Extraordinary normalcy: home, relationships and identities in narratives of unpaid care

Based on audio diaries and narrative interviews with family carers, this paper suggests care can be understood as an experience of ‘extraordinary normalcy’, meaning that profound shifts in home, relationships and identities take place through care, yet these become part of the normalcy of family life. To maintain and understand a sense of normalcy, our participants utilise professional and technological interventions in the home and draw on notions of responsibility, reciprocity and role-reversal as frameworks for explaining why they continue to care, despite the challenges it brings. The paper considers how domestic activities performed in the home can both highlight the extraordinary aspects of care and help maintain the normalcy of the everyday. Extraordinary normalcy is a concept that problematises definitions of care that remove it from the relational and everyday, yet acknowledges the challenges people face when performing care. This paper contributes to a call for a narrative based development of social policy and makes recommendations for policy and practice based on the in-depth accounts of family carers

Carbon Monoxide Screening in Pregnancy: An Evaluation Study of a Plymouth Pilot Intervention

This report provides an analysis and evaluation of a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended pilot intervention which was designed to identify pregnant women exposed to carbon monoxide due to cigarette smoke and refers them to local stop smoking services (LSSS). The pilot intervention was carried out by community midwives working in two areas of Plymouth. The city has areas of social and health inequalities and the study drew on populations from a socially deprived neighbourhood and a socially affluent area. The pilot was instigated following new NICE guidance recommending that all women attending initial ante natal booking appointments with their community midwives be offered a Carbon Monoxide (CO) breath analyser screening to determine their smoking status and or exposure to other forms of CO. This evaluation study identifies the benefits and barriers associated with the implementation of the CO screening pilot. In particular, our aims were to explore any detrimental impact on the relationship between women and their community midwives, identify the impact on midwives in terms of time and resources, reveal the responses and acceptability or otherwise of the screening as perceived and experienced by the women being asked to participate during the booking appointment and finally to evaluate the success of the intervention overall in relation to the numbers of referrals made to Plymouth’s LSSS. A further aim was explore any differences in the two socio demographic areas. We adopted a mixed methods approach involving four focus group interviews with 23 midwives, a survey posted to the 258 women who attended initial antenatal booking appointments in the study areas, an online version of the survey to ascertain the views and experiences of pregnant women and new mothers nationally and an interrogation of an internet forum discussion board for mothers. A two page questionnaire consisting of 12 questions was designed and posted to women who attended the booking appointment with the midwife during the three month pilot period and the same survey was made available online. Questions were designed to elicit women’s views about the information given by the midwife in relation to the screening, whether they had agreed to participate in the CO screening process, their experiences and views about offering CO screening to pregnant women and their smoking status and those of other household members. Of the 258 questionnaires posted to women who had attended the clinic during the pilot intervention 40 completed responses were returned representing a 15.5% response rate. Only 4 responses were received from the online survey posting but an additional 484 comments posted on the Mumsnet website discussion board were analysed. Our findings show that in general there was a high degree of acceptability for the intervention. Midwives and their clients were generally in support of the screening being offered to all pregnant women. However, this support was dependent on a number of contextual factors. Women wanted to be properly informed about the screening and midwives wanted to be kept informed about the effects of the intervention on women’s smoking cessation. Initial and ongoing training of midwives in utilising the protocol and in instructing women to correct use the monitor was also very important. Trust was revealed to be a very important aspect of the relationship between women and their midwives. Some women felt that the CO screening was being used just to check whether or not they were smokers and some midwives also worried about the possible negative effects the CO screening may have on their relationships with women

A review of microfabricated electrochemical biosensors for DNA detection

This review article presents an overview of recent work on electrochemical biosensors developed using microfabrication processes, particularly sensors used to achieve sensitive and specific detection of DNA sequences. Such devices are important as they lend themselves to miniaturisation, reproducible mass-manufacture, and integration with other previously existing technologies and production methods. The review describes the current state of these biosensors, novel methods used to produce them or enhance their sensing properties, and pathways to deployment of a complete point-of-care biosensing system in a clinical setting

Multisymplectic approach to integrable defects in the sine-Gordon model

Ideas from the theory of multisymplectic systems, introduced recently in integrable systems by the author and Kundu to discuss Liouville integrability in classical field theories with a defect, are applied to the sine-Gordon model. The key ingredient is the introduction of a second Poisson bracket in the theory that allows for a Hamiltonian description of the model that is completely equivalent to the standard one, in the absence of a defect. In the presence of a defect described by frozen Bäcklund transformations, our approach based on the new bracket unifies the various tools used so far to attack the problem. It also gets rid of the known issues related to the evaluation of the Poisson brackets of the defect matrix which involve fields at coinciding space point (the location of the defect). The original Lagrangian approach also finds a nice reinterpretation in terms of the canonical transformation representing the defect conditions

