Experiences of e-safety within primary school education

This research aims to establish what the current e-safety teaching strategies are within primary schools in England in relation to the National Curriculum and current office for standards in education (OFSTED) guidelines. The project focuses on up to three primary schools in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire where relationships have been established to identify how e-safety is approached and where it is adequately addressed and/or taught. During the initial stage of the project teachers will be interviewed and observed at the heart of this environment within their primary school setting. The intention of the initial study is to inform and direct subsequent research involving children within each particular school. The second stage of the project will establish what impact the current teaching strategies have on the children and the messages that are being received, interpreted and understood by them. The results of both studies will establish how effective the current teaching strategies are and their impact on young children to provide the necessary evidence to influence key stakeholders and make recommendations and support for an improved strategy and consistent approach to e-safety in primary schools in England

Investigation into Wheelchair Mobility Control that Uses a Minimally Invasive Intra-Oral Palate Control Device utilising Resistopalatography Techniques

Interfacing with conventional wheelchair input devices is a major challenge when it comes to patients with high levels of disability. This paper intends to report on the new method of wheelchair mobility interfacing using Resistopalatog- raphy. The technique proposed here is based around utilising the tongue as the controlling muscle group to input desired movement into a force sensitive sensing dental retainer. Using the position of the force, and force applied a direction and speed metric can be calculated emulating conventional joystick output data. The resistopalatography technique has been applied to other Human Machine Interfacing areas with success [1]

Letter Forwararding Telegram from Martin Cross to the Members of the Indian Affairs Subcommittee, May 16, 1956

This letter, dated May 16, 1956, from Hilda Henderson, Office Manager of the National Congress of American Indians, to the members of the United States (US) Indian Affairs Subcommittee and the US House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs forwards a telegram sent to them that morning from Three Affiliated Tribes Tribal Chairperson Martin Cross. The telegram, sent from Cross to Helen Peterson, urges Peterson to attend a May 17 hearing in support of US House Resolution 9423 (H. R. 9423) and US Senate Bill 1528 (S. 1528) or US House Resolution 10222 (H. R. 10222). Cross indicates that he is unable to attend the meeting.https://commons.und.edu/burdick-papers/1309/thumbnail.jp

Quantitative and Portable Instrumentation for the Screening and Assessment of Pharyngeal Dysphagia

Dysphagia, the dysfunction of swallowing, is a common complication of neurological conditions, and presents increased risk of morbidity, mortality, and may critically reduce the subject's quality of life. The early detection of dysphagia is essential to maintaining the subject's health, while accurate diagnosis of the physiological source of dysphagia is essential for successful treatment. 'Silent' dysphagia, where there are no outward symptoms, is a particular concern, as many screening processes rely on patients self-reporting difficulties. A gap exists in available instrumentation, between simple techniques, which are subjective and require experience to employ, and highly sophisticated instruments, which are invasive to the patient and resource intensive. This thesis addresses this by exploring the possibility of developing instrumentation techniques which present the potential for portable, non-invasive solutions, which are relatively inexpensive and require dramatically less expertise to employ, enabling more effective dysphagia screening procedures to be introduced to clinical practice. This thesis develops the means for measuring laryngeal motion by the use of a non-invasive throat-mounted sensor in four stages: Firstly, a mathematical and a physical model of the larynx are constructed to develop our understanding of the relationship between laryngeal motion and sensor signals; secondly, swallowing sensor data was captured from 23 healthy participants; thirdly, the data from the participants was analysed to evaluate alternative data processing techniques, and to develop an understanding of practical factors deriving from inter-personal variations in physiology; finally, a prototype instrument was constructed, based on specifications evolved from our analysis. Initial testing of the prototype instrument has demonstrated the validity of the concepts employed in its design: it is straight-forward to use, compact, portable, non-invasive, and can be used to quantitatively measure laryngeal elevation in a repeatable fashion

Poly-substance use and sexual risk behaviours: a cross-sectional comparison of adolescents in mainstream and alternative education settings

