1,467 research outputs found
Collective choreography of space: modelling digital co-Presence in a public arena
In this paper we report on recent investigations within an ongoing research project, which aims at developing a better understanding of the urban space augmented with the digital space. We are looking at developing sensing environments acting as an interface that can facilitate interactions between people and people, and people and their surrounding.
Here we describe a preliminary study that aims at mapping and visualising the digital presence of people in the public arena. We outline initial observations about how people move and congregate, and illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions. We suggest that by altering the relation between consciousness of communication and the intention of interaction, technology can be appropriated to support emergent choreography of space. This may help throw further light on the complex relationship between the digital space and urban space in general, and people’s relationship to each other and to the sensing environment. Finally, we discuss our initial results and mention briefly our ongoing work
The urban screen as a socialising platform: exploring the role of place within the urban space
In this paper we explore shared encounters mediated by technologies in the urban space. We investigate aspects that influence the interactions between people and
people and people and their surroundings when technology is introduced in the urban space. We highlight the importance of space and the role of place in providing temporal and spatial mechanisms facilitating different types of
social interactions and shared encounters.
An emperical experiment was condeucted with a prototype that was implemented in the form of a digital screen, embeded in the physical surrounding in selected
locations with low, medium and high pedestrian flows in the heritage City of Bath, UK.
The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers shared encounters among friends, observers or strangers. Using the body as an interaface, the screen acted as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people and people and their surrounding environment.
Here we outline early findings from deploying the digital screen as a socialiasing platform in a city context. We describe the user experience and demonstrate how people move, congregate and socialize around the digital
surface. We illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in and highlight related issues.
The initial findings indicated that introducing a digital platform as a public interactive installation in the urban space may provide a stage for emergent social interactions among various people and motivate users to actively and
collaboratively play with the media. However, situating the digital platform in various locations, and depending on the context, might generate diverse and unpredicted social behaviours designers might be unaware of. In this respect we
believe that the final experience is shaped by interconnection of structural, social, cultural, temporal and perhaps personal elements. We conclude by mentioning briefly our on going work
A sense of place and pervasive computing within the urban landscape
In this paper we report on recent investigations within an ongoing research
project, which aims at developing a better understanding of the urban landscape
augmented with the digital landscape in the heritage City of Bath.
Here we describe early findings from the deployment of a socialiasing digital
installation in various locations in the city. The aim is to create a novel
urban experience that triggers shared social encounters among friends,
observes or strangers. The installation is implemented in the form of a digital
urban ground , embeded in the physical surrounding, which acts as a
non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people and
people and their surrounding environment .
In this paper we explore the relationship between the urban space and technology
driven encounters. We outline initial findings about how people move, congregate
and socialize around the digital ground and illustrate the impact of the spatial
and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in a city context.
Finally we discuss initial results and mention briefly our on going work
A socializing interactive installation for the urban environments
In this paper we present the LEDs Urban Carpet: an interactive urban
installation using a body-input as a form of a non-traditional user interface.
The installation was tested in various locations around the city of Bath, UK.
We selected locations with low, medium and high pedestrian flows. The aim is to
generate a novel urban experience, which can be introduced in different
locations in the city and with different social situations.
The installation represents a game with a grid of LEDs that can be embedded as
an interactive carpet into the urban context. A pattern of lights is generated
dynamically following the pedestrians movement over the carpet. In this case
the pedestrians become active participants that influence the generative
process and make the pattern of LED-s change. The paper suggests that
introducing this kind of display in a social scenario can enrich the casual
interaction of people nearby and this might enhance social awareness and
engagement. However, we should point out that a number of factors need to be
taken into consideration when designing an interactive installation, especially
when situated within the urban space.
