Reclaiming the virtual community for spatial cultures: Functional generality and cultural specificity at the interface of building and street

This paper engages with the formation of spatial cultures at a micro-morphological level to advance a general argument for the need to further study the contribution of building morphology to the collective realm of the quotidian city. It suggests how the macro-scale approach in analysing spatiotemporal phenomena in urban space lacks a sensitivity to historical urban processes at the micro-scale where the generic and culturally specific aspects of the diachronic city interact to give rise to actual communities. This recalibration of scales, it is claimed, is an epistemological prerequisite for urban design theories to engage productively with the social theory of space. The paper problematizes the idea of the building-street interface and its implications for conditioning urban encounters at the threshold of architectural and urban scales. The argument develops the space syntax concept of ‘virtual community’ as a means to understand how the theoretical capacity for individual buildings to aggregate into a streetscape becomes culturally particular at the level of users’ co-presence in physical space. It looks at the rules of built form aggregation and their implications for shaping the building-street interface in terms of probabilistic encounters over historical time. The argument is then illustrated through an analysis of the historical building-street connectivity as a cultural articulation of spatial-morphogenetic processes. Two urban settings are examined: terraced house morphologies in London and row houses in Manhattan. It is proposed that a micro-morphological approach to the description and analysis of the building-street interface helps to supply a ‘missing link’ in theorising space-society relationship as part of a broader project of rethinking what 'design' means in an urban context

In vitro bioconversion of polyphenols from black tea and red wine/grape juice by human intestinal microbiota displays strong interindividual variability

Dietary polyphenols in tea and wine have been associated with beneficial health effects. After ingestion, most polyphenols are metabolized by the colonic microbiota. The current study aimed at exploring the interindividual variation of gut microbial polyphenol bioconversion from 10 healthy human subjects. In vitro fecal batch fermentations simulating conditions in the distal colon were performed using polyphenols from black tea and a mixture of red wine and grape juice. Microbial bioconversion was monitored by NMR- and GC-MS-based profiling of diverse metabolites and phenolics. The complex polyphenol mixtures were degraded to a limited number of key metabolites. Each subject displayed a specific metabolite profile differing in composition and time courses as well as levels of these metabolites. Moreover, clear differences depending on the polyphenol sources were observed. In conclusion, varying metabolite pathways among individuals result in different metabolome profiles and therefore related health effects are hypothesized to differ between subjects

Intersex in the USA’s best-selling undergraduate psychology textbooks: Uneven critique in an ongoing scientific and ethical crisis

The field of intersex studies is advancing and requires scholars to update their knowledge and representation of people with intersex variations. To examine how psychology students are taught about people with intersex variations, we reviewed best-selling USA psychology textbooks in introductory psychology ( n = 8), psychology of women and gender ( n = 5), human sexuality ( n = 4), and biological psychology ( n = 3). All textbooks indexed intersex or cognate terms, with alternative terms (e.g., disorders of sex development) indexed less frequently. Intersex variations were described as emerging during the stages of sex development, and as challenging binary categories for sex. Several specific variations were commonly described as syndromes with little reference to psychological research or lived experiences. Women and girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) were most clearly framed as “natural experiments” about how nature and nurture intersect. Diverse sex development involving 46 XY genotypes tended to be described as difference from norms for male endosex development. However, two textbooks included lengthy narratives of people’s lived experiences as intersex, and photographs of intersex-identified individuals were common. Photo images of the South African athlete Caster Semenya depicted more of her body than did the photo images of other intersex-identified individuals. The textbooks generally included critical reflection on the assumptions of a gender binary, and on the attribution of ambiguity to others’ bodies, genetic determinism, the medical gaze, and the sex testing of athletes. We consider how information in these textbooks can shape the representation of intersex among psychology students, and how it may be used to develop more humanizing representations of intersex across all psychology textbooks

What is the functional/organic distinction actually doing in psychiatry and neurology? [version 1; peer review: 3 approved]

The functional-organic distinction aims to distinguish symptoms, signs, and syndromes that can be explained by diagnosable biological changes, from those that cannot. The distinction is central to clinical practice and is a key organising principle in diagnostic systems. Following a pragmatist approach that examines meaning through use, we examine how the functional-organic distinction is deployed and conceptualised in psychiatry and neurology. We note that the conceptual scope of the terms ‘functional’ and ‘organic’ varies considerably by context. Techniques for differentially diagnosing ‘functional’ and ‘organic’ diverge in the strength of evidence they produce as a necessary function of the syndrome in question. Clinicians do not agree on the meaning of the terms and report using them strategically. The distinction often relies on an implied model of ‘zero sum’ causality and encourages classification of syndromes into discrete ‘functional’ and ‘organic’ versions. Although this clearly applies in some instances, this is often in contrast to our best scientific understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders as arising from a dynamic interaction between personal, social and neuropathological factors. We also note ‘functional’ and ‘organic’ have loaded social meanings, creating the potential for social disempowerment. Given this, we argue for a better understanding of how strategic simplification and complex scientific reality limit each other in neuropsychiatric thinking. We also note that the contribution of people who experience the interaction between ‘functional’ and ‘organic’ factors has rarely informed the validity of this distinction and the dilemmas arising from it, and we highlight this as a research priority

Meaning and role of functional-organic distinction: a study of clinicians in psychiatry and neurology services

