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This paper reports on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 69 disabled people in England and Scotland, and with 28 key informants from infrastructure organisations in the voluntary and statutory sectors, about the impact of COVID-19, and measures taken to control it. Participants were recruited through voluntary organisations. As with everyone, the Pandemic has had a huge impact: we discuss the dislocations it has caused in everyday life; the failures of social care; the use of new technologies; and participants' view on leadership and communication.We conclude with suggestions for urgent short term and medium term responses, so that the United Kingdom and other countries can respond better to this and other pandemics, and build a more inclusive world.

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There is a shift in university-based social research towards interdisciplinary working and collaboration with non-academic partners, which requires a reconsideration of methodological concepts and research practices. In this article, we draw on intensive collaborative action research (CAR) into public service reform to demonstrate how this ‘collaborative shift’ both challenges and creates new considerations for mainstream research approaches. We contend that the contemporary emphasis on research collaborations creates challenges for both social science researchers and non-academic partners, which require greater conceptual consideration. Researchers need to engage in distinctive, significant and ongoing relational, pragmatic and political work in multi-agency contexts. We present the concept of a ‘buffer zone’: a dynamic, contextual space and set of practices necessary to undertake participatory research within complex and changeable settings. This has implications for research management, design, funding and training.

Articles you may be interested inActively stabilized optical feedback scheme for very stable, high sensitivity shear-force measurement Rev. Sci. Instrum. 74, 3664 (2003);We introduce an improved piezoelectric shear-force feedback system for tip-sample distance control in a scanning near-field optical microscope. A tapered glass fiber is glued into a metal tube and both are integrated in a mounting, sandwiched between two piezosegments. One of the piezoelements excites the fiber tip at mechanical resonance while the other one is used for detection. During surface approach the fiber resonance is damped by shear forces, which is registered by the second piezoelement and used for distance control. The main attractions of this setup are its simplicity, its compactness, and the lack of disturbing light sources. The fiber is easy accessible and tip exchange is simple. With an acceptable fiber amplitude of 5-10 nm ͑peak to peak͒ we obtained a topographical resolution of 5 pm/ͱHz. The geometry also allows the measurement of samples covered with a few millimeters of liquid, which is important for applications in biology and medicine.

Nanopores in thin synthetic membranes have emerged as convenient tools for high-throughput single-molecule manipulation and analysis. Because of their small sizes and their ability to selectively transport solutes through otherwise impermeable membranes, nanopores have numerous potential applications in nanobiotechnology. For most applications, properties of the nanopore systems have to be characterize at the atomic level, which is currently beyond the limit of experimental methods. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can provide the desired information, however several technical challenges have to be met before this method can be applied to synthetic nanopore systems. Here, we highlight our recent work on modeling synthetic nanopores of the most common types. First, we describe a novel graphical tool for setting up all-atom systems incorporating inorganic materials and biomolecules. Next, we illustrate the application of the MD method for silica, silicon nitride, and polyethylene terephthalate nanopores. Following that, we describe a method for modeling synthetic surfaces using a bias potential. Future directions for tool development and nanopore modeling are briefly discussed at the end of this article.

Human rights education is a prominent concern of a number of international organisations and has been dominant on the United Nations' agenda for the past 20 years. The UN Decade for Human Rights Education (1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004) has been followed by the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2005-ongoing) and the recently adopted UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training. This article shares findings from a project that aimed to gauge the knowledge of human rights education of students undertaking initial teacher education and childhood practice programmes at one university in Scotland. Students were invited to share their experiences of and attitudes towards human rights education. While some students were confident in their approach to human rights education, others identified barriers, including their own knowledge and the structures acting upon them as teachers. Initial conclusions suggest that education students feel ill-equipped to engage with human rights education and that this issue must be addressed in initial teacher education courses.

In our experiments we show, that a contaminating water film is very important for the shear–force distance control in near-field optical microscopy. This is demonstrated at the transition between a hydrophilic glass surface and a hydrophobic Langmuir–Blodgett film of arachidic acid at different relative humidities. This contaminating water film is one, if not the important reason for the damping of an oscillating fiber during surface approach. It is further shown, that the bulk viscosity of water alone cannot be responsible for the observed damping effect. A thickness dependent viscosity of this water film is proposed. These observations can also explain, why the shear–force distance control works on nearly all surfaces at ambient conditions, but fails to work at very low temperatures.