Bioscience Horizons: the national journal of undergraduate research

Bioscience Horizons (BH)commenced publication in 2008 and features research papers and reviews written by graduating UK bioscience students. The journal is run by a consortium of UK universities (the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, Leeds and Chester) in association with Oxford University Press. Its submissions encompass the full range of subjects taught by UK bioscience departments, ranging from agronomy to zoology and including animal behaviour, cancer research, environmental biology, microbial sciences, molecular biology, pharmacolgy, primatology, taxonomy and other areas. BH receives manuscripts from recent graduates (with a bachelor of science or equivalent first degree) describing research carried out during their undergraduate studies, usually as a final-year research project. All submissions undergo expert review and have to meet strict criteria for scientific excellence and originality. Articles are written by a single author and published with the agreement of the graduate's home university department. The journal has an ISSN number and is open-access; articles are freely 'cite-able' contributions to the bioscience research literature.

Studying the impact of ubiquitous monitoring technology on office worker behaviours: the value of sharing research data

Pervasive computing is a continually, and rapidly, growing field, although still remains in relative infancy. The possible applications for the technology are numerous, and stand to fundamentally change the way users interact with technology. However, alongside these are equally numerous potential undesirable effects and risks. The lack of empirical naturalistic data in the real world makes studying the true impacts of this technology difficult. This paper describes how two independent research projects shared such valuable empirical data on the relationship between pervasive technologies and users. Each project had different aims and adopted different methods, but successfully used the same data and arrived at the same conclusions. This paper demonstrates the benefit of sharing research data in multidisciplinary pervasive computing research where real world implementations are not widely available.

The ethics of carbon offsetting

Carbon offsetting can be loosely characterized as a mechanism by which an organization or individual contributes to a scheme that is projected either to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or to deliver carbon dioxide emission reductions on the part of other organizations or individuals. An activity that has been offset therefore purports to make no long-term net contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The ethical basis for using carbon offsetting as an approach to tackling climate change is very much contested. We seek to expose some of the underlying reasons for these ethical disagreements. We show that they relate both to empirical disagreements about what the likely benefits of offsetting are and, more fundamentally, to principled disagreements about the right way to discharge duties to deliver carbon reductions.

Transfers, contracts and regulation: a new institutional economics perspective on the changing provision of social housing in Britain

Social housing policy in the UK mirrors wider processes Associated with shifts in broad welfare regimes. Social housing has moved from dominance by state housing provision to the funding of new investment through voluntary sector housing associations to what is now a greater focus on the regulation and private financing of these not-for-profit bodies. If these trends run their course, we are likely to see a range of not-for-profit bodies providing non-market housing in a highly regulated quasi-market. This paper examines these issues through the lens of new institutional economics, which it is believed can provide important insights into the fundamental contractual and regulatory relationships that are coming to dominate social housing from the perspective of the key actors in the sector (not-for-profit housing organisations, their tenants, private lenders and the regulatory state). The paper draws on evidence recently collected from a study evaluating more than 100 stock transfer organisations that inherited ex-public housing in Scotland, including 12 detailed case studies. The paper concludes that social housing stakeholders need to be aware of the risks (and their management) faced across the sector and that the state needs to have clear objectives for social housing and coherent policy instruments to achieve those ends.

Rhythmic behavior of social insects from single to multibody

Revealing the evolution of well-organized social behavior requires understanding a mechanism by which collective behavior is produced. A well-organized group may be produced by two possible mechanisms, namely, a central control and a distributed control. In the second case, local interactions between interchangeable components function at the bottom of the collective behavior. We focused on a simple behavior of an individual ant and analyzed the interactions between a pair of ants. In an experimental set-up, we placed the workers in a hemisphere without a nest, food, and a queen, and recorded their trajectories. The temporal pattern of velocity of each ant was obtained. From this bottom-up approach, we found the characteristic behavior of a single worker and a pair of workers as follows: (1) Activity of each individual has a rhythmic component. (2) Interactions between a pair of individuals result in two types of coupling, namely the anti-phase and the in-phase coupling. The direct physical contacts between the pair of workers might cause a phase shift of the rhythmic components in individual ants. We also build up a simple model based on the coupled oscillators toward the understanding of the whole colony behavior.

