Public Involvement in research within care homes: Benefits and challenges in the APPROACH Study

Public involvement in research (PIR) can improve research design and recruitment. Less is known about how PIR enhances the experience of participation and enriches the data collection process. In a study to evaluate how UK care homes and primary health care services achieve integrated working to promote older people’s health, PIR was integrated throughout the research processes. Objectives This paper aims to present one way in which PIR has been integrated into the design and delivery of a multi-site research study based in care homes. Design A prospective case study design, with an embedded qualitative evaluation of PIR activity. Setting and Participants Data collection was undertaken in six care homes in three sites in England. Six PIR members participated: all had prior personal or work experience in care homes. Data Collection Qualitative data collection involved discussion groups, and site-specific meetings to review experiences of participation, benefits and challenges, and completion of structured fieldwork notes after each care home visit. Results PIR members supported: recruitment, resident and staff interviews and participated in data interpretation. Benefits of PIR work were resident engagement that minimised distress and made best use of limited research resources. Challenges concerned communication and scheduling. Researcher support for PIR involvement was resource intensive. Discussion and Conclusions Clearly defined roles with identified training and support facilitated involvement in different aspectsPublic Involvement in Research members of the research team: Gail Capstick, Marion Cowie, Derek Hope, Rita Hewitt, Alex Mendoza, John Willmott. Also the involvement of Steven Iliffe and Heather Gag

Reflective Ghost Imaging through Turbulence

Recent work has indicated that ghost imaging may have applications in standoff sensing. However, most theoretical work has addressed transmission-based ghost imaging. To be a viable remote-sensing system, the ghost imager needs to image rough-surfaced targets in reflection through long, turbulent optical paths. We develop, within a Gaussian-state framework, expressions for the spatial resolution, image contrast, and signal-to-noise ratio of such a system. We consider rough-surfaced targets that create fully developed speckle in their returns, and Kolmogorov-spectrum turbulence that is uniformly distributed along all propagation paths. We address both classical and nonclassical optical sources, as well as a computational ghost imager.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Instrumentation for Biological Research, Volume I, Sections 1 to 3 Final Report, Nov. 9, 1964 - Mar. 31, 1966

Bioinstrumentation for controlling and measuring parameters interacting with biological syste

Fuel poverty, older people and cold weather: An all-island analysis

Executive Summary This report covers a number of different aspects of fuel poverty and older people. 1. An exploration of existing government survey data from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland with a particular focus on older people and conducting additional targeted analyses where required. 2. An original survey in the Republic of Ireland exploring the lived experience of older people in cold weather. 3. A feasibility study of data logging thermometers placed in the homes of older tenants in local authority accommodation. 4. Analysis of excess winter mortality among older people including a consideration of differences between the two jurisdictions. Older people on the island of Ireland, as in many other countries, experience a ‘dual burden’ in terms of fuel poverty. They are more likely to experience fuel poverty and are also particularly vulnerable to health and social harm as a result of this experience. The numbers of older people vulnerable to ill-effects from cold homes will rise as numbers of people aged 80 and over, and those living with chronic illness or disability, increase. There were significant differences observed between expenditure-based, and subjective (EU-SILC) based fuel poverty indicators, for older people, and between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland data. This data required careful interpretation. The higher levels of fuel poverty recorded for older people on the island of Ireland appeared to be driven by all aspects of the fuel poverty model - poor housing condition, energy inefficient housing, rising fuel prices and low income. The majority of older people live in their own home and these homes tend to be older properties which are detached or semi-detached. Older people on the island are over-represented among houses which are in poor condition and which lack central heating in both jurisdictions. Lacking central heating was a more common experience for older people in the Republic of Ireland than in Northern Ireland. Data on energy efficiency measures were not comparable North/South but similar patterns were observed. Older people were less likely than the general population to have attic/loft or wall insulation or double glazing. Older people were also vulnerable from an income point of view. This would seem to be a particular issue in Northern Ireland where rates of income poverty are significantly increasing. In both jurisdictions older people were heavily reliant on social transfers to keep them out of poverty. Coupled with this, there is evidence that many older people are not claiming their full entitlements. Oil dependency was a particular issue in Northern Ireland. Very significant increases were observed in the price of heating oil, as well as electricity and gas in recent years. There was little available research evidence on the relationship between the older consumer and heating oil suppliers

