Designs on Critical Practice?

This paper initially focuses on the way design and other creative disciplines are compromised and reduced in their practices in order that they may ‘fit’ within academe, with its axiological cast determined by the epistemologies of the sciences and humanities; a cast that has no place for the uncertainties of creative practice. It then explores the epistemological bases of design thinking and suggests that if design thinking is knowledge it is knowledge-in (as)- potential (potentia). This is a knowledge built with uncertainties - a pre-reflective knowing. It then moves to describe a critical thread that may be drawn through the stretch of design practice, including its uncertainties, and argues that this criticality is what the design community needs to appreciate and develop. It finally argues that academe needs to modify it’s validity criteria to accommodate critical practice rather than shape practice to fit with current validation models. [Abstract

Intermingled Bodies: Distributed Agency in an Expanded Appreciation of Making

This article offers an expanded view of making and, concomitantly, an understanding that through making we constitute the way we are in the world. The article begins with the idea that making produces a 'surrogate' of the body, which extends the body into the world, reforming the body and the world and their relationship. The ideas the article offers run counter to certain currents of thought that reduce making to a narrow cast anthropocentric crafting. Instead of this reduction, where making is merely understood and fixated as a close inembodied handicraft, the article advances: first, that all that we produce is making – not just that which is crafted by the immediacy of a hand; and, second, and linked to this expanded view of making, that all making workst hrough a distributed agency that includes human and non-human actors and actants in meshworks that extend across space – synchronous - and across time –diachronous. In other words, the body is extended into the world through what is made and this made world acts ineluctably on, and in, making. The paper references the practices of three makers to make the case for the need, bothethical and poetic, to think about making as an expanded term and to consideran intentionality of making that works through distributed agency doubly constituted as material and narrative

Mediatising public space and mediating practice: exhibition and research symposium

Exhibition and symposium of research by Pi Studio and Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research. A multidisciplinary research project that explores the future of media practice and theory. It involved papers, seminars and prototype designs

News Telescope

Description of design outcome of a news telescope as part of Leverhulme Research into Spaces of the Media, plus conference paper and stills from web publication at http://www.newstelescope.co.uk

i-Soapbox

The i-Soapbox is a working prototype that spatialises - places - political speech

The COMET (Comparison of Operative versus Monitoring and Endocrine Therapy) trial: a phase III randomised controlled clinical trial for low-risk ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS)

Introduction Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a noninvasive non-obligate precursor of invasive breast cancer. With guideline concordant care (GCC), DCIS outcomes are at least as favourable as some other early stage cancer types such as prostate cancer, for which active surveillance (AS) is a standard of care option. However, AS has not yet been tested in relation to DCIS. The goal of the COMET (Comparison of Operative versus Monitoring and Endocrine Therapy) trial for low-risk DCIS is to gather evidence to help future patients consider the range of treatment choices for low-risk DCIS, from standard therapies to AS. The trial will determine whether there may be some women who do not substantially benefit from current GCC and who could thus be safely managed with AS. This protocol is version 5 (11 July 2018). Any future protocol amendments will be submitted to Quorum Centralised Institutional Review Board/local institutional review boards for approval via the sponsor of the study (Alliance Foundation Trials). Methods and analysis COMET is a phase III, randomised controlled clinical trial for patients with low-risk DCIS. The primary outcome is ipsilateral invasive breast cancer rate in women undergoing GCC compared with AS. Secondary objectives will be to compare surgical, oncological and patient-reported outcomes. Patients randomised to the GCC group will undergo surgery as well as radiotherapy when appropriate; those in the AS group will be monitored closely with surgery only on identification of invasive breast cancer. Patients in both the GCC and AS groups will have the option of endocrine therapy. The total planned accrual goal is 1200 patients. Ethics and dissemination The COMET trial will be subject to biannual formal review at the Alliance Foundation Data Safety Monitoring Board meetings. Interim analyses for futility/safety will be completed annually, with reporting following Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) guidelines for noninferiority trials

Improving Forecast Skill by Assimilation of Quality-controlled AIRS Temperature Retrievals under Partially Cloudy Conditions

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on board the Aqua satellite has been long recognized as an important contributor towards the improvement of weather forecasts. At this time only a small fraction of the total data produced by AIRS is being used by operational weather systems. In fact, in addition to effects of thinning and quality control, the only AIRS data assimilated are radiance observations of channels unaffected by clouds. Observations in mid-lower tropospheric sounding AIRS channels are assimilated primarily under completely clear-sky conditions, thus imposing a very severe limitation on the horizontal distribution of the AIRS-derived information. In this work it is shown that the ability to derive accurate temperature profiles from AIRS observations in partially cloud-contaminated areas can be utilized to further improve the impact of AIRS observations in a global model and forecasting system. The analyses produced by assimilating AIRS temperature profiles obtained under partial cloud cover result in a substantially colder representation of the northern hemisphere lower midtroposphere at higher latitudes. This temperature difference has a strong impact, through hydrostatic adjustment, in the midtropospheric geopotential heights, which causes a different representation of the polar vortex especially over northeastern Siberia and Alaska. The AIRS-induced anomaly propagates through the model's dynamics producing improved 5-day forecasts