Too Cool at School - Understanding Cool Teenagers

Cool can be thought about on three levels; the having of cool things, the doing of cool stuff and the being of cool. Whilst there is some understanding of cool products, the concept, of being cool is much more elusive to designers and developers of systems. This study examines this space by using a set of pre-prepared teenage personas as probes with a set of teenagers with the aim of better understanding what is, and isn’t cool about teenage behaviours. The study confirmed that teenagers are able to rank personas in order of cool and that the process of using personas can provide valuable insights around the phenomenon of cool. The findings confirm that cool is indeed about having cool things but in terms of behaviours cool can be a little bit, but not too, naughty

Constructing the Cool Wall: A tool to explore teen meanings of cool

This paper describes the development and exploration of a tool designed to assist in investigating ‘cool’ as it applies to the design of interactive products for teenagers. The method involved the derivation of theoretical understandings of cool from literature that resulted in identification of seven core categories for cool, which were mapped to a hierarchy. The hierarchy includes having of cool things, the doing of cool activities and the being of cool. This paper focuses on a tool, the Cool Wall, developed to explore one specific facet of the hierarchy; exploring shared understanding of having cool things. The paper describes the development and construction of the tool, using a heavily participatory approach, and the results and analysis of three studies. The first study was carried out over 2 days in a school in the UK. The results of the study both provide clear insights into cool things and enable a refined understanding of cool in this context. Two additional studies are then used to identify potential shortcomings in the Cool Wall methodology. In the second study participants were able to populate a paper cool wall with anything they chose, this revealed two potential new categories of images and that the current set of images covered the majority of key themes. In the third study teenagers interpretations of the meaning of the images included in the Cool Wall were explored, this showed that the majority of meanings were as expected and a small number of unexpected interpretations provided some valuable insights

Emerging Therapies for Advanced Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma

Multiple combinational regimens have recently been approved and are now considered the standard of care for patients with advanced clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Several additional combinational regimens are deep in clinical assessment and are likely to soon join the crowded front-line therapeutic landscape. Most of these regimens are combinations of agents already approved as single-agents in RCC including tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) and immune checkpoint inhibitors. While these new front-line regimens are associated with reliably high response rates and prolonged survival, complete and durable remissions remain limited to a small subset of patients and the vast majority of patients continue to require subsequent therapy. The need for the continued development of novel agents in RCC persists and efforts have focused on agents targeting the molecular biology of clear cell RCC and novel immunotherapies including cytokines. In this review, we discuss the progress in the development of these novel therapies in the context of the evolving standard of care for patients with advanced clear cell RCC

Electrochemical biosensors: recommended definitions and classification

International audienceTwo Divisions of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), namely Physical Chemistry (Commission I.7 on Biophysical Chemistry, formerly Steering Committee on Biophysical Chemistry) and Analytical Chemistry (Commission V.5 on Electroanalytical Chemistry), have prepared recommendations on the definition, classification and nomenclature related to electrochemical biosensors; these recommendations could, in the future, be extended to other types of biosensors. An electrochemical biosensor is a self-contained integrated device, which is capable of providing specific quantitative or semi-quantitative analytical information using a biological recognition element (biochemical receptor) which is retained in direct spatial contact with an electrochemical transduction element. Because of their ability to be repeatedly calibrated, we recommend that a biosensor should be clearly distinguished from a bioanalytical system, which requires additional processing steps, such as reagent addition. A device which is both disposable after one measurement, i.e. single use, and unable to monitor the analyte concentration continuously or after rapid and reproducible regeneration should be designated a single-use biosensor. Biosensors may be classified according to the biological specificity-conferring mechanism or, alternatively, the mode of physicochemical signal transduction. The biological recognition element may be based on a chemical reaction catalysed by, or on an equilibrium reaction with, macromolecules that have been isolated, engineered or present in their original biological environment. In the latter case, equilibrium is generally reached and there is no further, if any, net consumption of analyte(s) by the immobilized biocomplexing agent incorporated into the sensor. Biosensors may be further classi®ed according to the analytes or reactions that they monitor: direct monitoring of analyte concentration or of reactions producing or consuming such analytes; alternatively, an indirect monitoring of inhibitor or activator of the biological recognition element (biochemical receptor) may be achieved. A rapid proliferation of biosensors and their diversity has led to a lack of rigour in defining their performance criteria. Although each biosensor can only truly be evaluated for a particular application, it is still useful to examine how standard protocols for performance criteria may be defined in accordance with standard IUPAC protocols or definitions. These criteria are recommended for authors, referees and educators and include calibration characteristics (sensitivity, operational and linear concentration range, detection and quantitative determination limits), selectivity, steady-state and transient response times, sample throughput, reproducibility, stability and lifetime