Growth of Perturbation in Gravitational Collapse and Accretion

When a self-gravitating spherical gas cloud collapses or accretes onto a central mass, the inner region of the cloud develops a density profile $\rho\propto r^{-3/2}$ and the velocity approaches free-fall. We show that in this region, nonspherical perturbations grow with decreasing radius. In the linear regime, the tangential velocity perturbation increases as $r^{-1}$, while the Lagrangian density perturbation, $\Delta\rho/\rho$, grows as $r^{-1/2}$. Faster growth occurs if the central collapsed object maintains a finite multiple moment, in which case $\Delta\rho/\rho$ increases as $r^{-l}$, where $l$ specifies the angular degree of the perturbation. These scaling relations are different from those obtained for the collapse of a homogeneous cloud. Our numerical calculations indicate that nonspherical perturbations are damped in the subsonic region, and that they grow and approach the asymptotic scalings in the supersonic region. The implications of our results to asymmetric supernova collapse and to black hole accretion are briefly discussed.Comment: 23 pages including 6 ps figures; Minor changes and update; To appear in ApJ, 200

An Extinction Study of the Taurus Dark Cloud Complex

We present a study of the detailed distribution of extinction in a region of the Taurus dark cloud complex. Our study uses new BVR images of the region, spectral classification data for 95 stars, and IRAS Sky Survey Atlas (ISSA) 60 and 100 micron images. We study the extinction of the region in four different ways, and we present the first inter-comparison of all these methods, which are: 1) using the color excess of background stars for which spectral types are known; 2) using the ISSA 60 and 100 micron images; 3) using star counts; and 4) using an optical (V and R) version of the average color excess method used by Lada et al. (1994). We find that all four methods give generally similar results, with important exceptions. To study the structure in the dust distribution, we compare the ISSA extinction and the extinction measured for individual stars. From the comparison, we conclude that in the relatively low extinction regions studied, with 0.9 < A_V < 3.0 mag (away from filamentary dark clouds and IRAS cores), there are no fluctuations in the dust column density greater than 45% (at the 99.7% confidence level), on scales smaller than 0.2 pc. We also report the discovery of a previously unknown stellar cluster behind the Taurus dark cloud near R.A 4h19m00s, Dec. 27:30:00 (B1950)Comment: 49 pages (which include 6 pages of tables and 6 pages of figures

Extended Source Diffraction Effects Near Gravitational Lens Fold Caustics

Calculations are presented detailing the gravitational lens diffraction due to the steep brightness gradient of the limb of a stellar source. The lensing case studied is the fold caustic crossing. The limb diffraction signal greatly exceeds that due to the disk as a whole and should be detectable for white dwarf sources in our Galaxy and it's satellites with existing telescopes. Detection of this diffraction signal would provide an additional mathematical constraint, reducing the degeneracy among models of the lensing geometry. The diffraction pattern provides pico-arcsecond resolution of the limb profile.Comment: 19 pages including 17 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ, Minor conceptual change from previous versio

Pmp27 Promotes Peroxisomal Proliferation

Peroxisomes perform many essential functions in eukaryotic cells. The weight of evidence indicates that these organelles divide by budding from preexisting peroxisomes. This process is not understood at the molecular level. Peroxisomal proliferation can be induced in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by oleate. This growth substrate is metabolized by peroxisomal enzymes. We have identified a protein, Pmp27, that promotes peroxisomal proliferation. This protein, previously termed Pmp24, was purified from peroxisomal membranes, and the corresponding gene, PMP27, was isolated and sequenced. Prop27 shares sequence similarity with the Pmp30 family in Candida boidinii. Pmp27 is a hydrophobic peroxisomal membrane protein but it can be extracted by high pH, suggesting that it does not fully span the bilayer. Its expression is regulated by oleate. The function of Pmp27 was probed by observing the phenotype of strains in which the protein was eliminated by gene disruption or overproduced by expression from a multicopy plasmid. The strain containing the disruption (3B) was able to grow on all carbon sources tested, including oleate, although growth on oleate, glycerol, and acetate was slower than wild type. Strain 3B contained peroxisomes with all of the enzymes of β-oxidation. However, in addition to the presence of a few modestly sized peroxisomes seen in a typical thin section of a cell growing on oleate-containing medium, cells of strain 3B also contained one or two very large peroxisomes. In contrast, cells in a strain in which Pmp27 was overexpressed contained an increased number of normal-sized peroxisomes. We suggest that Pmp27 promotes peroxisomal proliferation by participating in peroxisomal elongation or fission.