At the time I did not intend to write it up for publication in a peer review journal, but following some positive feedback from Academics, Specalist Diving Physicians and Researchers, and the Editor of a Journal, I grasped the thistle.
Below is the abstract from the article accepted for publication by ‘Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine‘, which is ‘The combined journal of the South Pacific Underwater Medicine Society’ and the ‘European Underwater and Baromedical Society’. The paper will be available in the next edition of the journal (October 2008). I hope you find it of interest and I look forward to discussing the work with anyone who wants to get in touch.
Personality as a predisposing factor for DCI: A pilot study
This study aimed to identify differences in personality characteristics related to Decompression Illness (DCI) in recreational SCUBA divers. A matched control group of 9 divers (without DCI) and research group of 9 divers (with DCI) were recruited. Following a chamber dive (control group), or post-treatment for DCI (research group), three psychometric scales; Locus of Control (LoC), Sensation Seeking Scale, and Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire – Revised (EPQ-R) were administered together with a Diving History Questionnaire and questions on motoring. One significant difference was identified and lay between engine sizes, with those experiencing DCI having cars with larger engines (p < .01). The data were inconsistent with previous research that suggested a relationship between sensation seeking and risk taking. Further research is needed to elucidate the relationship between diving injury and personality.
Last night we gathered at the Pervasive Media Studio for the second in the Dorkbot Show’n'Tell series. Sam Downie gave us an introduction to life casting and some of the technologies he’s been using in his internet radio and video casting shows. There was also a large swag bag from the last MacWorld that Sam was trying to get rid of generously giving away.
John Honniball then stepped up and showed some of his near inexhaustible range of old junk that too many of us recognised from our early brushes with technology. Whereas we used and abused these artefacts, John has accumulated, restored and demonstrates them. But not the Amstrad in the picture; thanks to Sir Alan Sugar’s engineering/business acumen, the plastic has degraded to the point that it has to be handled with latex gloves to prevent getting decomposed Amstrad all over your hands. Nasty.
We also had an introduction to SWiM from Tom Holder. Since a large portion of the audience were involved in web development, there was a ton of interest. Some great questions about authentication and the quality assurance for the apps store that they’re planning rounded out a great evening. Thanks to Sam & his Eye-Fi card for the photo and to Rachel for organising. More Dorkbot photos on Flickr soon I’m sure.
Bit slow off the mark on this post but it’s been a busy couple of days.
We had a really good morning on Tuesday with new faces and new coffee to try. Jack had popped up from the Temple Meads branch of Starbucks to mix some fresh brew for us using their Organic Ethiopian blend together with some cinnamon pastries to bring out the spicy aroma and flavours. We hope to have Jack back with his coffee tasting table.
Over the fresh coffee a couple of new faces joined the familiar ones. A twitter link brought Rick Hurst along for the first time. We also welcomed Jamie Dyer all the way from Plymouth and only just back from Canada, kudos! Just as I was leaving I saw Jamie and Mark Paney deep in discussion and it sounds like there could be another partnership arising from OpenCoffee, great stuff!
Joel Huges was also along having developed his platform but missed the Seedcamp deadline. Have to see if there is a business development / funding opportunity there, hopefully there’ll be something to demo shortly.
Chris Garrett & Craig Hellen from BexMedia were along as was Rachel Carney; apologies to anyone I missed.
The next OpenCoffee will be on 26 August, from 8.30am at Starbucks on Park St as usual. See you there.
The Cambridge Folk Festival might be a strange topic for this blog, but it is a function I have been working for the past sixteen years! Most people attend events such as this to watch great bands performing live. They get to enjoy the atmosphere and attempt to dance between the rain drops. I however am there to work! Obviously many people are there to work; security, general helping staff, vendors, bar staff, stage hands, electricians, gas engineers, not to mention the performers, but as it is often said an army marches on its stomach. That is where I come in……
I meet up with a select team of people each year under Bob the chef as part of the ‘Quintessential Cuisine’ team tasked with providing food for the “Staff and Artists”. This merry band of 5 produce breakfast, lunch and evening meals for 2000 people over a four day period. I am part of this team, but I also specifically look after the artists and their riders.
A contract rider includes specifications on stage design, sound systems, lighting rigs, as well as an artist’s wish list-from transportation and billing to dressing room accommodations and meals. At some festivals, a promoter will refuse a demand (crossing out the request on the document), but at Cambridge the stars usually get what they want, whether it’s new black cotton soaks, or a box full of fruit so they can prepare their own smoothies.
So I spend considerable amount of time preparing special meals for some artists and vast numbers of sandwiches and deli platers for others. What this does mean is that when the rest of the catering team are not working I am in the kitchen trying to get on top of things so that when the main rush hits, I can help out with the staff meals and coordinating service times.
This break from the routine of health/clinical psychology and research analysis is wonderful. As a qualified chef, preparing food is a careful balance of colours, flavours, textures and presentation not to mention getting it on the table in time (no mean feat when you’re basically working on a camping gas stove). I also experience a whole different side of humanity.
It essence it keeps me fresh and if you’re not going away on holiday then a change is as good as a rest!
This (below) is the abstract from a piece of research that has taken quite some time to complete, but that is the joy of a multi-centre study. The paper is available online ahead of hard copy publication. So please have a read if the abstract is of interest and feel free to ask any questions you like.
Respiratory Research Unit, Peninsula Medical School, Devon, 1 Davy Road, Plymouth PL6 8BX, United Kingdom.
INTRODUCTION: The Lung Information Needs Questionnaire (LINQ) assesses, from the patient’s perspective, their need for education. This questionnaire yields a total score and scores in six domains: disease knowledge, medicine, self-management, smoking, exercise and diet. The aim of this study was to assess the sensitivity of the LINQ to change before and after pulmonary rehabilitation (PR). METHOD: PR programmes across the UK recruited 158 patients (male=94; 59%). The participants completed the LINQ and other measures as used by the individual sites pre- and post-PR, including the Shuttle Walking Test, Chronic Respiratory Disease Questionnaire, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. RESULTS: Data were analysed on 115 patients who completed data collection pre- and post-PR. The LINQ total scores, and subscales scores across all sites improved significantly with large effect sizes, except for the smoking domain as information needs about smoking were well met prior to PR. There were similar patterns of information needs at baseline and after PR in all sites. DISCUSSION: This study shows that the LINQ is a practical tool for detecting areas where patients need education and is sensitive to change after PR. The quality of the education component of PR can be assessed using the LINQ, which could be considered as a routinely collected outcome measure in PR. The LINQ may also be a useful tool for general practitioners to assess their patients’ educational needs.
I was just thinking I needed some inspiration to write a post and Rob Sheffield emailed to point me at WhyNot? an ideas exchange from Profs Ayres & Nalebuff of Yale. Rob and I had been chatting recently about creativity, entrepreneurship and intersections between ideas. I’ve not seen this site, though it seems similar to global:ideas:bank and a couple others.
The concept is simple enough that you apply the wisdom of the crowds to identify the best ideas. People are free to post their idea, everyone votes on them and the best float to the surface. WhyNot? seems to be suffering from lack of participants, the top rated ideas are all from 2003 vintage and have just over 100 votes each (except for the top idea that has 337 votes). With over 3,500 ideas and 5 years you’d expect a bit more activity. WhyNot? uses a very simple vote count to determine the best ideas (Support, Neutral, Oppose).
The global:ideas:bank has a few more ideas (just over 6,000) and a different rating system based on % for Feasibility, Originality & Humour. The drawback here is that a small number of high rating gets you to the top. There doesn’t appear to be any weighting for a balanced opinion.
Of course Digg has been surfing the wisdom of the crowds for some time. Google also uses a variation on this to track site traffic and links and back-links to work out which are the best sites (or solutions) to your problem (or search query). There’s a whole industry in getting your product announcement to the top of Digg and your site to the top of Google (I just did a search for Angel Networks and Oprah has the top two spots on Google).
Digg and Google are successful (in small part at least) because there is an instant path to action. You find something at the top of the list that addresses your need and you click the link to go to the site. Alternatively, if you have a problem looking for a solution (or a site looking for ad traffic) then Digg and Google also work quite well for you. The challenge with many of the other idea exchange formats is that there’s no champion or pathway to change. So you vote an idea as being great, so what, does anything happen?
That’s the great benefit of purposeful network events like BEN, OpenCoffee (disclosure: I run OpenCoffee Bristol) and SeedCamp. They’re great melting pots for ideas because they go out of their way to bring diverse groups together. They also do this with a clear objective in mind; learn something new that will make you and your business more enterprising, find people in your city/region to help grow your business, hook up with investors and springboard your start-up.
They also give people the time and space to figure out who they can work with before disclosing the golden nugget idea. They also have the wider network to help bring the idea to some degree of realisation.
So how do you get your ideas to become reality? If it’s your idea, how do you find your partners and collaborators? If you’re into making things happen, how do you find cool ideas to work on?
Really good turn out at this morning’s Open Coffee with plenty of new faces and old friends. Sam Machin and Tom O’Neil both back after recent breaks, Sam even took time out from his Honeymoon to find an incubation centre in Dublin next to the Guinness factory so he could report back to us, that’s dedication (or at least that’s what he told us, mind you he also showed up with a brand new Acer sub-notebook).
Craig and I had a chance to catch up and agree some ideas to push Carrotmob Bristol forward a bit more and he also took the opportunity to show their latest mobile video project with Anglia Ruskin university providing a video map of the campus.
Peter, Tom, Matt Anderson and I had a good catch up on business confidence from our various perspectives. While a couple of industries have seen a down turn (or at least a hesitation) there are still plenty of growing technology businesses and great opportunities out there.
All of which bodes well for those starting and growing their businesses, and for those of us supporting them.