Background: Surveys of young people under-represent those in alternative education settings (AES), potentially disguising health inequalities. We present the first quantitative UK evidence of health inequalities between AES and mainstream education school (MES) pupils, assessing whether observed inequalities are attributable to socioeconomic, familial, educational and peer factors. Methods: Cross-sectional, self-reported data on individual- and poly-substance use (PSU: combined tobacco, alcohol and cannabis use) and sexual risk-taking from 219 pupils in AES (mean age 15.9 years) were compared with data from 4024 pupils in MES (mean age 15.5 years). Data were collected from 2008 to 2009 as part of the quasi-experimental evaluation of Healthy Respect 2 (HR2). Results: AES pupils reported higher levels of substance use, including tobacco use, weekly drunkenness, using cannabis at least once a week and engaging in PSU at least once a week. AES pupils also reported higher levels of sexual health risk behaviours than their MES counterparts, including: earlier sexual activity; less protection against sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and having 3+ lifetime sexual partners. In multivariate analyses, inequalities in sexual risk-taking were fully explained after adjusting for higher deprivation, lower parental monitoring, lower parent-child connectedness, school disengagement and heightened intentions towards early parenthood among AES vs MES pupils. However, an increased risk (OR = 1.73, 95% CI 1.15, 2.60) of weekly PSU was found for AES vs MES pupils after adjusting for these factors and the influence of peer behaviours. Conclusion: AES pupils are more likely to engage in health risk behaviours, including PSU and sexual risk-taking, compared with MES pupils. AES pupils are a vulnerable group who may not be easily targeted by conventional population-level public health programmes. Health promotion interventions need to be tailored and contextualised for AES pupils, in particular for sexual health and PSU. These could be included within interventions designed to promote broader outcomes such as mental wellbeing, educational engagement, raise future aspirations and promote resilience

Synaptic nanomodules underlie the organization and plasticity of spine synapses.

Experience results in long-lasting changes in dendritic spine size, yet how the molecular architecture of the synapse responds to plasticity remains poorly understood. Here a combined approach of multicolor stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED) and confocal imaging in rat and mouse demonstrates that structural plasticity is linked to the addition of unitary synaptic nanomodules to spines. Spine synapses in vivo and in vitro contain discrete and aligned subdiffraction modules of pre- and postsynaptic proteins whose number scales linearly with spine size. Live-cell time-lapse super-resolution imaging reveals that NMDA receptor-dependent increases in spine size are accompanied both by enhanced mobility of pre- and postsynaptic modules that remain aligned with each other and by a coordinated increase in the number of nanomodules. These findings suggest a simplified model for experience-dependent structural plasticity relying on an unexpectedly modular nanomolecular architecture of synaptic proteins

Powered Wheelchair Platform for Assistive Technology Development

Literature shows that numerous wheelchair platforms, of various complexities, have been developed and evaluated for Assistive Technology purposes. However there has been little consideration to providing researchers with an embedded system which is fully compatible, and communicates seamlessly with current manufacturer's wheelchair systems. We present our powered wheelchair platform which allows researchers to mount various inertial and environment sensors, and run guidance and navigation algorithms which can modify the human desired joystick trajectory, so as to assist users with negotiating obstacles, and moving from room to room. We are also able to directly access other currently manufactured human input devices and integrate new and novel input devices into the powered wheelchair platform for clinical and research assessment

An innovative approach to developing the reflective skills of medical students.

BACKGROUND: Development of the reflective skills of medical students is an acknowledged objective of medical education. DESCRIPTION: Description of an educational exercise which uses an email-based process for developing the reflective skills of undergraduate medical students. Student quotations illustrate learning outcomes qualitatively. DISCUSSION: The process described is immediate, direct, linked to learning objectives, enables rapid responses to be given to the students individually, and is followed by group sharing of learning. It provides a rigorous and robust feedback loop for students. It is relatively economic for teachers and incidentally benefits curriculum design and evolution. The approach supports development of a reflective approach to learning.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Can earth system science be a valued element of fair and effective earth system governance?

The hypothesis examined here is that Earth system scientists have become less relevant, or even irrelevant, to Earth system governance. We explore whether this proposition is true and, if it is, why this situation has arisen. By undertaking a review of current national efforts (in the UK and Australia) and a novel proposal regarding the use of the IPCC as a global governance tool, we try to discover under what, if any, circumstances Earth system science is valued in the development of environmental governance. These discussions lead us to the conclusion that targeted Earth system research (e.g. risk and resilience of systems and quantification of benefits of system components) can be genuinely valuable for future environmental governance. We, therefore, invite consideration of how Earth system researchers might be (re-) integrated into global Earth system governance development to the benefit of all