Facilitating a ‘non-judgmental’ skills-based co-design environment

This paper reflects on a pilot study for the design of a series of e-textiles workshops developed for the Nottinghamshire Mind Network community of mental health and wellbeing service users, managers and volunteers. The final workshops will form part of ‘An Internet of Soft Things’ (IoSofT) project, which seeks to develop a Person-Centred Approach (PCA) to design. The workshops should be experienced by participants as a non-judgemental environment, as one of the conditions of the Person-Centred Approach – unconditional positive regard (UPR) (Rogers, 1957). While the research team agree in theory that participants should feel safe and supported, putting non-judgement into practice in a multi - disciplinary environment, in which skills form the basis of workshop activity, has proved to be challenging. The paper introduces the key criteria of the PCA in psychotherapy, and describes the particular challenges that being non-judgemental presented to the textile designers and therapeutic practitioners who designed and facilitated the workshops. It presents an analysis of the design artefacts produced in the course of six workshop sessions (such as the ‘group agreement’), and participant feedback, and discusses the resulting framework that will be applied in the next iteration of workshops to enable participants’ comfort, creativity and autonomy

Do Housing Prices Reflect Environmental Health Risks? Evidence from More than 1600 Toxic Plant Openings and Closings

A ubiquitous and largely unquestioned assumption in studies of housing markets is that there is perfect information about local amenities. This paper measures the housing market and health impacts of 1,600 openings and closings of industrial plants that emit toxic pollutants. We find that housing values within one mile decrease by 1.5 percent when plants open, and increase by 1.5 percent when plants close. This implies an aggregate loss in housing values per plant of about $1.5 million. While the housing value impacts are concentrated within 1/2 mile, we find statistically significant infant health impacts up to one mile away

Supramolecular structure in the membrane of Staphylococcus aureus

The fundamental processes of life are organized and based on common basic principles. Molecular organizers, often interacting with the membrane, capitalize on cellular polarity to precisely orientate essential processes. The study of organisms lacking apparent polarity or known cellular organizers (e.g., the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus) may enable the elucidation of the primal organizational drive in biology. How does a cell choose from infinite locations in its membrane? We have discovered a structure in the S. aureus membrane that organizes processes indispensable for life and can arise spontaneously from the geometric constraints of protein complexes on membranes. Building on this finding, the most basic cellular positioning system to optimize biological processes, known molecular coordinators could introduce further levels of complexity. All life demands the temporal and spatial control of essential biological functions. In bacteria, the recent discovery of coordinating elements provides a framework to begin to explain cell growth and division. Here we present the discovery of a supramolecular structure in the membrane of the coccal bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which leads to the formation of a large-scale pattern across the entire cell body; this has been unveiled by studying the distribution of essential proteins involved in lipid metabolism (PlsY and CdsA). The organization is found to require MreD, which determines morphology in rod-shaped cells. The distribution of protein complexes can be explained as a spontaneous pattern formation arising from the competition between the energy cost of bending that they impose on the membrane, their entropy of mixing, and the geometric constraints in the system. Our results provide evidence for the existence of a self-organized and nonpercolating molecular scaffold involving MreD as an organizer for optimal cell function and growth based on the intrinsic self-assembling properties of biological molecules

The Controversies and Difficulties of Diagnosing Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia

We welcome the correspondence from Lavie and Amirav (1), highlighting the difficulties diagnosing primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) and the role of high-speed video analysis (HSVA). As members of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) PCD Diagnostic Task Force (2) and/or large PCD Centres, we agree that HSVA has an important role that is not recognized by the American Thoracic Society (ATS) PCD Diagnostic Guideline (3). This risks a large proportion of false-negative “missed” diagnoses and a sizable number of false-positive cases; we make additional important observations.</div

Wellbeing and smart textiles: reflecting on collaborative practices and the design process

