'Scrapbooks' as a resource in media research with young people

[About the book]: Visual media offer powerful communication opportunities. Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People explores the methodological, ethical, representational and theoretical issues surrounding image-based research with children and young people. It provides well-argued and illustrated resources to guide novice and experienced researchers through the challenges and benefits of visual research. Because new digital technologies have made it easier and cheaper to work with visual media, Pat Thomson brings together an international body of leading researchers who use a range of media to produce research data and communicate findings. Situating their discussions of visual research approaches within the context of actual research projects in communities and schools, and discussing a range of media from drawings, painting, collage and montages to film, video, photographs and new media, the book offers practical pointers for conducting research. These include: - why visual research is used - how to involve children and young people as co–researchers - complexities in analysis of images and the ethics of working visually - institutional difficulties that can arise when working with a 'visual voice' - how to manage resources in research projects Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People will be an ideal guide for researchers both at undergraduate and postgraduate level across disciplines, including education, youth and social work, health and nursing, criminology and community studies. It will also act as an up-to-date resource on this rapidly changing approach for practitioners working in the field

Doing it differently: youth leadership and the arts in a creative learning programme

Notions of youth ‘leadership’, partnership or collaborating with young people as ‘service users’, are currently being endorsed and elaborated across a very broad spectrum of thinking, policymaking and provision. This paper argues that if we want to understand this phenomenon, we should not look in the first instance to young people as the prime source of commentary or agency: instead, we need to understand it as a way of ‘doing’ – in this instance - the arts or education differently. The paper draws on research into how one organization, the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships run in schools between 2002 and 2011, attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. It argues that youth leadership should be analysed as it is enacted within and through specific sites and practices, and in terms of the subjectivities, capacities and narratives it offers to teachers, students, artists and others involved. The result is a more ambivalent account of participatory approaches, acknowledging their dilemmas as well as their achievements, and observing that they reconfigure power relations in sometimes unexpected, and sometimes all-too-familiar, ways

On solution structure of the radial heat problem with singular data

Initial value problem solutions to radial heat problem with Laplace operator and singular dat

The radial heat equation and Laplace transforms

Integral representations involving Laplace transforms developed for use in solutions of radial heat equatio

Dual Functions and Heat Expansions

Radial heat polynomial transformations in series expansions of heat equatio

Clinical implications of the anisotropic analytical algorithm for IMRT treatment planning and verification

PURPOSE: To determine the implications of the use of the Anisotropic Analytical Algorithm(AAA) for the production and dosimetric verification of IMRT plans for treatments of the prostate, parotid, nasopharynx and lung. METHODS: 72 IMRT treatment plans produced using the Pencil Beam Convolution (PBC)algorithm were recalculated using the AAA and the dose distributions compared. 24 of the plans were delivered to inhomogeneous phantoms and verification measurements made using a pinpoint ionisation chamber. The agreement between the AAA and measurement was determined. RESULTS: Small differences were seen in the prostate plans, with the AAA predicting slightly lower minimum PTV doses. In the parotid plans, there were small increases in the lens and contralateral parotid doses while the nasopharyngeal plans revealed a reduction in the volume of the PTV covered by the 95% isodose (the V95%) when the AAA was used. Large changes were seen in the lung plans, the AAA predicting reductions in the minimum PTV dose and large reductions in the V95%. The AAA also predicted small increases in the mean dose to the normal lung and the V20. In the verification measurements, all AAA calculations were within 3% or 3.5mm distance to agreement of the measured doses. Conclusions: The AAA should be used in preference to the PBC algorithm for treatments involving low density tissue but this may necessitate re-evaluation of plan acceptability criteria. Improvements to the Multi-Resolution Dose Calculation algorithm used in the inverse planning are required to reduce the convergence error in the presence of lung tissue. There was excellent agreement between the AAA and verification measurements for all sites

Imaging natural materials with a quasi-microscope

A Viking lander camera with auxilliary optics mounted inside the dust post was evaluated to determine its capability for imaging the inorganic properties of granular materials. During mission operations, prepared samples would be delivered to a plate positioned within the camera's field of view and depth of focus. The auxiliary optics would then allow soil samples to be imaged with an 11 pm pixel size in the broad band (high resolution, black and white) mode, and a 33 pm pixel size in the multispectral mode. The equipment will be used to characterize: (1) the size distribution of grains produced by igneous (intrusive and extrusive) processes or by shock metamorphism, (2) the size distribution resulting from crushing, chemical alteration, or by hydraulic or aerodynamic sorting; (3) the shape and degree of grain roundness and surface texture induced by mechanical and chemical alteration; and (4) the mineralogy and chemistry of grains