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A Qualitative Study of School Staff Experiences of Implementing Five Universal Mental Health Interventions in England
No full textSchools are well-placed to implement mental health interventions to large groups of children and young people. This study aimed to explore school staff perceptions of barriers and facilitators to the implementation and potential impact of five universal mental health interventions.Qualitative data collection (primarily semi-structured interviews) with 60 members of school staff (including class teachers, senior leadership team members, and pastoral support leads) was conducted across 20 primary and secondary schools in England in 2019. As part of two randomised controlled trials, schools were randomised to deliver one of five universal, classroom-based mental health interventions: The Guide, Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM), Strategies for Safety and Wellbeing (SSW), Relaxation Techniques, and Mindfulness-Based Exercises. Data analysis drew on a reflexive thematic analysis approach.Facilitators identified by school staff across the five interventions were: seeing the benefits; fit with school context; ease of implementation; consistency and security; and taking responsive action. Barriers or challenges identified across the five interventions were: not always seeing the benefits; varying engagement; differences of opinion, knowledge, and experience; and struggles with time and space.The findings suggest that to enable the impactful implementation of school-based, universal mental health interventions, school staff need to be consulted about what would work best within their individual schools, to ensure that interventions can meet the needs and preferences of different school environments and students
Time-Resolved Picosecond Luminescence Spectroscopy of ZnO Tetrapods: Opposite Ultrafast Energy Shifts of UV Stimulated and Visible Defect Emission
No full textTime resolved picosecond measurements of the UV and visible emissions from two ZnO tetrapod sample variants, synthesized with the flame transport synthesis method under two different conditions, were investigated upon UV light excitation. Spontaneous emissions of both regions were found, in line with previous measurements, to be long-lived with two time constants for the UV emission decay. Upon excitation with 340 nm, 100 fs pulses at fluences up to 3.3 × 10–4 J cm–2 (≈1.5 × 1015 photons cm–2 per pulse, corresponding to an estimated carrier density of ≈1 × 1019 cm–3), both ultraviolet (≈ 380 nm) and visible (≈ 490–510 nm) emissions were observed and studied. The UV emission exhibits stimulated characteristics, including spectral narrowing and a superlinear increase with pump fluence, with temporal full widths at half-maximum (FWHM) approaching the instrument response (≈0.8 ps). Wavelength-resolved TRPL reveals opposite early time spectral shifts: the UV emission red-shifts with increasing delay (consistent with exciton–electron scattering and electron–hole plasma formation with band gap renormalization), while the visible emission blue-shifts (assigned to progressive filling of defect-related trap states). Overall, these changes were seen to be nearly identical for both ZnO tetrapods (with minor differences), indicating that both synthesis variants delivered materials with similar optical response, ensuring high reliability of the flame method. These results demonstrate the opposite ultrafast dynamics of excitonic and defect-assisted processes in ZnO tetrapods and highlight their potential for applications requiring tunable emission in both the ultraviolet and visible ranges. Interpretations of the principles behind these events are presented in detail
PDF-Reshape: Adversarial Attack on Probabilistic Wind Power Forecasting
No full textProbabilistic wind power forecasting (PWPF) is a critical tool to manage the inherent uncertainty of wind power generation, providing probability predictions essential for economic dispatch and stability assessment. However, the increasing threat of cyberattacks necessitates a comprehensive investigation of the vulnerabilities of PWPFs. This letter introduces a novel adversarial attack framework, termed PDF-Reshape Attack, which targets to manipulate the statistical measures of the probability density functions (PDFs) while maintaining stealthiness by minimizing changes to the expectations. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed attack on mainstream PDF distributions (e.g., Gaussian, Beta, Gamma, Weibull) and assess its economic impact on downstream economic dispatch
Decentralised static output feedback tracking control for nonlinear interconnected systems using sliding mode techniques
No full textIn this paper, a sliding mode technique based decentralised static output feedback control scheme is proposed for system output tracking for a class of nonlinear interconnected systems where both nonlinear nominal subsystems and unknown interconnections are considered. A composite sliding surface is designed in terms of tracking error at first and then the corresponding sliding motion stability is analysed based on the Lyapunov approach. In order to guarantee the reachability, a decentralised output tracking control is designed based on system output and the pre-given desired output signals such that the effect of the interconnections can be tolerated and the tracking error dynamical systems are driven to the sliding surface maintaining a sliding motion thereafter. The proposed method depends on available information only and can reduce conservatism by fully exploring and adopting known information. An appropriate coordinate transformation is employed to facilitate the sliding mode control design. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through simulation applied to a river pollution system
Educational attainment of children with major congenital anomalies during primary school in England: a population cohort study
No full textPandemic governmentality and houselessness: interrogating management of COVID-19 through an analysis of dwelling
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic and its response eroded the survival mechanisms that precarious
populations have at their disposal in enduring urban dispossessions. Centring a politics of
dwelling, this paper examines how pandemic governance fractured inhabitation practices to
uphold hegemonic notions of home and housing. As the 'home' was seen as an important
site to shield from the virus, those inhabiting the streets were perceived as contaminators,
and coercive and carceral measures were introduced to confine these groups physically,
economically, socially, and politically. As an analytical framing, we centre biopolitics and
hygienisation to argue that pandemic governmentality reiterated the 'more-than neoliberal'
trajectories of urban transformation and the disproportionate impacts on the vulnerable
urban groups. With an empirical focus on Mumbai, this article examines the impact the
COVID-19 governance, particularly the sudden lockdown, had on the unhoused in Indian
cities. By highlighting how developmental ontologies of housing have shaped the politics of
houselessness in urban India, we argue that pandemic governmentality has ruptured
incremental practices of inhabitation and inventive modes of survival in the city through: the
destruction of dwelling, the inadequate provision of shelter, and forced spatial confinement
Anxiety makes time pass quicker: neural correlates
No full textAnxiety can be adaptive, but at a cost. One theory suggests that whilst anxiety promotes harm-avoidant cognitive processing, it impairs concurrent (non-harm-related) processing by commandeering finite neurocognitive resources.
