Clinical innovation: wider collaboration on lymphoedema research is needed — footwear and gait analysis

Extending teams that research and manage lymphoedema to include orthotists and podiatrists may extend our understanding of the condition and component parts of treatment. New technology, some of which is low cost, enables an increasing range of data and outcome measures. This article highlights the reality of a shortage of studies involving gait analysis and a lack of consideration of the impact of inappropriate footwear on exercise as a key component of lymphoedema management

The Attack on Boulogne

Account by Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Rowley, OC, Stormont, Dundas & Glengarry Highlanders given to Historical Officer, 21 September 1944

The Housewife, the Single Girl, and the Prostitute: Constructions of Femininity in Postwar American Historiography

America in the two decades after World War II experienced conditions that seemed to indicate an unprecedented focus on domesticity and traditional gender roles. Couples married at younger ages, fertility rates soared, and population shifted to suburban areas all over the country. Just beneath this surface, however, a more complex discourse about gender norms was also emerging. Gay and lesbian communities began to organize, teenagers emerged as a cultural force, and young single women began to view economic independence as a legitimate goal. These contradictory forces coexisted in a culture struggling to define gender and sexuality in the anxiety-ridden era of the Cold War. Journalists, psychologists, and other experts described a crisis of masculinity in American culture and gave women advice on how best to fulfill the roles of wives and mothers. The popularity of Playboy Magazine and the publication of the Kinsey Reports illustrate how central sexuality was in this ongoing postwar debate. Women’s sexuality in particular was tied to the larger fears gripping the nation. This essay explores how historians approach the postwar constructions of femininity and female sexuality. Some investigate the origins of the stereotypical suburban housewife model of domesticity and how it was perpetuated in American culture. Others address how some women modified that model for their own ends. A third group of historians is concerned with the women who resisted the domesticity model and how their femininity was constructed and understood in the discourse. Taken together, these three strands of inquiry paint a complex, nuanced picture of gender and sexuality in postwar America

Profiling and understanding student information behaviour: Methodologies and meaning

This paper draws on work conducted under the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) User Behaviour Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to identify a range of issues associated with research design that can form a platform for enquiry about knowledge creation in the arena of user behaviour. The Framework has developed a multidimensional set of tools for profiling, monitoring and evaluating user behaviour. The Framework has two main approaches: one, a broad‐based survey which generates both a qualitative and a quantitative profile of user behaviour, and the other a longitudinal qualitative study of user behaviour that (in addition to providing in‐depth insights) is the basis for the development of the EIS (Electronic Information Services) Diagnostic Toolkit. The strengths and weaknesses of the Framework approach are evaluated. In the context of profiling user behaviour, key methodological concerns relate to: representativeness, sampling and access, the selection of appropriate measures and the interpretation of those measures. Qualitative approaches are used to generate detailed insights. These include detailed narratives, case study analysis and gap analysis. The messages from this qualitative analysis do not lend themselves to simple summarization. One approach that has been employed to capture and interpret these messages is the development of the EIS Diagnostic Toolkit. This toolkit can be used to assess and monitor an institution's progress with embedding EIS into learning processes. Finally, consideration must be given to integration of insights generated through different strands within the Framework

Kiosks 21: a new role for information kiosks?

Discusses and analyses the latest generation of information kiosks, Kiosks 21, which features information provision/promotion, interaction, transaction and relationships. In contrast to their task based predecessors, these kiosks focus on customer service delivery to ‘customers in context’. Five case studies of such kiosks located respectively in an airport, railway station, car rental base, hotel lobby, and shopping mall are analysed to demonstrate the way in which the kiosks are implemented to meet the differing requirements of customers in different contexts. Case studies are analysed in terms of kiosk design and location, user profile, information architecture, interface design, communication, and commerce. A range of areas for research and development are proposed.</p

Feedback control of unstable steady states of flow past a flat plate using reduced-order estimators

We present an estimator-based control design procedure for flow control, using reduced-order models of the governing equations, linearized about a possibly unstable steady state. The reduced models are obtained using an approximate balanced truncation method that retains the most controllable and observable modes of the system. The original method is valid only for stable linear systems, and we present an extension to unstable linear systems. The dynamics on the unstable subspace are represented by projecting the original equations onto the global unstable eigenmodes, assumed to be small in number. A snapshot-based algorithm is developed, using approximate balanced truncation, for obtaining a reduced-order model of the dynamics on the stable subspace. The proposed algorithm is used to study feedback control of 2-D flow over a flat plate at a low Reynolds number and at large angles of attack, where the natural flow is vortex shedding, though there also exists an unstable steady state. For control design, we derive reduced-order models valid in the neighborhood of this unstable steady state. The actuation is modeled as a localized body force near the leading edge of the flat plate, and the sensors are two velocity measurements in the near-wake of the plate. A reduced-order Kalman filter is developed based on these models and is shown to accurately reconstruct the flow field from the sensor measurements, and the resulting estimator-based control is shown to stabilize the unstable steady state. For small perturbations of the steady state, the model accurately predicts the response of the full simulation. Furthermore, the resulting controller is even able to suppress the stable periodic vortex shedding, where the nonlinear effects are strong, thus implying a large domain of attraction of the stabilized steady state.Comment: 36 pages, 17 figure