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NIME: A Mis-user’s manual
No full textEver since the initiating workshop at the 2001 ACM CHI'01 Conference, annual New Interfaces for Musical Expression conferences have seen a proliferation of work featuring different forms of music, research values, philosophical, ethical and political standpoints. The 2025 ‘Entangled’ theme celebrates this diversity of creative, technical, and social ‘intelligencings’ (Thrift [68, p153-154]). It is precisely the non- or pluri-paradigmatic character of NIME that is its strength. Drawing on Maria Lugones [41], we characterise NIME less as an entangled weave—where threads maintain their separate yet assembled and interconnected character—than as a ‘curdling’ where relationships are more complex, varied, mutually interrupting and shaping, indeterminate and unknown without careful dialogue. We do not consider it appropriate to offer unifying frameworks or mappings with often hidden authoritarian implications. Rather, following Rancière [5], we prefer a radically democratic dissensus and, following Lugones, a spirit of ‘festive resistance’ where we poke at the limits of our inherited metaphors to undermine attempts to provide a fixed orderliness, (re)framing topics to kickstart exchange on new fertile grounds for collaboration. Multiple kinds and collisions of agency, and the lively openness of what some might deem ‘failure’ are prioritised over the often inhibiting closure and certainty of ‘success’ [e.g. 10, 11, 12, 40]. Our topics include: multiple ways of making as a means of maximising exposure to possible failure; shifting from interfaces to interfacing to create arenas for action rather than tools for purposes; foregrounding risk, inefficiency and forgetting; formulating improvisation as knowing-when and composing-the-now; performance practice, settings and contingencies; alternative resourcings/reframings for research; a wild spirit of tactical oppositionalism, dynamic uncompromise, and existential pluralism, to embrace the independence of divergent voices.<br/
Channelopathies in children in Northern Ireland 2005–2023: a national cohort study identified primarily via cascade screening
No full textBackgroundThe inherited cardiac channelopathies are a diverse range of conditions caused by genetic variants that predispose carriers to arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death (SCD). Examples include Congenital Long QTc (LQTS), Brugada syndrome (BrS), and Catecholaminergic Polymorphic Ventricular Tachycardia (CPVT).ObjectiveIn the Northern Ireland pediatric population, served by one inherited cardiac conditions clinic (ICCC), we describe the national prevalence and incidence of the channelopathies, clinical outcomes, adverse events, medication usage, medication adherence, and genetic data obtained.MethodsRetrospective chart review using the local pediatric cardiology database.Results216 children (Aged 0–18) were diagnosed with a channelopathy between 2005 and 2023 at the ICCC; 190 were diagnosed with LQTS (116 KCNQ1, 36 KCNH2, 11 SCN5A, 19 KCNE1, 3 patients with variants in two genes, 1 compound heterozygote for KCNE1 and 4 genotype negative), 22 with BrS and 4 with CPVT. Most cases were diagnosed via screening (95 %). There were five documented SCDs during this time, all patients unknown to the ICCC, who were diagnosed with channelopathies on molecular autopsy (2 CPVT, 2 BrS, 1 LQTS). One KCNH2 patient underwent implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) insertion. In the LQTS cohort, the majority had a variant identified (97 %). Twenty-two variants were identified in KCNQ1 patients, fourteen in KCNH2, two in SCN5A, and seven in KCNE1. As would be expected, phenotype heterogeneity was noted between and within variants. Adherence with medication varied between 70 and 90 %.ConclusionsIn general, children with channelopathies in Northern Ireland (NI) are diagnosed via family screening, commenced on appropriate pharmacotherapy, and adverse events are rare. The genetic profile is broadly similar to that reported worldwide. Unfortunately, there remains a cohort of patients who are only identified at molecular autopsy.<br/
Morphogenic shape grammars for the design of engineering structures
No full textBodies of multicellular organisms are laid out according to morphogens: chemical agents which establish a coordinate system in the early embryo and use this to decide where body parts should grow. This process offers a mechanism for the automation of the design of engineering constructs via evolutionary search in a similar manner to the way biological evolution has driven the diversity of body forms of life on Earth. There are many ways of encoding such body plans, but the main existing approaches have problems around managing the complexity and stability of the evolutionary search process, particularly when applied to practical engineering design problems. This contribution takes the notion of morphogen chemical gradients and uses it to develop a novel grammar for shape formation. The central idea is to organise and label the spatial sub-regions of a design before making decisions regarding the finished arrangement of structure. This makes it much simpler to explore compositions of the hierarchy of sub-assemblies in a design, and to represent design of shape in an evolvable manner. A worked example of such a morphogenic shape grammar is described, and used in a multi-objective evolutionary search for optimal bridge truss structures over four fitness objectives with two design constraints. The resulting Pareto front shows a wide variety of bridge designs, demonstrating the power of this approach to generate a diverse set of viable options to meet engineering design challenges.</p
