My Share of the Sky: Review 1

My Share of the Sky speaks like a poem. A poem of love, of life, and of loss. It is a story of finding refuge and freedom in a foreign land and reconciling with the longing for loved ones back home. Presented as an audio diary, Sheida Jahanbin invites listeners into her world as she and her husband Madyar make a new life for themselves in Oslo, Norway as political refugees from Iran. The program presents a stream of live happening moments which intimately capture Sheida\u27s life as it is unfolding. Juxtaposing the mundane and the terrifying, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the program gives full expression to the range of experiences of a refugee’s life. There is the constant grappling with not only the simple and menial things such as a blocked drainpipe but the ongoing attachment to the politics back home and the loved ones who remain there. The program\u27s fragmented structure gives expression to this tension by drawing on the range of experiences Sheida and Madyar have during their first months of settling into a new life. This acute insight into her own personal experience as a refugee, alongside her husband, is what makes this program both enthralling and harrowing. Produced by Sheida Jahanbin and Rikke Houd, My Share of the Sky secured third place in Prix Europa 2012

The FLOODLABEL as a social innovation in flood risk management to increase homeowners' resilience

In flood risk management awareness has been growing that the responsibility for coping with a flood cannot be assumed by the government alone. Homeowners need to be actively involved in flood risk management by taking responsibility; for this, they need empowerment and support to take adequate precautions. If homeowners implement precautionary measures, they can mitigate damage caused by floods and thus increase their resilience. This requires an appropriate risk communication strategy with the population. The FLOODLABEL in Germany informs and prompts homeowners to take precautionary measures. The Flood Competence Center developed the FLOODLABEL. This study employs the analytical framework of social innovation as the FLOODLABEL has some characteristics of social innovation. This study first explores the FLOODLABEL, which constitutes social innovation in flood risk management, and therefore characterizes the five development phases and their successes and challenges as social innovation. Second, it tries to understand and reflect upon the current stage of the FLOODLABEL as a social innovation in Germany and seeks to learn from this tool about the potential drivers associated with the process of implementation. Third, there is potential to gather a better understanding of other social innovations in flood risk management

Metabolism and Excretion of Caffeine during Germination of Coffea arabica L

To investigate the physiological role of the purine alkaloids during germination, seeds of Coffea arabica were allowed to germinate under aseptic conditions on agar at 26°C, either in the dark or in the light. After imbibition for 7 days less than 1% of the seed caffeine is found in the agar, indicating a strong diffusion barrier at the surface of the coffee bean. After 56 days, when the radicle has grown deep into the agar support, a considerable amount (22%) of caffeine is excreted. The total caffeine content increases during germination for 56 days by 83% in the dark and by 51% in the light, whereas the soluble protein falls drastically. We propose that caffeine is not a nitrogen reserve for germination and acts against competitors (release into the soil) and against predators (concentration increase in the tissue

SKIP-DRAG-FALL

This paper examines work from my Unsettled Attachments series, sculptural explorations, and the participatory experiences connected to their making. The Unsettled Attachments series involves ongoing enactments. Household items are moved in public spaces and then photographed as a gesture of inquiry into spatial recognitions and various peculiarities. Through a method of practice-based research that involves performative collaboration (joint authorship) and interactive public performance, my research-creation work grapples with queerness, failure, desire, and the entanglements of participatory engagement

Determining the sample size for a cluster-randomised trial: Bayesian hierarchical modelling of the ICC estimate

In common with many cluster-randomised trials, it was difficult to determine the appropriate sample size for the planned trial of the effectiveness of a systematic voiding programme for post-stroke incontinence due to the lack of a robust estimate of the intra-cluster correlation coefficient (ICC). One approach to overcome this problem is a method of combining ICC values in the Bayesian framework (Turner et al. 2005). We adopted this approach and used Bayesian hierarchical modelling to estimate the ICC

What can management theories offer evidence-based practice? A comparative analysis of measurement tools for organisational context

Background: Given the current emphasis on networks as vehicles for innovation and change in health service delivery, the ability to conceptualise and measure organisational enablers for the social construction of knowledge merits attention. This study aimed to develop a composite tool to measure the organisational context for evidence-based practice (EBP) in healthcare. Methods: A structured search of the major healthcare and management databases for measurement tools from four domains: research utilisation (RU), research activity (RA), knowledge management (KM), and organisational learning (OL). Included studies were reports of the development or use of measurement tools that included organisational factors. Tools were appraised for face and content validity, plus development and testing methods. Measurement tool items were extracted, merged across the four domains, and categorised within a constructed framework describing the absorptive and receptive capacities of organisations. Results: Thirty measurement tools were identified and appraised. Eighteen tools from the four domains were selected for item extraction and analysis. The constructed framework consists of seven categories relating to three core organisational attributes of vision, leadership, and a learning culture, and four stages of knowledge need, acquisition of new knowledge, knowledge sharing, and knowledge use. Measurement tools from RA or RU domains had more items relating to the categories of leadership, and acquisition of new knowledge; while tools from KM or learning organisation domains had more items relating to vision, learning culture, knowledge need, and knowledge sharing. There was equal emphasis on knowledge use in the different domains. Conclusion: If the translation of evidence into knowledge is viewed as socially mediated, tools to measure the organisational context of EBP in healthcare could be enhanced by consideration of related concepts from the organisational and management sciences. Comparison of measurement tools across domains suggests that there is scope within EBP for supplementing the current emphasis on human and technical resources to support information uptake and use by individuals. Consideration of measurement tools from the fields of KM and OL shows more content related to social mechanisms to facilitate knowledge recognition, translation, and transfer between individuals and groups

Valued constraint satisfaction problems: Hard and easy problems

tschiexOtoulouse.inra.fr fargierOirit.fr verfailOcert.fr In order to deal with over-constrained Constraint Satisfaction Problems, various extensions of the CSP framework have been considered by taking into account costs, uncertainties, preferences, priorities...Each extension uses a specific mathematical operator (+, max...) to aggregate constraint violations. In this paper, we consider a simple algebraic framework, related to Partial Constraint Satisfaction, which subsumes most of these proposals and use it to characterize existing proposals in terms of rationality and computational complexity. We exhibit simple relationships between these proposals, try t