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The behavior of British youth abroad has caused considerable concern over recent years. This is because many British youth engage in binge drinking, drug use, sex behavior and other risk behaviors – especially in the Balearics, Spain. While research has documented levels of alcohol use, drug use, risk and sex behaviors on these islands, it tends to rely on survey data. This article aims to offer some contextualization to the British youth holiday experience and to examine why such behaviors might take place.

The study uses ethnographic methods (observation, open‐ended focus groups) with British youth in San Antonio, Ibiza. Over the course of one week in July 2010, 17 focus groups were undertaken (n=97 aged between 17 and 31). Observations were conducted in bars, clubs, beaches, and general tourist areas.

The data suggest that young people engage in these behaviors not only to escape the constraints of work and family but also because they are exciting. The data also indicate that these behaviors appeared to help British youth construct life biographies which were integral to their identity construction. The findings are also considered within the social context of Ibiza which also played a role in promoting these behaviors.

No ethnographic research exists on the topic of British youth and their behaviors abroad. Previous research is mostly epidemiological survey research which does not adequately consider the social meaning and context for the behavior of British youth abroad.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and elucidate adolescents’ reasoning about risks related to food and eating.

Boys and girls aged 15-16 years participated in a focus group interview with role-playing as a stimulus for discussion and reflection. In all, 31 participants took part, divided into five groups. In the role-playing, the participants portrayed agents who they perceived to give messages about food. In the focus group they discussed their experience of carrying out the role-play, and how they usually cope with conflicting messages, preferences and needs regarding food and eating.

The findings suggested that there were two main themes of risk profiling related to eating. One concerned bodily risk related to the food ingested and included concerns both about not reaching health and performance due to the unfavourable intake of calories, nutrients, additives, bacteria, viruses and parasites, and threats to immediate well-being following consumption. The second main category concerned the risk of being conspicuous, or “sticking out”, which incorporated food-based gender norms and norms related to table manners. In practice, the risk of not displaying an appropriate image of themselves through their food and eating choices was more prominent than risk perceptions related to impacts of food choices on well-being and performance. Difficulties in classifying foods as “good” or “bad” enhanced their uncertainty.

The results suggest that health-promotion activities for young people should focus not only on how to feed their bodies but also on how to avoid feeding their anxieties.

This study considers the recently established higher vocational education reforms with Swedish advanced vocational education (AVE) and Finnish polytechnics in terms of organisational structure, the design of workplace learning, and furthermore, what kind of practical implications these new models of learning at work have resulted in.

The research strategy includes three main steps. First, a number of domestic research studies, government reports and other policy documents were examined. Secondly, this study brings the most recent national data available. Thirdly, a conceptual framework for cross‐national analysis was developed.

The results suggest that despite differences which stem from the nations' political, economical and socio‐cultural background, the formal methods engaging educators and representatives of working life are rather similar. However, the general implications are different. While the Swedish AVE has focused more on a principally demand‐led system with de‐centralised planning and design of programmes to fit the specific needs of regional labour markets, the Finnish polytechnics have instead maintained a strong institutional framework, focusing more on research and development issues.

This study has some methodological considerations that need to be addressed. First, there are differences on the curricular level between the two systems. Secondly, although Swedish and Finnish labour markets have developed along similar patterns in terms of industrial sectors and the emergence of labour unions, and employer associations, differences do exist on how these various representatives view the role of training, as well as their requirements for granting work licences and certificates.

Provides evidence that workplace learning can be decided by the complex relationship among the state, labour and capital.

