The perceptions of line and senior managers in relation tooccupational health issues

Perceptions of line and senior managers in relation to their role in managing workplace injury and illness were investigated with a large UK manufacturing company. The significance of this research to occupational health practitioners lies in the fact that increased understanding of the perceptions of senior and line managers is fundamental to the success of occupational safety and health programmes. Documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews were used to assess perceptions. The findings showed that the managers had a much sounder understanding of their role in injury prevention than that related to illness prevention. The way in which information relating to injury and illness data is presented to managers to aid decision making was found likely to be a fruitful area for further research

Someone to talk to: Using automated characters to support simulated learning activities

The University of the West of England (UWE) has a large number of students who will pursue subsequent careers in a wide range of professional fields such as engineering, law, business, nursing, teaching, psychology, criminology and design. An important part of that education is the ability to relate theory to practice (Barrett 2011), and developments in technology over the past years have now created opportunities to enable students to experience simulations of events and situations that are difficult, unethical or impossible to organise in the real world, before they put their skills into practice in the real world (Newland 2008). Virtual worlds are proving to be popular and effective environments at UWE for simulations of a range of experiences, such as accident investigations, risk assessments, business ethics cases, psychotherapy practice and sociological experiments. However, as the number of students undertaking these simulations increases, so the call on tutor time will significantly increase. These simulations require to be scalable, to enable their potential for study by large cohorts of students. This year we have experimented with automated non-player characters, also known as “bots,” to enable students to undertake some dialogue during the simulated scenarios without the need for a number of tutors to be available to take particular roles. The bots are currently unsophisticated keyword recognition systems, but even these have proven to have some value in two of the simulations; the accident investigation and the risk assessment, where students were able to gather information from characters they could “talk” to, making more realistic the experience of exploring the environment where the simulations were taking place. This paper discusses the results of student feedback, evaluations of these simulations and prototype development for the next generation bots that we want to implement in future learning simulations based on the findings of the evaluations

Learning spaces in virtual worlds: Bringing our distance students home

This paper was Highly Commended in the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 201

USING 3D VIRTUAL ACTIVITIES TO CONDUCT COLLABORATIVE WORK

Collaborative work can be conducted either in a classroom environment or in a computer-supported environment. The virtual world is one such computer supported environment that is used to conduct group activities. In this study, we explore students’ experiences in 3D virtual group activities. We conducted this study with the first-year Information Technology students in a Sri Lankan higher education institute. We planned this study in two steps; in the first step, we explored students’ experiences in classroom collaboration. After that, in the second step, we explored students’ experiences in virtual collaboration. Finally, we compared the results gathered from the questionnaire and found that students had a positive attitude about virtual collaboration compared to classroom collaboration. Moreover, we analysed the interview data qualitatively and identified students’ views about classroom group work and virtual group work. After analysing the data, we identified that students prefer to work in virtual group work than classroom group work. Also, it was clear that students’ participation and active engagement in virtual group activities were higher than classroom group activities. Based on these findings, we conclude that students had a positive experience in virtual group work

Anaerobic Digestion of food waste:eliciting sustainable water-energy-food nexus practices with Agent Based Modelling and visual analytics

Food waste is a problem for which solutions are recognised but not readily put into practice. What should be the primary objective, reducing or eliminating surplus food production, requires great change within social, cultural and economic structures. The secondary approach of redistributing surplus food to areas of deficit (in terms of socioeconomic groups and/or geographic regions) involves a significant logistical burden, and suffers the same issues as with the elimination of waste. The least desirable, but perhaps most practicable approach, is the use of food waste as a feedstock for Anaerobic Digestion (AD). The strategic adoption of AD can therefore be seen as an important step towards mitigating food waste, but the implementation of efficient AD systems on a large (county/region) scale involves significant complexity. The optimal number, size and location of AD plants, and whether they arecentralised versus decentralised, may be determined by considering factors such as supply and proximity to feedstock, transport links, emission hazards and social impact. Reaching balanced and objective decisions when faced with such disparate criteria is inevitably very difficult. To address this problem we prototype and evaluate a decision support tool for county-scale AD planning. Our approach is a hybridised Agent Based Model (ABM) with a Multi Objective Optimisation. We capture the spatio-temporal dependencies that exist in the water, energy and food systems associated with energy derived from food waste using Agent Based Modelling (ABM). The use of Visual Analytics in the form of Interactive Multi Criteria analysis offers a means to communicate the co-benefits and trade-offs that may emerge, as well as prioritise the AD strategies. Specifically, the method supports exploration of the social, environmental and economic impact of different AD strategies and decisions, linked to current issues, namely AD scale and adoption. The interactive MCA allows users to explore and understand the WEF impact of different implementations and management policies, based on the weighting of criteria. The results highlight a trade-off between transport costs and social acceptability for the AD centralised versus decentralised strategies. When low carbon options are more important, then slow, steady and aggressive decentralised strategies are the closest to the ideal, with centralised aggressive being the furthest from the ideal - i.e. worst option. Conversely, when Energy production is considered with a greater weighting, then aggressive scaling up in a centralised approach is best with slow and steady approaches being further from the ideal. The framework has demonstrated that it permits a space for dialogue and transparent prioritization of AD strategies based on WEF nexus impacts

