"Why does it happen like this?". Consulting with users and providers prior to an evaluation of services for children with life-limiting conditions and their families

Background: Children with life-limiting conditions and their families have complex needs. Evaluations must consider their views and perspectives to ensure care is relevant, appropriate and acceptable. Aims: We consulted with children, young people, their parents and local professionals to gain a more informed picture of issues affecting them prior to preparing a bid to evaluate services in the area. Design: Multiple methods included focus groups, face-to-face and telephone interviews and participatory activities. Recordings and products from activities were analysed for content to identify areas of relevance and concern. Results: An overarching theme from parents was “Why does it happen like this?” Services did not seem designed to meet their needs. Whilst children and young people expressed ideas related to quality of environment,services and social life, professionals focused on ways of meeting the families’ needs. The theme that linked families’ concerns with those of professionals was ‘assessing individual needs’. Two questions to be addressed by the evaluation are: (1) to what extent are services designed to meet the needs of children and families, and (2) to what extent are children, young people and their families consulted about what they need? Conclusion: Consultations with families and service providers encouraged us to continue their involvement as partners in the evaluatio

Compact moduli of plane curves

We construct a compactification M_d of the moduli space of plane curves of degree d. We regard a plane curve C as a surface-divisor pair (P^2,C) and define M_d as a moduli space of pairs (X,D) where X is a degeneration of the plane. We show that, if d is not divisible by 3, the stack M_d is smooth and the degenerate surfaces X can be described explicitly.Comment: 46 pages. Final version to be published in Duke Mathematical Journa

'Working our way to health': Final Evaluation Report

This summary presents the findings of an independent evaluation of the ‘Working our Way to Health’ programme. This programme was delivered by Sefton PCT, funded through the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, and was aimed at improving the health of men in three of the most deprived wards in its locality. It aimed to encourage men to be health aware and increase access to health and leisure services in order to improve key lifestyle behaviours and advance gender equity. The programme included: • Community agency and health staff training • Peer mentoring programme • Healthy lifestyle programme It aimed to promote community partnerships to assist the expansion of health advice and services into a new community arena and engage a previously unattainable section of the male population in healthier lifestyle interventions

The moduli space of curves is rigid

We prove that the moduli stack of stable curves of genus g with n marked points is rigid, i.e., has no infinitesimal deformations. This confirms the first case of a principle proposed by Kapranov. It can also be viewed as a version of Mostow rigidity for the mapping class group.Comment: 11 pages. v2: Proof rewritten to avoid use of log structures. Example of nonrigid moduli space of surfaces adde

Birational geometry of cluster algebras

We give a geometric interpretation of cluster varieties in terms of blowups of toric varieties. This enables us to provide, among other results, an elementary geometric proof of the Laurent phenomenon for cluster algebras (of geometric type), extend Speyer's example of an upper cluster algebra which is not finitely generated, and show that the Fock-Goncharov dual basis conjecture is usually false.Comment: 50 pages, to appear in Algebraic Geometr

Mirror symmetry for log Calabi-Yau surfaces I

We give a canonical synthetic construction of the mirror family to a pair (Y,D) of a smooth projective surface with an anti-canonical cycle of rational curves, as the spectrum of an explicit algebra defined in terms of counts of rational curves on Y meeting D in a single point. In the case D is contractible, the family gives a smoothing of the dual cusp, and thus a proof of Looijenga's 1981 cusp conjecture.Comment: 144 pages, 3 figures, Second version significantly shorter, 109 pages. The first version has a lot of material (particularly in the introduction and material on cyclic quotient singularities) which does not appear in the new version. Download version 1 if this material is desired. Third and final version, small changes from Version 2, to appear in Publ. IHE

A very deep IRAS survey at l(II) = 97 deg, b(II) = +30 deg

A deep far-infrared survey is presented using over 1000 scans made of a 4 to 6 sq. deg. field at the north ecliptic pole by the IRAS. Point sources from this survey are up to 100 times fainter than the IRAS point source catalog at 12 and 25 micrometers, and up to 10 times fainter at 60 and 100 micrometers. The 12 and 25 micrometer maps are instrumental noise-limited, and the 60 and 100 micrometer maps are confusion noise-limited. The majority of the 12 micrometer point sources are stars within the Milky Way. The 25 micrometer sources are composed almost equally of stars and galaxies. About 80% of the 60 micrometer sources correspond to galaxies on Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) enlargements. The remaining 20% are probably galaxies below the POSS detection limit. The differential source counts are presented and compared with what is predicted by the Bahcall and Soneira Standard Galaxy Model using the B-V-12 micrometer colors of stars without circumstellar dust shells given by Waters, Cote and Aumann. The 60 micrometer source counts are inconsistent with those predicted for a uniformly distributed, nonevolving universe. The implications are briefly discussed