The functional-organic distinction attempts to differentiate disorders with diagnosable biological causes from those without and is a central axis on which diagnoses, medical specialities and services are organised. Previous studies report poor agreement between clinicians regarding the meanings of the terms and the conditions to which they apply, as well as noting value-laden implications of relevant diagnoses. Consequently, we aimed to understand how clinicians working in psychiatry and neurology services navigate the functional-organic distinction in their work. Twenty clinicians (10 physicians, 10 psychologists) working in psychiatry and neurology services participated in semistructured interviews that were analysed applying a constructivist grounded theory approach. The distinction was described as often incongruent with how clinicians conceptualise patients’ problems. Organic factors were considered to be objective, unambiguously identifiable and clearly causative, whereas functional causes were invisible and to be hypothesised through thinking and conversation. Contextual factors—including cultural assumptions, service demands, patient needs and colleagues’ views—were key in how the distinction was deployed in practice. The distinction was considered theoretically unsatisfactory, eventually to be superseded, but clinical decision making required it to be used strategically. These uses included helping communicate medical problems, navigating services, hiding meaning by making psychological explanations more palatable, tackling stigma, giving hope, and giving access to illness identity. Clinicians cited moral issues at both individual and societal levels as integral to the conceptual basis and deployment of the functional-organic distinction and described actively navigating these as part of their work. There was a considerable distance between the status of the functional-organic distinction as a sound theoretical concept generalisable across conditions and its role as a gatekeeping tool within the structures of healthcare. Ambiguity and contradictions were considered as both obstacles and benefits when deployed in practice and strategic considerations were important in deciding which to lean on

Early Evolution of the 23–26 September 2012 U.K. Floods: Tropical Storm Nadine and Diabatic Heating due to Cloud Microphysics

Major river flooding affected the United Kingdom in late September 2012 as a slow-moving extratropical cyclone brought over 100 mm of rain to a large swath of northern England and north Wales, with local accumulations approaching 200 mm. The cyclone developed on 20–22 September following the interaction between an equatorward-moving potential vorticity (PV) streamer and Tropical Storm Nadine, near the Azores. A plume of tropical moisture was drawn poleward ahead of the PV streamer over a low-level baroclinic zone, allowing deep convection to develop. Convectively driven latent heat release reduced upper-tropospheric PV near the streamer, causing it to fracture and cut off from the reservoir of high PV over the United Kingdom. Simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with 4-km horizontal grid spacing in which microphysical heating and cooling tendencies are set to zero, alongside calculations of instantaneous diabatic heating rates and PV tendencies along trajectories, reveal that deposition heating contributed strongly to the fracturing of the PV streamer into a discrete anomaly by directly reducing upper-tropospheric PV to the streamer’s east. Condensation heating contributed to lower-tropospheric PV generation along the cold front as the cyclone developed, while cooling due to sublimation, evaporation, and melting modified the PV much less strongly. The results of this case study show that the collocation of strong deposition heating with positive absolute vorticity in the upper troposphere can lead to substantial PV modification and a very different cyclone evolution to that when deposition heating is suppressed

The Milky Way in Context: Building an integral-field spectrograph data cube of the Galaxy

The Milky Way (MW) is by far the best-studied galaxy and has been regarded as an ideal laboratory for understanding galaxy evolution. However, direct comparisons of Galactic and extra-galactic observations are marred by many challenges, including selection effects and differences in observations and methodology. In this study, we present a novel code GalCraft to address these challenges by generating mock integral-field spectrograph data cubes of the MW using simple stellar population models and a mock stellar catalog of the Galaxy derived from E-Galaxia. The data products are in the same format as external galaxies, allowing for direct comparisons. We investigate the ability of pPXF to recover kinematics and stellar population properties for an edge-on mock observation of the MW. We confirm that pPXF can distinguish kinematic and stellar population differences between thin and thick disks. However, pPXF struggles to recover star formation history, where the SFR is overestimated in the ranges between 2-4 and 12-14 Gyr compared to the expected values. This is likely due to the template age spacing, pPXF regularization algorithm, and spectral similarities in old population templates. Furthermore, we find systematic offsets in the recovered kinematics, potentially due to insufficient spectral resolution and the variation of line-of-sight velocity with [M/H] and age through a line-of-sight. With future higher resolution and multi-[$\alpha$/Fe] SSP templates, GalCraft will be useful to identify key signatures such as [$\alpha$/Fe]-[M/H] distribution at different $R$ and $|z|$ and potentially measure radial migration and kinematic heating efficiency to study detailed chemodynamical evolution of MW-like galaxies.Comment: 27 pages, 27 figures (8 figs in appendix), submitted to MNRAS. Comments are welcom

Roth–Waring–Goldbach

We use Green's transference principle to show that any subset of the $d$th powers of primes with positive relative density contains nontrivial solutions to a translation-invariant linear equation in $d^2+1$ or more variables, with explicit quantitative bounds

Person-Centered Health Promotion: Learning from 10 Years of Practice within Long Term Conditions

The utilization of person-centered care is highlighted as essential for health promotion, yet implementation has been inconsistent and multiple issues remain. There is a dearth of applied research exploring the facets of successful implementation. In this paper, a person-centered wellbeing program spanning various groups is discussed, outlining the central principles that have allowed for successful outcomes. Ten years of pragmatic pre–post service evaluation have shown consistent improvement in measures of functional capacity and wellbeing. The method for this paper is a reflective exploration of the theory and practices that can explain the continual improvement the clinics have achieved over 10 years. Core principles relate to connecting with people, connecting through groups, and connecting with self. The operationalization and theoretical explanation of these principles is outlined. The discussion of these principles posits essential factors to prioritize to advance the implementation of person-centered care in health promotion for long-term conditions