Speakers for Schools are offering state schools the opportunity to access a fantastic network of speakers who are willing to give inspirational talks to young people for free.

These speakers have kindly agreed to give at least one talk per annum in a state school and will address the big subjects: technological, scientific, political, economic, historical, cultural, artistic, ecological and ethical. They are people who will be able to explain the latest developments in areas such as business, cosmology, biology, medicine, linguistics, history, engineering, inter alia.

Speakers include: Honorary graduates Baroness Tessa Blackstone, Sir Peter Bonfield, Sir Christopher Bland, Sir William Castell, Evan Davis, Sir Richard Lambert and Martha Lane Fox. As well as David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Lord Sebastian Coe and other well know faces.

 For further information or to apply for a speaker, visit the Speaker4schools website: http://www.speakers4schools.org/

Can a cat be both alive and dead? Can a computer think? How does a tortoise beat Achilles in a race? To find out watch the brand new OU ITunes U collection entitled ’60-Second Adventures in Thought’.

Voiced by comedian David Mitchell, these fast-paced animations explain six famous thought experiments, from the ancient Greeks to Albert Einstein, that have changed the way we see the world.

Subjects as vast as time travel, infinity, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence, are squeezed into 60-second clips that will tickle your funny bone and blow your mind.

Find out more:

• Discover the Open University on ITunes U

 

Registration for the Engineering residential schools TXR120 (Engineering: an active introduction) and TXR220 (Engineering in action) for 2012 is now open. Owing to difficulties in expanding the number of available weeks at the Bath Residential School, places are likely to be very limited for 2012 so if you wish to undertake these modules next year we advise you to register soon to reserve a place. We are working to resolve this bottleneck and are hopeful that availability in 2013 will be better.

If you are studying towards the B24 BEng (Hons) please remember it is compulsory to complete 2 residential modules. These will need to be completed before the end of 2014 deadline. If your credit transfer includes exemption from a residential school this will be explicitly identified on the credit transfer certificate.

If you are unable to gain a place, another option is to register for another residential school module which will still be able to be used towards B24. However, if you are looking to gain accreditation with either IET or IMechE, then your residential modules need to be TXR120 and TXR220. Further guidance on their specified study paths can be found on the Accreditations page.

If you have any queries regarding your study plan or timescales in gaining the B24 before the 2014 deadline, please contact engineering@open.ac.uk for assistance.

Aerospace and nuclear power are industries where the structural integrity of materials and components is of prime importance.

Professors Mike Fitzpatrick and John Bouchard of the OU’s Materials Engineering Group are leading research into the structural integrity of safetycritical applications in the aerospace and nuclear industries. Work on the characterisation of material properties and internal stresses helps to ensure safety of the designs.

Working with the nuclear industry, their research assesses the residual stresses and integrity of welded joints, in order to improve the performance of metallic materials in nuclear power applications. Initial work on residual stresses in welded structures led to collaborative work with Airbus looking at integral structures for aerospace through a programme assessing novel bonded crack retarders. This was in order to
improve damage tolerance and hence increase the life span of such structural assemblies. This concept is currently being taken through to the design stage.

The research has resulted in the development and application of advanced experimental techniques – such as neutron diffraction for residual
stress measurement, and the new worldleading contour method for residual stress analysis (with research funded by Rolls-Royce and EMDA). Novel software packages for experimental design and simulation, which are licensed at leading experimental facilities around the world,
have also been developed.

To find out more visit www.open.ac.uk/structural-integrity
 

Do you consider the global consequences of what you put in your shopping trolley at the supermarket? Researchers at The Open University have designed a trolley handle which does just that – informs shoppers of the costs and benefits of their food choices.

The team has designed, built and tested a lambent shopping trolley handle which ‘nudges’ people to make more informed decisions when they shop for food – by measuring food miles as items are scanned and placed in the trolley.

When a shopper scans a product they can assess how their choices compare to the social norm. The handle, which just clips onto any regular shopping trolley handle, is mobile, easy to use and boasts a simple yet fully functional lambent display mechanism which conveys relevant information when making shopping decisions - that can often be tricky to find on food labels and packaging.

