Who is teaching the kids to cook? Results from a nationally representative survey of secondary school students in New Zealand

Learning how to cook is an important skill for developing healthy eating behaviors. Moreover, involvement in home cooking may offer young people opportunities for skill building, identity development and social engagement with their families. Recently, there have been concerns that the current generation of young people may not have the opportunities to develop sufficient cooking skills. These concerns have been addressed by the initiation of numerous, localized interventions. Yet, little is known about where the current generation of young people learn cooking skills. The objective of this study was to describe where the current generation of young people report learning to cook, drawing on nationally representative data from New Zealand. Data were collected as part of Youth2012, a nationally representative survey of secondary school students (n = 8500) in New Zealand. Almost all students reported learning to cook and from multiple sources. Almost all students reported learning to cook from a family member (mother, father, or other family member), approximately 60% of students reported that they learned to cook from certain media (cookbooks, TV, or the Internet) and half of all students reported learning to cook at school. There were numerous differences in where students learned to cook by socio-demographic characteristics. Findings from the current research highlight the important role that families play in teaching young people to cook and will be useful for those working with young people to develop these skills

OSCAR's Story: The History of Sickle Cell in Leicester

A social history of the local support group for sickle cell in Leicester, the Leicester Organization for Sickle Cell Anaemia Research, 1985-2008

A Report on Sickle Cell in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone is thought to be one of the West African countries most affected by sickle cell disorders. Estimates state that one in four people carry the gene for sickle cell and between 1 to 2% of births are of children with the condition. Despite this, there has been a general public health and social neglect of the condition, so that prevalence is poorly understood and policy non-existent. This participatory qualitative research project, conducted in 2018 in two districts in the country, sought to understand both women’s experiences caring for children with the condition, as well as what the needs were of women who had the condition. The findings illustrated that a historical memory of the condition and its effects exists in the intergenerational memories and practices of people. This is important to learn from to combat stigmatisation of women and people who have the condition. However, past expertise and medical knowledge currently co-exist in isolation from each other, with access to proper healthcare unavailable in most parts of the country. This has led to an inability to get a correct medical diagnosis, no advice about how to live with the condition and an inability to access specialized medical and rehabilitative services. These failures in care have led to early deaths and disablement, with the result that the general public fear the condition. A neglect of reproductive justice and the relational implications for women with the condition was also apparent in the high number of deaths of women and infants with sickle cell. Lastly, due to the work of the voluntary and medical sector, there is increasing awareness in parents, schools and communities of how the total environment is crucial for holistic management of sickle cell conditions in a low- income country. However, it is women who are still mostly responsible for ensuring that their children access a better quality of life and women who still incur moral blame and shame for their ill-health and that of their children

Sickle cell, habitual dys-positions and fragile dispositions: young people with sickle cell at school

The experiences of young people living with a sickle cell disorder in schools in England are reported through a thematic analysis of forty interviews, using Bourdieu’s notions of field, capital and habitus. Young people with sickle cell are found to be habitually dys-positioned between the demands of the clinic for health maintenance through self-care and the field of the school, with its emphases on routines, consistent attendance and contextual demands for active and passive pupil behaviour. The tactics or dispositions that young people living with sickle cell can then employ, during strategy and struggle at school, are therefore fragile: they work only contingently, transiently or have the unintended consequences of displacing other valued social relations. The dispositions of the young people with sickle cell are framed by other social struggles: innovations in school procedures merely address aspects of sickle cell in isolation and are not consolidated into comprehensive policies; mothers inform, liaise, negotiate and advocate in support of a child with sickle cell but with limited success. Reactions of teachers and peers to sickle cell have the enduring potential to drain the somatic, cultural and social capital of young people living with sickle cell

Riemann-Hilbert approach to multi-time processes; the Airy and the Pearcey case

We prove that matrix Fredholm determinants related to multi-time processes can be expressed in terms of determinants of integrable kernels \`a la Its-Izergin-Korepin-Slavnov (IIKS) and hence related to suitable Riemann-Hilbert problems, thus extending the known results for the single-time case. We focus on the Airy and Pearcey processes. As an example of applications we re-deduce a third order PDE, found by Adler and van Moerbeke, for the two-time Airy process.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Actor network theory, agency and racism: The case of sickle cell trait and US athletics

“This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Social Theory & Health. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Social Theory & Health 13, 62-77 (February 2015) | doi:10.1057/sth.2014.17 is available online at: 10.1057/sth.2014.1

Achieve equity in access to sickle cell services

Greater priority, and appropriate resources, need to be accorded to the provision of sickle cell and thalassaemia services. Sickle cell and thalassaemia disorders are among the most common genetic conditions in the world. In the UK, the condition affects about 15,000 people of all ethnic backgrounds but is more common in people of black African or African-Caribbean, Mediterranean and Asian origin. There are encouraging moves towards networks of clinical care based around centres with medical and nursing staff with specialist knowledge. Yet legitimate questions remain about the lack of priority accorded to sickle cell and thalassaemia services

Reducing motor variability enhances myoelectric control robustness across untrained limb positions

The limb position effect is a multi-faceted problem, associated with decreased upper-limb prosthesis control acuity following a change in arm position. Factors contributing to this problem can arise from distinct environmental or physiological sources. Despite their differences in origin, the effect of each factor manifests similarly as increased input data variability. This variability can cause incorrect decoding of user intent. Previous research has attempted to address this by better capturing input data variability with data abundance. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and investigate the effect of reducing trial-to-trial variability by improving the consistency of muscle activity through user training. Ten participants underwent 4 days of myoelectric training with either concurrent or delayed feedback in a single arm position. At the end of training participants experienced a zero-feedback retention test in multiple limb positions. In doing so, we tested how well the skill learned in a single limb position generalized to untrained positions. We found that delayed feedback training led to more consistent muscle activity across both the trained and untrained limb positions. Analysis of patterns of activations in the delayed feedback group suggest a structured change in muscle activity occurs across arm positions. Our results demonstrate that myoelectric user-training can lead to the retention of motor skills that bring about more robust decoding across untrained limb positions. This work highlights the importance of reducing motor variability with practice, prior to examining the underlying structure of muscle changes associated with limb position

Orbital ordering in transition-metal compounds: I. The 120-degree model

We study the classical version of the 120-degree model. This is an attractive nearest-neighbor system in three dimensions with XY (rotor) spins and interaction such that only a particular projection of the spins gets coupled in each coordinate direction. Although the Hamiltonian has only discrete symmetries, it turns out that every constant field is a ground state. Employing a combination of spin-wave and contour arguments we establish the existence of long-range order at low temperatures. This suggests a mechanism for a type of ordering in certain models of transition-metal compounds where the very existence of long-range order has heretofore been a matter of some controversy.Comment: 40 pages, 1 eps fig; a revised version correcting a bunch of small error