Materiality, Movement and Meaning: Architecture and the Embodied Mind.

To be human – and therefore to be embodied – is to be already extended into the world, into what Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his last writings called the ‘flesh’ of the world: a liminal realm where it is impossible to say categorically what belongs to the self and what belongs to the environment. This talk develops a new theoretical framework for understanding the relationship betweenarchitecture and embodiment – initially, by questioning the now commonplace view of the body’s prosthetic relationship with technology. Drawing on the work of contemporary thinkers such as Bernard Stiegler, Raymond Tallis, and Tim Ingold, it argues that rather than treating new technological extensions of the body as in some way threatening to our sense of self, we should instead see them in a more positive way as part of a longer developmental trajectory in which ‘the human’ and ‘the technological’ are in fact mutually co-constitutive. By considering these issues within the framework of recent advances in evolutionary, cognitive and neuroscientific theory, the paper tries  to draw out some of the more significant implications of both human and technological embodiment for designing, making and thinking about architecture today

Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections

Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are vulnerable to unobserved variable bias. Hence empirical evidence on the effectiveness of political social media activity is thin. We address this deficit by analysing a novel panel dataset of political Twitter activity in the 2015 and 2017 elections in the United Kingdom. We find that Twitter based campaigning does seem to help win votes, a finding which is consistent across a variety of different model specifications including a first difference regression. The impact of Twitter use is small in absolute terms, though comparable with that of campaign spending. Our data also support the idea that effects are mediated through other communication channels, hence challenging the relevance of engaging in an interactive fashion

Beyond 'health and safety':The challenges facing students asked to work outside of their comfort, qualification level or expertise on medical elective placement

Background: On elective students may not always be clear about safeguarding themselves and others. It is important that placements are safe, and ethically grounded. A concern for medical schools is equipping their students for exposure to and response to uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar requests in locations away from home, where their comfort and safety, or that of the patient, may be compromised. This can require legal, ethical, and/or moral reasoning on the part of the student. The goal of this article is to establish what students actually encounter on elective, to inform better preparing students for safe and ethical medical placements. We discuss the implications of our findings, which are arguably applicable to other areas of graduate training, e.g. first medical roles post-qualification.Method: An anonymised survey exploring clinical and ethical dilemmas on elective was issued across 3 years of returning final year elective medical students. Questions included the prevalence and type of potentially unsafe scenarios encountered, barriers to saying 'no' in unsafe situations, perceived differences between resource poor and developed world settings and the degree to which students refused or consented to participation in events outside of the 'norms' of their own training experience.Results: Three hundred seventy-nine students participated. 45% were asked to do something "not permissible" at home. 27% were asked to do something they felt "uncomfortable" with, often an invasive clinical task. Half asked to do something not usually permissible were "comfortable". 48% felt it more acceptable to bypass guidelines in developing settings. 27% refused an offer outside their experience.Conclusion: Of interest are reasons for "going along with" uncomfortable invitations, e.g. "emergency", self-belief in 'capability' and being 'more qualified' than host-personnel. This "best pair of hands available" merits scrutiny. Adverse scenarios were not exclusive to developing settings. We discuss preparing students for decision-making in new contexts, and address whether 'home' processes are too inflexible to prepare students for 'real' medical life? Ethical decision-making and communicating reluctance should be included in elective preparation.</p

Modelling the impact of social mixing and behaviour on infectious disease transmission: application to SARS-CoV-2

In regard to infectious diseases socioeconomic determinants are strongly associated with differential exposure and susceptibility however they are seldom accounted for by standard compartmental infectious disease models. These associations are explored here with a novel compartmental infectious disease model which, stratified by deprivation and age, accounts for population-level behaviour including social mixing patterns. As an exemplar using a fully Bayesian approach our model is fitted, in real-time if required, to the UKHSA COVID-19 community testing case data from England. Metrics including reproduction number and forecasts of daily case incidence are estimated from the posterior samples. From this UKHSA dataset it is observed that during the initial period of the pandemic the most deprived groups reported the most cases however this trend reversed after the summer of 2021. Forward simulation experiments based on the fitted model demonstrate that this reversal can be accounted for by differential changes in population level behaviours including social mixing and testing behaviour, but it is not explained by the depletion of susceptible individuals. In future epidemics, with a focus on socioeconomic factors the approach outlined here provides the possibility of identifying those groups most at risk with a view to helping policy-makers better target their support.Comment: Main article: 25 pages, 6 figures. Appendix 2 pages, 1 figure. Supplementary Material: 15 pages, 14 figures. Version 2 - minor updates: fixed typos, updated mathematical notation and small quantity of descriptive text added. Version 3 - minor update: made colour coding consistent across all time series figure