Troubling Vulnerability: Designing with LGBT Young People's Ambivalence Towards Hate Crime Reporting

HCI is increasingly working with ?vulnerable? people yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime they simultaneously rejected ascription as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people?s ambivalent identities and contribute insights on how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguous designed texts, alongside conventional qualitative data, we ?trouble? our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI

East Lancashire Research 2008

East Lancashire Research 200

Thermal Softening and Degradation of Wood and Bark

A thermogravimetric analyzer was modified for the study of thermal softening of several Pacific Northwest woods and barks under constant load at a heating rate of 16 C/min.Several stages of thermal softening were found in barks and wood. Regardless of species, oven-dry samples start to soften at 180 C, with termination at about 500 C. The maximum rate of softening occurred at 380 C with an additional softening at 280 C for bark and 320 C for wood of hardwood species. An increase of moisture content decreased the softening temperature. When the moisture content of either material was higher than 10%, a new maximum rate of softening appeared at 160 C, while the 280 C, 320 C and 380 C maxima were retained. The absolute softening of wood and bark at 160 C increased with increasing moisture content to a limit at about 30%.In conjunction with results from infrared spectrum, X-ray diffraction and differential thermal analysis, the heating of oven-dry wood and bark was found to exhibit neither physical nor chemical changes at less than 200 C. The softening of wood and bark in the presence of water at temperature less than 200 C must occur only in the amorphous regions, with water serving as a plasticizer. Softening of wood and bark at more than 200 C is a combined response of physical and chemical degradations. These thermal responses of wood and bark, particularly bark, are expected to be important to the strength, dimensional stability, water resistance and fire-retardant properties of composite products

Meeting the design challenges of nano-CMOS electronics: an introduction to an upcoming EPSRC pilot project

The years of ‘happy scaling’ are over and the fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will impinge deeply upon the design of future integrated circuits and systems. This paper provides an introduction to these challenges and gives an overview of the Grid infrastructure that will be developed as part of a recently funded EPSRC pilot project to address them, and we hope, which will revolutionise the electronics design industry

Anderson localisation in tight-binding models with flat bands

We consider the effect of weak disorder on eigenstates in a special class of tight-binding models. Models in this class have short-range hopping on periodic lattices; their defining feature is that the clean systems have some energy bands that are dispersionless throughout the Brillouin zone. We show that states derived from these flat bands are generically critical in the presence of weak disorder, being neither Anderson localised nor spatially extended. Further, we establish a mapping between this localisation problem and the one of resonances in random impedance networks, which previous work has suggested are also critical. Our conclusions are illustrated using numerical results for a two-dimensional lattice, known as the square lattice with crossings or the planar pyrochlore lattice.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, as published (this version includes minor corrections