“Overall, we found that the lambent shopping handle generated a significant nudge effect, influencing what products people selected. When using the device, 72 per cent of the products had lower mean food mileage than the products chosen when using a normal shopping trolley,” says Vaiva Kalnikaitė, a visiting research fellow to the Open University, working specifically on the CHANGE project and leading the handle design, build and evaluation.

Shoppers make fast and frugal decisions
The Lambent Trolley Handle falls under the CHANGE project which explores how technologies can be used to change and influence human behaviour, with particular focus on the environment. The CHANGE project is a collaboration between the OU, Goldsmiths, Nottingham University and Sussex University, which was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council between November 2009 and July 2011. The Lambent Trolley Handle was created and evaluated in collaboration with colleagues from Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK; University of Bath, UK; Indiana University, USA; and DFKI GmbH, Germany.

It provides salient information about the food miles for various scanned food items, represented by LEDs lights on the handle and a changing emoticon – happy face for good, sad face for bad - comparing the average miles of all the products in the trolley against a social norm.

“When evaluated in situ, the lambent handle display ‘nudged’ people to choose products with fewer food miles than the items they selected using their ordinary shopping strategies. People also felt guilty when the average mileage of the contents of their entire shopping trolley was above the social norm,” says Vaiva.

How do you do your shopping?
The project delves into how people make reasonable decisions given time constraints, limited information and resources to help them. Research shows that most shoppers make fast and frugal decisions; they make choices based on what is recognised and ignore information which can’t be processed quickly and easily.

“For example, in a supermarket, shoppers tend to make snap judgments based on just a few salient cues (low price, recognised brand and attractive packaging) and they rarely take time to read product information labels,” says the OU’s Professor Yvonne Rogers, principal investigator on the CHANGE project, who also helped design and evaluate the handle.

“People who read labels on products still did read the labels but it took them less time and if the information wasn’t there they were happy to use the handle. If they couldn’t find the information they wanted on their favourite brands, say cheese for example, they were happy to scan items and let the trolley handle decide for them, because it was quicker,” added Jon Bird, research fellow on the CHANGE project, who also worked on the handle design.

The handle has been developed to be fairly inconspicuous, so shoppers weren’t self-conscious using it, and which displayed information that could be seen at a glance with a series of coloured LED lights.

“It needed to be light and simple to attach, so we built a fully functional independent device that clips on to a shopping handle and comprises a small display, a series of LEDs that are connected to an embedded barcode reader and other electronics. And then we went shopping!” explains Vaiva.

Eighteen participants took part in the research – eight female and 10 male, aged between 23 and 65, from varying backgrounds, and all shopping took place in Asda, chosen because of its locality to the OU and because of the product information available on its website, which was poured into the trolley handle’s database.

Evaluating shopping behaviour
Each participant shopped once using the lambent trolley handle (nudge conditions) and once using an ordinary, unmodified shopping trolley (controlled condition). They were given a shopping list comprising of items such as Brie, demerera sugar, dark chocolate, honey and chillies.

“When selecting items for the shopping lists, we tried to pick products that varied in their food miles and organic properties. For each product on our shopping lists, there were at least two choices for origin, for example, local (UK) and close (European) or local (UK) and very far (rest of the world). However, we also had a few products where the country of origin was less important, such as Brie cheese where all the alternatives came from France,” said Vaiva.

“We asked people to shop with and without the handle to see how that affected shopping behaviour. Those who used the handle first got used to it and missed it when they shopped without it. It also changed basic things about the way they shopped – they took the trolley closer to the products, rather than parking it and coming back to it. They always stayed much closer to the trolley than those shopping without it” she added.

Khaled Bashour, a visiting research fellow to the OU, who helped conduct the evaluations with a team of volunteers in Asda, added: “For some items, shoppers had to make decisions about what was most important to them when buying food. Organic honey, for example, tends to come from Mexico which has high food miles, so there was no option to buy local organic honey or even honey from the UK. So it came down to price in the end; people tended to make the decision between organic versus food miles by going for what was cheapest.

