The perspectives of ‘disengaged’ students in the 14–19 phase on motivations and barriers to learning within the contexts of institutions and classrooms

In addressing educational disengagement, government policy in England focuses primarily on raising the age of educational participation, promoting vocationalism and directing resources at the population of young people not engaged in any education, employment or training (NEETs). However, ‘disengagement’ is a more fluid and dynamic concept than policy allows for and is visible within a wide range of students, even those deemed to be engaged by their presence in education and educational settings. This paper presents students’ accounts of their educational experiences which suggest that the context of the classroom, student–teacher relationships, peer relationships and pedagogical methods used in classrooms are salient factors in understanding engagement.

The Reintegration of Sex Offenders: Barriers and Opportunities for Employment

The process of reintegration of offenders after release from prison, or during a community sentence, is a key aim of criminal justice policy. This article provides details from recent research that investigated the barriers and opportunities to employment for sex offenders. The authors describe the barriers that are faced by sex offenders and the anxieties that employers experience when employing sex offenders. The authors conclude that the approach taken by the State is less than reintegrative and serves to increase the barriers and reduce the opportunities for employment for sex offenders.

Trade-offs between personal immunity and reproduction in the burying beetle, Nicrophorus vespilloides

How are resources split between caring for offspring and self-maintenance? Is the timing of immune challenge important? In burying beetles challenging the immune system prior to breeding does not affect the total number and quality of offspring produced during the individual's lifetime. However, the immune system is suppressed during breeding and if an immune challenge is presented during this time the beetle will upregulate its immune system, but at the detriment to the number of offspring produced during that breeding opportunity.We know that parental investment and immune investment are costly processes, but it is unclear which trait will be prioritized when both may be required. Here, we address this question using the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides, carrion breeders that exhibit biparental care of young. Our results show that immunosuppression occurs during provision of parental care. We measured phenoloxidase (PO) on Days 1-8 of the breeding bout and results show a clear decrease in PO immediately from presentation of the breeding resource onward. Having established baseline immune investment during breeding we then manipulated immune investment at different times by applying a wounding challenge. Beetles were wounded prior to and during the parental care period and reproductive investment quantified. Different effects on reproductive output occur depending on the timing of wounding. Challenging the immune system with wounding prior to breeding does not affect reproductive output and subsequent lifetime reproductive success (LRS). LRS is also unaffected by applying an immune elicitor prior to breeding, though different arms of the immune system are up/downregulated, perhaps indicating a trade-off between cellular and humoral immunity. In contrast, wounding during breeding reduces reproductive output and to the greatest extent if the challenge is applied early in the breeding bout. Despite being immunosuppressed, breeding beetles can still respond to wounding by increasing PO, albeit not to prebreeding levels. This upregulation of PO during breeding may affect parental investment, resulting in a reduction in reproductive output. The potential role of juvenile hormone in controlling this trade-off is discussed.

Gabions: evaluation of potential as low-cost roadside barriers

This paper evaluates the potential of gabions as roadside safety barriers. Gabions have the capacity to blend into natural landscape, suggesting that they could be used as a safety barrier for low-volume road in scenic environments. In fact, gabions have already been used for this purpose in Nepal, but the impact response was not evaluated. This paper reports on numerical and experimental investigations performed on a new gabion barrier prototype. To assess the potential use as a roadside barrier, the optimal gabion unit size and mass were investigated using multibody analysis and four sets of 1:4 scaled crash tests were carried out to study the local vehicle-barrier interaction. The barrier prototype was then finalised and subjected to a TB31 crash test according to the European EN1317 standard for N1 safety barriers. The test resulted in a failure due to the rollover of the vehicle and tearing of the gabion mesh yielding a large working width. It was found that although the system potentially has the necessary mass to contain a vehicle, the barrier front face does not have the necessary stiffness and strength to contain the gabion stone filling and hence redirect the vehicle. In the EN1317 test, the gabion barrier acted as a ramp for the impacting vehicle, causing rollover. 

HERQULES:System level cross-layer design exploration for efficient energy-quality trade-offs

In this paper, we present a unique cross-layer design framework that allows systematic exploration of the energy-delay-quality trade-offs at the algorithm, architecture and circuit level of design abstraction for each block of a system. In addition, taking into consideration the interactions between different sub-blocks of a system, it identifies the design solutions that can ensure the least energy at the "right amount of quality" for each sub-block/system under user quality/delay constraints. This is achieved by deriving sensitivity based design criteria, the balancing of which form the quantitative relations that can be used early in the system design process to evaluate the energy efficiency of various design options. The proposed framework when applied to the exploration of energy-quality design space of the main blocks of a digital camera and a wireless receiver, achieves 58% and 33% energy savings under 41% and 20% error increase, respectively. © 2010 ACM.

Enabling Complexity-Performance Trade-Offs for Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

Polar codes are one of the most recent advancements in coding theory and they have attracted significant interest. While they are provably capacity achieving over various channels, they have seen limited practical applications. Unfortunately, the successive nature of successive cancellation based decoders hinders fine-grained adaptation of the decoding complexity to design constraints and operating conditions. In this paper, we propose a systematic method for enabling complexity-performance trade-offs by constructing polar codes based on an optimization problem which minimizes the complexity under a suitably defined mutual information based performance constraint. Moreover, a low-complexity greedy algorithm is proposed in order to solve the optimization problem efficiently for very large code lengths.

Design methodology to trade off power, output quality and error resiliency: Application to color interpolation filtering

Power dissipation and tolerance to process variations pose conflicting design requirements. Scaling of voltage is associated with larger variations, while Vdd upscaling or transistor up-sizing for process tolerance can be detrimental for power dissipation. However, for certain signal processing systems such as those used in color image processing, we noted that effective trade-offs can be achieved between Vdd scaling, process tolerance and "output quality". In this paper we demonstrate how these tradeoffs can be effectively utilized in the development of novel low-power variation tolerant architectures for color interpolation. The proposed architecture supports a graceful degradation in the PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) under aggressive voltage scaling as well as extreme process variations in. sub-70nm technologies. This is achieved by exploiting the fact that some computations are more important and contribute more to the PSNR improvement compared to the others. The computations are mapped to the hardware in such a way that only the less important computations are affected by Vdd-scaling and process variations. Simulation results show that even at a scaled voltage of 60% of nominal Vdd value, our design provides reasonable image PSNR with 69% power savings.

The barriers & solutions to providing good quality palliative care in dementia in the GP practice

BACKGROUND: Dementia is a significant worldwide health issue, however, it is often insidious in onset and difficult to diagnose, therefore GPs have expressed a limited confidence in their diagnostic skills, extending into their prognostication of the disease. As a result diagnosing the terminal phase of dementia has been identified as a significant challenge to delivering effective palliative care. Therefore, identifying the challenges faced by the GPs in this field will help to guide their training and support, and as a result could assist in the provision of sustained and effective palliative care for their dementia patients.