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Complicated and overlapping motives : The political life and art of Cliff Rowe 1904 - 1989
Get PDFThis thesis critically reappraises the life and work of Cliff Rowe (1904–1989), an artist and Communist whose six-decade career has been largely overlooked in British art history. Best known as a founder of the Artists’ International – later the Artists’ International Association (AIA) - and a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Rowe’s career exemplifies the tensions of socially engaged art. His work reveals a constant negotiation between artistic integrity, political commitment, and historical circumstance, offering insights still relevant to debates on art and political activism. The study draws on Rowe’s journals, letters, essays, and autobiographical fragments, supplemented by oral histories, archival sources, and secondary scholarship. Acknowledging the author’s personal connection as Rowe’s son-in-law, it reflects on the ethical and methodological challenges of writing from within a family, while showing how biography can illuminate broader cultural and political forces. Rowe’s art is treated as both visual testimony and historical evidence, revealing the interplay between personal conviction, ideological discipline, and audience reception. The chapters proceed chronologically but are also thematic. Early chapters explore Rowe’s formative years, his transformative stay in the Soviet Union, and his role in establishing the Artists’ International and AIA. Subsequent chapters examine his wartime activities, his struggles with CPGB cultural policy during the Cold War, and the crises of the 1950s that forced him to reconsider his political and artistic commitments. An epilogue reflects on his later attempts to redefine socialist art outside Party orthodoxy. By situating Cliff Rowe within the context of twentieth-century British cultural politics, this study contributes to scholarship on the CPGB, the AIA, and the broader history of left-wing art, while also highlighting the contemporary significance of attempts to reconcile artistic practice with political ideals. It argues that Rowe’s career resists simple categorisation and should be understood as symptomatic of the dilemmas faced by many left-wing artists and writers during this period. Neither a straightforward Party propagandist nor an apolitical practitioner, Rowe embodied the ‘complicated and overlapping motives’ that characterised politically engaged cultural work. His persistence, despite compromises and contradictions, brings into focus the tensions between hope and disillusionment, conviction and doubt that shaped the experience of artists and intellectuals on the left. The choices he made illuminate the broader difficulty of artistic and political commitment in conditions where clear moral courses of action were not always available, and compromise was sometimes unavoidable
Designing Pervasive Display Systems for Residential Care Settings
Get PDFAs our population ages, care homes play an essential role in providing long-term support for older adults, prompting many to explore technology-based interventions to help meet these growing care needs. While much of the technology in this sector has focused on health monitoring and operational efficiency, there is increasing interest in technologies that support residents’ emotional, cognitive, and social well-being. The ubiquity of pervasive displays makes them promising candidates for a wide range of applications in care environments. However, despite widespread use in other sectors, digital signage systems have seen relatively little exploration in residential care settings. Drawing on insights gained from a long-term collaboration with a local care home and two decades of experience in managing the world’s largest research digital signage deployment, this article identifies key design considerations for signage systems in residential care settings
Measurements of differential charged-current cross sections on argon for electron neutrinos with final-state protons in MicroBooNE
Get PDFThis work presents single-differential electron-neutrino charged-current cross sections on argon measured using the MicroBooNE detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The analysis uses data recorded when the Neutrinos at the Main Injector beam was operating in both neutrino and antineutrino modes, with exposures of and protons on target, respectively. A selection algorithm targeting electron-neutrino charged-current interactions with at least one proton, one electron, and no pions in the final topology is used to measure differential cross sections as a function of outgoing electron energy, total visible energy, and opening angle between the electron and the most energetic proton. The interaction rate as a function of proton multiplicity is also reported. The total cross section is measured as [4.1 0.4 (stat.) 1.2 (syst.)]. The unfolded cross-section measurements are compared to predictions from neutrino event generators commonly employed in the field. Good agreement is seen across all variables within uncertainties
New Religions, Spiritualities, and Popular Music
No full textInterdisciplinary in its approach, this book draws on scholarship within the study of new religions, the sociology of religion, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and critical musicology. It examines the ways in which devotion to a band can lead to the establishment of a new religion and also how new religions use popular music evangelistically, ritualistically, and as a source of income. What emerges is a complex picture in which religious beliefs and popular music cultures cross-fertilize each other in unexpected and fascinating ways