Interplay between Zamolodchikov-Faddeev and Reflection-Transmission algebras

We show that a suitable coset algebra, constructed in terms of an extension of the Zamolodchikov-Faddeev algebra, is homomorphic to the Reflection-Transmission algebra, as it appears in the study of integrable systems with impurity.Comment: 8 pages; a misprint in eq. (2.14) and (2.15) has been correcte

Form factors of boundary fields for A(2)-affine Toda field theory

In this paper we carry out the boundary form factor program for the A(2)-affine Toda field theory at the self-dual point. The latter is an integrable model consisting of a pair of particles which are conjugated to each other and possessing two bound states resulting from the scattering processes 1 +1 -> 2 and 2+2-> 1. We obtain solutions up to four particle form factors for two families of fields which can be identified with spinless and spin-1 fields of the bulk theory. Previously known as well as new bulk form factor solutions are obtained as a particular limit of ours. Minimal solutions of the boundary form factor equations for all A(n)-affine Toda field theories are given, which will serve as starting point for a generalisation of our results to higher rank algebras.Comment: 24 pages LaTeX, 1 figur

A course agnostic approach to predicting student success from VLE log data using recurrent neural networks

We describe a method of improving the accuracy of a learning analytics system through the application of a Recurrent Neural Network over all students in a University, regardless of course. Our target is to discover how well a student will do in a class given their interaction with a virtual learning environment. We show how this method performs well when we want to predict how well students will do, even if we do not have a model trained based on their specific course

Dyons in N=4 Supersymmetric Theories and Three-Pronged Strings

We construct and explore BPS states that preserve 1/4 of supersymmetry in N=4 Yang-Mills theories. Such states are also realized as three-pronged strings ending on D3-branes. We correct the electric part of the BPS equation and relate its solutions to the unbroken abelian gauge group generators. Generic 1/4-BPS solitons are not spherically symmetric, but consist of two or more dyonic components held apart by a delicate balance between static electromagnetic force and scalar Higgs force. The instability previously found in three-pronged string configurations is due to excessive repulsion by one of these static forces. We also present an alternate construction of these 1/4-BPS states from quantum excitations around a magnetic monopole, and build up the supermultiplet for arbitrary (quantized) electric charge. The degeneracy and the highest spin of the supermultiplet increase linearly with a relative electric charge. We conclude with comments.Comment: 33 pages, two figures, LaTex, a footnote added, the figure caption of Fig.2 expanded, one more referenc

Pourquoi les politiques publiques sont-elles si peu suivies d’effets ?:Quelques interrogations

L’insertion des femmes sur le marché du travail a connu à la fois des avancées et des reculs. Si davantage de femmes accèdent à l’éducation supérieure et aux emplois qualifiés, d’autres sont touchées par la précarité et connaissent une dégradation de leurs conditions de travail et de vie. Face à ce constat ambivalent, on peut questionner la mise en œuvre et l’efficacité des politiques qui visent à promouvoir l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes. Cet article a pour objectif de soulever quelques débats. Le plus souvent, les politiques publiques au sens large (y compris la protection sociale) sont définies en termes de compensation et de correction des inégalités et des discriminations. Mais elles ne concernent pas les causes effectives de l’extension du sous-emploi des femmes, qui relèvent du fonctionnement même du marché du travail. C’est donc la définition des politiques publiques qu’il faut interroger, en dépassant une vision binaire qui oppose d’une part un champ économique extérieur, d’autre part un champ social, juridique et culturel qui, seul, pourrait être l’objet d’inflexions. En réalité, le champ économique est aussi le produit des politiques publiques : la libre-concurrence et la prééminence du marché sont le résultat d’une action volontaire des États. Il faut donc réintégrer les politiques économiques dans le champ de la réflexion sur les moyens de combattre les discriminations à l’encontre des femmes.The integration of women into the labour market has gone through both upswings and downturns. In view of this ambivalent result, we can question the efficiency of public policies set up to overcome gender inequality and fight gender discrimination. Does a real will exist, and if so why is it so inefficient or so poorly implemented? What forms do individual and collective resistance take? Most of the time, public policies are defined in terms of compensation and correction. But they don’t deal with the actual causes of women’s underemployment resulting from labour market adjustments. It is therefore the definition of the public policies that we need to examine, going beyond a binary view that opposes economic issues, on the one hand, to social, juridical and cultural concerns on the other

Noncommutative U(1) Instantons in Eight Dimensional Yang-Mills Theory

We study the noncommutative version of the extended ADHM construction in the eight dimensional U(1) Yang-Mills theory. This construction gives rise to the solutions of the BPS equations in the Yang-Mills theory, and these solutions preserve at least 3/16 of supersymmetries. In a wide subspace of the extended ADHM data, we show that the integer $k$ which appears in the extended ADHM construction should be interpreted as the $D4$-brane charge rather than the $D0$-brane charge by explicitly calculating the topological charges in the case that the noncommutativity parameter is anti-self-dual. We also find the relationship with the solution generating technique and show that the integer $k$ can be interpreted as the charge of the $D0$-brane bound to the $D8$-brane with the $B$-field in the case that the noncommutativity parameter is self-dual.Comment: 22 page