Researching Across Two Cultures: Shifting Positionality

Embodied and creative research methods provoke honesty, emotion, and vulnerability in participants, which add to the richness of the stories they tell and are willing to share. The positionality of the researcher is less of “interviewer” and more “co-producer” or participant in a dialogue. Visual and creative approaches invite participants to share in ways in which they are not able or willing through words alone. The data and outputs they produce, with film, art, or objects, can in turn affect those who see it more than written text and need to be analysed and disseminated along with more traditional transcripts, articles, and presentations. In the context of investigating sensitive issues such as those around embodied identity, these methods, which use embodied methods to explore embodied research questions, may feel the most appropriate. These approaches lie along the boundary of therapy and research, asking much of researchers who are unlikely to have received therapeutic training or ongoing support. Due to this deficit, the researched may find that their experience is not held or contained in a way that the content would demand. Similarly, the data themselves lie on the boundary of art and research, in that they can be seen as more than a tool to facilitate reflection, but as artifacts in their own right. What are the implications in this scenario? Where should we position ourselves and our work along these boundaries? Who holds the space for the researcher and the researched if both are made vulnerable

Strategies used in the pursuit of achievability during goal setting in rehabilitation

We used conversation analysis of six audio- and video-recorded goal setting meetings that were attended by patients and their respective treating team to explore and describe the interaction of participants during interdisciplinary goal setting, and to identify the strategies used to agree goals. The health care professionals involved in the six sessions included four physiotherapists, four occupational therapists, four nurses, one speech and language therapist, and one neuropsychologist. The participants included 3 patients with multiple sclerosis, 2 patients with spinal cord lesions, and 1 patient with stroke from an inpatient neurological rehabilitation unit. Detailed analysis revealed how the treating team shaped the meetings. The most notable finding was that there was rarely a straightforward translation of patient wishes into agreed-on written goals, with the treating team leading goal modification so that goals were achievable. Despite professional dominance, patients also influenced the course of the interaction, particularly when offering resistance to goals proposed by the treating team

Systems, interactions and macrotheory

A significant proportion of early HCI research was guided by one very clear vision: that the existing theory base in psychology and cognitive science could be developed to yield engineering tools for use in the interdisciplinary context of HCI design. While interface technologies and heuristic methods for behavioral evaluation have rapidly advanced in both capability and breadth of application, progress toward deeper theory has been modest, and some now believe it to be unnecessary. A case is presented for developing new forms of theory, based around generic “systems of interactors.” An overlapping, layered structure of macro- and microtheories could then serve an explanatory role, and could also bind together contributions from the different disciplines. Novel routes to formalizing and applying such theories provide a host of interesting and tractable problems for future basic research in HCI

Building relationships with the invisible in the digital (global) economy (BRIDGE).

Access to products, services and government is increasingly reliant on people being able to use information and communications technologies: from computers to mobile phones. Whilst there are many obvious benefits to those already familiar with the technology, those that do not have the skills or inclination to interact through such technology can get excluded and this may eventually lead to a permanent disadvantage. These groups within society can be very large according to the UK government, with 70% of over 65s reported as never having used the Internet (www.statistics.gov.uk, 2008). As companies grow in scale and design products and services for global rather than local markets it becomes harder to track these partially excluded groups. This is reported as a growing 'psychic distance' between the designers of technologies and the prospective users of those technologies, with a risk that those excluded from the market today will become effectively invisible to designers of future products. Such users' requirements of technology no longer inform the design process and create a digital divide that is socially constructed rather than economically constrained. This is neither good for society nor business, where such exclusion may alienate, as well as prevent business from identifying and engaging with latent demand for their products and services. This project aims to build a 'Bridge' from the needs of technologically excluded users to the capabilities of suppliers of products and services. This will be achieved through exploration of users' expectations, desires and needs and by building design guidelines to help address them. The project will extrapolate the results of this work to wider markets. In order to realise these goals, a combination is needed of qualitative research methods to deliver a detailed picture of user needs, and quantitative methods to map that to the data that large global corporations would typically hold about their current customers and markets. User needs identified through qualitative methods need to be related to behavioural characteristics observed through data analysis and modelling of demand within global markets. This element of the project builds on direct engagement with industry, both with designers, and their existing customers, as well as the organisational processes and data that relate one to the other and informs the designer's view of their users. Through direct engagement with users, designers and producers, BRIDGE will contribute to the design of new products, services and interfaces. As design improves and becomes more socially inclusive, better and more sustainable relationships can be established with consumers. This knowledge can be used to identify opportunities for expansion within global markets for UK industry and hence has the potential to benefit individuals, society and the economy overall

