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Supporting families and building relationships: Evaluation of a home and sleep safety equipment scheme for impoverished communities
No full textObjectivesSleep safety and home safety resources allow families to care for babies and young children, preventing injuries and child death, adverse outcomes that are strongly linked to poverty and social deprivation. Parenthood involves unexpected costs and greater levels of unmet need for safety resources occur in low-income families. We evaluate a local authority scheme which enabled professionals in County Durham to apply for necessary safety equipment on behalf of eligible families.Study designA holistic review of the first year of the operation of the Start For Life Fund (SFLF) scheme.MethodsA mixed method approach was used comprising: 1) a descriptive analysis of the application data submitted by professionals; 2) an online survey to capture the views and experiences of staff who had and had not used the scheme; 3) semi structured interviews with staff applicants and recipient families.Results679 families (988 children) were supported during the first operational year, average cost £407 per family (£280/child). Three-quarters of children (72.3 %) were under three; over a third (35.7 %) were pre-birth to 1-year. Staff from seven services and over 20 job roles made applications for families with financial, relationship, housing, domestic violence, and disability-related needs, most from areas with high deprivation scores. 256 staff across 8 service areas submitted survey responses, 39 % of whom had used the scheme which was viewed extremely positively. Interviews with 13 staff and 7 families evidenced how children, families and practitioners benefitted. Recipients reported reduced stress and anxiety about child safety and increased parental confidence.ConclusionsBy providing families with the sleep and home safety equipment they can't afford the SFLF gives parents the opportunity to change behaviours and reduce the risk to babies and children from unintentional injury and death. It helps to improve working relationships between practitioners and families, reduces parental experiences of anxiety, and risk to staff of moral injury. Taking steps to reduce unexpected infant death and child unintentional injury is crucial for families in absolute and relative poverty. Other local authorities could emulate this scheme
Understanding monsoon rainfall impacts on roadside slopes: a pathway to resilient transport infrastructures
Get PDFThe complex geological formations and rugged topography of mountainous regions, such as Nepal, present significant challenges for road construction. These construction challenges are exacerbated by the intense annual monsoon season, which triggers extensive landslides. Existing road excavation guidelines often fail to account for the impacts of heavy rainfall on slope stability and road design. In many hilly areas of Nepal, road construction involves hillside excavation without adequate slope stability investigation and analysis, often neglecting geotechnical properties. This haphazard approach further increases landslide susceptibility along road corridors, posing severe risks to infrastructure, settlements, agriculture, and economic connectivity. This study investigates the influence of monsoon rainfall on excavated hillside road slopes with varying soil types, topographies, and excavation scenarios. Seepage analyses were performed under realistic rainfall conditions, followed by detailed slope stability evaluations. The findings highlight that soil permeability and rainfall intensity play pivotal roles in slope instability. Shallower cut slopes experienced significant reductions in their Factor of Safety (FoS) due to rainfall infiltration. Coarse-grained soils exhibited the most substantial FoS reductions, reaching up to 70.08%. In contrast, coarse-grained soils with plastic fines experienced reductions up to 38.6%, and those with non-plastic fines saw reductions up to 46.2%. Silts, low plasticity clays, and high plasticity clays displayed lower reductions of up to 40.58%, 40.65%, and 42.7% respectively, highlighting soil-specific vulnerability to rainfall. Additionally, coarse-grained soils with plastic fines exhibited higher stability compared to those with non-plastic fines, primarily due to matric suction and enhanced cohesiveness, which contribute to additional stability. This study advances current knowledge by integrating critical factors of soil plasticity, matric suction, and permeability into slope stability analyses under monsoon conditions, offering practical guidelines for resilient road construction in Nepal’s Himalayan terrain. These results emphasize the importance of incorporating these factors into road excavation and slope design to effectively mitigate landslide risks and support sustainable transport infrastructure
FaultSpy: On the Insecurity of SPDM Protocols under Fault Injection