The arbitrariness and normativity of social conventions

This paper investigates a puzzling feature of social conventions: the fact that they are both arbitrary and normative. We examine how this tension is addressed in sociological accounts of conventional phenomena. Traditional approaches tend to generate either synchronic accounts that fail to consider the arbitrariness of conventions, or diachronic accounts that miss central aspects of their normativity. As a remedy, we propose a processual conception that considers conventions as both the outcome and material cause of much human activity. This conceptualization, which borrows from the économie des conventions as well as critical realism, provides a novel perspective on how conventions are nested and defined, and on how they are established, maintained and challenged.

The role of agronomic research in climate change and food security policy

Societal concern is growing about the consequences of climate change for food systems and, in a number of regions, for food security. There is also concern that meeting the rising demand for food is leading to environmental degradation thereby exacerbating factors in part responsible for climate change, and further undermining the food systems upon which food security is based. A major emphasis of climate change/food security research over recent years has addressed the agronomic aspects of climate change, and particularly crop yield. This has provided an excellent foundation for assessments of how climate change may affect crop productivity, but the connectivity between these results and the broader issues of food security at large are relatively poorly explored; too often discussions of food security policy appear to be based on a relatively narrow agronomic perspective. To overcome the limitation of current agronomic research outputs there are several scientific challenges where further agronomic effort is necessary, and where agronomic research results can effectively contribute to the broader issues underlying food security. First is the need to better understand how climate change will affect cropping systems including both direct effects on the crops themselves and indirect effects as a result of changed pest and weed dynamics and altered soil and water conditions. Second is the need to assess technical and policy options for either reducing the deleterious impacts or enhancing the benefits of climate change on cropping systems while minimising further environmental degradation. Third is the need to understand how best to address the information needs of policy makers and report and communicate agronomic research results in a manner that will assist the development of food systems adapted to climate change. There are, however, two important considerations regarding these agronomic research contributions to the food security/climate change debate. The first concerns scale. Agronomic research has traditionally been conducted at plot scale over a growing season or perhaps a few years, but many of the issues related to food security operate at larger spatial and temporal scales. Over the last decade, agronomists have begun to establish trials at landscape scale, but there are a number of methodological challenges to be overcome at such scales. The second concerns the position of crop production (which is a primary focus of agronomic research) in the broader context of food security. Production is clearly important, but food distribution and exchange also determine food availability while access to food and food utilisation are other important components of food security. Therefore, while agronomic research alone cannot address all food security/climate change issues (and hence the balance of investment in research and development for crop production vis à vis other aspects of food security needs to be assessed), it will nevertheless continue to have an important role to play: it both improves understanding of the impacts of climate change on crop production and helps to develop adaptation options; and also – and crucially – it improves understanding of the consequences of different adaptation options on further climate forcing. This role can further be strengthened if agronomists work alongside other scientists to develop adaptation options that are not only effective in terms of crop production, but are also environmentally and economically robust, at landscape and regional scales. Furthermore, such integrated approaches to adaptation research are much more likely to address the information need of policy makers. The potential for stronger linkages between the results of agronomic research in the context of climate change and the policy environment will thus be enhanced.

Self-ratings and observer-ratings of social skill: a manipulation of state social anxiety in anxious and non-anxious children

The role of state and trait anxiety on observer ratings of social skill and negatively biased self-perception of social skill was examined. Participants were aged between 7 and 13 years (mean=9.65; sd=1.77; N=102), 47 had a current anxiety diagnosis and 55 were non-anxious controls. Participants were randomly allocated to a high or low anxiety condition and asked to complete social tasks. Task instructions were adjusted across conditions to manipulate participants’ state anxiety. Observers rated anxious participants as having poorer social skills than non-anxious controls but there was no evidence that anxious participants exhibited a negative self-perception bias, relative to controls. However, as participants’ ratings of state anxiety increased, their perception of their performance became more negatively biased. The results suggest that anxious children may exhibit real impairments in social skill and that high levels of state anxiety can lead to biased judgements of social skills in anxious and non-anxious children.

