Coherence, engagement, and usefulness as sensemaking criteria in participatory media practice

When skilled practitioners create media artifacts such as web pages, newspaper articles, videos, or business presentations, they are engaging in a pursuit which has consequences for the people who will interact with those artifacts. The juncture of practice, artifact, and consequences involves diverse normative considerations. We have summarized these into three criteria: coherence, engagement, and usefulness. In this paper we report on initial progress to develop a method for assessing these criteria in a particular form of skilled real-time media practice

Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps

Map makers have long searched for a way to construct cartograms -- maps in which the sizes of geographic regions such as countries or provinces appear in proportion to their population or some other analogous property. Such maps are invaluable for the representation of census results, election returns, disease incidence, and many other kinds of human data. Unfortunately, in order to scale regions and still have them fit together, one is normally forced to distort the regions' shapes, potentially resulting in maps that are difficult to read. Many methods for making cartograms have been proposed, some of them extremely complex, but all suffer either from this lack of readability or from other pathologies, like overlapping regions or strong dependence on the choice of coordinate axes. Here we present a new technique based on ideas borrowed from elementary physics that suffers none of these drawbacks. Our method is conceptually simple and produces useful, elegant, and easily readable maps. We illustrate the method with applications to the results of the 2000 US presidential election, lung cancer cases in the State of New York, and the geographical distribution of stories appearing in the news.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Adoption Behaviour of Cashew Growers in Cuddalore District

India has a creditable record of attaining good amount of foreign exchange by way of export of cashew kernels. Among the Agri-Horticultural commodities getting exported fromIndia cashew ranks the 2nd position. The main objective of the study was to analyse the relationship of socio-personal and socio-psychological characteristics with their level ofadoption.The study was conducted in four village of Virudhachalam block of Cuddalore district. The sample size consisted of 120 cashew growers under NHM. Proportionaterandom sampling procedure was employed in selecting the respondents. The extent of adoption of different cultural practices taught in NHM training programmes was studiedthrough a teacher made test and that majority (65 %) of the respondents exhibited high level of adoption of technologies taught in NHM training programme

Lifetime Risk of Lower-Extremity Peripheral Artery Disease Defined by Ankle-Brachial Index in the United States.

Background There are no available lifetime risk estimates of lower-extremity peripheral artery disease (PAD). Methods and Results Using data from 6 US community-based cohorts and the vital statistics, we estimated the prevalence and incidence of PAD, defined as an ankle-brachial index < 0.90, at each year of age from birth to 80 years for white, black, and Hispanic men and women. Then, we used Markov Monte Carlo simulations in a simulated cohort of 100 000 individuals to estimate lifetime risk of PAD. On the basis of odds ratios of PAD for traditional atherosclerotic risk factors (eg, diabetes mellitus and smoking), we developed a calculator providing residual lifetime risk of PAD. In an 80-year horizon, lifetime risks of PAD were 30.0% in black men and 27.6% in black women, but ≈19% in white men and women and ≈22% in Hispanic men and women. From another perspective, 9% of blacks were estimated to develop PAD by 60 years of age, while the same proportion was seen at ≈70 years for whites and Hispanics. The residual lifetime risk within the same race/ethnicity varied by 3.5- to 5-fold according to risk factors (eg, residual lifetime risk in 45-year-old black men was 19.9% when current smoking, diabetes mellitus, and history of cardiovascular disease were absent versus 70.4% when all were present). Conclusions In the United States, ≈30% of blacks are estimated to develop PAD during their lifetime, whereas the corresponding estimate is ≈20% for whites and Hispanics. The residual lifetime risk within the same race/ethnicity substantially varies according to traditional risk factors

Scaffolding School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation with Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps

This chapter reports pilot work investigating the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping to scaffold young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Our research objective is to better understand pupils’ usage of dialogue maps created in Compendium to write scientific ex-planations. The participants were 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. Through qualitative analysis of three case studies, we investigate the value of dialogue mapping as a mediating tool in the scientific reasoning process during a set of learning activities. These activities were published in an online learning envi-ronment to foster collaborative learning. Pupils mapped their discussions in pairs, shared maps via the online forum and in plenary discussions, and wrote essays based on their dialogue maps. This study draws on these multiple data sources: pupils’ maps in Compendium, writings in science and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Our analysis highlights the diversity of ways, both successful and unsuccessful, in which dialogue mapping was used by these young teenagers

The role of microtubule movement in bidirectional organelle transport

We study the role of microtubule movement in bidirectional organelle transport in Drosophila S2 cells and show that EGFP-tagged peroxisomes in cells serve as sensitive probes of motor induced, noisy cytoskeletal motions. Multiple peroxisomes move in unison over large time windows and show correlations with microtubule tip positions, indicating rapid microtubule fluctuations in the longitudinal direction. We report the first high-resolution measurement of longitudinal microtubule fluctuations performed by tracing such pairs of co-moving peroxisomes. The resulting picture shows that motor-dependent longitudinal microtubule oscillations contribute significantly to cargo movement along microtubules. Thus, contrary to the conventional view, organelle transport cannot be described solely in terms of cargo movement along stationary microtubule tracks, but instead includes a strong contribution from the movement of the tracks.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

