'But I thought we were friends?' Life cycles and research relationships

This chapter is concerned with a relatively under-explored aspect of ‘engaged research’ – the nature of friendship relations between researchers and practitioners, and the ethical dilemmas that arise in such relationships. Attention has been paid to the relational aspects of research in the methodology literature, but this chapter focuses more closely on friendship in particular. The chapter is framed around two guiding concerns: how do friendships, formed in and around research, change over time; and in view of friendship conceived in this dynamic fashion, what ethical questions and dilemmas arise for the ‘friends’

Speaking Right: HRDs Role in Mediating Good Boardroom Conversations

Purpose This paper aims to explore the impact discourse has on decision making practices within the boardroom and considers how personal proficiency in micro-language use can enhance an individual’s personal efficacy in influencing boardroom decisions. The work uses Habermas’ theory of communicative action to critique board talk, highlighting the need for greater understanding of the power of everyday taken for granted talk in strategy shaping. It illuminates the contribution that human resource development (HRD) professionals can make to the management of such behaviour and minimising dysfunctional behaviour and enabling effective boardroom practices. Design/methodology/approach Traditional governance theory from a business and organisational perspectives are provided before considering the boardroom environment and HRD’s role. The authors undertake ethnographic research supported by conversation analysis to explore how directors use talk-based interpersonal routines to influence boardroom processes and enact collective decision making. The authors provide one extract of directors’ talk to illustrate the process and demonstrate what the data “looks like” and the insights it holds. Findings The analysis suggests that the established underlying assumptions and rationale ideologies of corporate governance are misplaced and to understand the workings of corporate governance HRD academics and professionals need to gain deeper insight into the employment of talk within boards. Armed with such insights HRD professionals can become more effective in developing strategies to address dysfunctional leadership and promote good governance practice throughout their organisation. Social implications The work raises a call for HRD to embrace a societal mediation role to help boards to become a catalyst for setting good practice which is strategically aligned throughout the organisation. Such roles require a more dialogical, strategic and critical approach to HRD, and professionals and academics take a more holistic approach to leadership development. Originality/value The paper considers the role of the development of HRD interventions that both help individuals to work more effectively within a boardroom environment and support development to shape a boardroom culture that promotes effective governance practice by influencing boardroom practice thereby promoting strong governance and broad social compliance throughout the organisation

Re-enchanting Volcanoes:The Rise, Fall and Rise Again or Art and Aesthetics in the Making of Volcanic Knowledges

Current day volcanology largely tends to an instrumentalist view of art as, in its mimetic form, capable of providing proxy data on the timing and unfolding of particular volcanic events and, in its impressionistic form, of conveying the sublime grandeur of volcanic events and scenes. In this chapter, we note that such a reductionist view of what science is unhelpfully glosses over a much more complex disciplinary lineage, wherein both art and aesthetics played a key role in knowledge production concerning volcanoes. Using the work of Sir William Hamilton and Mary Somerville as case studies, we emphasise that art and aesthetics were part and parcel of both an 18th and 19th century approach to the study of volcanoes, and the making of particular scientific audiences. What is more, it is this lineage that provides a creative reservoir for more recent efforts that cut across scientific and arts divides, such that the ‘communication’ of the nature of volcanoes becomes a multi-media, multi-affective endeavour that speaks to a diverse range of publics

Multi-directional sorting modes in deterministic lateral displacement devices

Deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) devices separate micrometer-scale particles in solution based on their size using a laminar microfluidic flow in an array of obstacles. We investigate array geometries with rational row-shift fractions in DLD devices by use of a simple model including both advection and diffusion. Our model predicts novel multi-directional sorting modes that could be experimentally tested in high-throughput DLD devices containing obstacles that are much smaller than the separation between obstacles

Microfluidics-based approaches to the isolation of African trypanosomes

African trypanosomes are responsible for significant levels of disease in both humans and animals. The protozoan parasites are free-living flagellates, usually transmitted by arthropod vectors, including the tsetse fly. In the mammalian host they live in the bloodstream and, in the case of human-infectious species, later invade the central nervous system. Diagnosis of the disease requires the positive identification of parasites in the bloodstream. This can be particularly challenging where parasite numbers are low, as is often the case in peripheral blood. Enriching parasites from body fluids is an important part of the diagnostic pathway. As more is learned about the physicochemical properties of trypanosomes, this information can be exploited through use of different microfluidic-based approaches to isolate the parasites from blood or other fluids. Here, we discuss recent advances in the use of microfluidics to separate trypanosomes from blood and to isolate single trypanosomes for analyses including drug screening

On the edge of a new frontier: Is gerontological social work in the UK ready to meet twenty-first-century challenges?

