From ‘other’ to involved: User involvement in research: An emerging paradigm

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ 2013 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article. Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.This article explores the issue of ‘othering’ service users and the role that involving them, particularly in social policy and social work research may play in reducing this. It takes, as its starting point, the concept of ‘social exclusion’, which has developed in Europe and the marginal role that those who have been included in this construct have played in its development and the damaging effects this may have. The article explores service user involvement in research and is itself written from a service user perspective. It pays particular attention to the ideological, practical, theoretical, ethical and methodological issues that such user involvement may raise for research. It examines problems that both research and user involvement may give rise to and also considers developments internationally to involve service users/subjects of research, highlighting some of the possible implications and gains of engaging service user knowledge in research and the need for this to be evaluated

Becoming Fully Human: Re-imagining Christian Discipleship for an Emerging Generation

It is my claim that followers of Jesus in the United States are suffering from missional amnesia and are seemingly unaware of their increasingly ineffective approaches towards Christian discipleship and evangelism. It seems the Church has forgotten why they exist? Simultaneously, an emerging generation watches how the Christian faith is being played out in the United States, and has arrived at the conclusion that the organized church has missed the point. The world has changed and the Church\u27s lack of response clearly indicates grand delusions of denial. The unique Christian sub-culture who were once the natives in the United States have now become immigrants. 1 The western Christian sub-culture has confused and justified itself as biblical Christianity, and its only chance of survival is radical reformation. I am further claiming the church in the twenty first century is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations and a previous world order.2 If the Christian Church in the United States desires to avoid its imminent demise, the time for revelation and revolution is now. An invitation to the next Great Awakening and Reformation is upon them. I am proposing a popular culture book that will begin by nailing a new stack of theses to the proverbial door of the church in North America. The first half of this book will examine current approaches of discipleship and evangelism that target the emerging generation, compare them to biblical models, examine their practical theology and evaluate their outcome. The second half of this book will advocate a new theology and praxis of Christian discipleship that invites an emerging generation to dwell in the Kingdom of God now, with Christ, as they simultaneously reside in the material world. However, the realities in the Kingdom of God are what will govern their lives and belief systems in the material world, which results in much more than spiritual formation. It results in a convergence of the supernatural and the natural in an incarnational holistic experience. It results in holistic human formation

Hypoxia does not influence the response of fish to a mixture of estrogenic chemicals

The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 American Chemical SocietyChemical risk assessment procedures assign a major role to standardized toxicity tests, in which the response of a particular organism to a single test substance is determined under otherwise constant and favorable conditions in the laboratory. This approach fails to consider the potential for chemical interactions, as well as failing to consider how the toxicological response varies, depending on the conditions of exposure. As yet, the issue of confounding factors on chemically mediated effects in wildlife has received little attention, despite the fact that a range of physicochemical parameters, including temperature, water quality, and pH, are known to modify chemical toxicity. Here, we consider how the estrogenic response of fish varies with regard to hypoxia. Fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas) were exposed to a mixture of estrogenic chemicals under hypoxic or normoxic conditions. Their estrogenic response was characterized using an in vivo assay, involving the analysis of the egg yolk protein, vitellogenin (VTG). The results revealed that there was no effect of hypoxia on the VTG response in either treatment group at the end of the exposure period. This suggests that this end point is robust and relatively insensitive to the effects of any physiological changes that arise as a result of hypoxia. The implications of these negative findings are discussed in terms of their relevance with regard to the development of risk assessment policy.This work was funded by a grant from the Natural Environment Research Council(NE/D00389X/1)

Understanding bricolage in norm development: South Africa, the International Criminal Court, and the contested politics of transitional justice

Within international relations the normative agency of African actors is often downplayed or derided. This article develops the concept of bricolage to offer a novel understanding of norm development and contestation in international relations, including the role African actors play in this. We contend that a norm's core hypothesis can be thought of as the nucleus of a norm. In the case of complex international norms, if this core hypothesis is sufficiently vague and malleable, the norm will continue to attract a range of actors who may claim to share a commitment to enacting the core hypothesis even if they simultaneously promote a variety of potentially conflicting and contradictory meanings-in-use of the norm when doing so. Each meaning-in-use, we argue, might be thought of as a product of bricolage: a process of combining and adapting both new and second-hand materials, knowledges, values, and practices by an actor to address a problem in hand. Through a detailed study of the contestation of transitional justice between South Africa and the International Criminal Court, we elucidate how bricolage can help to illuminate the normative agency of African actors in shaping transitional justice. Processes of bricolage add complexity and potentially confusion to a norm's development, but bricolage also offers the potential for a creative and dynamic means by which a range of actors can inject pluralism, dexterity, and vitality into debates about a norm's meaning and operationalisation

On large-scale diagonalization techniques for the Anderson model of localization

We propose efficient preconditioning algorithms for an eigenvalue problem arising in quantum physics, namely the computation of a few interior eigenvalues and their associated eigenvectors for large-scale sparse real and symmetric indefinite matrices of the Anderson model of localization. We compare the Lanczos algorithm in the 1987 implementation by Cullum and Willoughby with the shift-and-invert techniques in the implicitly restarted Lanczos method and in the Jacobi–Davidson method. Our preconditioning approaches for the shift-and-invert symmetric indefinite linear system are based on maximum weighted matchings and algebraic multilevel incomplete LDLT factorizations. These techniques can be seen as a complement to the alternative idea of using more complete pivoting techniques for the highly ill-conditioned symmetric indefinite Anderson matrices. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the numerical accuracy of these algorithms. Our numerical examples reveal that recent algebraic multilevel preconditioning solvers can accelerate the computation of a large-scale eigenvalue problem corresponding to the Anderson model of localization by several orders of magnitude

