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Selected AbstractsExperience and meaning of user involvement: some explorations from a community mental health projectHEALTH & SOCIAL CARE IN THE COMMUNITY, Issue 3 2002Carole Truman Abstract With an increased interest in and policy commitment to involving service users in the planning and delivery of health service provision, there is a clear need to explore both the rhetoric and realities of what user involvement entails. In the present paper, by drawing upon an evaluation of a community-based exercise facility for people with mental health problems, the authors explore ways in which the reality of user involvement is subject to a range of configurations within health services. The paper describes a piece of qualitative research that was undertaken within a participatory framework to explore the nature of user involvement within the facility. The data have been analysed using a grounded theory approach to provide insights into: the organisational context in which user involvement takes place; factors which encourage meaningful participation on the part of service users; perceived barriers to user involvement; and issues of sustainability and continuity. This research approach has enabled the authors to explore the views and experiences of users, service providers and referral agencies in relation to the nature and potential for user involvement. The findings illustrate ways in which user involvement may take place under both flexible and formal arrangements across a variety of activities. The present paper provides an account of some of the meanings and experiences of what ,successful' user participation may involve and the conditions which underpin ,success'. The authors conclude that successful and meaningful user involvement should enable and support users to recognise their existing skills, and to develop new ones, at a pace that suits their particular circumstances and personal resources. This process may require adaptation not only by organisations, but also by service providers and non-involved users. [source] Exploring the role of intertextuality in concept construction: Urban second graders make sense of evaporation, boiling, and condensation,JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 7 2006Maria Varelas The study explores urban second graders' thinking and talking about the concepts of evaporation, boiling, and condensation that emerged in the context of intertextuality within an integrated science-literacy unit on the topic of States of Matter, which emphasized the water cycle. In that unit, children and teacher engaged in a variety of activities (reading information books, doing hands-on explorations, writing, drawing, discussing) in a dialogically oriented way where teacher and children shared the power and the burden of making meaning. The three qualitative interrelated analyses showed children who initiated or continued productive links to texts, broadly defined, that gave them spaces to grapple with complex ideas and ways of expressing them. Although some children showed preference for a certain way of thinking about evaporation, boiling, and condensation, the data do not point toward a definite conclusion relative to whether children subscribe or not to a particular conceptual position. Children had multiple, complex, and often speculative, tentative, and emergent ways of accessing and interpreting these phenomena, and their conceptions were contextually based,different contexts offered opportunities for students to theorize about different aspects of the phenomena (along with some similar aspects). Children also theorized about aspects of the same phenomena in different ways. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 637,666, 2006 [source] Beyond Conceptual Change: Using Representations to Integrate Domain-Specific Structural Models in Learning MathematicsMIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION, Issue 2 2007Florence Mihaela Singer ABSTRACT, Effective teaching should focus on representational change, which is fundamental to learning and education, rather than conceptual change, which involves transformation of theories in science rather than the gradual building of knowledge that occurs in students. This article addresses the question about how to develop more efficient strategies for promoting representational change across cognitive development. I provide an example of an integrated structural model that highlights the underlying cognitive structures that connect numbers, mathematical operations, and functions. The model emphasizes dynamic multiple representations that students can internalize within the number line and which lead to developing a dynamic mental structure. In teaching practice, the model focuses on a counting task format, which integrates a variety of activities, specifically addressing motor, visual, and verbal skills, as well as various types of learning transfer. [source] Scientific Highlights from the ,k Network: Towards Atomistic Materials DesignPHYSICA STATUS SOLIDI (B) BASIC SOLID STATE PHYSICS, Issue 11 2006P. H. Dederichs The ,k network aims at encompassing the whole community of European groups working in the area of ab - initio materials modelling, including very many small groups and isolated researchers. Historically, the activities started in the 1980s in Trieste with the workshop series entitled "Total Energies and Forces". Since then, it has operated on the European level in various forms, with funding from various EC/EU and ESF sources, beginning more than 10 years ago with the EC's Human Capital and Mobility Programme. In that time, ,k has done much to make Europe the leading area in the world for research in atomic-scale ab - initio computer simulation of all types of materials, their structures, properties, and processes. To a large extent, this has been done by nurturing scientific excellence and collaboration in what might be called "the ,k family". The ,k Network is presently organized around 15 topical working groups. Over the years, the ,k network organized three large scale conferences in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany (1996, 2000, 2005), attended by hundreds of scientists from all over the world. The next ,k Conference is to be organized in Berlin in 2010. These ,k Conferences are unique events fully dedicated to the ab - initio research. In addition, the network organizes a variety of meetings and topical workshops every year. The core activities of the ,k network involve editing every two months a ,k newsletter with typically more than 100 pages, which contains a "Scientific Highlight", announcements of conferences, workshops and vacant positions, news of various ESF and EU funded networks, including reports on workshops, and abstracts of submitted papers. The ,k has its own web pages (http://psi-k.dl.ac.uk) which inform about the Network, its structure, and how to get involved in ,k activities. These web pages are also the repository of the ,k newsletters and Scientific Highlights and details about the ,k