Using social engagement to inspire design learning

Social design and ‘design for need’ are important frameworks for establishing ethical understanding amongst novice product designers. Typically, product design is a value-adding activity where normally aesthetics, usability and manufacturability are the key agendas. Howard [1] in his essay “Design beyond commodification” discusses the role of designers in contributing to cultural expressions designed to influence consumer aspirations and desires. He argues that designers are impelled “to participate in the creation of lifestyles that demand the acquisition of goods as a measure of progress and status.” As emerging consumers, student designers tend to reflect this consumer culture in their work, seeking to add ‘marketability’ by focusing on aesthetic development. However value adding can occur in many different manifestations, often outside commercial expectations and the students’ experience. Projects that may be perceived as having limited market potential can often have significant personal impact for both recipient and designer. Social engagement provides a valuable insight for design students into the potential of design to contribute solutions to societal well-being, rather than serve market forces. Working in a local context can enhance this, with unlimited access to end users, their environs and the product context, enabling the development of user empathy and a more intgrated collaborative process. The ‘Fixperts’ social project discussed in this paper has proved to be an effective method of engaging undergraduate students in participatory design within their local community. This model for social engagement has provided an unprecedented learning experience, and established a strong ethical framework amongst Brunel design students

Analyzing the Persistence of Referenced Web Resources with Memento

In this paper we present the results of a study into the persistence and availability of web resources referenced from papers in scholarly repositories. Two repositories with different characteristics, arXiv and the UNT digital library, are studied to determine if the nature of the repository, or of its content, has a bearing on the availability of the web resources cited by that content. Memento makes it possible to automate discovery of archived resources and to consider the time between the publication of the research and the archiving of the referenced URLs. This automation allows us to process more than 160000 URLs, the largest known such study, and the repository metadata allows consideration of the results by discipline. The results are startling: 45% (66096) of the URLs referenced from arXiv still exist, but are not preserved for future generations, and 28% of resources referenced by UNT papers have been lost. Moving forwards, we provide some initial recommendations, including that repositories should publish URL lists extracted from papers that could be used as seeds for web archiving systems.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to Open Repositories 2011 Conferenc

Performance of the Cell processor for biomolecular simulations

The new Cell processor represents a turning point for computing intensive applications. Here, I show that for molecular dynamics it is possible to reach an impressive sustained performance in excess of 30 Gflops with a peak of 45 Gflops for the non-bonded force calculations, over one order of magnitude faster than a single core standard processor

Modifications and Improvements to the Sea Beam System on Board R/V Thomas Washington

A number of modifications to the narrowbeam echo-sounder and echo processor of the Sea Beammultibeam bathymetric survey system have been implemented. These include the design and construction of a digital pitch compensator, the ability to use a variety of sensors for vertical reference, the design and construction of hardware test equipment, and an interface to the shipboard DEC VAX-11/730 computer for data logging, automation of start-up procedures, and performance monitorin

Expanding research on corporate corruption, management and organizations

In this special issue introduction, we briefly describe a variety of research paths researchers have followed to study the multifaceted phenomenon of corruption. Furthermore, we classify the papers included in this special issue according to their contribution to these research paths and briefly preview them. Finally, drawing on these four research paths and the papers included in this special issue, we propose a six-item agenda for future research on corruption

True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happiness

Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only for untrained participants, but also for academic researchers and even in those who study happiness specifically. Studies 2 and 3 then respectively ask whether this effect may be explained by general motivational biases or beliefs in a just world. In both cases, we find evidence against these explanations. Study 4 shows that the impact of moral judgments cannot be explained by changes in the perception of descriptive psychological states. Finally, Study 5 compares the impact of moral and non-moral value, and provides evidence that unlike non-moral value, moral value is part of the criteria that govern the ordinary concept of happiness. Taken together, these studies provide a specific explanation of how and why the ordinary concept of happiness deviates from the definition used by researchers studying happiness

Spitzer Mid-Infrared Observations of Seven Bipolar Planetary Nebulae

We have investigated the mid-infrared (MIR) and visual structures of seven bipolar planetary nebulae (BPNe), using imaging and spectroscopy acquired using the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST), and the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional in Mexico. The results show that the sources are more extended towards longer MIR wavelengths, as well as having higher levels of surface brightness in the 5.8 and 8.0 microns bands. It is also noted that the 5.8/4.5 and 8.0/4.5 microns flux ratios increase with increasing distance from the nuclei of the sources. All of these latter trends may be attributable to emission by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and/or warm dust continua within circum-nebular photo-dissociation regions (PDRs). A corresponding decrease in the flux ratios 8.0/5.8 microns may, by contrast, arise due to changes in the properties of the PAH emitting grains. We note evidence for possible 8.0 microns ring-like structures in the envelope of NGC 2346, located in a region beyond the minor axis limits of the ionized envelope. An analysis of the inner two rings shows that whilst they have higher surface brightnesses at longer MIR wavelengths, they are relatively stronger (compared to underlying emission) at 3.6 and 4.5 microns. There is also evidence for point reflection symmetry along the major axis of the outflow.Comment: 27 pages, 22 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 69 pages in arXi