Book review: Justice for laughing boy

Sara Ryan’s Justice for Laughing Boy is a deeply touching and personal account of the life and untimely death of Connor Sparrowhawk, who drowned in a bath while in the care of an NHS learning disability specific support unit, Slade House. Ryan, a social scientist and mother of Connor, offers readers an intimate perspective on her relationship with Connor throughout his life and her frustrations of trying to ensure that Connor had support appropriately tailored to his individual needs. Ryan highlights through Connor’s experiences at Slade House and the subsequent ‘Justice for Laughing Boy’ campaign that an important imbalance exists in health and social care delivery between individuals with and without additional needs in the UK

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This thesis is a process oriented case-study. The studied case is a interactiondesignassignment of a databasevisualisation and the process. The goalis to do this according to the ways of a screenwriter.When the computers spread from the military and university's into homes all around the world the computers and the programs had to becomeeasier for the users to understand and use. User interfacedesign became more and more important and companies like Apple put a lot of resources intothe designprocess. This quite new and evolving area of research, interactiondesign, has been forced to search for methods in other areas like lm, gamedesign, psychology and behavioural science. The area still needs to evolve and keep looking for new methods to bring the area forward.In this thesis the methods of a screenwriter is used in a interaction designwork.The main advantage of the screenwritingprocess might be the focuson the users feelings. This aspect was noted by Adam Connor during his speech at the conference InteractionEleven last year. Though Connor hasn't been writing any articles on this domain, it surely is an interesting aspectthat can help bring interaction deign forward. This thesis proves that it is possible to conduct a interaction designwork according to a screenwriters workingprocess with some advantages compared to common interactiondesignprocess

Structural Incentives for Political Party Polarization

Politics is often thought of as a pie cut in half and split between republicans and democrats. A more accurate representation would be a pie cut into several uneven slices; most of the small pieces would go to the democrats and the few large slices would go to republicans. The existing literature on political parties indicates that parties are not mirror opposites of one another. Issue density is not uniform among the parties. Since the New Deal, democrats have pushed extensive policy from Social Security to new roads and dams. The trend to expand the scope of government policy continues today in the form of universal healthcare, combating global warming, and gay rights. The tendency of democrats to expand their policy agenda stems from the makeup of the party. Unlike republicans, the Democratic party is composed of a coalition of interest groups. Republicans, in contrast, can be described as ideological and have held consistent over time. Republicans are more easily thought of in terms of big ideological principles that include low taxes, defense, and family values. Republicans, being more ideological, have a few core tenants. Democrats, being a coalition of interest groups, have a wide and diverse set of principles but less support behind each issue area. Given two political parties, one with a smaller but deeper set of beliefs and a second with a wider and shallower set of beliefs, the group with a smaller number of principles will find it relatively more difficult to compromise. Since politicians are single-minded seekers of reelection, they try to capture a comfortable number of votes to become reelected; however, if the party with the smaller number of principles were to compromise on a single principle, they would risk losing a proportionally greater number of voters. For instance, let us assume two political parties ‘R’ and ‘D’. R holds two principles ‘1’ and ‘2’, while D holds principles ‘3’, ‘4’, ‘5’, ‘6’, and ‘7’. If R compromises on principle 2 to gain access to voters from principle area 3, they risk losing half of their voter base, assuming 1 and 2 contain equal numbers of voters who care deeply about that principle. Whereas if D compromises on principle 3 to gain access to voters from principle area 2 they risk only losing one-fifth of their voter base, assuming 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 all contain equal numbers of voters who care deeply about that issue. Therefore, republicans are disincentivized from compromising while democrats have an incentive to work with republicans. Democrats compromise because they are likely to gain more votes from sacrificing small areas for a bigger traditionally republican area.Governmen

Development of a new Thomson parabola spectrometer for analysis of laser accelerated ions

This thesis details my work on developing a new Thomson parabola spectrometer for use at the SCARLET Laser Facility at The Ohio State University. The SCARLET laser facility is a 300 TW laser reaching peak intensities exceeding 10 21 W/cm 2 . The laser is used to study laser-matter interactions and plasma phenomena. The laser-matter interactions accelerate multiple types of particles and to understand the interactions it is necessary to have diagnostic tools to characterize the accelerated particles. In order to measure the charged particles a common device is a Thomson parabola spectrometer. A Thomson parabola spectrometer uses parallel electric and magnetic fields that are perpendicular to the incoming particles. This causes deflection of the particles based on their charge-to-mass ratio and energy. Therefore, the Thomson parabola spectrometer allows us to determine what particles are present and what their energy range is. I designed a new spectrometer to replace the existing Thomson parabola spectrometer which had problems during operation that reduced performance. Using a MATLAB code, I first modeled the performance of the new design to determine physical dimensions and field strengths that would allow for 1 MeV resolution of protons up to a maximum energy of 40 MeV. This resulted in a 5 cm long magnetic field with a field strength of 0.12 T and 10 cm electrodes with a voltage difference of 6 kV. These physical dimensions were used to create a SolidWorks model. As of this writing, the newly designed Thomson parabola spectrometer has been built and is currently being installed for use on future experiments.No embargoAcademic Major: Engineering Physic