Defining a Research Agenda in Value Driven Design: Questions That Need to be Asked

Value driven design is an innovative design process that utilizes the optimization of a system level value function to determine the best possible design. This contrasts with more traditional systems engineering techniques, which rely on satisfying requirements to determine the design solution. While ‘design for value’ is intuitively acceptable, the transformation of value driven design concepts into practical tools and methods for its application is challenging. This, coupled with the growing popularity of value-centric design philosophies, has led to a proposed research agenda in value driven design. This research agenda asks fundamental questions about the design philosophy and attempts to identify areas of significant challenge. The research agenda is meant to stimulate discussion in the field, as well as prompt research that will lead to the development of tools and methodologies that will facilitate the application of value driven design and further the state of the art.

Rapid serological diagnosis of Helicobacter pylori:a need for caution and re-evaluation

Screening for Helicobacter pylori in dyspeptic patients may improve selectivity for gastroscopy. Rapid serological tests based on ELISA technique are cheap, readily available and simple to use in the clinical setting. However local evaluation is essential in order to validate these techniques. Fifty-six dyspeptic patients (aged less than 45 yr) had a rapid serological test (Helisal) performed prior to gastroscopy. At gastroscopy H. pylori status was assessed using culture and histology. The Helisal sensitivity was 80 per cent, specificity 82 per cent. Screening patients with the Helisal test would have missed 6 patients with peptic ulcer disease and 2 with oesophagitis. The Helisal test did not perform satisfactorily as a screening test in selection of patients for gastroscopy.

Liver abnormalities associated with celiac sprue. How common are they, what is their significance, and what do we do about them?

We prospectively measured serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP), aspartate and alanine transaminase (AST/ALT), and tested sera for antinuclear, smooth-muscle, and antimitochondrial antibodies (ANA, SMA, AMA) in our patients with celiac sprue to determine the prevalence of associated liver abnormalities and its relevance to clinical management. Of 129 patients, ALP was the only elevated enzyme in 12 (9%) and in most cases was not thought to reflect significant liver disease. Seventeen (13%) had elevated AST and/or ALT with normal ALP. Levels normalized in 15 patients after dietary gluten exclusion and remained elevated in 2 noncompliers. Two patients (2%) with elevated AST, ALT, and ALP underwent further investigation: one had negative autoantibodies, liver biopsy, and endoscopic retrograde cholangiography and the other had ANA-positive chronic active hepatitis; enzymes in both cases improved with a gluten-free diet. There was no significant association between elevated AST/ALT and positive ANA/SMA; no patient had AMA. Abnormalities in liver enzymes are common in celiac sprue, but usually respond to dietary gluten exclusion. We propose that there is no need for invasive liver investigation in these patients unless there is more specific evidence of primary liver disease or failure of dietary response.

Assessing the extent to which temporal changes in waterbird community composition are driven by either local, regional or global factors.

1. Lough Neagh and Lough Beg Special Protection Area (SPA, hereafter Lough Neagh) is an important non-estuarine site in Britain and Ireland for overwintering wildfowl. Multivariate analysis of the winter counts showed a state-shift in the waterbird community following winter 2000/2001, mostly due to rapid declines in abundance (46–57% declines in the mean mid-winter January counts between 1993–2000 and 2002–2009) of members of the diving duck guild (pochard Aythya ferina, tufted duck Aythya fuligula and goldeneye Bucephala clangula) and coot (Fulica atra), a submerged macrophyte feeder.
2. Only pochard showed correlations between declines at Lough Neagh and those of overall species flyway population indices to suggest that global changes could contribute to declines at the site. However, indices from the Republic of Ireland showed no overall decline in the rest of Ireland. Tufted duck indices at the site were inversely related to indices in Great Britain. Lough Neagh goldeneye indices were positively correlated with indices in the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, suggesting that short-stopping could contribute to declines at the site. Coot declines at Lough Neagh did not correlate with trends elsewhere, suggesting local factors involved in the decline.
3. These analyses indicate that although there are potentially different explanations for the dramatic declines in these four waterbird species at this site, the simultaneous nature of the declines across two feeding guilds strongly
suggest that local factors (such as loss of submerged macrophytes and benthic invertebrates) were involved. An assessment of the food supply, local disturbance and other factors at Lough Neagh is required to find an explanation for the observed adverse trends in wintering numbers of the affected species.
4. This study highlights the potential of waterbird community structure to reflect the status of aquatic systems, but confirms the need to establish site-specific factors responsible for the observed changes in abundance of key waterbird species at a site.

Missing Links, Cultural Modernity and the Dead: Anatomically Modern Humans in the Great Cave of Niah (Sarawak, Borneo)

The Great Cave of Niah in Sarawak (northern Borneo) came into the gaze of Western Science through the work of Alfred Russell Wallace, who came to Sarawak in the 1850s to search for ‘missing links’ in his pioneering studies of evolution and the natural history of Island Southeast Asia and Australasia. The work of Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s placed the Great Cave, and particularly their key find, the ‘Deep Skull’, at the nexus of the evolving archaeological framework for the region: for decades the skull, dated in 1958 by adjacent charcoal to c.40,000 BP, was the oldest fossil of an anatomically modern human anywhere in the world and thus critical to ideas about human evolution and dispersal. Although several authorities later questioned the provenance and antiquity of the Deep Skull, renewed investigations of the Harrisson excavations since 2000 have shown that it can be attributed securely to a specific location in the Pleistocene stratigraphy, with direct U-series dating on a piece of the skull indicating an age for it of c.37,500 BP and the first evidence for associated human activity at the site going back to c.50,000 BP. The new work also indicates that the skull is part of a cultural deposit, perhaps a precursor to the long tradition in Borneo of processing of the dead and secondary burial. These indicators of cultural complexity chime with the complexity of the subsistence behaviour of the early users of the caves discussed by Philip Piper and Ryan Rabett in chapter ten of this volume.