Helping families: childcare, early education and the work-life balance

Since Labour came to power in May 1997, there have been substantial increases in spending aimed at helping families with formal childcare, early education and the work-life balance. We look at the effects of these reforms and at the proposals of the parties in this area

Support for participation in electronic paper prototyping

In this paper, we examine a range of tools for early prototyping of interactive systems that might be described as enabling 'electronic paper prototyping'. We then introduce Gabbeh, a prototype that we are developing to re-enable participatory design when using such tools. Paper-prototyping is an established approach to the creation of early prototypes in the participatory design of computer systems. Recent years have seen the rapid development of new interaction devices in which a display screen is combined with pen-based input to allow users to create sketches or hand-written notes in an interaction that is similar to writing with a pen on paper. Research with such devices has shown how this capability can be used to rapidly create simple prototypes of interactive systems such as websites. However, previous systems have not considered how end-users and other stakeholders could contribute to design dialogues around such prototypes.</p

Representing older people: towards meaningful images of the user in design scenarios

Designing for older people requires the consideration of a range of difficult and sometimes highly personal design problems. Issues such as fear, loneliness, dependency, and physical decline may be difficult to observe or discuss in interviews. Pastiche scenarios and pastiche personae are techniques that employ characters to create a space for the discussion of new technological developments and as a means to explore user experience. This paper argues that the use of such characters can help to overcome restrictive notions of older people by disrupting designers' prior assumptions. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences using pastiche techniques in two separate technology design projects that sought to address the needs of older people. In the first case pastiche scenarios were developed by the designers of the system and used as discussion documents with users. In the second case, pastiche personae were used by groups of users themselves to generate scenarios which were scribed for later use by the design team. We explore how the use of fictional characters and settings can generate new ideas and undermine rhetorical devices within scenarios that attempt to fit characters to the technology, rather than vice versa. To assist in future development of pastiche techniques in designing for older people, we provide an array of fictional older characters drawn from literary and popular culture.</p

Food Security: an ODA View

Summary The usefulness of food security as a specific donor objective must be kept in perspective. Food security issues are best dealt with us a subset of poverty issues more generally; in the longer term, economic growth is the solution to both poverty and hunger. ODA's country programme planning procedure is flexible enough to incorporate food Security approaches where these are a practical and cost?effective way of designing, targeting and monitoring poverty alleviation efforts

Raising awareness for potential sustainability effects in Uganda: A survey-based empirical study

Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. In July 2019, we ran the 3rd International BRIGHT summer school for Software Engineering and Information Systems at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The participants developed a group project over the course of the week, which included the application of the Sustainability Awareness Framework. The framework promotes discussion on the impact of software systems on sustainability based on a set of questions. In this paper, we present the educational evaluation of the Sustainability Awareness Framework in a country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results indicate that the framework can provide supportive guidance of the societal and environmental challenges in the given context

The potential for forest canopy litterfall interception by a dense fern understorey, and the consequences of litter decomposition.

Most studies on litter decomposition have assumed that all falling plant litter reaches the ground where it then decomposes. In many forests a proportion of this litter may in fact be intercepted by understorey vegetation, but the ecological significance of this remains poorly understood. We performed two experiments in a temperate rainforest in southern New Zealand, in which there was a dense understorey of the crown fern Blechnum discolor. The fronds of this fern originate from a crown, and have a funnel-like arrangement that can trap falling litter and prevent it from reaching the ground. The first experiment measured the effects of ferns on the spatial distribution of litter accumulation over one year. The ferns intercepted a substantial proportion of the total litterfall, and the fern crowns (from which the fronds originate) retained 10% of the total incoming litterfall (despite occupying only 2% of the ground area). The retained litter had a substantially higher ratio of twig to foliar litter than did the incoming litterfall. Further, much of the litter not retained on the crowns of the ferns accumulated at the base of the fern trunks. The second experiment considered litter decomposition in fern crowns versus the ground under the ferns. The litter that had accumulated in the crowns was characterized by higher microbial basal respiration and active microbial biomass than was the litter that had accumulated on the ground. The use of litterbags revealed that litter decomposition rates were significantly higher on the fern crowns than on the ground at 30 cm and 60 cm from the fern trunks. These results show that litter interception ameliorates the decomposer environment and increases the rate of litter decomposition. In total, this study provides evidence for understorey ferns greatly influencing both the spatial distribution of litterfall and the decomposition of plant litter. Although the ecological role of understorey vegetation in forested ecosystems has received little attention to date, our results point to understorey species as an important driver of forest ecosystem processes

