The Raploch: A history, people's perceptions and the likely future of a problem housing estate

This article explores the experience of belonging and identity, and the social distance and separateness which has long characterised aspects of Stirling’s Raploch housing estate. Detailed historical archive work uncovered the limited social planning and architectural ambitions set for this housing estate, when compared to the earlier Riverside development. The consequences of such decision making and subsequent poor management of the estate is then articulated through a series of qualitative interviews which explore attitudes to the construction and sustaining of neighbourhood and community identities. Achieving a physical solution to Raploch's social problems has eluded a series of recent regeneration initiatives and this paper suggests that the core problem is not primarily architectural but rather one of class related discrimination and stigma which has been core to Raploch's identity since the 16th Century

The effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of respite for caregivers of frail older people

The proportion of frail elderly people in the industrialized world is increasing. Respite care is a potentially important way of maintaining the quality of life for these people and their caregivers. The objective of this systematic review was to determine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different models of community-based respite care for frail older people and their caregivers. To identify relevant studies, 37 databases were searched, and reference checking and citation searches were undertaken. Well-controlled effectiveness studies were eligible for inclusion, with uncontrolled studies admissible only in the absence of higher-quality evidence. Studies assessed the effect of community-based respite on caregivers of frail elderly people relative to usual care or to another support intervention. Eligible economic evaluations also addressed costs. Where appropriate, data were synthesized using standard meta-analytic techniques. Ten randomized, controlled trials, seven quasi-experimental studies and five uncontrolled studies were included in the review. For all types of respite, the effects upon caregivers were generally small, with better-controlled studies finding modest benefits only for certain subgroups, although many studies reported high levels of caregiver satisfaction. No reliable evidence was found that respite care delays entry to residential care or adversely affects frail older people. The economic evaluations all assessed day care, which tended to be associated with similar or higher costs than usual care. Given the increasing numbers of frail elderly people and the lack of up-to-date, good-quality evidence for all types of respite care, better-quality evidence is urgently needed to inform current policy and practice

Context, ethics and pharmacogenetics

Most of the literature on pharmacogenetics assumes that the main problems in implementing the technology will be institutional ones (due to funding or regulation) and that although it involves genetic testing, the ethical issues involved in pharmacogenetics are different from, even less than, 'traditional' genetic testing. Very little attention has been paid to how clinicians will accept this technology, their attitudes towards it and how it will affect clinical practice. This paper presents results from interviews with clinicians who are beginning to use pharmacogenetics and explores how they view the ethics of pharmacogenetic testing, its use to exclude some patients from treatment, and how this kind of testing fits into broader debates around genetics. In particular this paper examines the attitudes of breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease specialists. The results of these interviews will be compared with the picture of pharmacogenetics painted in the published literature, as a way of rooting this somewhat speculative writing in clinical practice

Evidence for carbon sequestration by agricultural liming

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95356/1/gbc1382.pd

Narrating Devolution: Politics and/as Scottish Fiction

This article explores the tensions between the competing cultural andpolitical narratives of devolution, anchored around James Robertson’s state- of-the-nation novelAnd the Land Lay Still(2010). The article emergesfrom the two-year research project ‘Narrating Scottish Devolution’, and includes excerpts from workshops held on this topic at the Stirling Centre for Scottish Studies, alongside archival work on the internal debates of the Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969–73). The article unpicks competing teleologies of government de-centralisation and the recovery of Scottish cultural agency, ending with a call to begin the thorny task ofnarrativising devolution in political and historical terms. Access the podcast at: http://hdl.handle.net/11667/77The article reports the findings of a research project ('Narrating Scottish Devolution: Literature, Politics and the Culturalist Paradigm’) supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (ref SG132334)

Negative emotions in children with newly diagnosed epilepsy.

Purpose: To understand the emotional predicament in children with recently diagnosed idiopathic or cryptogenic epilepsy. Methods: We used the well-tried method of structured projection for the first time in children with epilepsy. Thirty-six children with epilepsy, aged 7-15 years (mean age, 9.5 years) and in 35 control children aged 7-15 years (mean age, 9.4 years), attributed shame and guilt in relation to three types of situation (non- illness related, illness related, and epilepsy related). Children were evaluated twice: shortly after diagnosis, before antiepileptic drug (AED) use and after an interval of 3 months. Results: Children with epilepsy and healthy controls were similar in their way of attributing shame and guilt. However, the type of situation was of influence: Both children with epilepsy and healthy children attributed more shame to incompetence due to epilepsy than to incompetence due to other illnesses. Conclusions: Increased affective problems in childhood epilepsy cannot be explained by excessive attribution of shame and guilt, affects known to be important precursors of psychopathology, yet both healthy children and children with epilepsy attribute more shame to epilepsy than to other illnesses. Epilepsy is not like any other disease