Profile

I live alone in London, since my inspiring husband died 2 years ago. I continue his interest in art and bric -a-brac and unusual objects from boot sales and even laboratories that are de-cluttering old but fascinating equipment.

Committed to community activity and volunteer to help older people get new skills: tablet, smartphone, computers. Also concerned about wider community, UK Europe and worldwide. So concerned about climate change, energy consumption and well being for all people.

Interested in using science and engineering to improve UK infrastructure in health, transport and telecommunications – broadband for ALL before current 6 th formers graduate or finish apprenticeships.

Love travel, reading, talking and indoor rowing in the gym.

Currently engaged in several research projects and statistical consultancy
Project 1. Getting and using best scientific evidence
There is much current hooha about experiments in psychology and medicine not being reliable. Many produce different results when repeated in other labs, maybe as many as two thirds. We our looking at how this is related to both the way the data is collected and the way it is analysed. A particular focus is how people decided on the criteria for accepting or rejecting evidence.
Project 2. Memory and Aging
Old style memory research is mostly about past events and information – like school work. This project investigates spontaneous memory of things that jump into one’s head like music and things we plan to do in the future. These kinds of memory are affected in different ways by disease and aging.
Project 3. Wearable computers
A new project on how wearable computers and associated appscan be used to help people achieve well specified goals.
Statistical Consulting
Meta analysis, combining the results of many existing studies, to get better evidence for medical decision making and estimation of future needs.

Breakfast watching TV news

Morning work with research assistant comparing ways of statistically analysing data. Use several statistical packages.

Lunch with friends & colleagues, maybe bag lunch eminar

Home writing and analysing results or planning new studies

Discuss statistical work by phone or skype

Hour at gym on indoor rower

Talk or go out with friends

I live in London with an excellent but aging underground transport network. I also use local rail stations in Hertfordshire and elsewhere. Most stations do not have wheelchair access – and wheelchair type access would also be enormously useful to parent with kids in buggies.

In my view almost all stations have sufficient space to install foldable stairlifts like those made by Stanna for home use. My idea is to promote a nationwide competition to design such lifts and possibly have local communities adopt a station to install the lifts.

Obviously, assessing demand is key to the project. So it would start with a survey on feasibility, desirability and key features.

This would need to be taken further by live inspection of the stations and by asking station users whether (a) they are in favour and (b) if they might help crowd source the costs for their local station.

Teh £500 would be spent on employing a facilitator for 30 hours at £15/hour to engage with pupils at 9 secondary schools serving 3 different tube stations to get the pupils to perform the feasibility analysis at the stations, and also ask. The facilitator would start with a 3 hour briefing session making use of results of survey, cost £50, before approaching schools.