Offenders’ perceptions of the UK prison smoking ban

Purpose Despite overall reductions in levels of smoking in the UK, rates of offender smoking remain high. In 2016, it was announced that prisons in England and Wales would gradually introduce a smoking ban. The purpose of this paper is to explore offenders’ perceptions around the upcoming smoking ban. Design/methodology/approach A total of eight focus groups were conducted in four prisons across the North of England. Both smoking and non-smoking offenders participated in the focus groups, and thematic analysis was used to explore the findings. Findings Themes generated from the data were “freedom and rights”, “the prison environment” and “guiding support”. Participants discussed how the smoking ban was viewed as a punishment and restricted their freedom, with perceptions as to why the ban was being implemented centring around others trying to control them. Participants expressed concerns around the financial implications of the smoking ban on already stretched prison resources. Participants also recommended improving the nicotine replacement therapy on offer, and increasing the range of leisure activities within the prison to prepare for the smoking ban. Originality/value Overall, it was apparent that participants’ awareness of the smoking ban was generally poor. It is recommended that offenders need to be made more aware of the smoking cessation support they will receive and given the opportunity to ask questions about the smoking ban. Increasing offenders’ awareness of the ban may reduce stress associated with a perceived lack of choice around their smoking behaviours

Precision tests of the J/psi from full lattice QCD: mass, leptonic width and radiative decay rate to eta_c

We show results from calculations in full lattice QCD of the mass, leptonic width and radiative decay rate to eta_c of the J/psi meson. These provide few % tests of QCD. Another (1.5%) test comes from comparison of time-moments of the vector charmonium correlator with results derived from the experimental values of R(e+e- to hadrons) in the charm region

Spatial incoherence of solar granulation: a global analysis using BiSON 2B data

A poor understanding of the impact of convective turbulence in the outer layers of the Sun and Sun-like stars challenges the advance towards an improved understanding of their internal structure and dynamics. Assessing and calibrating these effects is therefore of great importance. Here we study the spatial coherence of granulation noise and oscillation modes in the Sun, with the aim of exploiting any incoherence to beat-down observed granulation noise, hence improving the detection of low-frequency p-modes. Using data from the BiSON 2B instrument, we assess the coherence between different atmospheric heights and between different surface regions. We find that granulation noise from the different atmospheric heights probed is largely incoherent; frequency regions dominated by oscillations are almost fully coherent. We find a randomised phase difference for the granulation noise, and a near zero difference for the evanescent oscillations. A reduction of the incoherent granulation noise is shown by application of the cross-spectrum.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, MNRAS in pres

Nonperturbative tests of the renormalization of mixed clover-staggered currents in lattice QCD

The Fermilab Lattice and MILC collaborations have shown in one-loop lattice QCD perturbation theory that the renormalization constants of vector and axial-vector mixed clover-asqtad currents are closely related to the product of those for clover-clover and asqtad-asqtad (local) vector currents. To be useful for future higher precision calculations this relationship must be valid beyond one-loop and very general. We test its validity nonperturbatively using clover and Highly Improved Staggered (HISQ) strange quarks, utilising the absolute normalization of the HISQ temporal axial current. We find that the renormalization of the mixed current differs from the square root of the product of the pure HISQ and pure clover currents by 2−3%. We also compare discretization errors between the clover and HISQ formalisms

Feminists really do count : the complexity of feminist methodologies

We are delighted to be presenting this special issue on the topic of feminism and quantitative methods. We believe that such an issue is exceptionally timely. This is not simply because of ongoing debates around quantification within the field of feminism and women‟s studies. It is also because of debates within the wider research community about the development of appropriate methodologies that take account of new technological and philosophical concerns and are fit-for-purpose for researching contemporary social, philosophical, cultural and global issues. Two areas serve as exemplars in this respect and both speak to these combined wider social science and specifically feminist methodological concerns. The first is the increasing concern amongst social scientists with how the complexity of social life can be captured and analysed. Within feminism, this can be seen in debates about intersectionality that recognise the concerns arising from multiple social positions/divisions and associated power issues. As Denis (2008: 688) comments in respect of intersectional analysis „The challenge of integrating multiple, concurrent, yet often contradictory social locations into analyses of power relations has been issued. Theorising to accomplish this end is evolving, and we are struggling to develop effective methodological tools in order to marry theorising with necessary complex analyses of empirical data.‟ Secondly, new techniques and new data sources are now coming on line. This includes work in the UK of the ESRC National Data Strategy which has been setting out the priorities for the development of research data resources both within and across the boundaries of the social sciences. This will facilitate historical, longitudinal, interdisciplinary and mixed methodological research. And it may be the case that these developments facilitate the achievement of a longstanding feminist aim not simply for interdisciplinarity but for transdisciplinarity in epistemological and methodological terms

An overview of systematic reviews of complementary and alternative therapies for fibromyalgia using both AMSTAR and ROBIS as quality assessment tools

Abstract Background Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic, debilitating pain disorder. Dissatisfaction with conventional medicine can lead people with FM to turn to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Two previous overviews of systematic reviews of CAM for FM have been published, but they did not assessed for risk of bias in the review process. Methods Five databases Medline, Embase, AMED (via OVID), Web of Science and Central were searched from their inception to December 2015. Reference lists were hand-searched. We had two aims: the first was to provide an up-to-date and rigorously conducted synthesis of systematic reviews of CAM literature on FM; the second was to evaluate the quality of the available systematic review evidence using two different tools: AMSTAR (Shea et al. BMC Med Res Methodol 15; 7:10, 2007) and a more recently developed tool ROBIS (Whiting et al. J Clin Epidemiol 69:225-34, 2016) specifically designed to assess risk of bias in systematic reviews. Any review that assessed one of eight CAM therapies for participants diagnosed with FM was considered. The individual studies had to be randomised controlled trials where the intervention was compared to placebo, treatment as usual or waitlist controls to be included. The primary outcome measure was pain, and the secondary outcome measure was adverse events. Results We identified 15 reviews that met inclusion criteria. There was low-quality evidence that acupuncture improves pain compared to no treatment or standard treatment, but good evidence that it is no better than sham acupuncture. The evidence for homoeopathy, spinal manipulation and herbal medicine was limited. Conclusions Overall, five reviews scored 6 or above using the AMSTAR scale and the inter-rater agreement was good (83.6%), whereas seven reviews achieved a low risk of bias rating using ROBIS and the inter-rater agreement was fair (60.0%). No firm conclusions were drawn for efficacy of either spinal manipulation or homoeopathy for FM. There is limited evidence for topical Capsicum, but further research is required. There is some evidence to support the effectiveness of acupuncture for FM, but further high-quality trials are needed to investigate its benefits, harms and mechanisms of action, compared with no or standard treatment. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42016035846

Tidal and marine energy in the uk– identifying the future challenges for supply chain development

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current technical and operational supply chain issues surrounding the development of tidal and marine energy production in the UK. The paper outlines the market and growth potential of tidal energy production in the UK before identifying the key supply chain themes surrounding tidal energy production including an analysis of the portability and transferability of current supply chain thinking and development from other renewable energy systems such as wind turbine technology towards the development of tidal energy supply chain systems. The paper closes by identifying the major challenges that the UK supply chain must overcome in order to develop a comprehensive and robust supply chain system