82 research outputs found
Policy-making for creative industries in China: A case study of design policy
No full textPublished online: 27 Jun 2024.Conversation between Dr Weining Ning (Brunel University London) and Dr Sylvia Xihui Liu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University). Dr Weining Ning is the co-lead of the Policy Working Group of the SEED Fellowship project. Brunel University London.Design is recognized as a critical driving force of economic growth in China, shaped by its distinct political, economic and cultural history. However, documentation on Chinese design policies remains scarce. In this conversation, Dr Sylvia Xihui Liu, a distinguished researcher in design policy and design management from China, shares her invaluable experiences in influencing the development of China’s national design innovation policies. She also discusses the tangible impact these policies have on design practitioners within the country and offers her perspectives on the differences between the United Kingdom and China in crafting creative policies.This study was supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC SEED Fellowship (Award AH/Y000722/1)
Evaluating Assistive Product With Designers: How To Understand And Address User Stigma Around Visible And Invisible Disability
No full textAt the DRS conversation held on June 24, 2024, in Boston, researchers from
Brunel University engaged in a discourse with ten audience members from diverse
global backgrounds on the issue of user stigma in assistive product design. The purpose of this conversation was to delve into the potential challenges faced by disabled users when utilizing assistive products and to propose innovative design strategies aimed at eliminating stigma, fostering social inclusion, enhancing understanding of people with disabilities, and ultimately promoting the construction of a more barrier-free and equitable living environment. Through this discussion, participants gained a deeper understanding of the concept of disability and how design can effectively intervene to mitigate the associated stigma
Understanding stigma through camera-based mobile apps: studies on visually impaired users
No full textAcknowledgements:
We want to express our sincere gratitude to the DASH charity organisation in London for their invaluable support in participant recruitment and for providing the venue for the workshops. We also thank all the visually impaired participants, staff, and volunteers who generously shared their time and experiences with us.This study used multiple methods to investigate the stigma experienced by visually impaired people (VIP) when using a camera-based assistive mobile application. Initial investigations, including semi-structured interviews with VIP and a formalised expert conversation with academics and designers, highlighted the role of design and cooperation in mitigating stigma issues. The semi-structured interviews, formalised expert conversation, and co-design workshop were conducted to explore further the multifaceted nature of stigma and its impact on technology use. The findings reveal the complexity of stigma and its effects on the attitudes and abilities of VIP to use technology. Four key themes were identified as the design considerations, namely i) prioritising user autonomy, ii) fostering trust in communication, iii) designing for daily tasks, and iv) involving users in the design process. The developed design guidelines as a result of the study provide references for creating smart assistive mobile apps.DASH charity organisation
Optimizing queries for coarse grain parallelism
No full textWe consider the problem of optimizing select-project-join relational queries for minimum response time on parallel machines. The design of the optimizer is based on three ideas: (1) the concept and quantification of degree of coarse grain parallelism for an execution tree, (2) the design of a parallelizing scheduler for a tree of coarse grain operations which is provably near optimal, and (3) the analysis of the scheduling algorithm to obtain a cost formula for parallel execution time. The search algorithm of the optimizer is presented as a multi-dimensional dynamic programming algorithm. We present two three- dimensional search algorithms for the case when placement of relations in the parallel machine do not overlap. We propose the tree placement strategy and demonstrate, by means of examples, how the number of dimensions in the search can be significantly reduced, thereby increasing the efficiency of the search algorithm.Technical report lcsr-tr-21
Towards designing inclusion: insights from a user data collection study in China
No full textUserdatahasbeenidentifiedasoneoftheimportantknowledge basesfor
inclusive design. In order to explore the influential factors that may affect the
reliability of data and then build up a more effective and efficient data-collection
framework,wecarriedoutanexperimentalstudy tocollectdata fromolderpeople
(aged 50~70) in China, which included users’ capability, psychological and socialcultural attributes. Users’ actual product interaction performance was also
investigated.Threeissueswerediscussedbasedontheoutcome ofdataanalyses:a)
mood states have significant effects on respondent’s self-reporting results; b)
compared withmaximumsettings,peoplemayhaveawider rangeofperceptionsof
“comfortable” settings and it is possible to predict the performance in a
“comfortable” settingbasedon“maximum” data; c)social-cultural variables,vision,
hearing,dexterity,cognitionandpsychologicalcharacteristics canpredictsuccessful
product interaction tasks at different levels by using multiple logistic regression
analysis
NAIRU estimation of 28 EU-member states
No full textThe non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is an unemployment rate or range of unemployment rates that produces a stable rate of inflation. NAIRU is usually difficult to estimate since it is a hidden variable. In this thesis, the author allows time-varying NAIRU, and uses a structural model with forward and backward looking Phillips curves to estimate the output gap and unemployment gap. The author finds that in general, the negative relations between unemployment gap and inflation rate are significant across EU-member states. This method of capturing the relationship between unemployment and inflation is better than that of King and Watson’s, implied by the indicators of Pearson’s correlations, and also because of the potential ability of using our method to predict near future inflation rate
Creative industries research and innovation: Views from the United Kingdom and China regarding a future hub
No full textPublished online: 27 Jun 2024.Conversations:
Hua Dong with Hasan Bakhshi; Hua Dong with Daniel Brooker; Yinya You with Nick Bryan-Kinns; Yinya You with Yujia Huang; Weining Ning with Jun Wang.
These conversation pieces focus on the UK-China arts and creative industries research and innovation hub proposal. They explore the opportunities and challenges of collaboration between the two nations, and roles and functions of the future hub. The conversations took the form of a semi-structured interview with individuals from industry, academy, think tank, and the government.This conversation piece focuses on the UK–China Creative Industries Research and Innovation Hub project. It explores the opportunities and challenges of collaboration between the two nations, and roles and functions of the future hub. The conversation took the form of a semi-structured interview with individuals from industry, academy, think tank and the government, from both the United Kingdom and China.This study was supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC SEED Fellowship (Award AH/Y000722/1)
A new modification of the chiron ACS assay for total prostate-specific antigen achieves equimolar response characteristics and improves the detection of prostate cancer
No full textNonequimolar-response assays for prostate-specific antigen (PSA) are criticized for overestimating total PSA in some men without prostate cancer (PCA), and underestimating total PSA in some men with PCA. We recently studied three nonequimolar-response PSA assays that had undergone modifications. While two of the studied assays achieved equimolar-response characteristics with improved areas under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves (AUC), the modification of the Chiron ACS PSA assay (ACS PSA2, Chiron) failed to achieve this. Recently, the ACS assay underwent another modification (ACS PSA, Bayer), which we investigated. Sera from 305 men (155 without and 150 with PCA, PSA greater than or equal to2 and less than or equal to30 mug/l, TandemE) were measured using both modifications of the ACS assay and equimolar-response reference methods (TandemR free and Tandem E, Hybritech). Molar response relative to the reference method and clinical performance (comparison of AUCs) between the previous and new ACS assay modifications were studied. The new modification of the ACS assay (ACS PSA, Bayer) achieved equimolar-response characteristics but reported lower values (average 10%) than the Tandem E assay. Compared to the previous modification (ACS PSA2, Chiron), a 3% improvement in AUC (p=0.01) was found. Using results of the redesigned equimolar-response assay (ACS PSA, Bayer), we calculated that 6 of 155 men without PCA in this sample set could be spared unnecessary biopsy compared with the previous nonequimolar-response assay (ACS PSA2, Chiron) without missing additional PCA (90% sensitivity). These data provide additional evidence for clinical advantages of equimolar-response over nonequimolar-response PSA assay formats
Learning Goals and Styles by Gender -- A Study of NUS Students
No full textThis newsletter, from the National University of Singapore, contains an article discussing whether men and women learn differently. The author surveyed students on how they felt about goals that "drive one to master a topic and learn it well," encourage them to get good grades, and motivate one to study in order to obtain acceptance by one's community.This study found that women were more socially motivated in their approach to academics. Women preferred working with peers and looked for social recognition. Â
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