Virtual Avebury: Exploring sense of place in a virtual archaeology simulation

This paper describes and discusses creating and evaluating a virtual reality simulation of Avebury Stone Circle and Henge complex as it might have appeared and sounded circa 2300 BCE. Avebury is a Neolithic heritage site in the UK which is part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site. The overall aim of the project was to better understand the sense of place and presence that visitors can experience in virtual simulations of heritage sites. We investigated how virtual spaces might become experienced as places by visitors through their exploration, active participation, sensory stimulation and communication with other visitors in the simulation. More than 1200 members of the public experienced the simulation, both at Avebury itself and at three public exhibitions. The specific objectives of the project were to explore if and how the believability of a simulation was associated with feeling a sense of place in the virtual landscape, and if some personal characteristics, viz. age, disability, sex, immersive tendency, familiarity with IT and frequency of playing computer games, were associated with levels of enjoyment in, and learning from, the simulation. We analysed the data from a detailed questionnaire completed by 388 of the 702 visitors to Avebury from June to September 2018 who experienced the simulation, supported by observational data from all participants at all events. We found that believability was associated with a sense of place in the simulation, i.e. that the more believable the simulation appeared, the greater the sense of place experienced by the participants. We also found that personal characteristics had very little influence upon visitor reactions to the simulation, suggesting that such simulations might have wide appeal for heritage and museum visitors, regardless of age, gender or familiarity with technology

Taking ‘A walk through dementia’: exploring care home practitioners’ experiences of using a virtual reality tool to support dementia awareness

Emerging research has outlined the possibility for virtual reality (VR) experiences, which situate users into the perspective of someone living with dementia, to enhance dementia awareness. Currently, there is limited VR research that engages care home practitioners. It is imperative this population has high levels of dementia education given their requirements to provide care and support to residents, many of whom will be living with the condition. This paper reports on an exploratory qualitative study designed to elicit the experiences of care home practitioners who engaged with the VR application: ‘A walk through dementia’. Twenty practitioners, across four care homes in the United Kingdom, watched the VR scenarios and provided their views on the experience and the potential for the VR tool to be developed into a wider training programme to support dementia awareness. Data were collected via focus group discussions. Following an inductive thematic analysis, we constructed three themes. These suggested participants perceived the VR application offered them a convincing and immersive experience that was insightful and evocative, and provided ‘next-level’ dementia-awareness training that enabled them to reflect on care practices. Although the findings highlight important challenges for practitioners and developers wishing to use VR within dementia care, they suggest this application may be an engaging experiential learning tool that can provide care home staff with deeper cognitive and emotional awareness of living with dementia. Further work, drawing on these preliminary insights, is required to ensure the VR tool can be incorporated into a training programme that can positively contribute to the ‘dementia-friendly communities’ agenda

Understanding the National Student Survey: investigations in languages, linguistics and area studies

This report is a summary of interviews and focus groups with around 100 students and 50 members of academic staff in departments of languages, linguistics or area studies at nine universities in the UK. In recent years, concerns have been expressed about the ambiguity of some of the statements which students are asked to respond to in the National Student Survey (NSS). This project set out to get a better understanding of how students and staff understand the questions. The interviews and focus groups were carried out by members of academic staff at the nine institutions who each then wrote an individual report of their findings. This summary is designed to enable wider distribution of these findings without identifying individual staff, institutions `or departments

Experiencing sense of place in virtual and physical Avebury.

This paper discusses the findings from a project to construct a simulation of Avebury henge, a Late Neolithic/ Early Bronze Age monument in SW Britain, in a 3D, virtual world environment. The aims of the study were to explore the archaeological research and interpretation necessary to plan and construct such a simulation in an interactive, online environment, to identify which aspects of visualisation and soundscape design appear to have the greatest impact upon users’ sense of place in the virtual simulation and to explore the experiences of a small group of users in the virtual simulation and the effects of those experiences upon their sense of place at the physical site. The findings from this project demonstrated that in undertaking a simulation of an ancient site, a core set of sources need to be selected to create the main parts of the simulation. There is often much debate in archaeological literature regarding the way in which archaeological findings are interpreted, and a different virtual Avebury would be constructed if different interpretations had been chosen. Any simulation of an ancient site should therefore clearly recognise and state the basis upon which it has been designed. The evaluation showed that responses to virtual environments, and the resulting effect upon responses to physical environments, are complex and personal, resulting in a range of experiences and perceptions, suggesting that the range of users’ experiences might be a more significant issue than attempting to find any general consensus on user reactions to simulated ancient sites

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio