Hydraulic brake safety valve

Safety device, consisting of three separate fluid chambers, insures that two wheels of a brake system continue to function if a failure occurs

Fear Appeals in Anti-Knife Carrying Campaigns: Successful or Counter-Productive?

In the UK, knife crime continues to be a persistent and worrying concern. Media campaigns are often used by police and anti-knife crime organisations in an attempt to discourage young people from picking up a weapon. Many focus on the potentially devastating consequences associated with carrying a weapon, with the aim of provoking fear and thus a deterrent effect. In this paper we present the findings from two experimental studies exploring the effects of exposure to fear-based knife crime media campaigns on young people’s intentions to engage in knife carrying behaviour. Utilising a terror management theory perspective, in both studies we found that exposure to knife-related campaign imagery increased mortality salience, but there was no effect of campaign condition on willingness to carry a knife or on perceived benefits of knife-carrying. Although knife-related self-esteem/cultural world views predicted attitudes towards knife-carrying, such views did not moderate the effect of exposure to knife-related campaign imagery, and there was no effect of priming participants’ to consider the value of behaving responsibly. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed

A Comment on Roy Battenhouse, "Religion in King John: Shakespeare's View"

This is a Response to Roy Battenhouse's essay "Religion in King John: Shakespeare's View.

Model selection applied to reconstruction of the Primordial Power Spectrum

The preferred shape for the primordial spectrum of curvature perturbations is determined by performing a Bayesian model selection analysis of cosmological observations. We first reconstruct the spectrum modelled as piecewise linear in \log k between nodes in k-space whose amplitudes and positions are allowed to vary. The number of nodes together with their positions are chosen by the Bayesian evidence, so that we can both determine the complexity supported by the data and locate any features present in the spectrum. In addition to the node-based reconstruction, we consider a set of parameterised models for the primordial spectrum: the standard power-law parameterisation, the spectrum produced from the Lasenby & Doran (LD) model and a simple variant parameterisation. By comparing the Bayesian evidence for different classes of spectra, we find the power-law parameterisation is significantly disfavoured by current cosmological observations, which show a preference for the LD model.Comment: Minor changes to match version accepted by JCA

Do measures of memory, language, and attention predict eyewitness memory in children with and without autism?

Background & aims. There are few investigations of the relationship between cognitive abilities (memory, language and attention) and children’s eyewitness performance in typically developing children (TD), and even fewer in children on the autism spectrum. Such investigations are important to identify key cognitive processes underlying eyewitness recall, and assess how predictive such measures are compared to non-verbal IQ, diagnostic group status (autism or TD) and age. Methods. A total of 272 children (162 boys; 110 girls) of age 76 months to 142 months (M = 105 months) took part in this investigation: 71 children with autism and 201 TD children. The children saw a staged event involving a minor mock crime and were asked about what they had witnessed in an immediate Brief Interview. This focused on free recall, included a small number of open-ended questions, and was designed to resemble an initial evidence gathering statement taken by police officers arriving at a crime scene. Children were also given standardised tests of intelligence, memory, language and attention. Results & conclusions. Despite the autism group recalling significantly fewer items of correct information than the TD group at Brief Interview, both groups were equally accurate in their recall: 89% of details recalled by the TD group and 87% of the details recalled by the autism group were correct. To explore the relationship between Brief Interview performance and the cognitive variables, alongside age, diagnostic group status and non-verbal IQ, multiple hierarchical regression analyses were conducted, with Brief Interview performance as the dependant variable. Age and diagnostic group status were significant predictors of correct recall, whereas non-verbal IQ was less important. After age, non-verbal IQ and diagnostic group status had been accounted for, the only cognitive variables that were significant predictors of Brief Interview performance were measures of memory (specifically, memory for faces and memory for stories). There was little evidence of there being differences between the autism and TD groups in the way the cognitive variables predicted the Brief Interview. Implications. The findings provide reassurance that age – the most straightforward information to which all relevant criminal justice professionals have access – provides a helpful indication of eyewitness performance. The accuracy of prediction can be improved by knowing the child’s diagnostic status (i.e., whether the child is on the autism spectrum), and further still by using more specific assessments (namely memory for faces and memory for stories), possibly via the input of a trained professional. Importantly, the findings also confirm that whilst children with autism may recall less information than TD children, the information they do recall is just as accurate

Diagnosis of spinal xanthomatosis by next-generation sequencing: identifying a rare, treatable mimic of hereditary spastic paraparesis.

Cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis is an autosomal recessive disorder of bile acid metabolism causing a range of progressive neurological symptoms. Even in the presence of the classical triad of neurological dysfunction, tendon xanthoma and early onset cataracts, the diagnosis is often missed. It can mimic more common conditions such as hereditary spastic paraparesis or multiple sclerosis, particularly if the phenotype is spinal xanthomatosis where the disease causes a spastic paraplegia. Early recognition and treatment with chenodeoxycholic acid may prevent irreversible neurological damage. The introduction of next-generation sequencing to screen for a large number of genetic disorders associated with progressive spastic paraparesis will allow earlier identification and treatment of these patients and their families, and will particularly help in atypical cases such as the patient described here

Development of a Time Efficient Protocol for Cross-Limb Comparisons of Muscle Mitochondrial Capacity Using NIRS

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One More Awareness Gap? The Behaviour–Impact Gap Problem

Preceding research has made hardly any attempt to measure the ecological impacts of pro-environmental behaviour in an objective way. Those impacts were rather supposed or calculated. The research described herein scrutinized the ecological impact reductions achieved through pro-environmental behaviour and raised the question how much of a reduction in carbon footprint can be achieved through voluntary action without actually affecting the socio-economic determinants of life. A survey was carried out in order to measure the difference between the ecological footprint of “green” and “brown” consumers. No significant difference was found between the ecological footprints of the two groups—suggesting that individual pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour do not always reduce the environmental impacts of consumption. This finding resulted in the formulation of a new proposition called the BIG (behaviour–impact gap) problem, which is an interesting addition to research in the field of environmental awareness gaps

Plasmonic atoms and plasmonic molecules

The proposed paradigm of plasmonic atoms and plasmonic molecules allows one to describe and predict the strongly localized plasmonic oscillations in the clusters of nanoparticles and some other nanostructures in uniform way. Strongly localized plasmonic molecules near the contacting surfaces might become the fundamental elements (by analogy with Lego bricks) for a construction of fully integrated opto-electronic nanodevices of any complexity and scale of integration.Comment: 30 pages, 16 figure