Researching the support needs of Pakistani families with disabled children in the UK

Copyright @ 2007 Social Services Research Group.Pakistani families living in the UK form one of the most disadvantaged sections of the society. Key issues faced relate to poverty, high unemployment, ill health, low levels of English proficiency, rising ‘Islamophobia’, men feeling misunderstood and misrepresented, and a lack of faith/culture appropriate facilities. When a disabled child is born, additional issues are added to this already challenging situation. These include a significantly higher incidence of disability, high costs of raising a disabled child, being less likely to receive benefits, poor access to health and social care, negative attitudes towards disability within the community and a high incidence of depression and anxiety among primary carers. Although a considerable body of research-based evidence has been available for well over a decade, no significant improvement in service provision to these families has been seen. The paper suggests that a critical paradigm of research, with emancipatory goals, is needed and that participatory action research be used to help Pakistani families gain better understanding of their own support needs and to provide better skills to be able to ensure that these needs will be met more effectively within the family, in the community and through mainstream services

Using participatory and creative methods to facilitate emancipatory research with people facing multiple disadvantage: a role for health and care professionals

Participatory and creative research methods are a powerful tool for enabling active engagement in the research process of marginalised people. It can be particularly hard for people living with multiple disadvantage, such as disabled people from ethnic minority backgrounds, to access research projects that are relevant to their lived experience. This article argues that creative and participatory methods facilitate the co-researchers’ engagement in the research process, which thus becomes more empowering. Exploring the congruence of these methods with their professional ethos, health and care professionals can use their skills to develop them further. Both theory and practice examples are presented

Regular spherical dust spacetimes

Physical (and weak) regularity conditions are used to determine and classify all the possible types of spherically symmetric dust spacetimes in general relativity. This work unifies and completes various earlier results. The junction conditions are described for general non-comoving (and non-null) surfaces, and the limits of kinematical quantities are given on all comoving surfaces where there is Darmois matching. We show that an inhomogeneous generalisation of the Kantowski-Sachs metric may be joined to the Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi metric. All the possible spacetimes are explicitly divided into four groups according to topology, including a group in which the spatial sections have the topology of a 3-torus. The recollapse conjecture (for these spacetimes) follows naturally in this approach.Comment: Minor improvements, additional references. Accepted by GR

Higgs and SUSY Searches at LHC

I start with a brief introduction to Higgs mechanism and supersymmetry. Then I discuss the theoretical expectations, current limits and search strategies for Higgs boson(s) at LHC --- first in the SM and then in the MSSM. Finally I discuss the signatures and search strategies for the superparticles.Comment: Typos and figure styles corrected; LaTeX (28 pages) including 13 ps files containing 11 figures; Invited talk at the 5th Workshop on High Energy Physics Phenomenology (WHEPP-5), Pune, India, 12 - 25 January 199

Spreading in Social Systems: Reflections

In this final chapter, we consider the state-of-the-art for spreading in social systems and discuss the future of the field. As part of this reflection, we identify a set of key challenges ahead. The challenges include the following questions: how can we improve the quality, quantity, extent, and accessibility of datasets? How can we extract more information from limited datasets? How can we take individual cognition and decision making processes into account? How can we incorporate other complexity of the real contagion processes? Finally, how can we translate research into positive real-world impact? In the following, we provide more context for each of these open questions.Comment: 7 pages, chapter to appear in "Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems"; Eds. Sune Lehmann and Yong-Yeol Ahn, Springer Natur

A new technique for timing the double pulsar system

In 2004, McLaughlin et al. discovered a phenomenon in the radio emission of PSR J0737-3039B (B) that resembles drifting sub-pulses. The repeat rate of the sub-pulses is equal to the spin frequency of PSR J0737-3039A (A); this led to the suggestion that they are caused by incidence upon B's magnetosphere of electromagnetic radiation from A. Here we describe a geometrical model which predicts the delay of B's sub-pulses relative to A's radio pulses. We show that measuring these delays is equivalent to tracking A's rotation from the point of view of an hypothetical observer located near B. This has three main astrophysical applications: (a) to determine the sense of rotation of A relative to its orbital plane; (b) to estimate where in B's magnetosphere the radio sub-pulses are modulated and (c) to provide an independent estimate of the mass ratio of A and B. The latter might improve existing tests of gravitational theories using this system.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 9 pages in emulated MNRAS format, 3 figure

Budget Processes: Theory and Experimental Evidence

This paper studies budget processes, both theoretically and experimentally. We compare the outcomes of bottom-up and top-down budget processes. It is often presumed that a top-down budget process leads to a smaller overall budget than a bottom-up budget process. Ferejohn and Krehbiel (1987) showed theoretically that this need not be the case. We test experimentally the theoretical predictions of their work. The evidence from these experiments lends strong support to their theory, both at the aggregate and the individual subject level

Stabilization of an ambient-pressure collapsed tetragonal phase in CaFe2As2 and tuning of the orthorhombic-antiferromagnetic transition temperature by over 70 K via control of nanoscale precipitates

We have found a remarkably large response of the transition temperature of CaFe2As2 single crystals grown from excess FeAs to annealing and quenching temperature. Whereas crystals that are annealed at 400ˆC exhibit a first-order phase transition from a high-temperature tetragonal to a low-temperature orthorhombic and antiferromagnetic state near 170 K, crystals that have been quenched from 960ˆC exhibit a transition from a high-temperature tetragonal phase to a low-temperature, nonmagnetic, collapsed tetragonal phase below 100 K. By use of temperature-dependent electrical resistivity, magnetic susceptibility, x-ray diffraction, Mössbauer spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance measurements we have been able to demonstrate that the transition temperature can be reduced in a monotonic fashion by varying the annealing or quenching temperature from 400ˆ to 850ˆC with the low-temperature state remaining antiferromagnetic for transition temperatures larger than 100 K and becoming collapsed tetragonal, nonmagnetic for transition temperatures below 90 K. This suppression of the orthorhombic-antiferromagnetic phase transition and its ultimate replacement with the collapsed tetragonal, nonmagnetic phase is similar to what has been observed for CaFe2As2 under hydrostatic pressure. Transmission electron microscopy studies indicate that there is a temperature-dependent width of formation of CaFe2As2 with a decreasing amount of excess Fe and As being soluble in the single crystal at lower annealing temperatures. For samples quenched from 960ˆC there is a fine (of order 10 nm) semiuniform distribution of precipitate that can be associated with an average strain field, whereas for samples annealed at 400ˆC the excess Fe and As form mesoscopic grains that induce little strain throughout the CaFe2As2 lattice

Integrability of irrotational silent cosmological models

We revisit the issue of integrability conditions for the irrotational silent cosmological models. We formulate the problem both in 1+3 covariant and 1+3 orthonormal frame notation, and show there exists a series of constraint equations that need to be satisfied. These conditions hold identically for FLRW-linearised silent models, but not in the general exact non-linear case. Thus there is a linearisation instability, and it is highly unlikely that there is a large class of silent models. We conjecture that there are no spatially inhomogeneous solutions with Weyl curvature of Petrov type I, and indicate further issues that await clarification.Comment: Minor corrections and improvements; 1 new reference; to appear Class. Quantum Grav.; 16 pages Ioplpp