No full textThe Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) establishes device-level trust in hardware platforms through authentication, attestation, and secure session establishment. While prior research has focused on formal analyses and deployment considerations, the impact of implementation-level vulnerabilities, particularly under active physical adversaries, remains largely underexplored. This work presents FaultSpy, the first systematic framework for evaluating SPDM against Fault Injection Attacks (FIAs) and their combination with other prominent attack vectors, such as Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks. Leveraging the fault injection simulation tool, FaultFinder, with our custom SPDM-specific hooks, we uncover nine concrete vulnerabilities spanning both threat models. These include bypassing mutual authentication, suppressing signature generation and verification, downgrading negotiated capabilities, skipping mandatory protocol steps, manipulating key update behavior, transmitting messages intended to be encrypted in plaintext, and extracting session keys. We further validate the feasibility of these attacks through practical voltage glitching experiments on an RP2350 microcontroller. Our findings demonstrate that FIAs-whether in isolation or combined with other attacks-significantly expand the SPDM attack surface, highlighting the need for robust implementation-level countermeasures
Bethe ridge electron Compton spectroscopy
Get PDFCompton spectroscopy measures J(pz), the number density of occupied electronic states with momentum component pz. In a transmission electron microscope (TEM) Compton spectroscopy is performed by acquiring a momentum resolved, dark-field electron energy loss spectrum (EELS). Here it is shown that the Bethe ridge in a single energy filtered diffraction pattern can provide identical J(pz) information. The energy filtered TEM (EFTEM) approach is more dose efficient, since all (projected) momenta pz are recorded in parallel. For weakly diffracting specimens, the J(pz) profiles extracted using EFTEM are in reasonable agreement with dark-field EELS. Bragg diffraction and thermal diffuse scattering are known to introduce artefacts in Compton spectroscopy, and this is true for the EFTEM method as well. The artefacts can however be mitigated by analysing suitably thin specimens
Projections of 21st Century sea-level fall along coastal Greenland
No full textThe Greenland Ice Sheet will significantly contribute to global mean sea-level rise this century. However, glacial isostatic adjustment is expected to cause regional sea-level fall around Greenland as the land rebounds and the gravitational pull of the shrinking ice sheet decreases. A fall in local sea level has implications for Greenlandic communities whose economy, near-shore infrastructure, and food security are vulnerable to coastal changes, and for the dynamics of marine-terminating glaciers. In this study, we use a glacial isostatic model paired with sea-level and vertical land motion observations to predict future sea-level change in this region. We find that local sea level will fall around the island by 2100 CE (relative to 2017 CE) reaching a median value and likely range (17th-83rd percentile) of − 0.9 m [ − 1.2 m to − 0.66 m] and − 2.5 m [ − 3.8 m to − 1.7 m] for Representative Concentration Pathways 2.6 and 8.5, respectively, with viscous effects contributing 20–40% of the predicted local sea-level signal associated with future ice change
Evaluation of the National Creativity Collaboratives Pilot Programme: Full Research Report
No full textFeelings without Emotion: rethinking male friendship and the value of personal reticence
No full textIn various Euro-American contexts, commentators have highlighted how emotional reticence inhibits men's ability to understand themselves and connect with others. More generally, public discourses of affective expressivity often present curtailed emotion as a form of “repression.” Through an ethnographic account of male railway enthusiasts, this paper explores the nature of friendships that are explicitly marked by the absence of personal disclosure. Building on anthropological literatures on friendship and affect, I highlight forms of connection that emerge in the absence of talk of this kind, and the feelings that are shared, even when unmarked by words. Accounts of unarticulated intimacy, in Western contexts and beyond, have largely treated this as an incidental or unmarked quality of relations that work in alternative registers, for instance, through shared tasks and banter. By contrast, through showing how emotional reticence emerges as an actively engendered ideology in explicit opposition to the norms of affective expressivity, I foreground the specific forms of intimacy and care that emerge through this awareness. My argument is not simply that feelings arise in the absence of explicated emotion, but that these sentiments are actively shaped by this awareness of absence
TRACE: Temporally Reliable Anatomically-Conditioned 3D CT Generation with Enhanced Efficiency
No full text3D medical image generation is essential for data augmentation and patient privacy, calling for reliable and efficient models suited for clinical practice. However, current methods suffer from limited anatomical fidelity, restricted axial length, and substantial computational cost, placing them beyond reach for regions with limited resources and infrastructure. We introduce TRACE, a framework that generates 3D medical images with spatiotemporal alignment using a 2D multimodal-conditioned diffusion approach. TRACE models sequential 2D slices as video frame pairs, combining segmentation priors and radiology reports for anatomical alignment, incorporating optical flow to sustain temporal coherence. During inference, an overlapping-frame strategy links frame pairs into a flexible length sequence, reconstructed into a spatiotemporally and anatomically aligned 3D volume. Experimental results demonstrate that TRACE effectively balances computational efficiency with preserving anatomical fidelity and spatiotemporal consistency. Code is available at: https://github.com/VinyehShaw/TRAC
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