Growing Place: Intersecting Architecture, Food & Education in an Interstitial Urban Collage

As cities continue to rapidly expand in population, their dependence on external resources generates sociocultural challenges. How we plan to feed this growth of urban occupancy is one of the many challenges cities face in the near future. Current large-scale food systems are failing to provide access, resources and most importantly education that sustains the relationship between people, the built environment and the food they consume. This thesis engages this global issue at a regional scale and explores the opportunity for architecture to serve as a cultural and educational foundation for supporting self-reliant urban environments. Investigating the existence of food deserts in Baltimore, this thesis critiques current academic institutions and food supply centers such as grocery stores, and re-imagines them through a design exploration of the interactive market place. The design proposes a hybrid of civic, social and institutional building agendas that connect place with program through exposing a Baltimore vernacular - the marketplace - and reinterpreting the cyclic nature of food production and distribution as a place of learning. Acting as an urban anchor both at a geographical and programmatic scale, this proposal uses architecture to expose, intersect and engage people with the processes of food from which they are frequently separated

Enabling research in care homes : an evaluation of a national network of research ready care homes

© 2014 Davies et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedIn the UK care homes are one of the main providers of long term care for older people with dementia. Despite the recent increase in care home research, residents with dementia are often excluded from studies. Care home research networks have been recommended by the Ministerial Advisory Group on Dementia Research (MAGDR) as a way of increasing research opportunities for residents with dementia. This paper reports on an evaluation of the feasibility and early impact of an initiative to increase care home participation in researchPeer reviewe

Physiological and psychological health effects of Nordic walking on sedentary adults

To investigate the effects of an eight week Nordic Walking programme on health outcomes in sedentary yet healthy adults. Thirty-nine participants (mean age = 54.6 ± 9.3 years) were randomised to a Nordic (N=20) or standard walking group (N=19) and completed three 55-minute supervised walking sessions per week. Blood pressure, aerobic capacity, lipid profile and anthropometry were assessed and participants completed measures of health-related quality of life, self-esteem, depression and mood pre- and post intervention. There was a significant group interaction for diastolic blood pressure with a trend for lower values in the Nordic Walking group post intervention. There was a significant decrease in waist, hip and upper arm circumference and a significant increase in total distance and averaging exercising heart rate in both walking groups post intervention. There were no significant differences within or between groups for total cholesterol, high and low density lipoprotein however a significant intervention effect was observed for triglycerides. The findings point towards a non-significant improvement in health-related quality of life, selfesteem, depression and mood in both walking groups over time. In line with previous research, an eight-week walking intervention significantly improved aspects of physical and mental health in a sedentary population, although Nordic Walking did not enhance these health benefits compared to standard walking. Further research needs to focus on increasing intervention duration, ensuring mastery of correct technique and monitoring intensity during the intervention period

Investigating the impact of an adult interactive style intervention on the spontaneous communication of three students with autism and severe learning difficulties

RATIONALE: Enabling spontaneous communication has been identified as a key goal in the education of students with autism. Autistic young people with severe learning difficulties are an under-researched group and there is a gap in curricular and pedagogical guidance and training for staff working in special schools. Educational psychologists could have a greater role in addressing this. Therefore, this study sought to investigate the impact of an Adult Interactive Style Intervention (Kossyvaki, 2017) on the spontaneous communication of three young people with autism and severe learning difficulties, with a view to broadening the offer of educational psychology services. INTERVENTION PROCEDURE: Staff were videoed naturally interacting with the students. The video was edited and shared during group training sessions to highlight strengths and good practice, illustrating 13 general principles and 8 communicative opportunities distilled from the autism intervention literature. Staff trialled the strategies over several weeks, were facilitated to reflect on them, and decided to implement 6 of the communicative opportunities from the original study. These were incorporated into the students’ daily routine as often as possible for 5 weeks. Supervision sessions were held half way through the strategy implementation phase. METHODOLOGY: The project is founded on a critical realist philosophical position and used an action research methodology to produce a nested case study. Data was collected using a mixed methods approach, including video observation of the students pre and post intervention, semi structured interviews with staff post intervention, a self-report check in questionnaire completed by staff regarding their use of the communicative opportunities, and contextual information was recorded in the researcher’s diary. FINDINGS: The spontaneous communication of two students improved (implementation of the principles and data collection was limited for the third child). A range of factors impacting the intervention were identified at the student, staff, process and school level, and used to inform implications for future research and educational psychology practice

The size, concentration, and growth of biodiversity-conservation nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in efforts to conserve biodiversity. Their success in this regard will be determined in part by how effectively individual nonprofits and the sector as a whole are structured. One of the most fundamental questions about an organization’s structure is how large it should be, with the logical counterpart being how concentrated the whole sector should be. We review empirical patterns in the size, concentration, and growth of over 1700 biodiversity-conservation nonprofits registered for tax purposes in the United States within the context of relevant economic theory. Conservation-nonprofit sizes vary by six to seven orders of magnitude and are positively skewed. Larger nonprofits access more revenue streams and hold more of their assets in land and buildings than smaller or midsized nonprofits do. The size of conservation nonprofits varies with the ecological focus of the organization, but the growth rates of nonprofits do not

