Experimental making in multi-disciplinary research

For the past 3 years, Graham Whiteley has been using making in a project to develop a mechanical analogy for the human skeletal arm to inform the future development of prostheses and other artefacts. Other aspects of the work such as use of drawings and the use of a principled approach in the absence of concrete design goals have been documented elsewhere, this paper concentrates on the central role of making in the process. The paper will discuss the role of making in multi-disciplinary research; craft skills and resources appropriate to each stage of a practice centred research project in this area; the use of models in an iterative experimental investigation and the value of models in eliciting knowledge from a broad community of interested parties and experts.</p

First make something – principled, creative design as a tool for multi-disciplinary research in clinical engineering

Design provides a set of tools for exploring our world and these can give very different insights from the tools of the natural scientist or social scientist. The Art and Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University is developing the use of creative practice at the centre of multi-disciplinary research and has demonstrated that this approach can bring significant results in areas of research which are more usually thought of thought of as science or engineering. This paper describes a 3-year project which has provided completely new ideas for the design of artificial limbs based on close analogies with human anatomy. The project was intended to look at very long-term developments but has also resulted in ideas for today's products and has changed the thinking of both clinicians and manufacturers. Investigative methods included iterative cycles of creative development and reflection; work with users including the production of video material to stimulate their thinking beyond the state of the art; and both qualitative and quantitative evaluation of design outcomes with scientific and clinical specialists.</p

Touching the hero: bodies, boundaries and blood in the Old French Cycle des Narbonnais

The poems of the Old French Cycle des Narbonnais are highly concerned with touch, paying close attention to who touches whom first in greetings, who is authorised to perform certain symbolic touches and, reading violence as a radical version of touch, whose touch is victorious in battle. Modern sociologists suggest that touching follows lines of social prestige; however, by employing a performative approach to identity, overlaid with a psychoanalytic interpretation of the subject’s relationship with the Other, I argue that regulated patterns of touch in the poems iterate and maintain heroic identity. Of course, an identity forged in this way is problematic, for touch both creates and erases the difference upon which performative identity depends, and I argue that violence erupts as a result of this paradox. By thus linking touch, violence and identity, I ask questions about the nature of violence itself, making this a relevant study in a world that is getting out of touch, yet is riven by violent conflict. I demonstrate that within the community of knights with which the poems concern themselves, there is a shared language of touch that creates bonds between those men, excluding those who are ineligible: women, peasants, children and Saracens. The ritualised public touch of the dubbing ceremony marks the knight’s entry into this community, and announces his willingness to kill its enemies. Now his prowess, honour and self-worth – his heroic identity – will be figured through his ability to destroy outsiders whilst remaining inviolate. His violent touching of the Other is a means to safeguard his own body against the Other’s traumatic touch, yet it also necessitates proximity with an enemy that troublingly mirrors his own values and achievements. As anxiety provoked by disintegrating subjective boundaries worsens, violence escalates and knights battle mercilessly, until as one poem describes, ‘de lor sanc cort li ruz contre val’ (‘the river of their blood ran down the valley’, Les Narbonnais, l. 3952)

Government Performance and Life Satisfaction in Contemporary Britain

This paper investigates relationships between public policy outcomes and life satisfaction in contemporary Britain. Monthly national surveys gathered between April 2004 and December 2008 are used to analyze the impact of policy delivery both at the micro and macro levels, the former relating to citizens personal experiences, and the latter to cognitive evaluations of and affective reactions to the effectiveness of policies across the country as a whole. The impact of salient political events and changes in economic context involving the onset of a major financial crisis also are considered. Analyses reveal that policy outcomes, especially microlevel ones, significantly influence life satisfaction. The effects of both micro- and macrolevel outcomes involve both affective reactions to policy delivery and cognitive judgments about government performance. Controlling for these and other factors, the broader economic context in which policy judgments are made also influences life satisfaction. © 2010 Southern Political Science Association

