Extraordinary normalcy: home, relationships and identities in narratives of unpaid care

Based on audio diaries and narrative interviews with family carers, this paper suggests care can be understood as an experience of ‘extraordinary normalcy’, meaning that profound shifts in home, relationships and identities take place through care, yet these become part of the normalcy of family life. To maintain and understand a sense of normalcy, our participants utilise professional and technological interventions in the home and draw on notions of responsibility, reciprocity and role-reversal as frameworks for explaining why they continue to care, despite the challenges it brings. The paper considers how domestic activities performed in the home can both highlight the extraordinary aspects of care and help maintain the normalcy of the everyday. Extraordinary normalcy is a concept that problematises definitions of care that remove it from the relational and everyday, yet acknowledges the challenges people face when performing care. This paper contributes to a call for a narrative based development of social policy and makes recommendations for policy and practice based on the in-depth accounts of family carers

Carbon Monoxide Screening in Pregnancy: An Evaluation Study of a Plymouth Pilot Intervention

This report provides an analysis and evaluation of a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended pilot intervention which was designed to identify pregnant women exposed to carbon monoxide due to cigarette smoke and refers them to local stop smoking services (LSSS). The pilot intervention was carried out by community midwives working in two areas of Plymouth. The city has areas of social and health inequalities and the study drew on populations from a socially deprived neighbourhood and a socially affluent area. The pilot was instigated following new NICE guidance recommending that all women attending initial ante natal booking appointments with their community midwives be offered a Carbon Monoxide (CO) breath analyser screening to determine their smoking status and or exposure to other forms of CO. This evaluation study identifies the benefits and barriers associated with the implementation of the CO screening pilot. In particular, our aims were to explore any detrimental impact on the relationship between women and their community midwives, identify the impact on midwives in terms of time and resources, reveal the responses and acceptability or otherwise of the screening as perceived and experienced by the women being asked to participate during the booking appointment and finally to evaluate the success of the intervention overall in relation to the numbers of referrals made to Plymouth’s LSSS. A further aim was explore any differences in the two socio demographic areas. We adopted a mixed methods approach involving four focus group interviews with 23 midwives, a survey posted to the 258 women who attended initial antenatal booking appointments in the study areas, an online version of the survey to ascertain the views and experiences of pregnant women and new mothers nationally and an interrogation of an internet forum discussion board for mothers. A two page questionnaire consisting of 12 questions was designed and posted to women who attended the booking appointment with the midwife during the three month pilot period and the same survey was made available online. Questions were designed to elicit women’s views about the information given by the midwife in relation to the screening, whether they had agreed to participate in the CO screening process, their experiences and views about offering CO screening to pregnant women and their smoking status and those of other household members. Of the 258 questionnaires posted to women who had attended the clinic during the pilot intervention 40 completed responses were returned representing a 15.5% response rate. Only 4 responses were received from the online survey posting but an additional 484 comments posted on the Mumsnet website discussion board were analysed. Our findings show that in general there was a high degree of acceptability for the intervention. Midwives and their clients were generally in support of the screening being offered to all pregnant women. However, this support was dependent on a number of contextual factors. Women wanted to be properly informed about the screening and midwives wanted to be kept informed about the effects of the intervention on women’s smoking cessation. Initial and ongoing training of midwives in utilising the protocol and in instructing women to correct use the monitor was also very important. Trust was revealed to be a very important aspect of the relationship between women and their midwives. Some women felt that the CO screening was being used just to check whether or not they were smokers and some midwives also worried about the possible negative effects the CO screening may have on their relationships with women

A review of microfabricated electrochemical biosensors for DNA detection

This review article presents an overview of recent work on electrochemical biosensors developed using microfabrication processes, particularly sensors used to achieve sensitive and specific detection of DNA sequences. Such devices are important as they lend themselves to miniaturisation, reproducible mass-manufacture, and integration with other previously existing technologies and production methods. The review describes the current state of these biosensors, novel methods used to produce them or enhance their sensing properties, and pathways to deployment of a complete point-of-care biosensing system in a clinical setting

Children’s Multilectal Repertoires: Diglossic Style-Shifting by Palestinian Children and Adolescents in Syria