Apologies to those that I didn’t get to talk to but I’m greatly heartened that more people are turning up than I can network with in 90min (which is saying something). Thanks to everyone for supporting Open Coffee and look forward to seeing you all (and your colleagues, business partners, etc) at the next Open Coffee on 12 August.
Well a lot has been happening and there are a couple of conversation threads so I thought I’d put up a quick ’story so far…’
Craig Hellen (Pod Chains) brought up Carrotmob at the OpenCoffee meeting on 1 July. We were talking about Seedcamp and various ideas for supporting innovative new businesses across the South West. Craig kind of lobbed Carrotmob in as a thought grenade and since none of us had heard of it it kind of fizzled out until later that evening when I’d had a chance to see the video and twittered it.
Craig and I swapped a couple of DM’s but everything pretty much went quiet until he shared an email he’d just received from Brent at Carrotmob saying what a great thing it’d be to see a Carrotmob campaign in Bristol. That got us going again and I dropped Kevin O’Malley a note at Connecting Bristol to drum up some more interest from the wider readership that he gets. I also got in touch with Bristol City Council as they organise the Harbour Festival and we’d (Craig and I) thought that’d be a great event to put Carrotmob alongside.
Following Kevin’s post and another twitter post lots of folks responded (@Z303, @mikedunn, @emargee, @PeteJ, @wrestlevania, & @bluerocket) so we set up a room in Friendfeed to discuss and share. Then Jacob Park from Carrotmob got in touch and Zoe and I swapped a couple emails with him and that lead to the suggestion that we (Bristol) might work with Carrotmob testing an application to help folks put together their own Carrotmob’s.
Which is all really cool!
The drawback is their application probably won’t be public until October, and it’s now only 10 days to the Harbour Festival (9 by the time I post this).
All of which means we’re still really keen to see Carrotmob come to Bristol, and we’re going to be helping Brent & Jacob specify and test their application, and we’re going to keep building the momentum here ready for a (probable) Halloween launch!
Right now the best way to register support is probably to join the Friendfeed group and/or subscribe to this blog. That way we’ll know you’re specifically interested in Carrotmob rather than my general ramblings, and you’ll find out more information as it becomes available. You can also leave suggestions in the comments for other groups to partner up with to make Carrotmob Bristol really take off.
Also, if anyone wants to take the lead in organising the Bristol Campaign, let us know and head over to the Carrotmob sign up page.
This morning’s Open Coffee had some visitors from the research community asking about user generated innovations in the field of intelligent transport systems. Prof Glynn Lyonns and Dr’s Juliet Jain and Tilly Line are leading the activity to better understand this bottom up innovation driver in an industry that is dominated by top-down incrementalism.
The discussions quickly wheeled around forms of innovation, the challenges facing government in supporting innovations, and the competing interests after the funding that the Technology Strategy Board is making available. Nick Sturge (SetSquared) was on hand to provide a wider city and business perspective and the entrepreneur / innovators started coming up with both ideas and examples that I’m sure will keep Glynn, Juliet at Tilly busy for several weeks to come.
It was great to also welcome Sam Tipper from Gloucestershire who was pointed at OpenCoffee by Chris and got the details via chatting with Sam Harding via the GTalk widget on this website; and Robin from Bath who’s providing media businesses with growth and development consultancy support (and launching a business start up; website pending).
OpenCoffee will be running through the summer, every other Tues from about 8.30 in Starbucks on Park St (the next few are on 29 July, 12 & 26 Aug). Contact me at jwgbradford@gmail.com to be added to the email reminder list and/or follow OpenCoffeeBR1 on Twitter for reminders and nudges.
Yesterday was spent in Manchester at the NESTA launch of their latest report (pdf not live yet) into innovation in the Creative Industries.
From a broad reading of the report, it seems to largely reflect last year’s report that much innovation in industry isn’t recorded in official statistics rather than not taking place. The Creative Industries face a further double whammy since very small and micro companies (under 10 employees) are excluded from the official returns, as are many of the SIC codes that cover the sector. Prof’s Ian Miles and Lawrence Green recognise that the existing surveys are a potential burden that the micro companies could probably do without, except that without the evidence base there won’t be policy and incentives from central Government.
This could be a valuable role for places like the Pervasive Media Studio and Universities? Aggregating and presenting an industry perspective on behalf of the micro business communities?
Most of the findings from the case study interviews could apply across pretty much any sector. Customers are more sophisticated, networked, discriminating and active. Not sure there are many industries where that isn’t the case. One point of note was a comment from the video games industry (one of the 4 sub-sector foci) for novel titles, sophistication and interfaces - wonder how that translates to the explosion in casual & mobile gaming, Kongregate, Gameloft, the Wii etc?
One aspect that might be unique was the reported lack of innovation management. Some of this is undoubtedly down to the speed of change and comparative size of companies, but may also be down to a culture of perpetual beta. Many of the associated issues that have been reported could be related to company size. How many firms under 10 employees have a dedicated R&D budget, or a formal knowledge management system whatever industry they’re in?
How about providing/managing a framework for Open Innovation as a role for HE in the creative sector?
Entries (RSS)