The impact of childhood disability on family life

This is the second report of a study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that explored the costs to parents of bringing up a child with a severe disability. The first report, Paying to Care(Dobson and Middleton, 1998), described a minimum budget standard, which is the minimum amount that parents believed to be necessary to bring up a child with severe disabilities. This report describes the actual spending patterns of parents on 182 children with severe disabilities, and presents a detailed examination of how much parents actually spend on bringing up a severely disabled child. Fieldwork was conducted during 1997–98 and so all figures presented have been up-rated to 2000 by the Retail Price Index

Food activities and identity maintenance in old age: a systematic review and meta-synthesis

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Objectives: Services provided to older people should be developed based on active ageing policies. Nutrition is one aspect of active ageing, but little is known about how food activities contribute to psychological well-being in later life. This is a systematic review of qualitative and quantitative research that answers the question ‘What is known about the relationship between food activities and the maintenance of identities in old age?’

Hand gesture-based interactive puppetry system to assist storytelling for children

© 2016 The Author(s)Digital techniques have been used to assist narrative and storytelling, especially in many pedagogical practices. With the rapid development of HCI techniques, saturated with digital media in their daily lives, young children, demands more interactive learning methods and meaningful immersive learning experiences. In this paper, we propose a novel hand gesture-based puppetry storytelling system which provides a more intuitive and natural human computer interaction method for young children to develop narrative ability in virtual story world. Depth motion sensing and hand gestures control technology is utilized in the implementation of user-friendly interaction. Young players could intuitively use hand gestures to manipulate virtual puppet to perform story and interact with different items in virtual environment to assist narration. Based on the result of the evaluation, this novel digital storytelling system shows positive pedagogical functions on children’s narrating ability as well as the competencies of cognitive and motor coordination. The usability of the system is preliminary examined in our test, and the results which showed that young children can benefit from playing with Puppet Narrator

Dietary advice for muscularity, leanness and weight control in Men's Health magazine: a content analysis

Background: The dietary content of advice in men’s lifestyle magazines has not been closely scrutinised. Methods: We carried out an analysis of such content in all 2009 issues (n = 11) of Men’s Health (MH) focusing on muscularity, leanness and weight control. Results: Promotion of a mesomorphic body image underpinned advice to affect muscle building and control weight. Diet advice was underpinned by a strong pseudo-scientific discourse, with citation of expert sources widely used to legitimise the information. Frequently multiple dietary components were advocated within one article e.g. fat, omega-3 fatty acids, thiamine, zinc and high-glycaemic index foods. Furthermore advice would cover numerous nutritional effects, e.g. strengthening bones, reducing stress and boosting testosterone, with little contextualisation. The emphasis on attainment of a mesomorphic body image permitted promotion of slimming diets. Advice to increase calorie and protein intake to augment muscle mass was frequent (183 and 262 references, respectively). Such an anabolic diet was advised in various ways, including consumption of traditional protein foods (217 references) and sports foods (107 references), thereby replicating muscle magazines’ support for nutritional supplements. Although advice to increase consumption of red meat was common (52 references), fish and non-flesh sources of protein (eggs, nuts & pulses, and soy products) together exceeded red meat in number of recommendations (206 references). Advice widely asserted micronutrients and phytochemicals from plant food (161 references) as being important in muscle building. This emphasis diverges from stereotypical gender-based food consumption patterns. Dietary advice for control of body weight largely replicated that of muscularity, with strong endorsement to consume fruits and vegetables (59 references), diets rich in nuts and pulses and fish (66 references), as well as specific micronutrients and phytochemicals (62 references). Notably there was emphasis on fat-burning, good fats and consumption of single foods, with relatively little mention of dietary restriction. Conclusions: Despite the widespread use of scientific information to endorse dietary advice, the content, format and scientific basis of dietary content of MH leaves much to be desired. The dietary advice as provided may not be conducive to public health

No evidence that footedness in pheasants influences cognitive performance in tasks assessing colour discrimination and spatial ability

The differential specialization of each side of the brain facilitates the parallel processing of information and has been documented in a wide range of animals. Animals that are more lateralized as indicated by consistent preferential limb use are commonly reported to exhibit superior cognitive ability as well as other behavioural advantages.We assayed the lateralization of 135 young pheasants (Phasianus colchicus), indicated by their footedness in a spontaneous stepping task, and related this measure to individual performance in either 3 assays of visual or spatial learning and memory. We found no evidence that pronounced footedness enhances cognitive ability in any of the tasks. We also found no evidence that an intermediate footedness relates to better cognitive performance. This lack of relationship is surprising because previous work revealed that pheasants have a slight population bias towards right footedness, and when released into the wild, individuals with higher degrees of footedness were more likely to die. One explanation for why extreme lateralization is constrained was that it led to poorer cognitive performance, or that optimal cognitive performance was associated with some intermediate level of lateralization. This stabilizing selection could explain the pattern of moderate lateralization that is seen in most non-human species that have been studied. However, we found no evidence in this study to support this explanation

Self-prioritization and perceptual matching: The effects of temporal construal.

Recent research has revealed that self-referential processing enhances perceptual judgments - the so-called self-prioritization effect. The extent and origin of this effect remains unknown, however. Noting the multifaceted nature of the self, here we hypothesized that temporal influences on self-construal (i.e., past/future-self continuity) may serve as an important determinant of stimulus prioritization. Specifically, as representations of the self increase in abstraction as a function of temporal distance (i.e., distance from now), self-prioritization may only emerge when stimuli are associated with the current self. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Self-relevance only enhanced performance in a standard perceptual-matching task when stimuli (i.e., geometric shapes) were connected with the current self; representations of the self in the future (Expts. 1 & 2) and past (Expt. 3) failed to facilitate decision making. To identify the processes underlying task performance, data were interrogated using a hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) approach. Results of these analyses revealed that self-prioritization was underpinned by a stimulus bias (i.e., rate of information uptake). Collectively, these findings elucidate when and how self-relevance influences decisional processing

Deconstructive Aporias: Quasi-Transcendental and Normative

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: the first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy