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Navigating inclusive education in the United Arab Emirates: Perspectives from school leaders and teachers
No full textInclusive education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been promoted through ambitious policies. These have included a mandated change in nomenclature alongside strengthening the infrastructure and professional development to support inclusive education in mainstream schools. Perspectives from school leaders and teachers across the country about these changes and their implementation have not been captured. This research used a qualitative methodology to explore school leaders' and teachers' perspectives of inclusive education policy and practice. Participants included 22 school leaders and 57 teachers from public and private schools across the seven Emirates of the UAE. Data were collected through group and individual interviews and analysed using thematic analysis. Four themes were generated through the data: believing in the changes; worrying about preparedness; debating curricular pathways; and building a culture of inclusion. These themes reflect common challenges in the process of inclusive education. For the UAE, the specific nuances highlight a policy imperative to co‐create pathways for students with disabilities as they move through and beyond school so they can be part of the inclusive society policy intends. Implications for practice and further research are considered
Newborn Screening for Spinal Muscular Atrophy in the UK: Use of Modelling to Identify Priorities for Ongoing Evaluation
No full textSpinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a genetic condition that causes the degeneration of motor neurons in the spinal cord. Newborn blood spot (NBS) screening can potentially enable diagnosis before symptoms, and presymptomatic treatment is considered to be more effective than symptomatic treatment. In this paper, we present an overview of a cost-effectiveness model of NBS screening for SMA in the UK, informed by key clinical trials and the relevant published literature. Our analyses suggest that implementing screening could result in better outcomes and lower costs compared to the current approach of no screening plus treatment. However, several uncertainties and limitations of the model remain. These include uncertainty in the reimbursement status of nusinersen and risdiplam in the future; the 'actual' costs of treatments, as they are under confidential commercial agreements; uncertainty in the long-term effectiveness of presymptomatic and symptomatic treatment; and uncertainty around the incidence of SMA and the costs and the accuracy of NBS screening. An SMA in-service evaluation (ISE) that could capture data specific to the UK is under consideration, and an appropriately designed ISE with ongoing data collection could support periodic updates of clinical and cost-effectiveness estimates of NBS screening for SMA in the UK
Cohort Differences in Internet Use Among Older Adults: Evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA)
No full textWhile much has been written on the age-based digital divide, more understanding of the relative importance of factors affecting use of the internet is needed. This paper analyses nationally representative data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to understand older adults’ frequency of using the internet and reasons for not using it more. We examine the extent to which health, lifestyle, and sociodemographic correlate with the pronounced age gradient in not using the internet. We find that the reasons why people in the 80+ cohort did not use the internet more are not qualitatively different from the reasons people aged 50–64 or 65–79 did not use it more, but do differ between rare and regular users. We also find that of the myriad factors that are potentially relevant, only cognitive ability, educational attainment, and employment status were robustly associated with the age gradient in internet use
Advancing the concept of community positive health through participatory research in marginalized communities in Kenya
No full textThere have long been global calls to strengthen community-led and -engaged approaches in public health, but most community health interventions are still driven by governments and other external actors to reduce narrow measures of disease burden. Despite theoretical advancements in salutogenesis and positive health, these concepts remain underapplied in understanding and supporting collective health and wellbeing at the community level. This empirical qualitative study aimed to refine the concept of “community positive health” by grounding it in community perspectives and identifying the factors that shape local health and wellbeing. This participatory research engaged community health leaders and residents in marginalized communities in Kenya in expert interviews, community focus group discussions, and co-analysis in three iterative qualitative phases from 2021 to 2022. Thematic analysis guided the synthesis of community-derived insights into a definition of community positive health as a community-led salutogenic process supported by networked capabilities to provide mutual care and thrive as communities encounter changes and challenges for their health and wellbeing. Five interconnected dimensions at the intersection of resources and risk factors were identified: meeting basic needs, people-centered care, sustainable resource management, informed decision-making, and self-governance. Strengthening community positive health requires a dual focus on resources and risk factors, and, most importantly, how networked “communities of health” can be supported by formal community health structures. This approach offers a path toward reimagining health not just for communities but also with them
