4,296 research outputs found
Perinatal psychosocial interventions
Background:
Joint working between adult and child services has historically been difficult; the Think Family Toolkit was produced by the government in order to aid collaborative working.
Aim:
The aim of this evaluation was to explore joint working between services using the Think Family Toolkit.
Method:
An adult team, child team and service users were given questionnaires to explore joint working.
Results:
Joint working was described as something that would be useful but there were many barriers to achieving it. The child team did not respond to the questionnaire perhaps due to time constraints and potential burnout.
Conclusions:
Recommendations are provided to increase the effectiveness of joint working between services
Exploring Mediated Interactions: A Design Exercise
With the emergence of personal and ubiquitous computing systems in the last decade, interaction designers have started designing products by employing quality oriented aspects such as user experience, playfulness, enchantment and others. In order to explore novel forms of mediated interactions, designers need to focus beyond the basic user requirements and usability issues. We present a procedure and results of a design exercise that we carried out with students of a masterâs course on Visual Design. Our intention was to explore new forms of mediated interaction by using a specific design exercise. We provide the details of the resulted design concepts and discuss the usefulness of our design exercise
Spin-String Interaction in QCD Strings
I consider the question of the interaction between a QCD string and the spin
of a quark or an antiquark on whose worldline the string terminates. The
problem is analysed from the point of view of a string representation for the
expectation value of a Wilson loop for a spin-half particle. A string
representation of the super Wilson loop is obtained starting from an effective
string representation of a Wilson Loop. The action obtained in this manner is
invariant under a worldline supersymmetry and has a boundary term which
contains the spin-string interaction. For rectangular loops the spin-string
interaction vanishes and there is no spin-spin term in the resulting heavy
quark potential. On the other hand if an allowance is made for the finite
intrinsic thickness of the flux-tube, by assuming that the spin-string
interaction takes place not just at the boundary of the string world-sheet but
extends to a distance of the order of the intrinsic thickness of the flux tube,
then we do obtain a spin-spin interaction which falls as the fifth power of the
distance. Such a term was previously suggested by Kogut and Parisi in the
context of a flux-tube model of confinement.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure; Published version with added discussion and
references in section
HIV Stigma Within Religious Communities in Rural India
This study was conducted to gain a better understanding of HIV/AIDS-related stigma within religious communities in rural Gujarat, India. This study used the hidden distress model of HIV stigma and the HIV peer education model as conceptual frameworks to examine a rural population sample of 100 participants. Regression analysis was conducted to test if school education had a moderating effect on the relationship between illness as punishment for sin (IPS) and HIV stigma. Religiosity was tested for mediating effects on the relationship between early religious involvement (ERI) and HIV stigma. The results of this study indicated that single unemployed men under the age of 28 were more likely to relate religiosity, IPS, and ERI to HIV stigma. Furthermore, education did not significantly moderate the relationship between IPS and HIV Stigma, and religiosity also did not mediate the relationship between ERI and HIV stigma. However, an additional mediation analysis showed that IPS did mediate the relationship between religiosity and HIV stigma in this study. The results of this study suggested that HIV/AIDS awareness programs may need to focus on young unemployed men because they may be the most susceptible to stigmatic thinking. It can be concluded that IPS was a major contributor in the proliferation of HIV stigma for participants in this study. Further research is needed to understand how belief in an authoritarian God could increase IPS, and how education initiatives may aid in decreasing IPS among inhabitants. This study strived to add to the existing body of knowledge and help improve the lives of those infected with HIV in rural parts of India
Designing Awareness Support for Distributed Cooperative Design Teams
Motivation â Awareness is an integral part of remote collaborative work and has been an important theme within the CSCW research. Our project aims at understanding and mediating non-verbal cues between remote participants involved in a design project. \ud
Research approach â Within the AMIDA1 project we focus on distributed âcooperative designâ teams. We especially focus on the 'material' signals â signals in which people communicate through material artefacts, locations and their embodied actions. We apply an ethnographic approach to understand the role of physical artefacts in co-located naturalistic design setting. Based on the results we will generate important implications to support remote design work. We plan to develop a mixed-reality interface supported by a shared awareness display. This awareness display will provide information about the activities happening in the design room to remotely located participants.\ud
Findings/Design â Our preliminary investigation with real-world design teams suggests that both the materiality of designersâ work settings and their social practices play an important role in understanding these material signals that are at play. \ud
Originality/Value â Most research supporting computer mediated communication have focused on either face-to-face or linguistically oriented communication paradigms. Our research focuses on mediating the non-verbal, material cues for supporting collaborative activities without impoverishing what designers do in their day to day working lives.\ud
Take away message â An ethnographic approach allows us to understand the naturalistic practices of design teams, which can lead to designing effective technologies to support group work. In that respect, the findings of our research will have a generic value beyond the application domain chosen (design teams).\u
Assessing gender equality in the South African sports sector
Abstract: Sport has generally been a male-dominated domain which appears to discriminate against women by preventing their advancement to high-level positions in sports organisations. The article conceptually utilises the Gender and Development approach as a theoretical framework. The rationale behind this approach is that in a patriarchal society, there are stereotyped mentality, social practices, and cultural traditions confining women to household tasks only; role-conflict between men and women; and gender challenges in terms of work-family-balanced tasks that restrict women from advancing their careers outside their delegated and expected home-based tasks. This approach therefore aims to empower, incorporate, integrate, and mainstream gender in the sport sector. The article contextually utilises a comprehensive literature survey, document analysis, and a desktop review of the Department of Sport and Recreation South Africa to identify gender gaps. Through document analysis, the gender gaps will be discussed in the South African sports sector at strategic and policy levels that suppress women from holding decision-making and strategic positions. Authors believe that women alone are not responsible for the lack of gender-based representation in sports management. Male counterparts hold equal responsibility to encourage, promote,..
Remarkable Objects: Supporting Collaboration in a Creative Environment
In this paper, we report the results of a field trial of a Ubicomp system called CAM that is aimed at supporting and enhancing collaboration in a design studio environment. CAM uses a mobile-tagging application which allows designers to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design objects in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. The purpose of our field trial was to explore the role of augmented objects in supporting and enhancing creative work. Our results show that CAM was used not only used to support participantsâ mutual awareness and coordination but also to facilitate designers in appropriating their augmented design objects to be explorative, extendable and playful supporting creative aspects of design work. In general, our results show how CAM transformed static design objects into âremarkableâ objects that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible
Heavy Quark Potential from Gauge/Gravity Duality: A Large D Analysis
The heavy-quark potential is calculated in the framework of gauge/gravity
duality using the large-D approximation, where D is the number of dimensions
transverse to the flux tube connecting a quark and an antiquark in a flat
D+2-dimensional spacetime. We find that in the large-D limit the leading
correction to the ground-state energy, as given by an effective Nambu-Goto
string, arises not from the heavy modes but from the behavior of the massless
modes in the vicinity of the quark and the antiquark. We estimate this
correction and find that it should be visible in the near-future lattice QCD
calculations of the heavy-quark potential.Comment: 22 pages, 5 Figures. v2: references added, typos corrected and, Sec.
4 rewritten with an expanded non-perturbative discussion of the corrections
to the Arvis potential arising from the massless modes near the boundary of
the qcd strin
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