Predicting space climate change

The recent decline in the open magnetic flux of the Sun heralds the end of the Grand Solar Maximum (GSM) that has persisted throughout the space age, during which the largest‐fluence Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) events have been rare and Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) fluxes have been relatively low. In the absence of a predictive model of the solar dynamo, we here make analogue forecasts by studying past variations of solar activity in order to evaluate how long‐term change in space climate may influence the hazardous energetic particle environment of the Earth in the future. We predict the probable future variations in GCR flux, near‐Earth interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), sunspot number, and the probability of large SEP events, all deduced from cosmogenic isotope abundance changes following 24 GSMs in a 9300‐year record

The Distribution of X-ray Dips with Orbital Phase in Cygnus X-1

We present results of a comprehensive study of the distribution of absorption dips with orbital phase in Cygnus X-1. Firstly, the distribution was obtained using archival data from all major X-ray observatories and corrected for the selection effect that phase zero (superior conjunction of the black hole) has been preferentially observed. Dip occurrence was seen to vary strongly with orbital phase \phi, with a peak at \phi ~ 0.95, i.e. was not symmetric about phase zero. Secondly, the RXTE ASM has provided continuous coverage of the Low State of Cygnus X-1 since Sept. 1996, and we have selected dip data based on increases in hardness ratio. The distribution, with much increased numbers of dip events, confirms that the peak is at \phi ~ 0.95, and we report the discovery of a second peak at \phi ~ 0.6. We attribute this peak to absorption in an accretion stream from the companion star HDE 226868. We have estimated the ionization parameter at different positions showing that radiative acceleration of the wind is suppressed by photoionization in particular regions in the binary system. To obtain the variation of column density with phase, we make estimates of neutral wind density for the extreme cases that acceleration of the wind is totally suppressed, or not suppressed at all. An accurate description will lie between these extremes. In each case, a strong variation of column density with orbital phase resulted, similar to the variation of dip occurrence. This provides evidence that formation of the blobs in the wind which lead to absorption dips depends on the density of the neutral component in the wind, suggesting possible mechanisms for blob growth.Comment: 9 pages, Latex, 7 ps figures. accepted by MNRA

Exploring Parameter Constraints on Quintessential Dark Energy: The Exponential Model

We present an analysis of a scalar field model of dark energy with an exponential potential using the Dark Energy Task Force (DETF) simulated data models. Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling techniques we examine the ability of each simulated data set to constrain the parameter space of the exponential potential for data sets based on a cosmological constant and a specific exponential scalar field model. We compare our results with the constraining power calculated by the DETF using their ``$w_0-w_a$'' parametrization of the dark energy. We find that respective increases in constraining power from one stage to the next produced by our analysis give results consistent with DETF results. To further investigate the potential impact of future experiments, we also generate simulated data for an exponential model background cosmology which can not be distinguished from a cosmological constant at DETF ``Stage 2'', and show that for this cosmology good DETF Stage 4 data would exclude a cosmological constant by better than 3$\sigma$.Comment: 11 pages including 10 figure

Ion charge states and potential geoeffectiveness: the role of coronal spectroscopy for space-weather forecasting

Severe space-weather is driven by interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs), episodic eruptions of solar plasma and magnetic flux that travel out through the heliosphere and can perturb the Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere and upper atmosphere. In order for space-weather forecasts to allow effective mitigating action, forecasts must be made as early as possible, necessitating identification of potentially “geoeffective” ICMEs close to the Sun. This presents two challenges. Firstly, geoeffectiveness is primarily determined by the magnetic field intensity and orientation, both of which are difficult to measure close to the Sun. Secondly, the magnetic field evolves in transit between the Sun and the Earth, sometimes in a highly non-linear way. Conversely, solar wind ion charge states, such as the ratio of O7+ to O6+, can be observed near the Sun through coronal spectroscopy and are fixed by the electron temperature at the coronal height where ion-electron collisions are last possible as the ICME erupts. After this point, they are said to be “frozen in” as they do not evolve further as the ICME propagates through the solar wind. In this study we show that ions charge states, while not geoeffective in and of themselves, act as strong markers for the geoeffectiveness of the ICME. The probability of severe space weather is around seven times higher in “hot” ICMEs than “cold” ICMEs, as defined by O7+/O6+. We suggest that coronal spectroscopy of ICMEs could complement current forecasting techniques, providing valuable additional information about potential geoeffectiveness