How was it for you? Experiences of participatory design in the UK health service

Improving co-design methods implies that we need to understand those methods, paying attention to not only the effect of method choices on design outcomes, but also how methods affect the people involved in co-design. In this article, we explore participants' experiences from a year-long participatory health service design project to develop ‘Better Outpatient Services for Older People’. The project followed a defined method called experience-based design (EBD), which represented the state of the art in participatory service design within the UK National Health Service. A sample of participants in the project took part in semi-structured interviews reflecting on their involvement in and their feelings about the project. Our findings suggest that the EBD method that we employed was successful in establishing positive working relationships among the different groups of stakeholders (staff, patients, carers, advocates and design researchers), although conflicts remained throughout the project. Participants' experiences highlighted issues of wider relevance in such participatory design: cost versus benefit, sense of project momentum, locus of control, and assumptions about how change takes place in a complex environment. We propose tactics for dealing with these issues that inform the future development of techniques in user-centred healthcare design

Germ cell specification and ovary structure in the rotifer Brachionus plicatilis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The segregation of the germline from somatic tissues is an essential process in the development of all animals. Specification of the primordial germ cells (PGCs) takes place via different strategies across animal phyla; either specified early in embryogenesis by the inheritance of maternal determinants in the cytoplasm of the oocyte ('preformation') or selected later in embryonic development from undifferentiated precursors by a localized inductive signal ('epigenesis'). Here we investigate the specification and development of the germ cells in the rotifer <it>Brachionus plicatilis</it>, a member of the poorly-characterized superphyla Lophotrochozoa, by isolating the <it>Brachionus </it>homologues of the conserved germ cell markers <it>vasa </it>and <it>nanos</it>, and examining their expression using <it>in situ </it>hybridization.</p> <p>Results</p> <p><it>Bpvasa </it>and <it>Bpnos </it>RNA expression have very similar distributions in the <it>Brachionus </it>ovary, showing ubiquitous expression in the vitellarium, with higher levels in the putative germ cell cluster. <it>Bpvas </it>RNA expression is present in freshly laid eggs, remaining ubiquitous in embryos until at least the 96 cell stage after which expression narrows to a small cluster of cells at the putative posterior of the embryo, consistent with the developing ovary. <it>Bpnos </it>RNA expression is also present in just-laid eggs but expression is much reduced by the four-cell stage and absent by the 16-cell stage. Shortly before hatching of the juvenile rotifer from the egg, <it>Bpnos </it>RNA expression is re-activated, located in a subset of posterior cells similar to those expressing <it>Bpvas </it>at the same stage.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The observed expression of <it>vasa </it>and <it>nanos </it>in the developing <it>B. plicatilis </it>embryo implies an epigenetic origin of primordial germ cells in Rotifer.</p

National evaluation of the neighbourhood nurseries: integrated report

Report description: The NNI was launched in 2001 to provide high quality childcare in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of England, to help parents into employment, reduce child poverty and boost children’s development. By 2005 45,000 new childcare places had been created in approximately 1,400 neighbourhood nurseries. This report brings together the findings of the four individual strands of the National Evaluation of Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative as shown above and makes a number of recommendations. The report shows the rationale for the government’s strategy in targeting disadvantaged neighbourhoods and in focusing on high quality childcare to provide the link between raising parental employment and income and improving children’s life chances