Linkages Between the Phenologies of Jack Pine \u3ci\u3e(Pinus Banksiana)\u3c/i\u3e Foliage and Jack Pine Budworm (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae)

A field study conducted in 2001 and 2002 in the Michigan Upper Peninsula investigated seasonal associations between the development of jack pine, Pinus banksiana Lamb., and larvae of the jack pine budworm Choristoneura pinus Freeman (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae). There was almost no active relationship between post-diapause emerging second instars and elongation of vegetative shoots. Early instars were not closely synchronized with the flushing of current-year needle fascicles, which is required to optimize larval feeding. How- ever, there were close feeding and shelter relationships between early instars and year-2 pollen cone development. Associations with, and larval damage to, year-2 seed cones were dependent upon larval population size and posed only minimal and periodic threats to jack pine seed production. As a consequence, early instar jack pine budworm relied almost exclusively on pollen cones for survival. Third to fifth instars vacated pollen cones as soon as they became desiccated. Only then did these larvae start close associations with vegetative shoots. First, they excised partially emerged needles at their base, and when the needle-pairs completely escaped their fascicle sheath, the larvae fed routinely on the complete needle lamina. Late instars, pupae and adults were associated with previous years’ and current-year foliage without any apparent bias. This study has shown that it might be more practical to time insecticide strategies, which are intended to manage jack pine budworm larvae, to the tree’s phenology rather than jack pine budworm larval indices

Approaches to providing missing transfer parameter values in the ERICA Tool: how well do they work?

A required parameter for the ERICA Tool is the concentration ratio (CR), which is used to describe the transfer from environmental media to a range of organisms. For the original parameterisation of the ERICA Tool, 60% of these values were derived using a variety of extrapolation approaches, including the application of allometric models, the use of values for a similar organism or element with similar biogeochemical behaviour and the use of values from a different ecosystem. Although similar approaches are applied in other assessment systems, there has been little attempt to see how well these approaches perform. In this paper, CR values in the ERICA Tool derived using extrapolation approaches are compared to more recently available empirical data from the IAEA wildlife transfer database. The primary purpose of the default CR database in the ERICA Tool, and other models, is to enable the user to conduct conservative screening assessments. Conservatism was therefore introduced to the analyses by selecting the 95th percentile CR values for subsequent calculations. The extrapolation methodologies are not guaranteed to provide conservative estimates of empirical 95th percentile CRs. For the terrestrial ecosystem, the extrapolation methods provide underpredictions of empirical 95th percentiles as often as they produce overpredictions. In a few cases the underestimation of CR values, when considering all ecosystems, is substantial - by orders of magnitude - which is clearly unacceptable for a screening assessment. Thus, although extrapolation approaches will remain an essential component of screening assessments in the future, because data gaps will always be present, diligence is important in their application. Finally, by synthesizing the results from the current analyses and through other considerations, some recommendations are provided with regards to modifying the original guidance on use of extrapolation approaches in the ERICA Tool

Investigating Engagement with In-Video Quiz Questions in a Programming Course

In-video quizzes are common in many distance learning platforms, including those from Coursera and EdX. However the effectiveness of in-video quizzes has not previously been assessed. In this paper we describe the construction and instrumentation of an Interactive Video Lecture Platform to measure student engagement with in-video quizzes. We also investigate the use of in-video quizzes as an approach to mitigate the lack of feedback available to students and lecturers in videos and traditional lectures. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of augmenting video with the ability to answer and receive feedback to quiz questions embedded directly within the video. We observed that student engagement with in-video questions was consistently high (71-86%) across two cohorts (N1=81, N2=84) with a rate of 1 question per 8.7 minutes of video. We identified three broad levels of engagement with the quiz questions and four motivations, including challenge seeking and completionism, which explain some of the observed behaviour. The results from this investigation demonstrate that in-video quizzes were successful in creating an engaging and interactive mode of content delivery. We recommend that in-video quizzes be used to increase the interactivity of video content as well as supporting formative assessment within a flipped classroom environment.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2015.244437

Working with Children with Learning Disabilities and/or who Communicate Non-verbally: Research experiences and their implications for social work education, increased participation and social inclusion

Social exclusion, although much debated in the UK, frequently focuses on children as a key 'at risk' group. However, some groups, such as disabled children, receive less consideration. Similarly, despite both UK and international policy and guidance encouraging the involvement of disabled children and their right to participate in decision-making arenas, they are frequently denied this right. UK based evidence suggests that disabled children's participation lags behind that of their non-disabled peers, often due to social work practitioners' lack of skills, expertise and knowledge on how to facilitate participation. The exclusion of disabled children from decision-making in social care processes echoes their exclusion from participation in society. This paper seeks to begin to address this situation, and to provide some examples of tools that social work educators can introduce into pre- and post-qualifying training programmes, as well as in-service training. The paper draws on the experiences of researchers using non-traditional qualitative research methods, especially non-verbal methods, and describes two research projects, focusing on the methods employed to communicate with and involve disabled children, the barriers encountered and lessons learnt. Some of the ways in which these methods of communication can inform social work education are explored alongside wider issues of how and if increased communication can facilitate greater social inclusion