Generation of human parallel chimeric antigen receptor (pCAR) T cells to achieve synergistic T cell co-stimulation

Dual co-stimulation may be harnessed using parallel chimeric antigen receptors (pCARs) in which two distinct co-stimulatory units are adjacently localized on the plasma membrane. This protocol summarizes construct design, human T cell isolation, retroviral transduction, tissue culture expansion, and preclinical testing of pCAR T cells, exemplified by receptors that co-target avb6 integrin and ErbB dimers. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Muliaditan et al. (2021)

The Importance of Cell Compression Pressure for Flow Battery Performance

Compared to fuel cells, which possess similar cell architecture, flow batteries have poor performance. For example, conventional fuel cells can easily achieve current densities of 1.5 A cm-2 whereas the corresponding figure for the all vanadium flow battery (VFB) is an order of magnitude less, often less than 0.2 A cm 2 [1]. Consequently, relatively large flow battery cells are required for a given power, increasing the cost of the technology. There are a few noticeable exceptions to the relatively poor performance of flow batteries, including the work of Zawodzinski et al. who achieved current densities in excess of 0.8 A cm 2 with a VFB [2]. Most impressively, Weber and co-workers achieved current densities as high as 4 A cm 2 with a H2-Br2 flow battery [3]. In both cases, the researchers used fuel cell components and fuel cell assembly techniques to minimize the cell ohmic resistance, particularly the contact resistance between the cell parts (electrodes, bipolar plates and current collectors). Typically, fuel cells are assembled using compression pressures of above 8 bar to minimize contact resistance. In comparison, flow batteries use compression pressures less than 1 bar during cell assembly with carbon fibre felt electrodes; hence contact resistance values are relatively high. A number of studies have measured the effect of felt compression on battery performance [4-5], where the felt compression is increased from 0 to 30%, resulting in a decrease in cell resistance and a noticeable improvement in performance. This study builds on previous felt compression work by exploring a much wider range of electrode compression pressures in a VFB system

Community pharmacy advanced adherence services for children and young people with long-term conditions:a cross-sectional survey study

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the provision of community pharmacy services to children and young people with a focus on advanced services such as medicines use review. Perceptions and experiences of community pharmacists, pharmacy staff, young people and their parents or carers on the provision of such services were also explored. Methods: Four different cross-sectional, self-administered questionnaires were distributed in parallel to pharmacists, pharmacy staff members, children and young people and parents in the United Kingdom. Results: An outline of pharmacist’s current involvement with children and young people was provided by 92 pharmacists. A different group of 38 community pharmacists and 40 non-pharmacist members of pharmacy staff from a total of 46 pharmacies provided information and views on the conduct of Medicines use review with children and young people. Experiences of advanced pharmacy service provision were collected from 51 children and young people and 18 parents. Most pharmacists offered public health advice to children and young people (73/92; 79.3%) and even more (83/92; 90.2%) reported that they often interacted with children and young people with long-term condition. Despite their high levels of interaction, and a majority opinion that medicines use reviews could benefit children (35/38; 92.1%), the number of pharmacies reporting to have conducted medicines use reviews with children was low (5/41). Pharmacists perceived the main barriers to recruitment as consent (17/29; 58.6%), guideline ambiguity (14/29; 48.3%) and training (13/29; 44.8%). A considerable proportion pharmacists (12/29; 41.4%) and other personnel (14/33; 42.4%) working in community pharmacies were unaware that children were potentially eligible for medicines use reviews. Only 29.4% of the 51 children and young people participants had received advice about their long-term condition from a pharmacist and the majority (46/51; 90.2%) had not taken part in an advanced service focused on adherence. Conclusions: While general engagement with children and young people appears high from the pharmacist’s perspective, advice specific to children and young people with long-term conditions and the provision of advanced services in this group remains a challenge

Climate change adaptation in disaster-prone communities in Cambodia and Fiji

This article examines how rural communities living in flood-prone river basins of Cambodia and Fiji have responded to increasing variability of floods and other natural hazards under the influence of climate change and other risk factors. Particular emphasis is placed on risk perceptions and adaptive strategies of households and communities with regard to regular and catastrophic floods and how the livelihoods of vulnerable groups are affected by floods and other climate-induced disasters. Our research approach integrates the food, water and energy security nexus with the rural livelihood framework. The study aims at identifying the spatial extent and dynamics of flood events and determining the factors that enhance adaptive capacities of flood-affected communities and households. Our study finds that access to resources as well as local socio-cultural contexts are important determinants of coping and adaptation practices at the community and household level in the two countries. Findings also suggest that research participants had a profound understanding of flood flows, extent and impacts that complements knowledge gained from hydrological and remote sensing methods. We conclude that blending local and scientific knowledge is a promising approach to enhancing adaptive capacity and resilience