Workshops of the most recent years. The ,k mailing list contains about 1700 e-mail addresses from across the world, and all the important information about a variety of activities of the network is distributed across this list on a daily basis. The "Scientific Highlights" of the ,k newsletters reflect the scientific activities of the network and aim at presenting reviews and current developments in the field. This special issue of physica status solidi (b) gives a collection of some of the most recent Highlight contributions to the ,k newsletter. All manuscripts originally posted on the ,k server were peer-reviewed by two referees and accepted according to the standards of pss. They are published here partly in revised or updated version. We hope that the readership of the journal will benefit from the quality of the research they report on and the high level of the presentations. [source] Activity-induced dental modification in holocene siberian hunter-fisher-gatherersAMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2010Andrea Waters-Rist Abstract The use of teeth as tools provides clues to past subsistence patterns and cultural practices. Five Holocene period hunter-fisher-gatherer mortuary sites from the south-western region of Lake Baikal, Siberia, Russian Federation, are observed for activity-induced dental modification (AIDM) to further characterize their adaptive regimes. Grooves on the occlusal surfaces of teeth are observed in 25 out of 123 individuals (20.3%) and were most likely produced during the processing of fibers from plants and animals, for making items such as nets and cordage. Regional variation in the frequency of individuals with occlusal grooves is found in riverine versus lakeshore sites. This variation suggests that production of material culture items differed, perhaps in relation to different fishing practices. There is also variation in the distribution of grooves by sex: grooves are found predominately in females, except at the Late Neolithic-Bronze Age river site of Ust'-Ida I where grooves are found exclusively in males. Occlusal grooves were cast using polyvinylsiloxane and maxillary canine impressions were examined by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to determine striation patterns. Variation in striae orientation suggests that a variety of activities, and/or different manufacturing techniques, were involved in groove production. Overall, the variability in occlusal groove frequency, sex and regional distribution, and microscopic striae patterns, points to the multiplicity of activities and ways in which people used their mouths and teeth in cultural activities. Am J Phys Anthropol 143:266,278, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] The Expansion, Diversification, and Segmentation of Power in Late Prehispanic NascaARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Issue 1 2004Christina A. Conlee During the Late Intermediate Period (A.D. 1000,1476) the organization and foundation of power in Nasca was transformed from earlier times. Previously, religious resources were central to the development and maintenance of the political and social hierarchy. After the collapse of the Wari Empire and a period of balkanization, the resources used to establish and maintain power broadened considerably. The expansion of the power base into new realms coincided with an increase in the number of local elites in the drainage. There was no longer a focus on regional ceremonial centers; instead, elites were able to build power through a variety of activities including exchange, craft production (with a focus on utilitarian items), feasting, community-based ritual activities, and probably warfare and defense. During this period the levels of the political hierarchy grew and a more heterarchical type of regional polity developed. [source] Analysis of brain activity immediately before conscious teeth clenching using magnetoencephalographic methodJOURNAL OF ORAL REHABILITATION, Issue 7 2007T. IIDA summary, The reasons for unconscious teeth clenching have not been clarified. The long-term goal of our project was the elucidation of processing in the brain immediately before unconscious teeth clenching, in order to clarify its significance in humans. The objective of the present study was to establish a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) method of measuring brain activity immediately before clenching, and to clarify the time-course of brain activity immediately before conscious clenching. We measured the MEG signal in six subjects before, during and after clenching in a protocol that restricted head movement <5 mm. We derived tomographic estimates of brain activity for each time slice of data, as well as time courses for regional brain activations. Analysis of the tomographic images and time courses yielded statistical maps of activity in the motor, pre-motor and somatosensory cortices immediately before clenching in all subjects. Activations were found bilaterally, but with a strong unilateral bias in most subjects. Our results demonstrate that the MEG procedures, we have introduced are capable of measuring brain activity immediately before clenching, and indicate that analysis should begin from at least 200 ms before electromyogram onset. [source] Microbial mediation of fruit fly,host plant interactions: is the host plant the "centre of activity"?OIKOS, Issue 3 2002S. Raghu Insects utilize resources in their environment with the aid of mutualistic or symbiotic mediation by microorganisms. Some insect species such as ants and termites often have complex ecological and evolutionary associations with their symbionts, while the nature and functional significance of such associations in non-social insects is often unclear. In the Dacinae (Diptera: Tephritidae), specific Enterobacteriaceae (Erwiniaherbicola, Enterobactercloacae, Klebsiellaoxytoca) are believed to mediate interactions between the adult fruit flies and the larval host plant. This bacterial mediation is hypothesized as being integral to the larval host plant being the "centre of activity" of the fly. Using a non-pest, monophagous fruit fly (Bactroceracacuminata [Hering]), we tested this hypothesis by manipulating the fruiting state of its larval host plant (Solanum mauritianum Scopoli) and subsequently assessing insect behaviour and phylloplane microflora on those hosts. On host plants that had never fruited, few flies or bacterial colonies were recorded, consistent with hypothesis expectations. On fruiting host plants or plants that had had their fruit removed, bacterial colonies were present; again consistent with expectation. However, few flies were recorded on fruit-removed plants and all fly behaviours, other than resting or oviposition, were rare or absent on any hosts; inconsistent with expectation. The general pattern of results suggested that female flies coming to oviposit on fruiting hosts were spreading Enterobacteriaceae, but such spread was incidental and not part of some mutualistic interaction between fruit flies and bacteria. [source] | |||||||||||||