Trigger and Physics

A detailed study is presented of the expected performance of the ATLAS detector. The reconstruction of tracks, leptons, photons, missing energy and jets is investigated, together with the performance of b-tagging and the trigger. The physics potential for a variety of interesting physics processes, within the Standard Model and beyond, is examined. The study comprises a series of notes based on simulations of the detector and physics processes, with particular emphasis given to the data expected from the first years of operation of the LHC at CERN

Imagining the Lives of Others: Empathy in Public Relations

This paper asks how we might theorise empathy in public relations (PR) in the light of a widespread ‘turn’ towards emotion in the academy, as well as in popular discourse. Two distinct notions of empathy are explored: ‘true’empathy as discussed in intercultural communication, is driven by a human concern for the other in order to understand experiences, feelings and situations that may be different from our own; whereas ‘instrumental’ empathy, reflecting a self orientation, is said to characterise much neoliberal market discourse in which corporations are urged to understand their customers better. Thus, while empathy may seem highly desirable as a means to enter into dialogue with an organisation’s publics, particularly during times of social upheaval and crisis, it is important to pay attention to empathy in public relations discourses including whose goals are served by empathetic engagement; and the type(s) of empathy called upon within a PR context. A literature review identified a socio-cultural definition of empathy as ‘imaginary effort’. A review of the public relations literature, however, found that while empathy is considered an important principle and personal attribute, notions of empathy, with a few exceptions, are under-explored. Nonfunctionalist, socio-cultural research which examines the meanings that practitioners associate with empathy is distinctly lacking; therefore in order to gain further insight into empathy, two sources of data were explored. The analysis of a popular online practitioner blog showed that other-centred empathic skill is discursively framed as instrumental in achieving clients’ business objectives. The analysis of three empathy statements drawn from 12 in-depth interviews with practitioners revealed complex empathic discourse in practitioner-client relationships. While the findings are limited to illustrative analyses only, this paper challenges researchers to develop conceptualisations and perspectives of empathy as imaginary effort in public relations

The 'lost child' as figure of trauma and recovery in early post-war cinema: Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) and Natan Gross's Unzere Kinder (1948)

The article examines the figure of the ‘lost child’ in feature films of the immediate post-war period. The figure’s enormous symbolic value as innocent victim and future generation, granted the ‘lost child’ a key position in post-war discourse, including films which tried to grapple with the moral and physical destruction of the continent after 1945. National film industries, particularly of the perpetrator nation, employed the ‘lost child’ for genre stories in which the post-war chaos is being mastered and a new, masculine national self is re-built. However, films made by victim groups outside a national context rely on the ‘lost child’ to broach the destruction of their identity by war and persecution. Analysing two films, Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) and Nata Gross’s Unzere Kinder (1948), I argue that they use the child figure to deal with traumatization and make it part of the reconstruction of communal intergenerational relations. This does not result in stories of masculine mastery but in narratives that incorporate moments of trauma process emerging around destroyed mother-child relations. The films, encoding traumatization in film language, develop a rich cinematic language along questions of identity and form a first instance of posttraumatic cinema

Self-bias and the emotionality of foreign languages

Article first published online: June 13, 2018Foreign language contexts impose a relative psychological and emotional distance in bilinguals. In our previous studies, we demonstrated that the use of a foreign language changes the strength of the seemingly automatic emotional responses in the self-paradigm, showing a robust asymmetry in the self-bias effect in a native and a foreign language context. Namely, larger effects were found in the native language, suggesting an emotional blunting in the foreign language context. In the present study, we investigated the source of these effects by directly comparing whether they stem from a language’s foreignness versus its non-nativeness. We employed the same self-paradigm (a simple perceptual matching task of associating simple geometric shapes with the labels “you,” “friend,” and “other”), testing unbalanced Spanish–Basque–English trilinguals. We applied the paradigm to three language contexts: native, non-native but contextually present (i.e., non-native local), and non-native foreign. Results showed a smaller self-bias only in the foreign language pointing to the foreign-language-induced psychological/emotional distance as the necessary prerequisite for foreign language effects. Furthermore, we explored whether perceived emotional distance towards foreign languages in Spanish–English bilinguals modulates foreign language effects. Results suggest that none of the different indices of emotional distance towards the foreign language obtained via questionnaires modulated the self-biases in the foreign language contexts. Our results further elucidate the deeply rooted and automatic nature of foreign-language-driven differential emotional processing.This research has been partially funded by grants PSI2015-65689-P and SEV-2015-0490 from the Spanish Government, AThEME-613465 from the European Union, and a 2016 BBVA Foundation Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators awarded to the last author (J.A.D.)