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website. Copyright @ 2013 The Authors.This article explores the readiness of gerontological social work in the UK for meeting the challenges of an ageing society by investigating the focus on work with older people in social work education and the scope of gerontological social work research. The discussion draws on findings from two exploratory studies: a survey of qualifying master's programmes in England and a survey of the content relating to older people over a six-year period in four leading UK social work journals. The evidence from master's programmes suggests widespread neglect of ageing in teaching content and practice learning. Social work journals present a more nuanced picture. Older people emerge within coverage of generic policy issues for adults, such as personalisation and safeguarding, and there is good evidence of the complexity of need in late life. However, there is little attention to effective social work interventions, with an increasingly diverse older population, or to the quality of gerontological social work education. The case is made for infusing content on older people throughout the social work curriculum, for extending practice learning opportunities in social work with older people and for increasing the volume and reporting of gerontological social work research.Brunel Institute for Ageing Studie

Extension of nano-confined DNA: quantitative comparison between experiment and theory

The extension of DNA confined to nanochannels has been studied intensively and in detail. Yet quantitative comparisons between experiments and model calculations are difficult because most theoretical predictions involve undetermined prefactors, and because the model parameters (contour length, Kuhn length, effective width) are difficult to compute reliably, leading to substantial uncertainties. Here we use a recent asymptotically exact theory for the DNA extension in the "extended de Gennes regime" that allows us to compare experimental results with theory. For this purpose we performed new experiments, measuring the mean DNA extension and its standard deviation while varying the channel geometry, dye intercalation ratio, and ionic buffer strength. The experimental results agree very well with theory at high ionic strengths, indicating that the model parameters are reliable. At low ionic strengths the agreement is less good. We discuss possible reasons. Our approach allows, in principle, to measure the Kuhn length and effective width of a single DNA molecule and more generally of semiflexible polymers in solution.Comment: Revised version, 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, supplementary materia

On the Selection of Photometric Planetary Transits

We present a new method for differentiating between planetary transits and eclipsing binaries based on the presence of the ellipsoidal light variations. These variations can be used to detect stellar secondaries with masses ~0.2 M_sun orbiting sun-like stars at a photometric accuracy level which has already been achieved in transit surveys. By removing candidates exhibiting this effect it is possible to greatly reduce the number of objects requiring spectroscopic follow up with large telescopes. Unlike the usual candidate selection method, which are primarily based on the estimated radius of the orbiting object, this technique is not biased against bona-fide planets and brown dwarfs with large radii, because the amplitude of the effect depends on the transiting object's mass and orbital distance. In many binary systems, where a candidate planetary transit is actually due to the partial eclipse of two normal stars, the presence of flux variations due to the gravity darkening effect will show the true nature of these systems. We show that many of the recent OGLE-III photometric transit candidates exhibit the presence of significant variations in their light curves and are likely to be due to stellar secondaries. We find that the light curves of white dwarf transits will generally not mimic those of small planets because of significant gravitationally induced flux variations. We discuss the relative merits of methods used to detect transit candidates which are due to stellar blends rather than planets. We outline how photometric observations taken in two bands can be used to detect the presence of stellar blends.Comment: ApJ, 11 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, replaced with accepted versio

Nanoconfinement-enhanced conformational response of single DNA molecules to changes in ionic environment

We show that the ionic environment plays a critical role in determining the configurational properties of DNA confined in silica nanochannels. The extension of DNA in the nanochannels increases as the ionic strength is reduced, almost tripling over two decades in ionic strength for channels around 100x100 nm in dimension. Surprisingly, we find that the variation of the persistence length alone with ionic strength is not enough to explain our results. The effect is due mainly to increasing self-avoidance created by the reduced screening of electrostatic interactions at low ionic strength. To quantify the increase in self-avoidance, we introduce a new parameter into the de Gennes theory: an effective DNA width that gives the increase in the excluded volume due to electrostatic repulsion