A Rapid Appraisal of How Alcohol Is Screened and Treated Amongst Minoritised Ethnic Service Users Within Community Mental Health Settings
Get PDFIntroduction: Close to half of those engaged with community mental health teams (CMHT) report an alcohol or drug problem. UK public health guidance recommends that these services screen for harmful alcohol use, but reporting may be less likely amongst minoritised ethnic groups. This study aimed to explore: (i) the prevalence of screening and referrals to alcohol services within CMHTs and differences across ethnic groups; (ii) how alcohol use is assessed and treated in CMHTs, and tailored for minoritised ethnic service users; and (iii) staff and minoritised ethnic service users' experiences of assessing and reporting alcohol use. Methods: A rapid appraisal was conducted which triangulated data across patient healthcare records (aim 1), online survey (aim 2), interviews and focus groups (aim 3) with three CMHT services within an NHS Mental Health Foundation Trust in North‐West England. Data was analysed using framework analysis. Results: Both patient notes and survey data showed that alcohol was seldom assessed using formal tools. Three themes were developed reflecting differences in the barriers of reporting and assessing alcohol use for minoritised ethnic service users and staff. With barriers for the former including information sharing and barriers for the latter including protecting the therapeutic relationship. Discussion and Conclusions: Triangulating data from across different sources highlights the complex challenges that services face in meeting the recommendations around alcohol screening in CMH services. Our findings have implications on the need for staff in mental health services to better understand and accommodate the needs of minoritised ethnic service users who may have co‐occurring alcohol and mental health problems
Using Emotions to Help Detect Fake Tourism Reviews
Get PDFDetecting fake reviews has emerged as a urgent critical challenge in NLP, with significant implications for practical applications across various industries. In the tourism sector, fake reviews pose a serious threat by misleading potential customers, damaging the credibility of genuine businesses, and eroding trust in online platforms. The ability to effectively identify and handle deceptive content is essential for safeguarding tourism consumers and maintaining the integrity of related review platforms. While the NLP community has made notable advancements in fake tourism reviews detection, there remains limited understanding of how emotion information can be leveraged to enhance the detection of tourism fake reviews. This research fills this gap by exploring the integration of emotional information into LLM-based approaches for tourism fake review detection. Specifically, the study evaluates the performance of three prominent large language models (LLMs), including BERT, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa on a tourism-specific dataset, named GeFaRe, both with and without the inclusion of emotion-based information. The dataset used in this research was annotated with emotional labels derived from Plutchik’s eight primary emotions, allowing for the incorporation of rich emotional information into the fake reviews classification process. Various experimental configurations were designed to assess the impact of emotional information on the performance of each of the models. My study provides compelling evidence of the value of integrating emotion information into LLM-based fake tourism review detection models. Across all of my configurations, the inclusion of emotional information led to an improvement of most models’ performance, with DistilBERT achieving the highest levels of accuracy up to 0.956. This underscores the potential of emotional information as key information in the context of fake tourism review detection. Furthermore, my findings highlight the importance fine-tuning the LLMs for domain-specific datasets for emotion and fake tourism reviews detection
Realising the Educational Potential of Mass Higher Education
No full textThis open access book addresses the current disillusionment with mass higher education and argues that it is based on a profound misunderstanding of its educational potential. The authors analyse a seven-year longitudinal research project that tracked participants who studied chemistry or chemical engineering from their first year of university until up to three years after they graduated. Drawing on over 700 interviews with students/graduates from two English, two South African and two American universities, the book explores the educational intentions of their degree programmes, what participants wanted to get out of going to university and studying for a degree, how their views of knowledge and the world changed, and what they felt they had gained from going to university. The book argues that the educational potential of higher education lies, not in graduate salaries or employability, but in the ways in which engaging with structured bodies of knowledge changes students' understanding of the world and what they can do in it. The authors consider the implications of this argument for how the educational role of higher education is understood by students, graduates, universities, and policymakers and how this understanding might be drawn upon to counter the damaging disillusionment with mass higher education that appears to be growing in many countries
Comparative Outcomes of Percutaneous Needle Tenotomy Performed by a Podiatrist Versus an Orthopaedic Surgeon in the Management of Toe Ulcers
Get PDFBackground: Foot ulceration is a debilitating and often disabling complication of diabetes mellitus, with negative prognostic associations in terms of morbidity and mortality. Percutaneous needle tenotomy (PNT) is increasingly recognized as a safe, minimally invasive procedure for treating tendon‐related deformities, including mechanical forefoot ulceration. This study evaluated clinical outcomes of needle flexor tenotomies performed by a podiatrist versus an orthopaedic surgeon. Methods: This service evaluation reviewed consecutive adult patients with foot ulceration who received needle tenotomy by a senior podiatrist, excluding those who underwent alternative procedures/amputation. Orthopaedic surgeon conducted tenotomy was the comparison group. Results: Podiatrist: 30 patients underwent needle tenotomy (total—31 feet) (23 patients had diabetes). Orthopaedic surgeon: 10 patients underwent needle tenotomy (total—12 feet). Median age was 71.5 years (range: 39.0–92.0), with 8 males/2 females. (8 patients had diabetes). The podiatrist‐led group was older and had higher HbA1c, greater proportion of smokers, larger ulcer size and longer ulcer duration pre‐intervention (median 54 vs. 20 weeks and p = 0.002) than the orthopaedic surgeon–led group. Despite these differences in disease severity, time to ulcer resolution (median 4.7 vs. 2 weeks, p = 0.119) and the rate of complete healing (86.7% vs. 100% and p = 0.556) did not differ significantly between groups. Conclusion: The lowest cost of the minor surgical foot procedure as a day case = £554 (€662) with this cost at least halved by conducting the procedure in a podiatry clinic. In conclusion, podiatrist‐led percutaneous needle tenotomy is a safe and effective intervention for foot ulcers, achieving healing outcomes comparable to an orthopaedic surgeon. We hope that the procedure can be adopted more widely
Extending Gaze and Pinch with Thumb-to-Finger Microgestures for Cross-Context Interaction
Get PDFGaze+Pinch is a simple and effective model for XR interaction, using gaze for pointing and pinch for selection. Yet, for many tasks, its expressivity is lacking. To address this problem, we extend the pinch gesture with additional thumb to finger microgestures to leverage the expressivity afforded by the hand. Rather than designing a gesture set that tackles an individual problem, this project’s approach is to design a system-level gesture set that maps gestures to application-specific functionality, depending on the application in focus. Utilising a system-level gesture set aims to provide interactions that are learnable and discoverable across diverse contexts, while application-specific mappings aim to provide task-specific utility, while leaving the original Gaze+Pinch interaction untouched. To support users across contexts changes, we employed two established desktop metaphors that describe how gestures will behave across contexts (the buttons and scroll wheel of a mouse, and function-key shortcuts on a keyboard). In a 16 participant user study across two practical tasks (travel planning and spreadsheeting), we compared Gaze+Pinch against Gaze+Microgestures (a condition which restricted participants to the extended gesture set) and Combined (where participants were able to freely choose between Gaze+Pinch and Gaze+Microgesture interactions). Results from the study revealed the viability of our approach, with the Combined offering the fastest, most preferred, and most satisfying performance. Participants engaged with the extended gesture set in the combined condition, but preference fell when restricted to the additional gestures in Gaze+Microgestures. This, in conjunction with qualitative feedback, underscores the importance of user agency and customisability, especially for gestural input, where differences in hand dimensions, finger dexterity, and personality can result in significant impacts on user experience. These findings demonstrate that optional microgestures can enhance expressivity without compromising the usability of the original interaction, pointing towards a design strategy that enables more expressive and flexible gaze-based input systems
Supporting Holistic AI Ethics Literacy Education Through Critical Reflection : Three Recommendations for Fostering Children’s Ethical Growth
No full textWith childhood increasingly mediated by AI and marked by children’s heightened vulnerabilities, critical reflection emerges as a vital tool for both understanding and strengthening children’s ethical reasoning, steering them between uncritical adoption and blanket pessimism about AI. As such, we present outcomes of a study with 66 children (aged 10-11) wherein we trace what children attend to and how they perceive AI ethics. Aligned with UNESCO’s ethical principles for AI, we utilised 10 design fiction scenarios set in familiar contexts to prompt reflection. Mixed-methods data showed that children’s perceptions skewed towards caution; ethical concerns were also distributed unevenly across principles, indicating where AI ethics literacy may need targeted scaffolding. This work contributes to HCI by highlighting the complexity of children’s perceptions and showing how speculative, reflection-based methods can shift children’s ethical considerations about AI, with three recommendations for AI ethics literacy education that the HCI community should consider in future