Interparticle interactions:Energy potentials, energy transfer, and nanoscale mechanical motion in response to optical radiation

In the interactions between particles of material with slightly different electronic levels, unusually large shifts in the pair potential can result from photoexcitation, and on subsequent electronic excitation transfer. To elicit these phenomena, it is necessary to understand the fundamental differences between a variety of optical properties deriving from dispersion interactions, and processes such as resonance energy transfer that occur under laser irradiance. This helps dispel some confusion in the recent literature. By developing and interpreting the theory at a deeper level, one can anticipate that in suitable systems, light absorption and energy transfer will be accompanied by significant displacements in interparticle separation, leading to nanoscale mechanical motion

Making Representations Matter: Understanding Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking

Appropriating new technologies in order to foster collaboration and participatory engagement is a focus for many fields, but there is relatively little research on the experience of practitioners who do so. The role of technology-use mediators is to help make such technologies amenable and of value to the people who interact with them and each other. When the nature of the technology is to provide textual and visual representations of ideas and discussions, issues of form and shaping arise, along with questions of professional ethics. This thesis examines such participatory representational practice, specifically how practitioners make participatory visual representations (pictures, diagrams, knowledge maps) coherent, engaging and useful for groups tackling complex societal and organizational challenges. This thesis develops and applies a method to analyze, characterize, and compare instances of participatory representational practice in such a way as to highlight experiential aspects such as aesthetics, narrative, improvisation, sensemaking, and ethics. It extends taxonomies of such practices found in related research, and contributes to a critique of functionalist or techno-rationalist approaches to studying professional practice. It studies how fourteen practitioners using a visual hypermedia tool engaged participants with the hypermedia representations, and the ways they made the representations matter to the participants. It focuses on the sensemaking challenges that the practitioners encountered in their sessions, and on the ways that the form they gave the visual representations (aesthetics) related to the service they were trying to provide to their participants. Qualitative research methods such as grounded theory are employed to analyze video recordings of the participatory representational sessions. Analytical tools were developed to provide a multi-perspective view on each session. Conceptual and normative frameworks for understanding the practitioner experience in participatory representational practice in context, especially in terms of aesthetics, ethics, narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation, are proposed. The thesis places these concerns in context of other kinds of facilitative and mediation practices as well as research on reflective practice, aesthetic experience, critical HCI, and participatory design

Social deprivation and exposure to health promotion. A study of the distribution of health promotion resources to schools in England

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund and is available from the specified link - Copyright @ 2010 Chivu and ReidpathBACKGROUND: Area deprivation is a known determinant of health. It is also known that area deprivation is associated with lower impact health promotion. It is less well known, however, whether deprived areas are less responsive to health promotion, or whether they are less exposed. Using data from a national, school-based campaign to promote vaccination against the human papilloma virus (HPV), the relationship between area deprivation and exposure was examined. METHODS: Taking advantage of a health promotion campaign to provide information to schools about HPV vaccination, a cross sectional study was conducted to examine the relationship between area level, social deprivation, and take-up of (i.e., exposure to) available health promotion material. The sample was 4,750 schools across England, including government maintained and independent schools. The relationship between area deprivation and exposure was examined using bi- and multivariate logistic regression. RESULTS: It was found that schools in the least deprived quintile had 1.32 times the odds of requesting health promotion materials than schools in the most deprived areas (p = .01). This effect was independent of the school size, the type of school, and the geographic region. Conclusion The relationship between area deprivation and the impact of health promotion may be due, at least in part, to differential levels of exposure. The study was limited in scope, pointing to the need for more research, but also points to potentially important policy implications

Probing the Heterogeneity of Protein Kinase Activation in Cells by Super-Resolution Microscopy

Heterogeneity of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) activation in genetically identical cells, which occurs in response to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) signaling, remains poorly understood. MAPK cascades integrate signals emanating from different EGFR spatial locations, including the plasma membrane and endocytic compartment. We previously hypothesized that in EGF-stimulated cells the MAPK phosphorylation (pMAPK) level and activity are largely determined by the spatial organization of the EGFR clusters within the cell. For experimental testing of this hypothesis, we used super-resolution microscopy to define EGFR clusters by receptor numbers (N) and average intra-cluster distances (d). From this data, we predicted the extent of pMAPK with 85% accuracy on a cell-to-cell basis with control data returning 54% accuracy (P50nm were most predictive for pMAPK level in cells. Electron microscopy revealed that these large clusters were primarily localized to the limiting membrane of multivesicular bodies (MVB). Many tighter packed dimers/multimers (d<50nm) were found on intraluminal vesicles within MVBs, where they were unlikely to activate MAPK because of the physical separation. Our results suggest that cell-to-cell differences in N and d contain crucial information to predict EGFR-activated cellular pMAPK levels and explain pMAPK heterogeneity in isogenic cells