Knowledge and the artefact

This paper discusses ways that knowledge may be found in or through artefacts. One purpose is to suggest situations where artefacts might be central to a narrative, rather than secondary to a text. A second purpose is to suggest ways that design and production of artefacts might be instrumental in eliciting knowledge. Four general situations are proposed: (1) Simple Forms - an artefact demonstrates or describes a principle or technique. (2) Communication of Process - artefacts arising from a process make the process explicit. (3) Artefacts Within the Research - artefacts are instrumental in advancing the research by communicating ideas or information. (4) Knowledge Elicited by Artefacts - artefacts provide a stimulus or context which enables information to be uncovered. .</p

Origins of NASA names

Names are selected for NASA spaceflight projects and programs from various sources. Some have their foundations in mythology and astrology or legend and folklore. Some have historic connotations; others are based on a description of their mission, often resulting in an acronym. Included are names of launch vehicles, spacecraft, manned spaceflight programs, sounding rockets, and NASA field installations. This study is limited to names of approved projects through 1974; it does not include names of numerous projects which have been or are being studied or projects that were canceled or postponed before reaching actual flight

Error bounds on block Gauss Seidel solutions of coupled\ud multiphysics problems

Mathematical models in many fields often consist of coupled sub–models, each of which describe a different physical process. For many applications, the quantity of interest from these models may be written as a linear functional of the solution to the governing equations. Mature numerical solution techniques for the individual sub–models often exist. Rather than derive a numerical solution technique for the full coupled model, it is therefore natural to investigate whether these techniques may be used by coupling in a block Gauss–Seidel fashion. In this study, we derive two a posteriori bounds for such linear functionals. These bounds may be used on each Gauss–Seidel iteration to estimate the error in the linear functional computed using the single physics solvers, without actually solving the full, coupled problem. We demonstrate the use of the bound first by using a model problem from linear algebra, and then a linear ordinary differential equation example. We then investigate the effectiveness of the bound using a non–linear coupled fluid–temperature problem. One of the bounds derived is very sharp for most linear functionals considered, allowing us to predict very accurately when to terminate our block Gauss–Seidel iteration.\ud \ud Copyright c 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

A note on heat and mass transfer from a sphere in Stokes\ud flow at low Péclet number

We consider the low Péclet number, Pe ≪ 1, asymptotic solution for steady-state heat and mass transfer from a sphere immersed in Stokes flow with a Robin boundary condition on its surface, representing Newton cooling or a first-order chemical reaction. The application of van Dyke’s rule up to terms of O(Pe3) shows that the O(Pe3 log Pe) terms in the expression for the average Nusselt/Sherwood number are double those previously derived in the literature. Inclusion of the O(Pe3) terms is shown to increase significantly the range of validity of the expansion

Britain Says NO: Voting in the AV Ballot Referendum

The purpose of this paper is to explain why voters made the choices that they did in Britains Alternative Vote (AV) referendum on 5 May 2011. The paper utilises four alternative theoretical models to analyse individual voting behaviour. They are described as the cost-benefit, cognitive engagement, heuristics and mobilisation models. The explanatory power of these models is investigated using a large survey data set gathered in the AV referendum study conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study. Multivariate analyses show that all four models contribute to explaining why some people voted in favour of electoral reform, with the cost-benefit model exhibiting particularly strong effects. The conclusion discusses public reactions to the referendum and possible implications of the decisive rejection of electoral reform after a campaign characterised by disaffection and disengagement. © 2011 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society. All rights reserved

Towards shape representation using trihedral mesh projections

This paper explores the possibility of approximating a surface by a trihedral polygonal mesh plus some triangles at strategic places. The presented approximation has attractive properties. It turns out that the Z-coordinates} of the vertices are completely governed by the Z-coordinates assigned to four selected ones. This allows describing the spatial polygonal mesh with just its 2D projection plus the heights of four vertices. As a consequence, these projections essentially capture the “spatial meaning” of the given surface, in the sense that, whatever spatial interpretations are drawn from them, they all exhibit essentially the same shape.This work was supported by the project 'Resolución de sistemas de ecuaciones cinemáticas para la simulación de mecanismos, posicionado interactivo de objetos y conformación de moléculas' (070-722).Peer Reviewe