Our previous work has shown that anxiety reliably ‘speeds up time’, promoting temporal underestimation, possibly due to a loss of temporal information. Whether this results from anxiety overloading neurocognitive systems involved in time processing remains unclear. Here, we examined whether anxiety and time processing overlap, particularly in regions of the cingulate cortex.
Across two studies (an exploratory Study 1, N = 13, informing a pre-registered Study 2, N = 29), we combined a well-established anxiety manipulation (threat of shock) with a temporal bisection task while participants underwent fMRI.
Consistent with our previous findings, time was perceived to pass more quickly under anxiety. Anxiety induction led to widespread activation in the cingulate cortex, while perceiving longer intervals was associated with more circumscribed activation in a mid-cingulate region. Importantly, conjunction analysis revealed convergence between anxiety and time processing in the insula and mid-cingulate cortex.
These results tentatively support the idea that anxiety overloads already-engaged neural resources. In particular, overloading mid-cingulate capacity may drive emotion-related changes in temporal perception, consistent with its hypothesised role in mediating responses to anxiety
Presence Is Reality: Rethinking Virtual and Real-World Consciousness
No full textThe sense of presence is typically defined as the feeling of “being there” in a virtual environment, whereas the sense of reality is defined as the ability to discriminate between real and unreal phenomena. We challenge this rigid dichotomy, arguing that presence and reality can be considered conceptually, mechanistically, and phenomenologically continuous. We first demonstrate that both cognitive sciences and virtual reality (VR) studies use the terms inconsistently and interchangeably. We then go on to identify and combine perceptual and cognitivist accounts of presence, arguing that presence, like reality, is likely to be formed from integrative mechanisms. We then go further to identify converging psychophysical findings from the two fields in multisensory integration, self-embodiment, and agency. This is further supported by results from preliminary neuroimaging studies, indicating a shared frontolimbic substrate for generating the feeling of “realness.” This reconceptualization has significant implications, including validating the use of VR as a tool for studying the sense of reality and its clinical disorders. We conclude by advocating for directly comparing these phenomena in future research to systematically test for their functional and neural equivalence
Robust URLLC Beamforming in SWIPT via Data-Augmented Model-Driven Deep Learning
No full textThis letter studies robust beamforming for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) downlink transmission with imperfect channel state information (CSI) in a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system. By modeling CSI estimation errors via statistical distributions, we maximize the minimum rate quantile among all users through the joint optimization of the beamforming matrix and the power-splitting factor under outage probability constraints. We propose a data augmentation and model-driven (DA-MD) deep neural network (DNN) algorithm: data augmentation addresses imperfect CSI via massive error sampling, while the model-driven beamforming recovery structure reduces complexity. Our results validate the superiority of the proposed approach for URLLC
A Portable Broadband Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Device for In Vivo Oxygenation and Metabolism Measurements
No full textBroadband NIRS (bNIRS) is an extension of fNIRS that provides the same assessment of oxygenation biomarkers along with a valuable marker for oxygen metabolism at a cellular level, the oxidation state of cytochrome-c-oxidase (oxCCO). bNIRS implements many (100s) wavelengths in the NIR spectrum to address this and provide insight into tissue energetics. To supply these many wavelengths of light, broadband sources are required, and spectrometers are employed to distinguish power per wavelength. Current multi-channel bNIRS instruments are bulky and only semi-portable due to technological limitations. We propose a design for a bNIRS device that has been miniaturised to allow for portable use. This design leverages the innovations in photonic devices that have created a new line of SMD-type micro-spectrometers and broadband NIR high-power LEDs. This first-of-its-kind device, referred to as microCYRIL (after its two predecessors CYRIL and miniCYRIL), has been developed for oxygenation and metabolism measurements with dual channel operation. To validate functionality, concentration changes in oxygenated (HbO2) and deoxygenated (HHb) haemoglobin and oxCCO were successfully tracked during a cuff-induced brachial arterial occlusion