Playing forWellness: A Diary Study of Videogame Usage and AdolescentWellbeing
No full textAdolescence is often associated with emotional upheaval and teens
themselves value support with their emotions. HCI research on
emotion regulation has focused on lab-based interventions for those
with the greatest needs. This paper explores how adolescents use
commercially available videogames in their daily environments and
how these practices relate to emotion regulation. We conducted a
2-week diary and interview study with eleven teens asking them to
reflect on their videogame practices and emotions. We deployed a
multimodal diary to encourage authentic teen voice on factors not
typically considered in intervention studies. Our findings indicate
that teens use videogames to regulate their emotions and to recover
from stress in diverse ways. These processes are often intertwined
with adolescents’ social relationships and can be mediated through
game affordances. We argue that traditional approaches to emotion
regulation may be too individualistic to recognise or support the
social dynamics that define teens’ emotional lives
Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri-La, 1900-1969
No full textImperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri-La, 1900-1969 investigates scientific studies undertaken in British India by Robert McCarrison and Albert Howard in the 1920s, and how this research was later adapted in Britain and the USA. It examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped McCarrison’s dietary laboratory experiments and Howard’s development of the Indore Composting Process. Ashok Malhotra reveals how Indian scientists and Indian Princes contributed to the research culture in the institutes that were founded by these two British scientists, and in so doing, he draws attention to figures whose contributions have previously been overlooked by scholars. Malhotra demonstrates how McCarrison’s and Howard’s research was interpreted by British and US-based organic farming advocates to advocate for agricultural methods which returned organic matter to the soil and rejected chemical fertilisers.
It discusses how organic advocates on both sides of the Atlantic deployed the Hunzas, a community in British India (later Pakistan), as an example of a ‘tribe’ whose vigour could be ascribed to their farming techniques and diets. The narrative concludes by demonstrating how US travel writers in the 1950s and 1960s represented Hunza as a Shangri-La – a paradise whose inhabitants lived prolonged lives in blissful contentment
On Performance of FRIS-Enabled Uplink NOMA
No full textThe fluid antenna system (FAS) introduces reconfigurability in both position and geometry, offering new degrees of freedom (DoFs) for future wireless networks. Extending this concept, fluid reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (FRIS) enable each reflecting element to dynamically reposition within a local subregion while applying a tunable phase shift, providing significantly greater flexibility than conventional reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) architectures. This letter proposes an FRIS-assisted uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) multiuser communication framework that jointly maximizes the sum rate and the minimum user rate, thereby balancing throughput and fairness under quality of service (QoS) constraints. The resulting mixed-integer, non-convex optimization problems are efficiently addressed through a lightweight alternating-optimization (AO) algorithm. For fixed FRIS coefficients, a triangular feasibility test with backward recursion yields closed-form NOMA power updates, while for fixed transmit powers, a majorization-minimization (MM) step selects the top- S entries along the ascent direction and projects the optimized phases onto a b -bit unit circle. Our results confirm that the proposed FRIS-enabled uplink NOMA design significantly outperforms conventional RIS-based baselines, and reveal fundamental trade-offs among sum rate, fairness, and QoS feasibility in FRIS-assisted systems
Understanding the 2024 Summer Riots in the UK: Three Case Studies
No full textThe wave of riots in England in summer 2024 constituted the biggest wave of disorder in the country for more than a decade. These were followed by swift policy responses, based on assumptions about the events and the participants, before any detailed empirical investigation had been carried out. There is a need for detailed description of events as a solid basis for both social psychological theory and policy. This article therefore presents case studies of the disorders in Bristol, Hanley, and Tamworth, using interviews and multiple secondary sources, to understand what happened and who was involved. Our analysis suggests that it is inaccurate to see the events as ‘protests’, since they consisted of collective attacks (on asylum seekers' accommodation and on mosques). Protagonists were ethnically white but not homogeneous. At least four different parties were involved—anti-immigrant participants, police, counter-protesters, the targets of the actions (asylum seekers and Muslims), and on one occasion ‘community defenders’. We compare these events to the 2011 English riots, and we specify remaining ‘unknowns’ that future research should address. Please refer to the Supporting Information section to find this article’s community and social impact statement