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Does love at first sight actually exist?
No full textThis is a Psychology Subject Spotlight with Dr Joseph Adonu from the University of Bedfordshire. An interactive, cinematic course taster experience to allow students to gain insights into what it's like to study Psychology
Reporting the impact of public and patient involvement in midwife-led care study on reproductive age group women in India
No full textInterviewing mothers and daughters: reflecting on the role of the ‘insider’
Get PDFHaving arrived in the UK as a five-year-old immigrant child, and vividly remembering those early days when everything for me was very different and alienating, formed one of the inspirations for my study on the influence of immigration on families. The influence of my mother, the person central to my care and upbringing, was the core reason for my study on immigrant South Asian families and the way that mother and daughter roles evolve. Mothers are often key role models, as well as being a critical source of support and reassurance, for their children. The vastly differing experiences of my mother, an eighty-four-year-old first-generation immigrant, compared to my third-generation nineteen-year-old daughter, as well as my own intermediary position as both second-generation mother, and daughter, led me to reflect on how the categories and expectations of immigrant South Asian motherhood and daughterhood have shifted over this tripartite generational evolution. My research question attempts to explore the changes in the experiences and lives of mothers and daughters from South Asia over three generations. I have conducted the first set of interviews for my study. I will discuss reflections from these interviews, specifically examining my role as an ‘insider’. This reflection has allowed me to identify the benefits of an insider role in qualitative research interviews and how the lived experience of an insider can be a useful method for oral history interviews
River Project, an innovative way to reduce pollution on riverboats
Get PDFConsidering the EU environmental standards for non-road mobile machinery (NRMM), reducing pollutant emissions from inland waterway vessels is becoming increasingly important. The RIVER research project aims to find solutions to achieve nitrogen-free combustion in waterways transportation systems while also emitting zero CO2 emission. RIVER addresses these issues using Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology and Oxy-fuel combustion (OFC). The project is co-financed by the European Union, as part of the Interreg North-West Europe program. There are ten partners involved in this project (FR, UK, GE, NL, LU). In OFC technology, pure oxygen is used instead of air. Due to the absence of N2 in the intake charge, NOx emissions will be eliminated. Consequently, the only products of combustion are CO2 and water vapor. To have a stable combustion process and avoid overheating problems caused by using pure oxygen, some part of the exhaust CO2 will be recirculated to the engine to create an oxygen-CO2 mixture for being fed into the engine. A detailed CFD simulation carried out in this project has revealed that 21% oxygen and 79% carbon dioxide is the ideal mixture for the engine to run at maximum efficiency. The remaining CO2 from the exhaust is collected. It is then condensed, compressed, and stored in a tank to be valorized later. It will be transformed into cosmetics, skincare products, and formic acid. These types of acids are used by the medical sector as an anti-rheumatic product. River's final demonstration will take place in Crewe, UK in July 2022
Enhancing uptake of antenatal care in an ethnically diverse socio-economically deprived area in the UK: from evidence to reality
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Effect of Ajwa date pits powder (Phoenix dactylifera L.) on body composition, lipid profile and blood pressure in patients with hyperlipidemia: a randomized clinical trial
Get PDFObjective: To evaluate the effect of Ajwa dates pit powder (ADP) on lipid profile, body composition and blood pressure in patients with hyperlipidemia. Materials and Methods: This randomized controlled clinical study was carried out on 40 patients with total cholesterol >200 mg/dl, triglycerides >150 mg/dl and BMI >25, of either sex, aged 30-50 years, who were recruited through written consent. The patients were divided into two groups (n=20 each): the ADP and the control group (CG). All patients received the doctor’s prescribed class A statin (Rosuvastatin/ Atorvastatin) 10 mg/day, while 2.7 g ADP was given on daily basis before breakfast with lukewarm water for 40 days and the control group received the same amount of wheat flour. Body composition, blood pressure and lipid profile were determined at baseline, and after 20 and 40 days. Data were analyzed by using SPSS and GraphPad Prism. Results: ADP significantly reduced body weight (p<0.001), BMI (p<0.001), fat mass, body fat percentage, visceral fat area and waist circumference compared to the control group. Similarly, ADP significantly (p=0.000) decreased the serum level of total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein. Conclusion: ADP may have the potential to improve dyslipidemia and obesity
Non-verbal communication and context: multi-modality in interaction