“There’s a brand of sugar that comes from the UK although it doesn’t actually say that on the packaging, but it’s double the price of other sugars. So the handle helped people to learn why it was priced higher and possibly nudge them to spend more knowing it was local. Without that knowledge they would have simply dismissed it as too expensive” he added.

Watch the fest and frugal shopping challenge and see the lambent trolley handle in action...

The results of the research have been written up into a paper but proved hard to analyse; some products sold out so not all volunteers were able to shop for exactly the same items.

And while the project and funding has now come to an end, the team hopes to continue work with the shopping handle, which can be programmed to look for a range of data including salt content, origin and organic properties.
 
“We’d really like to do more work with the shopping trolley handle,” says Vaiva. “We’d also be interested in seeing how families use it and how children interact with it. Perhaps they could influence how parents shop and help them understand issues like food miles and also make shopping more of a family experience.”

The research is also on its way to China - the team will give a presentation and a live demonstration of how the shopping trolley handle works at the Ubicomp’11 conference in Beijing this September. Furthermore, they are currently liaising with another UK supermarket chain over future use of the handle and its technology, with more testing potentially being carried out with colleagues at DFKI GmbH in Saarbrϋken, Germany.

Who was involved?
Vaiva Kalnikaitė, visiting research fellow on the CHANGE project; Professor Yvonne Rogers, head of Pervasive Interaction Lab at the OU, principle investigator on the CHANGE project; Jon Bird, research fellow on the CHANGE project; Nicolas Villar, researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge; Khaled Bachour, visiting research fellow on the CHANGE project; Professor Steven Payne, University of Bath, UK; Professor Peter M. Todd, Indiana University, USA; Johannes Schöning, research fellow at DFKI GmbH, Germany; Professor Antonio Krüger; DFKI GmbH, Germany; Stefan Kreitmayer, PhD student at Pervasive Interaction Lab at the OU.



 

An Open University-supported electric car scheme is going ahead in Milton Keynes, despite Government scrapping of plans for a nationwide network of electric vehicle recharging points.

In a new strategy document published last week, the Department of Transport said it had dropped the planned network of 9000 public recharging points across the country because it would be "uneconomic" and "underutilised".

Stephen Potter, OU Professor of Transport Strategy, said the scheme in Milton Keynes – where the OU's headquarters are is based – is a step ahead of government.

"In putting the Milton Keynes scheme together, we recognised the weakness in the government's emphasis on public charging points and so included grants for employers to install charging points at workplaces, and also grants to households to install home charging points as well. So to some extent we anticipated this decision," he said.

"However, local employers have been slow to take up the grant."

Public charging points have already been installed and are operating in Central Milton Keynes, he added.

The OU is a partner in the Milton Keynes Consortium working to create a re-charging infrastructure in Milton Keynes, as part of the national Plugged In Places programme.

Useful Links

• Coalition scraps national network of charging points for electric cars
• OU helps bring electric car charging infrastructure to Milton Keynes

A new study has found that where people work in high-tech industries – which demand the kind of analytical skills often seen in those with autism – there will be a higher rate of autism among children.

Cambridge University has for the first time found that autism diagnoses are more common in an IT-rich region. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at the University of Cambridge, led the study (which was conducted in the Netherlands) with Dr Rosa Hoekstra, a Dutch autism researcher based at ARC and The Open University.

The Medical Research Council (MRC) funded study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, predicts that autism spectrum conditions (ASC) would be more common in populations enriched for ‘systemizing’, a skill required in disciplines such as engineering, physics, computing and mathematics.

The team had previously discovered evidence for a familial association between a talent for systemizing and autism in that fathers and grandfathers of children with autism spectrum conditions are over-represented in the field of engineering. The team had also previously found that mathematicians more often have a sibling with autism spectrum conditions, and students in the natural and technological sciences, including mathematics, show a higher number of autistic traits.

The researchers tested for differences in the prevalence of ASC in school-aged children in three geographical regions in the Netherlands: Eindhoven, Haarlem, and Utrecht-city. The Eindhoven region was selected because it’s rich in IT, having the Eindhoven University of Technology there, as well as the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, where IT and technology companies such as Philips, ASML, IBM and ATOS Origin are based. The Philips factory has been in Eindhoven since 1891. Since then, the region has attracted businesses in IT and technology.

