The contribution of sleep to ‘Closing the Gap’ in the health of Indigenous children: a methodological approach

Examination of the sleep of Australian Indigenous children presents some unique challenges, particularly in terms of community input, study design and in the collection of relevant data. Abstract Objectives: Research on Indigenous children’s sleep quality is likely to play a significant part in ‘Closing the Gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children’s health, academic performance and social outcomes. However, examination of the sleep of Australian Indigenous children presents some unique challenges, particularly in terms of community input, study design and in the collection of relevant data. Methods: The current literature on Indigenous sleep research is reviewed and includes factors such as mental and physical health, socioeconomic disadvantage, and their relationships to sleep. Challenges encountered in researching Indigenous sleep and strategies for best practice are explored. Conclusion: Many challenges exist in researching sleep in Indigenous children, but the imperative of undertaking this task is clear. An assessment of the sleep of Australian Indigenous children requires a thorough evaluation of factors that contribute to sleep health such as co-morbid disease, regional factors and social disadvantage. Methodological issues include appropriate assessment tools, affordable and objective sleep quality measures, accounting for differing cultural beliefs and practices and timekeeping associated with bedtimes and get-up times

Radiative corrections and parity-violating electron-nucleon scattering

Radiative corrections to the parity-violating asymmetry measured in elastic electron-proton scattering are analyzed in the framework of the Standard Model. We include the complete set of one-loop contributions to one quark current amplitudes. The contribution of soft photon emission to the asymmetry is also calculated, giving final results free of infrared divergences. The one quark radiative corrections, when combined with previous work on many quark effects and recent SAMPLE experimental data, are used to place some new constraints on electroweak form factors of the nucleon

Contribution of spin 1/2 and 3/2 resonances to two-photon exchange effects in elastic electron-proton scattering

We calculate contributions of hadron resonances to two-photon exchange effects in electron-proton scattering. In addition to the nucleon and P33 resonance, the following heavier resonances are included as intermediate states in the two-photon exchange diagrams: D13, D33, P11, S11 and S31. We show that the corrections due to the heavier resonances are smaller that the dominant nucleon and P33 contributions. We also find that there is a partial cancellation between the contributions from the spin 1/2 and spin 3/2 resonances, which results in a further suppression of their aggregate two-photon exchange effect.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure; additional comparison with data, results unchanged; to be published in Phys. Rev.

Performing the comic side of bodily abjection: A study of twenty-first century female stand-up comedy in a multi-cultural and multi-racial Britain

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is a socio-cultural study of the development of female stand-up comedy in the first decade of the twenty-first century within a multi-racial and multi-cultural Britain. It also engages with the theory and practice of performance and asks the question: ‘In what ways can it be said that female stand-up comics perform the comic side of bodily abjection?’ This question is applied to three groups of female case-studies which include: those who came into stand-up comedy in the 1980s; second-generation transnationals who became established at the end of the twentieth century; and twenty-first century newcomers to stand-up comedy. This third group also includes the author of this thesis who uses her own embodied experience as research, and Lynne Parker whose Funny Women organization was set up in 2002 to facilitate female entry into stand-up comedy. Alongside these three groups the subject of females as audience of female stand-up comedy is also explored. The issue of bodily abjection is explored in relation to seminal works on abjection by Julia Kristeva (1982) and Mary Douglas (1966) and regarding theories of the grotesque as posited by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) and Mary Russo (1995). These texts are used in this thesis to argue that abjection is a significant aspect of both the context and content of contemporary female stand-up comedy and that the orifices, surfaces and processes of the body are still pertinent to twenty-first century female stand-up comedy

Resistance to Cry Intensive Sleep Intervention in Young Children: Are We Ignoring Children’s Cries or Parental Concerns?

The majority of behavioural sleep interventions for young children (defined as 5 years of age or less) involve extinction procedures where parents must ignore their child’s cries for a period. Many parents have difficulties implementing and maintaining these procedures, leading to attrition, non-compliance and treatment avoidance. Yet the reasons for these methods being difficult to implement for parents have not been well understood or addressed in the literature. In fact, they are being ignored. We discuss that understanding and addressing parental concerns may enable better targeted sleep interventions

An Interdisciplinary Concept of Activity

It is suggested that if Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is to fulfil its potential as an approach to cultural and historical science in general, then an interdisciplinary concept of activity is needed. Such a concept of activity would provide a common foundation for all the human sciences, underpinning concepts of, for example, state and social movement equally as, for example, learning and personality. For this is needed a clear conception of the ‘unit of analysis’ of activity, i.e., of what constitutes ‘an activity’, and a clear distinction between the unit of analysis and the substance, i.e., ultimate reality underlying all the human sciences: artifact-mediated joint activity. It is claimed that the concept of ‘project collaboration’ – the interaction between two or more persons in pursuit of a common objective – forms such a unit of activity, the single ‘molecule’ in terms of which both sociological and psychological phenomena can be theorised. It is suggested that such a clarification of the notion of activity allows us to see how individual actions and societal activities mutually constitute one another and are each construed in the light of the other