No full textTraditionally, the study of linguistics has focussed on verbal communication. In the sense that linguistics is the scientific study of language, the approach is perfectly justified. Those working in the sub-discipline of linguistic pragmatics, however, are faced with something of a dilemma. The aim of a pragmatic theory is to explain how utterances are understood, and utterances, of course, have both linguistic and non-linguistic properties. As well as this, current work in pragmatics emphasizes that the affective dimension of a speaker’s meaning is at least as important as the cognitive one and it is often the non-linguistic properties of utterances that convey information relating to this dimension. This paper highlights the major role of non-verbal ‘modes’ of communication (‘multi-modality’) in accounting for how meaning is achieved and explores in particular how the quasi-musical contours we impose on the words we say, as well as the movements of our face and hands that accompany speech, constrain the context and guide the hearer to our intended meaning. We build on previous exploration of the relevance of prosody (Wilson and Wharton 2006) and, crucially, looks at prosody in relation to other non-verbal communicative behaviours from the perspective of relevance theory. In-so-doing, we also hope to shed light on the role of multimodality in both context construction and utterance interpretation and suggest prosody needs to be analysed as one tool in a set of broader gestural ones (Bolinger 1983). Relevance theory is an inferential model, in which human communication revolves around the expression and recognition of the speaker’s intentions in the performance of an ostensive stimulus: an act accompanied by the appropriate combination of intentions. This inferential model is proposed as a replacement for the traditional code-model of communication, according to which a speaker simply encodes into a signal the thought they wish to communicate and the hearer retrieves their meaning by decoding the signal they have provided. We will argue that much existing work on multimodality remains rooted in a code model and show how adopting an inferential model enables us to integrate multimodal behaviours more completely within a theory of utterance interpretation. As ostensive stimuli, utterances are composites of a range of different behaviours, each working together to form a range of contextual cues
Quaternion quasi-Chebyshev non-local means for color image denoising
Get PDFQuaternion non-local means (QNLM) denoising algorithm makes full use of high degree self-similarities inside images to suppress the noise, so the similarity metric plays a key role in its denoising performance. In this study, two improvements have been made for the QNLM: 1) For low level noise, the use of quaternion quasi-Chebyshev distance is proposed to measure the similarity of image patches and it has been used to replace the Euclidean distance in the QNLM algorithm. Since the quasi-Chebyshev distance measures the maximal distance in all color channels, the similarity of color images measured by quasi-Chebyshev distance can capture the structural similarity uniformly for each color channel; 2) For high level noise, quaternion bilateral filtering has been proposed as the preprocessing step in the QNLM algorithm. Denoising simulations were performed on 110 images of landscape, people, and architecture at different noise levels. Compared with QNLM, quaternion non-local total variation (QNLTV), and non-local means (NLM) variants (NLTV, NLM after wavelet threshold preprocessing, and the color adaptation of NLM), our novel algorithm not only improved PSNR/SSIM (peak signal to noise rate/structural similarity) and figure of merit values by an average of 2.77 dB/8.96% and 0.0491 respectively, but also reduced processing time
Device-measured change in physical activity in primary school children during the UK COVID-19 pandemic lockdown: a longitudinal study
Get PDFBackground: Lockdown measures, including school closures, due to the COVID-19 pandemic have caused widespread disruption to children’s lives. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of a national lockdown on children’s physical activity using seasonally matched accelerometry data. Methods: Using a pre/post observational design, 179 children aged 8 to 11 years provided physical activity data measured using hip-worn triaxial accelerometers worn for 5 consecutive days prepandemic and during the January to March 2021 lockdown. Multilevel regression analyses adjusted for covariates were used to assess the impact of lockdown on time spent in sedentary and moderate to vigorous physical activity. Results: A 10.8-minute reduction in daily time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity (standard error: 2.3 min/d, P < .001) and a 33.2-minute increase in daily sedentary activity (standard error: 5.5 min/d, P < .001) were observed during lockdown. This reflected a reduction in daily moderate to vigorous physical activity for those unable to attend school (−13.1 [2.3] min/d, P < .001) during lockdown, with no significant change for those who continued to attend school (0.4 [4.0] min/d, P < .925). Conclusion: These findings suggest that the loss of in-person schooling was the single largest impact on physical activity in this cohort of primary school children in London, Luton, and Dunstable, United Kingdom
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