Final report of 2008-2009 sustainable strategic partnerships of scale : SPEEAD (sporting prosthetics for everyday and elite athletes with a disability)

In considering a strategy for research development in prosthetics in the National Centre for Prosthetics and Orthotics, the importance of making involvement in sport more accessible to those athletically inclined became apparent. In preparation for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, there was also a clear need to herald a renewed focus on sport for those with mobility challenges and empower those who might never have participated to become involved1. There was a desire to build an enhanced national profile in terms of expertise and research in sporting prostheses and to promote our field of prosthetics. SPEEAD continues to have two aims: - To build the level and nature of expertise and research capacity in the wider prosthetics practitioner community - To address a postgraduate instructional course need in the UK prosthetics practitioner communit

Internet as a Human Right: A Practical Legal Framework to Address the Unique Nature of the Medium and to Promote Development

A Taiwanese court sentenced a blogger to 30 days of detention for her comments that a restaurant’s food was too salty and that the locale was unsanitary. In Indonesia, a woman was sentenced to six months in jail for libel after an e-mail she sent to friends about poor treatment she received in a hospital was posted on Facebook. These are not isolated cases of persecution, but part of a broad pattern of challenges facing individuals around the world. The United Nations recently released a report on legal trends involving restriction of expression on the Internet, declaring that freedom of expression on the Internet is a human right. If Internet freedom is a human right, what are the limits of that entitlement? This Essay explores existing legal models and restrictions on online communication through case studies, including discussion of restrictions in countries affected by the Arab Spring of 2011. This Essay suggests six basic elements for a legal framework that can support the unique challenges presented by the Internet as it becomes a primary mode of communication

An Inductive Study Of Experiential Workplace Learning And Peer Coaching: Participant Perceptions Of Early Childhood Intervention Professional Induction

This six-chapter dissertation is a grounded theory investigation of the perceptions and reflections of four novice practitioners as they traversed their orientation process at an early intervention agency in Western North Carolina. The dissertation presents the data in two formats. An illustrative case study (Chapter 4) describes a process for experiential workplace learning (EWL) and discusses how it was applied to a small early childhood intervention program’s professional induction process for four novice practitioners. The paper concludes that EWL was an efficient method for ensuring orientation to the use of evidence based early intervention pedagogical practice by novice practitioners. The dissertation also presents an exploratory case study (Chapter 5) employing a collaborative approach to grounded theory methods to explore the experiences and perceptions of four novice early intervention practitioners who participated in an experiential learning process facilitated by peer coaches. Grounded theory methods were used to construct a framework for considering adult learning process within the context of experiential workplace learning mediated by peer coaching

Generating samples of extreme winters to support climate adaptation

Recent extreme weather across the globe highlights the need to understand the potential for more extreme events in the present-day, and how such events may change with global warming. We present a methodology for more efficiently sampling extremes in future climate projections. As a proof-of-concept, we examine the UK’s most recent set of national Climate Projections (UKCP18). UKCP18 includes a 15-member perturbed parameter ensemble (PPE) of coupled global simulations, providing a range of climate projections incorporating uncertainty in both internal variability and forced response. However, this ensemble is too small to adequately sample extremes with very high return periods, which are of interest to policy-makers and adaptation planners. To better understand the statistics of these events, we use distributed computing to run three 1000-member initial-condition ensembles with the atmosphere-only HadAM4 model at 60km resolution on volunteers’ computers, taking boundary conditions from three distinct future extreme winters within the UKCP18 ensemble. We find that the magnitude of each winter extreme is captured within our ensembles, and that two of the three ensembles are conditioned towards producing extremes by the boundary conditions. Our ensembles contain several extremes that would only be expected to be sampled by a UKCP18 PPE of over 500 members, which would be prohibitively expensive with current supercomputing resource. The most extreme winters we simulate exceed those within UKCP18 by 0.85 K and 37% of the present-day average for UK winter means of daily maximum temperature and precipitation respectively. As such, our ensembles contain a rich set of multivariate, spatio-temporally and physically coherent samples of extreme winters with wide-ranging potential applications

Carbonic anhydrase III (Car3) is not required for fatty acid synthesis and does not protect against high-fat diet induced obesity in mice

Carbonic anhydrases are a family of enzymes that catalyze the reversible condensation of water and carbon dioxide to carbonic acid, which spontaneously dissociates to bicarbonate. Carbonic anhydrase III (Car3) is nutritionally regulated at both the mRNA and protein level. It is highly enriched in tissues that synthesize and/or store fat: liver, white adipose tissue, brown adipose tissue, and skeletal muscle. Previous characterization of Car3 knockout mice focused on mice fed standard diets, not high-fat diets that significantly alter the tissues that highly express Car3. We observed lower protein levels of Car3 in high-fat diet fed mice treated with niclosamide, a drug published to improve fatty liver symptoms in mice. However, it is unknown if Car3 is simply a biomarker reflecting lipid accumulation or whether it has a functional role in regulating lipid metabolism. We focused our in vitro studies toward metabolic pathways that require bicarbonate. To further determine the role of Car3 in metabolism, we measured de novo fatty acid synthesis with in vitro radiolabeled experiments and examined metabolic biomarkers in Car3 knockout and wild type mice fed high-fat diet. Specifically, we analyzed body weight, body composition, metabolic rate, insulin resistance, serum and tissue triglycerides. Our results indicate that Car3 is not required for de novo lipogenesis, and Car3 knockout mice fed high-fat diet do not have significant differences in responses to various diets to wild type mice

Turn off the Tap: Behavioural messages increase water efficiency during toothbrushing

Reducing consumer demand is part of a multidimensional strategy to increase water resilience. Theory-based ‘nudges’ or behaviour-change strategies may be effective at reducing demand at little cost. This paper reports a unique partnership between GlaxoSmithKline, water utility Anglian Water, and researchers at the University of East Anglia. Two experimental studies drawing on the strengths of these organizations investigated a behaviour change intervention designed to reduce water usage when toothbrushing. Study 1 tested the efficacy of three theory-based behavioural messages (social norms, ingroup norms, and collective efficacy) designed to encourage participants (N = 164) to turn off the tap whilst brushing teeth. In an actual toothbrushing scenario, all three messages proved to be effective compared to a no-treatment control condition. In study 2, homes in Newmarket, Suffolk (N = 382) were given toothbrushing packs containing a collective efficacy message that highlighted turning off the tap while toothbrushing. Smart-meter recorded water usage was obtained for three weeks before and three weeks after receiving the toothbrushing packs. Household water usage significantly decreased after receiving the packs. A control group of N = 382 households did not show a significant decrease in water usage during this timeframe. These studies suggest that behavioural messages from public or private companies can be effective in reducing real-world water usage while toothbrushing. This model of collaboration between industry, water utilities, and academics can serve as a model of best practice for public and private companies interested in reducing household water usage

Rethinking Maintenance Terminology for an Industry 4.0 Future

Sensors and mathematical models have been used since the 1990’s to assess the health of systems and diagnose anomalous behavior. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the range of assets on which data can be collected cost effectively. Cloud-computing and the wider availability of data and models are democratizing the implementation of prognostic health (PHM) technologies. Together, these advancements and other Industry 4.0 developments are creating a paradigm shift in how maintenance work is planned and executed. In this new future, maintenance will be initiated once a potential failure has been detected (using PHM) and thus completed before a functional failure has occurred. Thus corrective work is required since corrective work is defined as “work done to restore the function of an asset after failure or when failure is imminent.” Many metrics for measuring the effectiveness of maintenance work management are grounded in a negative perspective of corrective work and do not clearly capture work arising from condition monitoring and predictive modeling investments. In this paper, we use case studies to demonstrate the need to rethink maintenance terminology. The outcomes of this work include 1) definitions to be used for consistent evaluation of work management performance in an Industry 4.0 future and 2) recommendations to improve detection of work related to PHM activities