The experience we present here can assist designers in understanding
difficulties and issues that need to be taken into account during the design of
an interactive urban project of this nature
Generating Narrative Spaces from Events History
For a successful distributed teamwork it is vital to provide team-members with awareness on collaborative activities. One way of achieving this is through applying a narrative based approach to construct the events that have taken place on documents and folders in a project workspace, as various members make changes to its content. The research presented in this paper investigates the possibility of exploring the history of activities performed by team members. Past events are aggregated in the form of a three dimensional environment time tunnel, providing the team-members with a generative tool to visualize the project?s events history in various configurations, in order to reveal the usually hidden relationships between separate pieces of events. Furthermore we provide a tool for managing and inspecting the folder?s contents: the DocuDrama Timetunnel. Here we present preliminary findings showing how the visualisation of a sequence of connected actions and happenings using a temporal and spatial narrative based approach may lead to a better understanding of the project-related events history
Seeding of the nematic-isotropic phase transition by an electric field
In this paper, we use a relatively simple continuum model to investigate the effects of dielectric inhomogeneity within confined liquid crystal cells. Specifically, we consider, in planar, cylindrical and spherical geometries, the stability of a nematic-isotropic interface subject to an applied voltage. Depending on the magnitude of this voltage, the temperature and the geometry of the cell, the nematic region may shrink until the material is completely isotropic within the cell, grow until the nematic phase cells the cell or, in certain geometries, coexist with the isotropic phase. For planar geometry, no coexistence is found, but we are able to give analytical expressions for the critical voltage for an electric-field-induced phase transition as well as the critical wetting layer thickness for arbitrary applied voltage. In cells with cylindrical and spherical geometries, however, stable nematic-isotropic coexistence is predicted, the thickness of the nematic region being controllable by alteration of the applied voltage.</p
Searching for novel cell cycle regulators in Trypanosoma brucei with an RNA interference screen
<b>Background</b><br />
The protozoan parasite, Trypanosoma brucei, is spread by the tsetse fly and causes Human African Trypanosomiasis. Its cell cycle is complex and not fully understood at the molecular level. The T. brucei genome contains over 6000 protein coding genes with >50% having no predicted function. A small scale RNA interference (RNAi) screen was carried out in Trypanosoma brucei to evaluate the prospects for identifying novel cycle regulators.<p></p>
<b>Results</b><br />
Procyclic form T. brucei were transfected with a genomic RNAi library and 204 clones isolated. However, only 76 RNAi clones were found to target a protein coding gene of potential interest. These clones were screened for defects in proliferation and cell cycle progression following RNAi induction. Sixteen clones exhibited proliferation defects upon RNAi induction, with eight clones displaying potential cell cycle defects. To confirm the phenotypes, new RNAi cell lines were generated and characterised for five genes targeted in these clones. While we confirmed that the targeted genes are essential for proliferation, we were unable to unambiguously classify them as cell cycle regulators.<p></p>
<b>Conclusion</b><br />
Our study identified genes essential for proliferation, but did not, as hoped, identify novel cell cycle regulators. Screening of the RNAi library for essential genes was extremely labour-intensive, which was compounded by the suboptimal quality of the library. For such a screening method to be viable for a large scale or genome wide screen, a new, significantly improved RNAi library will be required, and automated phenotyping approaches will need to be incorporated.<p></p>
Tracking autophagy during proliferation and differentiation of trypanosoma brucei
Autophagy is a lysosome-dependent degradation mechanism that sequesters target cargo into autophagosomal vesicles. The Trypanosoma brucei genome contains apparent orthologues of several autophagy-related proteins including an ATG8 family. These ubiquitin-like proteins are required for autophagosome membrane formation, but our studies show that ATG8.3 is atypical. To investigate the function of other ATG proteins, RNAi compatible T. brucei were modified to function as autophagy reporter lines by expressing only either YFP-ATG8.1 or YFP-ATG8.2. In the insect procyclic lifecycle stage, independent RNAi down-regulation of ATG3 or ATG7 generated autophagy-defective mutants and confirmed a pro-survival role for autophagy in the procyclic form nutrient starvation response. Similarly, RNAi depletion of ATG5 or ATG7 in the bloodstream form disrupted autophagy, but did not impede proliferation. Further characterisation showed bloodstream form autophagy mutants retain the capacity to undergo the complex cellular remodelling that occurs during differentiation to the procyclic form and are equally susceptible to dihydroxyacetone-induced cell death as wild type parasites, not supporting a role for autophagy in this cell death mechanism. The RNAi reporter system developed, which also identified TOR1 as a negative regulator controlling YFP-ATG8.2 but not YFP-ATG8.1 autophagosome formation, will enable further targeted analysis of the mechanisms and function of autophagy in the medically relevant bloodstream form of T. brucei
A safer place for patients: learning to improve patient safety
1 Every day over one million people are treated
successfully by National Health Service (NHS) acute,
ambulance and mental health trusts. However, healthcare
relies on a range of complex interactions of people,
skills, technologies and drugs, and sometimes things do
go wrong. For most countries, patient safety is now the
key issue in healthcare quality and risk management.