Narratives of justice: the relationship between the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council
No full textThe critical-forensic linguistic interface and the spectrum of trial by media: media-made sexual assault in the courtroom
No full textMuch scholarly work in trial by media addresses the role of the media in holding society to account without as well as within the legal system and also analyses the potential part played by the press in courtroom proceedings of high-profile trials. Whilst acknowledging the multiple roles played by the media in trials with a large public profile such as those that feature elsewhere in this collection, the critical-forensic linguistic interface (Statham, Redefining trial by media. John Benjamins, 2016) argues that the media also operates in a routine way in trials that are not necessarily high-profile and that could themselves be described as routine. Focusing on trials by jury in common law jurisdictions, this critical-forensic linguistic interface draws on models of analysis from forensic, critical and cognitive linguistics to construct the Spectrum of Trial by Media. Comprised of three interrelated dimensions—direct, enhanced and reinforced trial by media—this model offers a framework to analyse the influence of the media on courtroom jurors and legal professionals at trial. Focusing on the crime of sexual assault, this chapter will outline and demonstrate the critical-forensic linguistic interface, setting out the three sections of the Spectrum and examining the role played by the ideological media discourse construction of sexual assault in the strategies of defence attorneys in sexual assault trials
Performance characterization of continuous reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
No full textWe consider a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) that can implement a phase rotation continuously over the whole surface rather than via a finite number of discrete elements. Such an RIS can be considered a design for future systems where advances in metamaterials make such an implementation feasible or as the limiting case where the number of elements in a traditional RIS increases in a given area. We derive the optimal RIS design for the single-user (SU) scenario assuming a line-ofsight (LoS) from the RIS to the base station (BS) and correlated Rayleigh fading for the other links. We also derive the associated optimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and its mean, a bound on the mean spectral efficiency (SE), an approximation to the SNR outage probability and an approximation to the coefficient of variation for the investigation of channel hardening
Economic burden of cardiovascular disease in the United Kingdom
No full textBackground and aimsDirect (medical and non-medical) and indirect (production losses and informal care) costs of cardiovascular disease (CVD) have been captured in two previous United Kingdom (UK) cost-of-illness studies, but the areas of long-term care and medical device costs were neglected. We aimed to quantify the economic burden of CVD in the UK from a societal perspective between fiscal years 2019/20 to 2021/22.MethodsMixed-methods study in a prevalence-based retrospective review of economic costs focused on the public sector. Top-down costing was applied to the following areas: inpatient hospital care, outpatient specialist care, emergency care, primary care, medications, medical devices, long-term care, production losses to morbidity, and production losses to mortality. Bottom-up costing was used by applying the marginal effects of having a cardiovascular disease on several parameters using survey data from the Survey on Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe to estimate informal care costs.ResultsThe modelling performed shows that the total costs of CVD in the UK in 2021/22 were £29.021 billion (bn), with direct costs of £16.620 bn and indirect costs of £12.402 bn. The breakdown of direct costs for the UK were inpatient care (£6.732 bn), long-term care (£4.649 bn), medications (£1.940 bn), primary care (£1.556 bn), outpatient care (£1.011 bn), emergency care (£327.6 million (mn)), and medical devices (£404.4 mn). The breakdown of indirect costs for the UK were informal care costs (£6.377 bn), production losses to mortality (£4.544 bn), and production losses to morbidity (£1.481 bn).ConclusionThere is a significant economic burden of CVD in the UK, with the highest direct cost resulting from inpatient care and the highest indirect cost resulting from informal care
Multi-target localization and association in cell-free massive MIMO for multi-static ISAC
No full textThis paper investigates the problem of localizing and associating multiple targets in an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system that employs a multi-static cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF−mMIMO) architecture. In this system, a large area is covered by a number of distributed access points (APs). The problem of simultaneously detecting and locating multiple targets is considered to be crucial and challenging, particularly in order to avoid interference in the communications functionalities. By using the virtual channel representation of both the sensing and communication channels and the angular estimation method, e.g., estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT), we can first accurately identify specific angular directions from unidentified targets to each receiving (Rx)-AP. Then, we transform the association problem into a clustering problem. We propose a low-complexity approach based on the clustering algorithm to solve this association problem. The proposed method yields robust communication performance while simultaneously achieving outstanding association and localization performance