The psycho-social impact of impairment: the case of motor neurone disease

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Robust particle outline extraction and its application to digital on-line holography

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Living with MND: An Evaluation of Care Pathways Available to Adults with, and the Families or Carers of Adults with Motor Neurone Disease in Scotland

Main Findings Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a progressive condition that damages motor neurones, the cells that control voluntary muscle activity, in both the spinal cord and the brain. It can cause difficulty in walking and movement, talking, swallowing and breathing and many muscles in the body can become affected. To find out what it is like to live with MND from the perspective of those with the condition we carried out a longitudinal study in which we interviewed 40 people with MND and their partners a number of times over a two year period. We found that: Control, or more particularly the lack of it was the overarching theme that occurred throughout the interviews. People wanted to be consulted, informed and involved in decisions about their health and their social care and where this happened people were more likely to report satisfaction with the service. The diagnosis of MND is a long and protracted process, one that was for many a very distressing experience. 45% of those we spoke to took over 12 months for a diagnosis, 19% over 18 months. Participants had difficulty getting professionals to take their symptoms seriously and once they entered the neurology system many people experienced delays and often the diagnosis was not confirmed by a neurologist. Physical access to hospitals was in some cases difficult. Car parking and the location of the clinic often made it hard for people to get to a hospital appointment. Health professionals had an important role. Good professionals were those who took time to create a sense of teamwork with the person with MND and their family. This was less likely to happen with hospital consultants and where this did not people felt insecure and not listened to. There was also some evidence of poor communication between professionals and medical notes were often not shared between different professionals. Where people accessed general wards they were rarely treated well. Informal carers provided much of the social care and support for those with MND, with spouses meeting most of the need. Whilst many people were happy with this arrangement meeting the need placed a great deal of strain on the families. Many people did not want to rely on care supplied by outside agencies as they did not trust the quality or the reliability of the care and neither did they want their home overrun with people. Housing adaptations and the provision of aids to daily living were for many a great cause of stress and strain and many people felt that they were not involved in the decision making process, felt out of control and unable to influence the situation. The rapidly progressive nature of MND can exacerbate this problem. Social Care and support provided by local authorities was very heavily criticised. There were inconsistencies between services, people felt excluded from decisions made about their care and their care needs and people did not have access to the necessary information to make an informed choice about which services to access. Specialist Care Nurses (SCN) played a vital role in the care and support of those with MND. Not only do they provide help and support directly they also help to act as a champion for the family and coordinate services and service provision. This service is however under great strain and there are a significant number of people for whom this service is not working because the service was too stretched and the resources were not available to allow the SCN to meet their needs

Procedural Elaboration: How Players Decode Minecraft

Minecraft play practices reveal a type of analytic play in which significant work is invested in discovering esoteric details about the game, without necessarily providing practical prescriptions for optimizing play. This paper proposes the term “procedural elaboration” to describe such activities and the knowledge thereby produced. In contrast to the existing concept of theorycrafting, the products of procedural elaboration are primarily descriptive rather than prescriptive. However, this knowledge is far from trivial or banal. I argue that these knowledge-making activities can be explained through two functions of procedural elaboration. First, it provides players with a tool for dealing with the threatening inscrutability of some procedural game systems. Second, it acts as a ritual form of communication that helps to solidify a coherent Minecraft player community, while also establishing a social order within that community. Subsequently, I consider why players persist in using specifically experimental methods in procedural elaboration, even though the online availability of decompiled Minecraft source code means that the rules are not fully hidden as they are in most other games. I argue that the experimental method persists for these reasons: because it does not require specialized programming skills; because the gameplay already casts scientific experimentation as play; and because the iterative nature of Minecraft’s development has produced source code that is structured in a way that resists direct deciphering

Characterisation of the contribution of the kinase and RNase activities of Ire1α to activation of apoptotic JNK signalling