The Department of Health (the Department) estimates
that one in ten patients admitted to NHS hospitals will be
unintentionally harmed, a rate similar to other developed
countries. Around 50 per cent of these patient safety
incidentsa could have been avoided, if only lessons from
previous incidents had been learned.
2
There are numerous stakeholders with a role in
keeping patients safe in the NHS, many of whom require
trusts to report details of patient safety incidents and near
misses to them (Figure 2). However, a number of previous
National Audit Office reports have highlighted concerns
that the NHS has limited information on the extent and
impact of clinical and non-clinical incidents and trusts need
to learn from these incidents and share good practice across
the NHS more effectively (Appendix 1).
3 In 2000, the Chief Medical Officer’s report An
organisation with a memory
1
, identified that the key
barriers to reducing the number of patient safety incidents
were an organisational culture that inhibited reporting and
the lack of a cohesive national system for identifying and
sharing lessons learnt.
4 In response, the Department published Building a
safer NHS for patients3 detailing plans and a timetable
for promoting patient safety. The goal was to encourage
improvements in reporting and learning through the
development of a new mandatory national reporting
scheme for patient safety incidents and near misses. Central
to the plan was establishing the National Patient Safety
Agency to improve patient safety by reducing the risk of
harm through error. The National Patient Safety Agency was
expected to: collect and analyse information; assimilate
other safety-related information from a variety of existing
reporting systems; learn lessons and produce solutions.
5 We therefore examined whether the NHS has
been successful in improving the patient safety culture,
encouraging reporting and learning from patient safety
incidents. Key parts of our approach were a census of
267 NHS acute, ambulance and mental health trusts in
Autumn 2004, followed by a re-survey in August 2005
and an omnibus survey of patients (Appendix 2). We also
reviewed practices in other industries (Appendix 3) and
international healthcare systems (Appendix 4), and the
National Patient Safety Agency’s progress in developing its
National Reporting and Learning System (Appendix 5) and
other related activities (Appendix 6).
6 An organisation with a memory1
was an important
milestone in the NHS’s patient safety agenda and marked
the drive to improve reporting and learning. At the
local level the vast majority of trusts have developed a
predominantly open and fair reporting culture but with
pockets of blame and scope to improve their strategies for
sharing good practice. Indeed in our re-survey we found
that local performance had continued to improve with more
trusts reporting having an open and fair reporting culture,
more trusts with open reporting systems and improvements
in perceptions of the levels of under-reporting. At the
national level, progress on developing the national reporting
system for learning has been slower than set out in the
Department’s strategy of 2001
3
and there is a need to
improve evaluation and sharing of lessons and solutions by
all organisations with a stake in patient safety. There is also
no clear system for monitoring that lessons are learned at the
local level. Specifically:
a The safety culture within trusts is improving, driven
largely by the Department’s clinical governance
initiative
4
and the development of more effective risk
management systems in response to incentives under
initiatives such as the NHS Litigation Authority’s
Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (Appendix 7).
However, trusts are still predominantly reactive in
their response to patient safety issues and parts of
some organisations still operate a blame culture.
b All trusts have established effective reporting systems
at the local level, although under-reporting remains
a problem within some groups of staff, types of
incidents and near misses. The National Patient Safety
Agency did not develop and roll out the National
Reporting and Learning System by December 2002
as originally envisaged. All trusts were linked to the
system by 31 December 2004. By August 2005, at
least 35 trusts still had not submitted any data to the
National Reporting and Learning System.
c Most trusts pointed to specific improvements
derived from lessons learnt from their local incident
reporting systems, but these are still not widely
promulgated, either within or between trusts.
The National Patient Safety Agency has provided
only limited feedback to trusts of evidence-based
solutions or actions derived from the national
reporting system. It published its first feedback report
from the Patient Safety Observatory in July 2005
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