Electrochemical biosensors: recommended definitions and classification

International audienceTwo Divisions of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), namely Physical Chemistry (Commission I.7 on Biophysical Chemistry formerly Steering Committee on Biophysical Chemistry) and Analytical Chemistry (Commission V.5 on Electroanalytical Chemistry) have prepared recommendations on the definition, classification and nomenclature related to electrochemical biosensors; these recommendations could, in the future, be extended to other types of biosensors. An electrochem-ical biosensor is a self-contained integrated device, which is capable of providing specific quantitative or semi-quantitative analytical information using a biological recognition element (biochemical receptor) which is retained in direct spatial contact with an electrochemical transduction element. Because of their ability to be repeatedly calibrated, we recommend that a biosensor should be clearly distinguished from a bioanalytical system, which requires additional processing steps, such as reagent addition. A device that is both disposable after one measurement, i.e. single use, and unable to monitor the analyte concentration continuously or after rapid and reproducible regeneration, should be designated a single use biosensor. Biosensors may be classified according to the biological specificity-conferring mechanism or, alternatively, to the mode of physico-chemical signal transduction. The biological recognition element may be based on a chemical reaction catalysed by, or on an equilibrium reaction with macromolecules that have been isolated, engineered or present in their original biological environment. In the latter cases, equilibrium is generally reached and there is no further, if any, net consumption of analyte(s) by the immobilized biocomplexing agent incorporated into the sensor. Biosensors may be further classified according to the analytes or reactions that they monitor: direct monitoring of analyte concentration or of reactions producing or consuming such analytes; alternatively, an indirect monitoring of inhibitor or activator of the biological recognition element (biochemical receptor) may be achieved. A rapid proliferation of biosensors and their diversity has led to a lack of rigour in defining their performance criteria. Although each biosensor can only truly be evaluated for a particular application, it is still useful to examine how standard protocols for performance criteria may be defined in accordance with standard IUPAC protocols or definitions. These criteria are recommended for authors, referees and educators and include calibration characteristics (sensitivity, operational and linear concentration range, detection and quantitative determination limits), selectivity, steady-state and transient response times, sample throughput, reproducibility, stability and lifetime

QCD thermodynamics with continuum extrapolated Wilson fermions II

We continue our investigation of 2+1 flavor QCD thermodynamics using dynamical Wilson fermions in the fixed scale approach. Two additional pion masses, approximately 440 MeV and 285 MeV, are added to our previous work at 545 MeV. The simulations were performed at 3 or 4 lattice spacings at each pion mass. The renormalized chiral condensate, strange quark number susceptibility and Polyakov loop is obtained as a function of the temperature and we observe a decrease in the light chiral pseudo-critical temperature as the pion mass is lowered while the pseudo-critical temperature associated with the strange quark number susceptibility or the Polyakov loop is only mildly sensitive to the pion mass. These findings are in agreement with previous continuum results obtained in the staggered formulation.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, published versio

Rotation Mitigation and OCCAMS + Tungsten Flight Termination for Eclipse Balloon Missions

Stack rotation is a nemesis for many ballooning experiments, especially photography when trying to keep a specific target in view such as the Moon’s shadow (or the Sun itself) on eclipse flights. Ascending weather balloons tend to slow or even stop rotating once in the stratosphere and out of most cross winds. However payload stacks can continue to rotate with respect to the balloon right up to burst, especially if attached to the balloon neck by just a single main line. Our passive “rotation mitigation” device attaches directly to the neck of the balloon and runs four parallel lines separated by 6 inches from the balloon neck down to the payload stack, significantly diminishing stack rotation with respect to the balloon, especially at high altitudes. This arrangement complicates the placement of the parachute, but we have successfully deployed parachutes from a hook on the side of the upper-most payload box. This also complicates the placement of a flight-termination line-cutter, be that Montana’s “OCCAMS” razor cutter or something like a Tungsten hot-wire cutter. We have developed a compact payload box to enclose both an OCCAMS razor cutter and a Tungsten hot-wire cutter, both of which can independently release the multiple lines of our rotation mitigation device. We can fire the OCCAMS by XBee commands relayed through our RFD 900 payload, as an alternative to the Iridium text-message system. The Tungsten cutter can be fired by XBee command, by timer, or by autonomous GPS-sensor-based decision making