The unfolded protein response (UPR) is a highly conserved mechanism by which all eukaryotes respond to endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. In higher eukaryotes this response is mediated by three ER transmembrane stress sensors: activating transcription factor 6 (ATF6/), PKR-like ER kinase (PERK) and inositol requiring 1 (IRE1/). IRE1 is the most highly conserved of the three ER stress sensors and is also the only sensor to mediated UPR signalling via two different enzymatic domains. It is currently believed that during prolonged ER stress, the RNase domain of IRE1α provides cytoprotection via XBP1 splicing, whilst the kinase domain initiates proapoptotic JNK signalling via interaction with the adaptor protein TRAF2. However, characterising how these domains contribute to cell fate decisions is complicated by the fact that traditional models use ER stress mimetic drugs, which activate all three branches of the UPR and thus make it difficult to attribute downstream events to individual effectors. Therefore, the aim of the research presented in this thesis was to produce a model that allowed isolated activation of IRE1α in order to determine the contribution of its kinase and RNase activities to proapoptotic JNK signalling, without input from other upstream effectors. Using the Fv2E-IRE1α system, the data presented in this thesis provides novel insight into the mechanism by which IRE1α instigates proapoptotic JNK signalling by suggesting that a functional kinase domain is not required for IRE1α to interact with TRAF2 and that endoribonuclease function may be required for downstream JNK activation in humans. Furthermore, evidence is also provided to suggest that, whilst kinase activity is not required for interaction with TRAF2, it is required for downstream JNK activation. This gives rise to the possibility that, contrary to current knowledge, the IRE1α kinase domain has the capacity to phosphorylate proteins other than IRE1α

A Multiple Case Study on Small and Mid-Size Enterprise Managers’ Lived Experiences on the Impact of Job Losses on Outsourcing Practices

There is a greater need to understand how economic insecurities contribute to outsourcing practices. Previous research documented that small and medium-sized enterprises gained limited advantages from outsourcing. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study design was to explore the contribution of consumer job losses on outsourcing practices. A semi-structured open-ended interview was used to collect data from the 13 participants from the furniture, bedding, and wooden industries in Jamaica. From the analysis of the data collected, two themes emerge: (1) affordability and (2) market trends. The findings obtained from this research suggest that consumer job losses contributed to outsourcing practices. This knowledge might change current views on the factors that lead to outsourcing and the benefits of this strategy to manufacturing small and mid-size enterprise from developing countries. The results may also contribute to more informed macroeconomic policies. The following recommendations emerged from the findings: (a) utilize employment forecast to gauge production; (b) hedge prices for procured materials, and (c) quote selling price in primary outsourcing currency. Future research directed at SMEs managers’ lived experiences of a specific economic insecurity, additional manufacturing industries, and adopting different methodological designs could create a larger body of knowledge for comparisons

An investigation of the potential of anaerobically digested piggery waste for use in food production, with particular reference to tomato and fish production.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential of animal waste for use in food production, by employing anaerobically digested piggery waste as a nutrient source for tomatoes and fish. The problem has been configured in terms of a "Bioplex" (integrated agriculture) system, and as such has been tackled by employing a bastardised systems methodology, which seeks to recognise the relationships between the resource to be used, and the food production system itself. This assumption underlies the experimental work carried out in the thesis. Initial experimentation comprised studies on the use of the piggery effluent in its raw form as a medium for the hydroponic production of tomatoes by nutrient film technique, and as a conventional fertiliser. These trials, and a study of the physical and chemical characteristics of the piggery waste indicated that in order to maximise the food production potential of the effluent, it should be viewed as a composite of three different fractions, each of which may be most usefully employed in a specific food production system. The bulk of the thesis is concerned with the extraction of two distinct fractions of the effluent; the protein rich suspended solids, and the aqueous phase, by means of an oxidation technique. The main criterion used to describe the success of the separation process is the application of the two products to food production operations, rather than the efficiency of the separation per se. To this end, the clarified liquid, and the separated solids were used as the basis of a nutrient solution for the hydroponic production of tomatoes, and a substitute protein source in the diet of common carp, respectively. The separation technique passed through two design iterations before products suitable as nutrient sources were generated. As the trials on fish and tomatoes were closely linked to the separation technique, this work occupies the main body of the thesis, and the initial feasibility experimentation is presented in the form of appendices

Point of Care Testing Error in the ICU

Point-of-care testing (POCT) first arose in the 1970s, as self-calibrating blood gas measurement machines moved from the central lab to the ICU. Quality control factors, then as now, dictated operation by trained personnel. Sources of error reported in the literature are varied. We discuss POCT error in the context of two clinical cases

Gathering in a cyber world: internet use of Chinese disabled people and the emergence of disability constituencies

This article examines how Chinese disabled people use the internet to create active constituencies and the potential for this to afford the opportunity for a new form of activism. Based on a content analysis of China’s two largest disability online forums, the article documents disabled people’s online activities. These include the description of everyday activities, the build-up of social relations, and organisation and mobilisation for changes. The analysis suggests the emergence of new disability constituencies. This, the article argues, is starting to reshape dis-ability politics and develop new disability activism