645 research outputs found
Can academic writing retreats function as wellbeing interventions?
Research and academic writing are increasingly difficult to prioritise in Higher Education. Academic writing retreats are growing in popularity as means to help academics to write. However, while they have been shown to enhance productivity their potential as wellbeing interventions has received less attention. We explore the experiences of UK-based academic participants in a structured writing programme through a structured questionnaire and in-depth interviews. Our findings suggest that writing retreats can positively impact on both hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing. They may help mediate wellbeing threats, such as isolation, the conflict of work priorities and other pressures associated with academic research and time pressures. The opportunity to privilege writing provided our academic participants with positive benefits, yet we conclude that these effects do not endure if interventions are not maintained
Gamma-ray bursts as the birth-cries of black holes
The origin of cosmic gamma-ray bursts remains one of the most intriguing
puzzles in astronomy. We suggest that purely general relativistic effects in
the collapse of massive stars could account for these bursts. The late
formation of closed trapped surfaces can occur naturally, allowing the escape
of huge energy from curvature-generated fireballs, before these are hidden
within a black hole.Comment: 4 pages Revtex, 1 figure. This essay received an honorable mention in
the Gravity Research Foundation essay competitio
Independence for Whom? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Onboarding a Home Health Monitoring System for Older Adult Care
Home health monitoring systems (HHMS) are presented as a cost-effective solution that will assist with collaborative care of older adults. However, instead of care recipients feeling like collaborators, such systems often disempower them. In this paper, we examine the dissemination, onboarding, and initial use of an HHMS to see how the discourse used by developers and participants affects users' collaborative care efforts. We found that the textual information provided often contrasted with how our participants managed their care. Instead of providing participants with 'independence,' 'safety,' and 'peace of mind,' care recipients were placed in a more dependent, less proactive role, and care providers were pressured to take on more responsibilities. We position HHMS, as they are currently marketed and onboarded, as normalizing pseudo-institutionalization. As an alternative we advocate that the discourse and design of such systems should reflect and re-enforce the varied roles care recipients take in managing their care
Black Hole Boundary Conditions and Coordinate Conditions
This paper treats boundary conditions on black hole horizons for the full
3+1D Einstein equations. Following a number of authors, the apparent horizon is
employed as the inner boundary on a space slice. It is emphasized that a
further condition is necessary for the system to be well posed; the
``prescribed curvature conditions" are therefore proposed to complete the
coordinate conditions at the black hole. These conditions lead to a system of
two 2D elliptic differential equations on the inner boundary surface, which
coexist nicely to the 3D equation for maximal slicing (or related slicing
conditions). The overall 2D/3D system is argued to be well posed and globally
well behaved. The importance of ``boundary conditions without boundary values"
is emphasized. This paper is the first of a series. This revised version makes
minor additions and corrections to the previous version.Comment: 13 pages LaTeX, revtex. No figure
Continuous Self-Similarity and -Duality
We study the spherically symmetric collapse of the axion/dilaton system
coupled to gravity. We show numerically that the critical solution at the
threshold of black hole formation is continuously self-similar. Numerical and
analytical arguments both demonstrate that the mass scaling away from
criticality has a critical exponent of .Comment: 17 pages, harvmac, six figures uuencoded in separate fil
Head-on collision of ultrarelativistic charges
We consider the head-on collision of two opposite-charged point particles
moving at the speed of light. Starting from the field of a single charge we
derive in a first step the field generated by uniformly accelerated charge in
the limit of infinite acceleration. From this we then calculate explicitly the
burst of radiation emitted from the head-on collision of two charges and
discuss its distributional structure. The motivation for our investigation
comes from the corresponding gravitational situation where the head-on
collision of two ultrarelativistic particles (black holes) has recently aroused
renewed interest.Comment: 4 figures, uses the AMSmat
Recommended from our members
Sensory dominance and multisensory integration as screening tools in aging
Multisensory information typically confers neural and behavioural advantages over unisensory information. We used a simple audio-visual detection task to compare healthy young (HY), healthy older (HO) and mild-cognitive impairment (MCI) individuals. Neuropsychological tests assessed individuals' learning and memory impairments. First, we provide much-needed clarification regarding the presence of enhanced multisensory benefits in both healthily and abnormally aging individuals. The pattern of sensory dominance shifted with healthy and abnormal aging to favour a propensity of auditory-dominant behaviour (i.e., detecting sounds faster than flashes). Notably, multisensory benefits were larger only in healthy older than younger individuals who were also visually-dominant. Second, we demonstrate that the multisensory detection task offers benefits as a time- and resource-economic MCI screening tool. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis demonstrated that MCI diagnosis could be reliably achieved based on the combination of indices of multisensory integration together with indices of sensory dominance. Our findings showcase the importance of sensory profiles in determining multisensory benefits in healthy and abnormal aging. Crucially, our findings open an exciting possibility for multisensory detection tasks to be used as a cost-effective screening tool. These findings clarify relationships between multisensory and memory functions in aging, while offering new avenues for improved dementia diagnostics
Infinite Kinematic Self-Similarity and Perfect Fluid Spacetimes
Perfect fluid spacetimes admitting a kinematic self-similarity of infinite
type are investigated. In the case of plane, spherically or hyperbolically
symmetric space-times the field equations reduce to a system of autonomous
ordinary differential equations. The qualitative properties of solutions of
this system of equations, and in particular their asymptotic behavior, are
studied. Special cases, including some of the invariant sets and the geodesic
case, are examined in detail and the exact solutions are provided. The class of
solutions exhibiting physical self-similarity are found to play an important
role in describing the asymptotic behavior of the infinite kinematic
self-similar models.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in General Relativity &
Gravitatio
e-Tourism and Culture through Virtual Art Galleries: A pilot study of the usability of an interface
Virtual tours of museums and galleries are
becoming an increasingly common aspect of e-Tourism
marketing. This paper reports on a usability pilot study that
analyses the design of icons in a German 3-D virtual art gallery
interface. It evaluates the extent to which a sample of typical
computer users can interpret the meaning of icons from the
interface taken âout of contextâ. This was done by assessing a
sample of twenty-one icons representing the âactionâ,
âinformationâ and ânavigationâ functions. An Icon Intuitiveness
Test (IIT) was used to measure their Icon Recognition Rate
(IRR) and to classify them as âidentifiableâ, âmediocreâ or
âvagueâ according to an adapted stereotypy. The IIT results
show that the meaning of almost 30% of the icons was
misinterpreted or confused, which can seriously compromise
the usability of an interface. Based on these findings,
recommendations are made for icon redesign and replacement
and it is concluded that further research is needed into the
âlearnabilityâ of icons and usersâ understanding of icons in
context. It is contended that increased usability leading to an
improved user experience can have an economic impact on e-Tourism
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