Search

This paper was originally included in Parliament and the Law, an edited collection of essays supported by the UK Study of Parliament Group and published by Hart/Bloomsbury in 2018. This draft is included here for the first time with the kind permission of the publisher and with access to the underlying statistical research in advance of a conference on Parliament and the Courts organised by the Canadian Study of Parliament Group. The paper considers the effectiveness of the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR). In an evidence based analysis, it examines the impact of the committee's legislative and thematic reports. The underlying statistical research examines the impact of reports by the JCHR on Government legislation. The associated Excel tables, published by the Study of Parliament Group, provide details of the JCHR’s legislative scrutiny between 2010 and 2017. They also evaluate the impact of the JCHR recommendations published in reports in the 2014–15, 2015–16 and 2016–17 parliamentary sessions (and, in particular, whether they led to any changes to Government legislation). The authors recorded all the conclusions and recommendations made by the JCHR over the three parliamentary sessions and assessed whether they sought to amend Government legislation. They then tracked whether the recommendations were taken forward by any Member of Parliament, or the Government. Amendments that were won on division, or agreed to without debate or division, were logged. Impact was recorded where there was direct evidence of a Committee recommendation being a driver for change. The authors acknowledge that the decisions they reached on impact must, on some occasions, be subjective. They were assisted in verifying some of their conclusions by former JCHR staff.

"Gamification" research has evolved and grown dramatically in recent years, gaining popularity across disciplines. While such efforts have generated headway in many respects, and in various directions, from conceptual understandings to user studies, the field could benefit from more work focused upon use in research methodologies at the nexus of practice and theory. This paper, in turn, reflects upon such an experiment aimed at the design and application of gamification techniques within a typical technical-communication context. In this case, subject matter experts within the National Park Service were being asked to improve accessibility of their site brochures by audio describing them. During this training, they were given an overview of audio description, as a process, as well as introduced to a prototype web tool and then asked to use that tool to create the description for their site brochure. Unlike previous training exercises with other parks in this project, though, this group also was organized by sites into a tournament bracket, in which pairs of parks competed against each other in exercises designed to create comparable audio description. The winner of each round, as determined by an independent panel of judges, advanced to the next round, spurred by the promise of fun Hawaiian-themed prizes at the end. This gamification strategy appeared to generate more data, and more research-focused data, than the previous training exercises we have offered, per user. It also apparently engaged many, in various evident ways. But it also seemed to disenfranchise some as well, who dropped out of this voluntary training, creating a mix of results, which will be outlined in this paper.

Upregulation of heat shock proteins, such as Hsp70 and HspB1/Hsp27, have been associated with an amelioration of the deficits in animal models of Alzheimer's disease (AD). HspB1 is reported to be increased in AD brains and to accumulate in plaques, but whether this localization is an attempt by HspB1 to ameliorate the detrimental effects of amyloid-β (Aβ) on cells or part of the disease process is unknown. Here we explore the potential effects of the HspB1 on amyloid-β protein precursor (AβPP) processing and distribution within HEK293 stable cell lines expressing either AβPPwt or AβPPsw. We compare AβPP production, distribution, and release of proteolytic products (including Aβ40 and Aβ42) to determine possible modifications in the presence of HspB1. We also investigate whether HspB1 interacts with Aβ or its precursor, AβPP, and whether, through this interaction, it is able to alter AβPP processing or release of Aβ peptide. Coexpression of HspB1 resulted in increased cellular holoAβPP as well as C-terminal fragments. Further, expression of HspB1 attenuated the release of Aβ42 from the AβPPsw cells. In summary, we have shown that expression of HspB1 alters AβPP expression and processing in cell lines expressing AβPPwt and AβPPsw. Furthermore, the presence of HspB1 decreased the amount of Aβ42 released by the cell lines. Thus in addition to its effects on protecting cells from the potentially toxic effects of Aβ, HspB1 also appears to be involved in modulating cellular levels of AβPP, although an understanding of the underlying mechanisms requires further investigation.

This paper describes the process we undertook to address a significant technical communication issue embedded within traditional information-distribution procedures in the U.S. National Park Service: The bureau's nationally circulated brochures, as print artifacts, are inaccessible to people who are blind, visually impaired and print dyslexic and also not optimized for people who prefer audio communication. This report includes findings from the second year of a three-year project, funded by a grant from the National Park Service. Our first year on this project was spent getting to know the frameworks and foundations of the 342 brochures currently circulating in the country, through a deep reading of samples and a larger content analysis of the brochure structures and content genres. The second year of this project, which is the focus of this paper and poster presentation at SIGDOC 2016, revolves around the design-based research prototyping experiments we conducted as a way to create and refine a web tool to support and produce audio description, particularly in relation to the remediation of NPS brochures to audio-based mobile apps. This process led to prototyping experiments within the NPS that revealed a significant gap between practitioner knowledge and best practices. Those best practices also were found to be lacking in many areas, such as guidance for the practitioners to audio describe a NPS staple, the site map. While audio description, like open/closed captioning, might be considered a relatively straightforward process to those uninitiated in the activity, these practitioner experiments revealed many of the nuances and complexities of audio description that make it a difficult translation exercise. They also led to the generation of important scholarly research questions, such as "In what ways could one audio describe a map?"

Unigrid" design specifications created by Massimo Vignelli have provided the standards for the layout of paper brochures at U.S. National Park Service sites for more than three decades. These brochures offer visitors a familiar analog presentation of visual information, blending text, photographs, maps, and illustrations. These materials, however, are not accessible to people who are blind, have low vision, or a print disability. The National Park Service for decades has been challenged -- by requirements and principle -- to offer alternate formats that provide equivalent experiences and information of these print materials. In other words, people who are blind or visually impaired should have access to a "brochure" experience, too. This exploratory study, funded by the National Park Service, takes a new approach to this long-term problem by conducting a content analysis of current Unigrid brochures to determine their fundamental components, found in practice. This components-based approach is intended to provide clear pathways for cross-modal translation of the printed material into audio-described media, which then, can be efficiently distributed via mobile apps, as an extension of these original components.