Arabic diglossia, whereby Standard Arabic (SA) exists alongside numerous vernaculars, often leads to diglossic style‐shifting based on context or topic changes and is marked in the vernac‐ ular by shifting to standard linguistic features. While this phenomenon has been widely studied in the speech of educated adults, research on diglossic style‐shifting by children and adolescents has been rather limited. This paper investigates how it operates amongst 3–17‐year‐olds from a Bedouin speech community of Palestinian refugees in Syria. It examines context effects on realizations of the variables (θ) and (\uf0), which overlap with local realizations and (q), which has a standard realization ([q]) that is independent of dialectal variation in the community. Participants were recorded dur‐ ing sociolinguistic interviews and a picture‐naming task, the latter being expected to evoke a school setting and prompt the use of more standard realizations, signaling diglossic style‐shifting in their speech. Style‐shifting was influenced by age, context, and the linguistic variables under examination. While picture‐naming prompted greater use of standard realizations of all variables, shifting to [q] also appeared during the interview in lexical borrowings from SA, revealing topic effects on diglossic style‐shifting. Children aged 6–14 exhibited more style‐shifting in picture‐naming, likely reflecting the central role of school in their lives, while the speech of 15–17‐year‐olds contained more lexical borrowing with [q]. This likely reflects their larger linguistic repertoires and longer exposure to SA than their younger peers. These findings indicate that SA plays a key role in participants’ linguistic practices and reflect their awareness of how to employ it appropriately in their speech

Multisymplectic approach to integrable defects in the sine-Gordon model

Ideas from the theory of multisymplectic systems, introduced recently in integrable systems by the author and Kundu to discuss Liouville integrability in classical field theories with a defect, are applied to the sine-Gordon model. The key ingredient is the introduction of a second Poisson bracket in the theory that allows for a Hamiltonian description of the model that is completely equivalent to the standard one, in the absence of a defect. In the presence of a defect described by frozen Bäcklund transformations, our approach based on the new bracket unifies the various tools used so far to attack the problem. It also gets rid of the known issues related to the evaluation of the Poisson brackets of the defect matrix which involve fields at coinciding space point (the location of the defect). The original Lagrangian approach also finds a nice reinterpretation in terms of the canonical transformation representing the defect conditions

Interplay between Zamolodchikov-Faddeev and Reflection-Transmission algebras

We show that a suitable coset algebra, constructed in terms of an extension of the Zamolodchikov-Faddeev algebra, is homomorphic to the Reflection-Transmission algebra, as it appears in the study of integrable systems with impurity.Comment: 8 pages; a misprint in eq. (2.14) and (2.15) has been correcte

Form factors of boundary fields for A(2)-affine Toda field theory

In this paper we carry out the boundary form factor program for the A(2)-affine Toda field theory at the self-dual point. The latter is an integrable model consisting of a pair of particles which are conjugated to each other and possessing two bound states resulting from the scattering processes 1 +1 -> 2 and 2+2-> 1. We obtain solutions up to four particle form factors for two families of fields which can be identified with spinless and spin-1 fields of the bulk theory. Previously known as well as new bulk form factor solutions are obtained as a particular limit of ours. Minimal solutions of the boundary form factor equations for all A(n)-affine Toda field theories are given, which will serve as starting point for a generalisation of our results to higher rank algebras.Comment: 24 pages LaTeX, 1 figur

A course agnostic approach to predicting student success from VLE log data using recurrent neural networks

We describe a method of improving the accuracy of a learning analytics system through the application of a Recurrent Neural Network over all students in a University, regardless of course. Our target is to discover how well a student will do in a class given their interaction with a virtual learning environment. We show how this method performs well when we want to predict how well students will do, even if we do not have a model trained based on their specific course

Dyons in N=4 Supersymmetric Theories and Three-Pronged Strings

We construct and explore BPS states that preserve 1/4 of supersymmetry in N=4 Yang-Mills theories. Such states are also realized as three-pronged strings ending on D3-branes. We correct the electric part of the BPS equation and relate its solutions to the unbroken abelian gauge group generators. Generic 1/4-BPS solitons are not spherically symmetric, but consist of two or more dyonic components held apart by a delicate balance between static electromagnetic force and scalar Higgs force. The instability previously found in three-pronged string configurations is due to excessive repulsion by one of these static forces. We also present an alternate construction of these 1/4-BPS states from quantum excitations around a magnetic monopole, and build up the supermultiplet for arbitrary (quantized) electric charge. The degeneracy and the highest spin of the supermultiplet increase linearly with a relative electric charge. We conclude with comments.Comment: 33 pages, two figures, LaTex, a footnote added, the figure caption of Fig.2 expanded, one more referenc

Microbial Primer: what is the stringent response and how does it allow bacteria to survive stress?

The stringent response is a conserved bacterial stress response that allows bacteria to alter their activity and survive under nutrient-limiting conditions. Activation of the stringent response is characterized by the production of intracellular signalling molecules, collectively termed (p)ppGpp, which interact with multiple targets inside bacterial cells. Together, these interactions induce a slow growth phenotype to aid bacterial survival by altering the transcriptomic profile of the cell, inhibiting ribosome biosynthesis and targeting enzymes involved in other key metabolic processes