The main policy discourses in education in Sweden now emphasise personal flexibility, creativity, responsibility for learning and freedom of choice for learners and the aim to produce creative, motivated, alert, inquiring, self-governing and flexible users and developers as opposed to just recipient reproducers of knowledge. These curriculum ideas are reflected in National Curricula (such as Lpo 94; Lpf 94) in statements relating to such things as “students developing capacities to take personal responsibility for learning…by taking part in planning and evaluation and by choosing courses, subjects, themes and activities” (Lpo 94, p. 85). However they derive from policy writing at the political level of the education system internationally (Zackari, 2001) as exemplified in writing such as OECD (1992) and (1995), which states that individual schools should create their own profiles and help individual pupils to influence the content of their studies’ (OECD, 1995, s. 137) and exhort the “willingness and ability of individual citizens and families to take responsibility for choices and priorities of their own” (OECD, 1995, s. 86). These ideas have filtered through things like official national propositions (Dir. 1991, p. 117; SOU, 1992, p. 94) and reports (e.g. Skolverkets rapport 1999, p. 443) to the arenas of action comprised by schools and colleges, where they are developed into new working aims for our modern schools and are described as contributing toward a new school vision (see also Lundahl, 2001).

Over the years, electrical stimulation in drug delivery system holds particular interest in producing spatially and temporally controlled release mechanism. These systems helped in localized doses drugs to be administrated and response efficiently at target site to achieve excellent healing effect in control microenvironment. Extensive research is needed in order to develop versatile electroactive biomaterials in the field of therapeutics applications. This paper aims to discuss this issue.

This work reports the development of polycaprolactone (PCL) electrospun coated with pectin/polyaniline (PANi) composite, which has been characterized and whose drug delivery application is ascertained. The composite has been characterized on its mechanical conductivity and wettability properties to evaluate best formulation. The analysis on morphological properties using scanning electron microscope (SEM) confirmed the formation of the dual-layer electro-responsive composite.

Among different formulations studied, the pectin/PANi composition (12 percent/3 percent) was found to be an optimized composition with ultimate tensile strength of 55.48±0.65 MPa and modulus strength of 63.30±0.43 MPa with 2.41×10^–3 Scm⁻¹ electrical percolation. The hydrophobic PCL electrospun reduced as coating material was introduced on top with optimum of 85.3 percent degree of swelling and water contact angle at 39.17±0.67°. SEM micrograph revealed strong interaction between dual-layer structures with interconnected porous of uniform fibers.

Overall, these data present a multiangle initial characterization of this novel dual-layer electro-responsive composite for applications in drug delivery. However, additional analysis should be performed in order to provide a clear verification as drug delivery scaffold.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understandings of how documents are experienced by looking to work in reception studies for methodological examples. Based on a review of research from literary studies, communication studies and museum studies, it identifies existing approaches and challenges. Specifically, it draws attention to problems cited in relation to small-scale user studies and suggests an alternative approach that focusses on how infrastructures influence experience.

This paper presents data collected from over a year of ethnographic work at a cultural archive and exhibition space and analyses the implications of infrastructural features such as institutional organization, database structures and the organization of physical space for making available certain modes of reception.

This research suggests that infrastructure provides a useful perspective on how experiences of documents are influenced by larger systems.

This research was conducted to explore the implications of an alternative research methodology. Based on the ethnographic study presented, it suggests that this approach produces results that warrant further work. However, as it is intended only to be a test case, its scope is limited, and future research following the approach discussed here should more fully engage with specific findings in relation to the experience of documents.

This paper presents an alternative approach to studying the experience of documents that responds to limitations in previous work. The research presented suggests that infrastructures can reveal ways that the experience is shared across contexts, shifting discussions from individuals and objects to technical systems, institutions and social structures.

Successes in scaffold guided tissue engineering require scaffolds to have specific macroscopic geometries and internal architectures to provide the needed biological and biophysical functions. Freeform fabrication provides an effective process tool to manufacture many advanced scaffolds with designed properties. This paper reports our recent study on using a novel precision extruding deposition (PED) process technique to directly fabricate cellular poly‐ε_rm;‐caprolactone (PCL) scaffolds. Scaffolds with a controlled pore size of 250 μm and designed structural orientations were fabricated.