The growth of the High Tech Campus Eindhoven has led to Eindhoven becoming a major technology and industrial hub: 30 per cent of jobs in Eindhoven are now in technology or ICT, in Haarlem and Utrecht this is respectively 16 and 17 per cent.

'In regions where parents gravitate towards jobs that involve strong ‘systemizing’, such as the IT sector, there will be a higher rate of autism among their children'

The two control regions were selected because they have similar size populations and a similar socioeconomic class. Schools in each region were asked to provide the number of children enrolled, the number having a clinical diagnosis of ASC and/or two control neurodevelopmental conditions (dyspraxia and ADHD). The participating schools in the three regions provided diagnostic information on a total of 62,505 children. The researchers found school-reported prevalence estimates of ASC in Eindhoven was 229 per 10,000, significantly higher than in Haarlem (84 per 10,000) and Utrecht (57 per 10,000), whilst the prevalence for the control conditions were similar in all regions.

Simon Baron-Cohen commented: “These results are in line with the idea that in regions where parents gravitate towards jobs that involve strong ‘systemizing’, such as the IT sector, there will be a higher rate of autism among their children, because the genes for autism may be expressed in first degree relatives as a talent in systemizing. The results also have implications for explaining how genes for autism may have persisted in the population gene pool, as some of these genes appear linked to adaptive, advantageous traits.”

Rosa Hoekstra, a psychology lecturer with the OU's Faculty of Science, added: “We need to conduct a follow-up study to validate the diagnoses and to test the alternative explanations for the elevated rate of autism in Eindhoven, including the possibility that children with autism may more often remain undetected in the two other regions. These results are important findings in the field of autism epidemiology, since they suggest regional variation in autism prevalence. In our follow-up study we plan to study the causes of this variation in more detail. This will help local authorities plan services appropriately for the number of children with autism.”

The research team also included Martine Roelfsema (a Dutch graduate student), Sally Wheelwright and Dr Carrie Allison (experts in autism screening), and Professor Carol Brayne and Dr Fiona Matthews (experts in public health research and biostatistics).

Useful links

• The full research on Open Research Online

Thanks to the continuing generosity of the Comino Foundation, five students about to embark on their research projects, have recently each been awarded £1,000 to enhance their studies...

Successful student applicants from T450 The engineering project, T885 Team engineering, and T802 The MSc research course currently benefit from these scholarships.

The Foundation was set up in 1971 by the late Demetrius Comino with his daughter Anna and these scholarships are offered in memory of Norman Bailey, a former Trustee who himself was an engineer. The Foundation is committed to encouraging people to want to succeed and enable them to develop their self-esteem, enterprise and initiative, their ability to lead and to work with others. It encourages creative thinking and decision making, and to accept personal responsibility for their decisions and actions.

Two rounds of scholarships are offered each year and this Spring there were 30 applicants. The successful scholarship recipients will be working on a diverse range of projects, from the use of composite materials in the operation of the Thames Barrier, to the design of a satellite network that will interconnect numerous rural communities in Ethiopia.

The Open University and the Bailey-Comino scholarship recipients are very grateful to the Foundation for this, their ninth year of support for Open University students.

• Find out more about engineering at The OU
• Find out more about environmental decision making at the OU

 

The Open University has just received accreditation for its engineering degrees from The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), a licensed body of The Engineering Council.

This means that the Open University’s MEng and MSc in Engineering fully satisfy the academic requirements for Chartered Engineer status, with the BEng(Hons) fully satisfying the requirements for Incorporated Engineer status.

This accreditation is in addition to OU's recent re-accreditation by the Institution of Engineering Designers (IED) and Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE).

Michael Hush, Design and Engineering Programme Director at The Open University said: “These new accreditations confirm the high standing of our engineering qualifications and provide a boost to the many thousands of students currently studying with us part-time."

The OU currently has around 7,000 students registered on engineering degrees.

 

Useful Links

Engineering at the OU