Review of recent research (1998-2012) in German for Academic Purposes (GAP) in comparison with English for Academic Purposes (EAP): cross-influences, synergies and implications for further research

This state-of-the-art review reports on the major studies conducted in the field of Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache (academic German) since the late 1990s. To begin with, the current position of German as a language of academic communication nationally and internationally will be discussed, focusing especially on the challenges posed by the status of English as a lingua franca. Subsequently, the major research undertaken since the late 1990s will be reviewed and its contribution to the development of teaching materials evaluated. Since studies on academic German have been influenced, to some extent, by research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), this paper also attempts to dovetail developments in EAP in order to highlight commonalties and differences. The final sections will discuss some potential synergies and implications for further research in both fields.

The impact of social and relational contexts on innovation transfer in foreign subsidiaries

It is widely acknowledged that innovation is one of the pillars of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and that technological knowledge from different host locations is a key factor to the MNEs’ competitive advantages development. Concerning these assumptions, in this paper we aim to understand how the social and the relational contexts affect the conventional and reverse transfer of innovation from MNEs’ subsidiaries hosted in emerging markets. We analyzed the social context through the institutional profile (CIP) level and the relational context through trust and integration levels utilizing a survey sent to 172 foreign subsidiaries located in Brazil, as well as secondary data. Through an ordinary least squares regression (OLS) analysis we found that the relational context affects the conventional and reverse innovation transfer in subsidiaries hosted in emerging markets. We however did not find support for the social context effect.

Poetry of social conscience, poetry of transition: Ann Hawkshaw's 'Introductory Stanzas' and 'The Mother to her Starving Child'

Through close readings of Ann Hawkshaw's poetry in the context of industrial Manchester in the 1840s, this article highlights the interaction of form and content in poetry that makes use of the idea of the past to question or complicate the politics of the present.

Societal transformation in response to global environmental change: a review of emerging concepts

The study of societal transformation in response to environmental change has become established, yet little consensus exists regarding the conceptual basis of transformation. This paper aims to provide structure to the dialog on transformation, and to reflect on the challenges of social research in this area. Concepts of transformation are identified through a literature review, and examined using four analytical criteria. It is found that the term ‘transformation’ is frequently used merely as a metaphor. When transformation is not used as a metaphor, eight concepts are most frequently employed. They differ with respect to (i) system conceptualization, (ii) notions of social consciousness (deliberate/emergent), and (iii) outcome (prescriptive/descriptive). Problem-based research tends to adopt concepts of deliberate transformation with prescriptive outcome, while concepts of emergent transformation with no prescriptive outcome tend to inform descriptive-analytical research. Dialog around the complementarities of different concepts and their empirical testing are priorities for future research.

Social citizenship, housing wealth and the cost of social care: is the Care Act 2014 'Fair'?

This article assesses the extent to which it is ‘fair’ for the government to require owner-occupiers to draw on the equity accumulated in their home to fund their social care costs. The question is stimulated by the report of the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, Fairer Care Funding (the Dilnot Commission) and the subsequent Care Act 2014. The enquiry is located within the framework of social citizenship and the new social contract. It argues that the individualistic, contractarian approach, exemplified by the Dilnot Commission and reflected in the Act, raises questions when considered from the perspective of intergenerational fairness. We argue that our concerns with the Act could be addressed by inculcating an expectation of drawing on housing wealth to fund older age: a policy of asset-based welfare.

Official use of social network sites by African universities

The use of social network sites (SNS) has become very valuable to educational institutions. Some universities have formally integrated these social media in their educational systems and are using them to improve their service delivery. The main aim of this study was to establish whether African universities have embraced this emerging technology by having official presence on SNS. A purposive sampling method was used to study 24 universities from which data were obtained by visiting their official websites and following the official links to the most common SNS.