This paper reports on an inter-disciplinary, EPSRC funded research project, 'An Internet of Soft Things' (IoSofT) which seeks to bring soft surfaces, smart textiles and wearable technologies to join the Internet of Things debate. The project involves researchers from academic disciplines: design, computing and mental health in collaboration with a project partner, the Nottinghamshire network of the mental health charity, Mind. This paper will reflect upon the research project and specifically the approach the authors have taken to collaborative textile practice and how this has impacted upon the design process. This project was conducted through a number of practical workshop activities with Mind service user groups. The workshops focused upon the crafting of personalized textile objects with soft switches and various output and also recorded the clients' descriptions of their sense of ownership, awareness of their own and others' emotions and behaviours. The workshops included the researchers' reflections and observations to enable further understanding of how this community invests meaning in material things and modes of expressive output. The aim of the research project is to use textile craft practice and smart materials alongside therapeutic approaches to contribute to the development of a wellbeing and mental health toolkit to support future client work for Mind

Gender gaps in the performance of Norwegian biology students: the roles of test anxiety and science confidence

Background: Understanding student motivational factors such as test anxiety and science confidence is important for increasing retention in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), especially for underrepresented students, such as women. We investigated motivational metrics in over 400 introductory biology students in Norway, a country lauded for its gender equality. Specifically, we measured test anxiety and science confidence and combined students’ survey responses with their performance in the class. Results: We found that female students expressed more test anxiety than did their male counterparts, and the anxiety they experienced negatively predicted their performance in class. By contrast, the anxiety male students experienced did not predict their performance. Conversely, men had higher confidence than women, and confidence interacted with gender, so that the difference between its impact on men’s and women’s performance was marginally significant. Conclusions: Our findings have implications for STEM instructors, in Norway and beyond: specifically, to counter gender-based performance gaps in STEM courses, minimize the effects of test anxiety.publishedVersio

Separating within and between effects in family studies: an application to the study of blood pressure in children.

In epidemiology the analyses of family or twin studies do not always fully exploit the data, as information on differences between siblings is often used while between-families effect are not considered. We show how cross-sectional time-series linear regression analysis can be easily implemented to estimate within- and between-families effects simultaneously and how these effects can then be compared using the Hausman test. We illustrate this approach with data from the Uppsala family study on blood pressure in children with age ranging from 5.5 to 12.3 years for the younger and from 7.5 to 13.8 years for the older siblings. Comparing the effect of differences in birth weight on blood pressure within-family (in full siblings) and between-families (in unrelated children) allows us to study the contributions of fixed and pregnancy-specific maternal effects on birth weight and consequently on blood pressure. Our data showed a 0.88 mmHg decrease (95 per cent confidence interval: -1.7 to -0.03 mmHg) in systolic blood pressure for one standard deviation increase in birth weight between siblings within a family and 0.88 mmHg (95 per cent confidence interval: -1.6 to -0.2 mmHg) decrease in systolic blood pressure for one standard deviation increase in birth weight between unrelated children. These estimates were controlled for sex, age, pubertal stage, body size and pulse rate of the children at examination and for maternal body size and systolic blood pressure. The within- and between-families effects were not significantly different, p = 0.19, suggesting that fixed and pregnancy-specific factors have similar effects on childhood systolic blood pressure

Limits to Interstellar C_4 and C_5 Towards zeta Ophiuchi

We have made a sensitive search for the origin bands in the known electronic transitions of the linear carbon chains C_4 and C_5 at 3789 and 5109 A towards zeta Oph (A_V <= 1). The incentive was a recent detection of C_3 in this interstellar cloud with a column density of 1.6 x 10^12 cm^-2 plus the availability of laboratory gas phase spectra of C_4 and C_5. Further, some models of diffuse interstellar clouds predict that the abundance of these latter species should be within an order of magnitude of C_3. Despite achieving S/N of 2300 to 2600 per pixel at a resolution of ~110,000, the searches were negative, leading to 3 sigma upper limits to the column density of N(C_5) = 2 x 10^11 cm^-2 and N(C_4) = 4 x 10^12-13 cm^-2 where these values rely on theoretically calculated oscillator strengths. The implication of these limits are discussed on the choice of molecules for study in future attempts to identify the carriers of the stronger diffuse interstellar bands.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure