The War on Obesity Needs You! Or Does It?

Although I am not exactly sure who, I expect it was a very wise person who once said that things are never as bad or as good as they seem. I take heart from this because we live at a time when almost everything seems to be in or on the verge of a crisis. Take health. Although one of the best and most well funded in the world, to my knowledge people have been describing Australia's health system as "in crisis" for at least 20 years. It is true that many people are not able to access the same level of medical treatment as readily as others because of their ethnicity, income, geographical location or some other factor and that this is a situation which needs to be remedied. But we might at least stop to wonder how something can be in a perpetual state of "crisis" and whether it is accurate to describe it this way

Obesity discourse and the crisis of faith in disciplinary technology

According to Kirk (1998) (following Foucault) a shift in corporeal power has been underway since the late 18th century in many ‘western’ countries, from an external form of power and locus of control to an internal form and locus. In light of the increased volume of discourse around the alleged obesity crisis (Gard & Wright 2005) we revisit and attempt to update Kirk’s thesis about the regulation of bodies in schools; is the widespread concern about an obesity crisis producing new ways of managing and disciplining children’s bodies? We explore in some detail a case study of curriculum development in Health and Physical Education in Ontario, Canada where we argue that the grades 1–8 syllabus trades the productive compliance and liberal individualism of previous eras for a new layering of physical education discourse and the production of cheerfully courteous and responsible individuals. We complete this analysis by asking whether this curriculum development in an era of obesity discourse signals a crisis of faith in disciplinary technology. We end by noting the need for the retention of spaces within school physical education where young people can question assumptions about corporeality

Perceived risks for slipping and falling at work during wintertime and criteria for a slip-resistant winter shoe among Swedish outdoor workers

The leading cause of work related accidents in Sweden is falls. Many slips and falls occur on icy and snowy surfaces, but there is limited knowledge about how to prevent accidents during outdoor work in winter conditions. The purpose of this study was to describe risk factors of slips and falls and criteria for slip-resistant winter shoes from a user perspective. The result is based on focus group interviews with 20 men and women working in mail delivery, construction and home care in Sweden. The data was analyzed with qualitative content analysis. Risk factors described were related to physical work environment, risky work situations, individual and organizational factors. User criteria for winter work shoes focused on safety, adaptation to the environment, usability and own priorities. The mechanisms of slips and falls during outdoor work are complex. There is a need for more functional and user friendly work shoes than those available and user preferences should be considered by shoe designers. Future challenges include finding ways to make individually adapted shoes suitable for changing work environments, situations and tasks. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Scientific U-turns: eight occasions when science changed its mind

The Scientific Method is the series of processes by which hypotheses, ideas and theories are shown to be true beyond a reasonable scientific doubt. Most science ‘fact’ is expressed in terms of probabilities rather than certainties. Thus, by means of statistical calculations, researchers aim to determine whether an observed association between two events or characteristics may have occurred by chance (coincidence), whether they frequently occur together (correlation) or whether they occur together because one causes the other (causative relationship). In this article we review the Scientific Method and consider the statistical tests that are applied. We then focus on the occasions when science changes its mind and review eight such occurrences

Working hard on the outside: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of The Biggest Loser Australia

The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality television weight-loss programme that positions itself as a response to the so-called “obesity crisis”. Research on TBL has thus far focussed on audience responses and its effect on viewers’ beliefs about weight loss. This article focuses instead on how meaning is constructed in TBL. We conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a key episode of TBL (the 2012 Australian season finale) to examine how the textual, visual and auditory elements combine to construct meanings beyond the ostensible health messages. Although the overt message is that all contestants have worked hard, turned their lives around and been “successful”, examination of editing choices, lighting and colour, clothing and time spent on contestants allows us to see that the programme constructs varying degrees of success between contestants and provides accounts for these differences in outcomes. In this way the programme is able to present itself as a putative celebration of all contestants while prescribing narrow limits around what constitutes success. TBL reinforces an ideology in which “success” is a direct result of “the work” of weight loss (both physical and emotional), which can apparently be read straightforwardly off the body. TBL’s “celebration” of weight loss thus reproduces and strengthens the widespread view of fat bodies as physical manifestations of individual (ir)responsibility and psychological dysfunction, and contributes to the ongoing stigmatisation of obesity

Smoke detection in low-G fires

Fires in spacecraft are considered a credible risk. To respond to this risk, NASA flew fire detectors on Skylab and the Space Shuttle (STS) and included them in the design for International Space Station Alpha (ISSA). In previous missions (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo), the crew quarters were so cramped that it was not considered credible that the astronauts could fail to observe a fire. The Skylab nodule included approximately 20 UV fire detectors. The space shuttle has 9 ionization detectors in the mid deck and flight deck and Spacelab has six additional ionization detectors. The planned detectors for ISSA are laser-diode, forward-scattering, smoke or particulate detectors. Current plans for the ISSA call for two detectors in the open area of the module and detectors in racks that have both cooling air flow and electrical power. Due to the complete absence of data concerning the nature of particulate and radiant emission from low-g fires, all three of these detector systems were designed based upon 1-g test data. As planned mission durations and complexity increase and the volume of spacecraft increases, the need for and importance of effective, crew independent, fire detection grows significantly. This requires more knowledge concerning low-gravity fires and how they might be detected. To date, no combustion-generated particulate samples have been collected for well-developed microgravity flames. All of the extant data come from drop tower tests and therefore only correspond to the early stages of a fire. The fuel sources were restricted to laminar gas-jet diffusion flames and rapidly overheated wire insulation. These gas-jet drop tower tests indicate, through thermophoretic sampling, that soot primaries and aggregates (groups of primary particles) in micro-g may be significantly larger than those in normal-g (ng). This raises new scientific questions about soot processes as well as practical issues for particulate detection/alarm threshold levels used in on-orbit smoke detectors. Furthermore, it is widely speculated but unverified that the aggregates will grow to very large scales in a microgravity fire of longer duration than available on the ground. Preliminary tests in the 2.2 second drop tower suggest that particulate generated by overheated wire insulation will also be larger in microgravity than in normal gravity. TEM grids downstream of the fire region in the WIF experiment as well as visual observation of long string-like aggregates, further confirm this suggestion. The combined impact of these limited results and theoretical predictions is that direct knowledge of low-g combustion particulate as opposed to extrapolation from 1-g data is needed for a more confident design of smoke detectors for spacecraft

Gender and Videogames: The political valency of Lara Croft

The Face: Is Lara a feminist icon or a sexist fantasy? Toby Gard: Neither and a bit of both. Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist cliches apart from the fact that she’s got an unbelievable figure. Strong, independent women are the perfect fantasy girls—the untouchable is always the most desirable (Interview with Lara’s creator Toby Gard in The Face magazine, June 1997)

L-Edge Spectroscopy of Dilute, Radiation-Sensitive Systems Using a Transition-Edge-Sensor Array

We present X-ray absorption spectroscopy and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) measurements on the iron L-edge of 0.5 mM aqueous ferricyanide. These measurements demonstrate the ability of high-throughput transition-edge-sensor (TES) spectrometers to access the rich soft X-ray (100-2000eV) spectroscopy regime for dilute and radiation-sensitive samples. Our low-concentration data are in agreement with high-concentration measurements recorded by conventional grating-based spectrometers. These results show that soft X-ray RIXS spectroscopy acquired by high-throughput TES spectrometers can be used to study the local electronic structure of dilute metal-centered complexes relevant to biology, chemistry and catalysis. In particular, TES spectrometers have a unique ability to characterize frozen solutions of radiation- and temperature-sensitive samples.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure