Design tribes and information spaces for creative conversations

This paper reports on work in progress to augment the role and practice of Creative Conversations in product design education. We describe changes in practice designed to elevate the importance of conversations and various pedagogical approaches used to support this elevation. These changes are principally manifested in the formation of like-minded Communities of Interest, or ‘Design Tribes’, the adoption of revised design process models and the associated reorganisation of assessment philosophy and practice. We go on to describe and reflect on various technological interventions deployed, that have been designed to weakly augment the conversation space in both situated (studio based contact sessions) and distributed (work undertaken in between contact sessions) settings. Keywords: Design Development, Creative Conversation, Idea Generation, Design Critique, Design Practice

The Early Bronze Age Log Coffin Burials of Britain: The Origins and Development of a Burial Rite(s)

This paper describes the results from a project to obtain radiocarbon determinations from Early Bronze Age log coffin burials. Log coffins have been recognised as a burial tradition since antiquarian excavations uncovered the first examples. However, comparatively few are associated with radiocarbon determinations and many old determinations are very imprecise. To address this, seven log coffin burials were identified across England, and 11 samples from these were submitted for radiocarbon dating. The dates from the project were reviewed with previously obtained reliable determinations to reconsider the origins and development of the log coffin burial by region. The resulting study indicates that the earliest log coffins were associated with Beaker burials but that regional variations involving different rites soon developed

An Introduction to RNA Databases

We present an introduction to RNA databases. The history and technology behind RNA databases is briefly discussed. We examine differing methods of data collection and curation, and discuss their impact on both the scope and accuracy of the resulting databases. Finally, we demonstrate these principals through detailed examination of four leading RNA databases: Noncode, miRBase, Rfam, and SILVA.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures, 1 tables. Submitted as a chapter for "An introduction to RNA bioinformatics" to be published by "Methods in Molecular Biology