Anchoring the Northern Powerhouse: Understanding anchor institutions and their contribution within a complex urban and regional system

The Northern Powerhouse vision (Osborne 2014), to create thriving Northern city-regions with a re-balancing of the English economy (Martin et al 2014, pp. 3-6) is by necessity a long-term ambition (Osborne 2014). City-regional sustainable development is a complex system (Martin and Simmie 2008; Martin & Sunley 2015; RSA 2014, p15) and will rely on local leadership for policies and decision making in a devolved environment (Cox and Hunter 2015, pp. 11-12). Experience from Anchor Institutions in the United States highlights new models of place-based leadership (Dubb et al 2013, p vii; Serang, Thompson and Howard 2013, p14-17) shared value (Porter 2010; ICIC 2011; Porter and Kramer 2011), investment (Serang, Thompson and Howard 2013, pp. 4-6) and community wealth building (Dubb et al 2013, pp. 24-29) for delivering city-regional development. New forms of multi-level governance institutions, such as Combined Authorities (Sandford 2015) and Local Enterprise Partnerships (HM Government 2010 pp. 12-14) will be significant in this shaping of place and economies (Cox and Hunter 2015, p 17). This paper provides an early analysis of the role and contribution of Anchor Institutions in the Northern Powerhouse geography. These institutions have the potential in a devolved administration (House of Lords and House of Commons 2015) to make a major contribution to the sustainable development of the Northern Powerhouse and to address the economic, social and environmental factors that contribute to the sustainability of places in the long term

Lumbar spine discs labeling using axial view MRI based on the pixels coordinate and gray level features

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. Disc herniation is a major reason for lower back pain (LBP), a health issue that affects a very high proportion of the UK population and is costing the UK government over £1.3 million per day in health care cost. Currently, the process to diagnose the cause of LBP involves examining a large number of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) but this process is both expensive in terms time and effort. Automatic labeling of lumbar disc pixels in the MRI to detect the herniation area will reduce the time to diagnose and detect the cause of LBP by the physicians. In this paper, we present a method for automatic labeling of the lumbar spine disc pixels in axial view MRI using pixels locations and gray level as features. Clinical MRIs are used for the training and testing of the method. The pixel classification accuracy and the quality of the reconstructed disc images are used as the main performance indicators for our method. Our experiments show that high level of classification accuracy of 91.1% and 98.9% can be achieved using Weighted KNN and Fine Gaussian SVM classifiers respectively

Novel Decision Forest Building Techniques by Utilising Correlation Coefficient Methods

Decision Forests have attracted the academic community’s interest mainly due to their simplicity and transparency. This paper proposes two novel decision forest building techniques, called Maximal Information Coefficient Forest (MICF) and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient Forest (PCCF). The proposed new algorithms use Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (PCC) and Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) as extra measures of the classification capacity score of each feature. Using those approaches, we improve the picking of the most convenient feature at each splitting node, the feature with the greatest Gain Ratio. We conduct experiments on 12 datasets that are available in the publicly accessible UCI machine learning repository. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed methods have the best average ensemble accuracy rank of 1.3 (for MICF) and 3.0 (for PCCF), compared to their closest competitor, Random Forest (RF), which has an average rank of 4.3. Additionally, the results from Friedman and Bonferroni-Dunn tests indicate statistically significant improvement

The Network Turn

This Element contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Culture as Soft Power

Including a thorough literature review and a number of case studies referred to cultural institutions and organisations, this book sheds light on different usages of culture as a source of soft power. Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, it addresses issues tackled in international cultural relations, intellectual history, comparative literature, sociology of literature and global literary studies

Understanding challenges and design opportunities for digital mental well-being in Saudi Arabia

Mental health is considered a growing and highly stigmatized con- cern in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Despite the high interest in mobile health (mHealth) in the KSA and its potential to over- come traditional barriers, research on its application in the Saudi mental well-being context is scarce. My thesis reviews the Saudi app market and explores the main opportunities and barriers to the use of publicly available Arabic mental well-being mobile apps in the KSA from various perspectives including mental health clini- cians and Saudi individuals, with a particular focus on young Saudi women. Ultimately, this thesis aims to contribute to the current knowledge by providing design recommendations derived from interviews, co-design workshops, development and evaluation of a prototype, to inform the future design of Arabic mental well-being technologies considering values and cultural norms

Culture as Soft Power

Including a thorough literature review and a number of case studies referred to cultural institutions and organisations, this book sheds light on different usages of culture as a source of soft power. Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, it addresses issues tackled in international cultural relations, intellectual history, comparative literature, sociology of literature and global literary studies

The politics of the (global) urban: city strategies as repeated instances

In this chapter, the author argues that new understandings of the grounds or territorializations of 'urban agency' need to be developed, not least in response to the changing empirical realities of urban politics and globalization. It shows the value of bringing the various cases into conversation with each other in order to enrich understandings of urban politics in each context. The author also argues that genetic grounds for comparison, based on the extraordinary array of interconnected processes which lead to often repeated, but distinctive, urban outcomes around the globe. The London Plan itself is a circulating practice, a form of strategic planning drawn on and promoted by the United Kingdom national government. As in London, international policy circuits are an presence for Johannesburg's officials, through their own professional training, internet and institutional connections. Johannesburg has prepared a sequence of city strategies, with different emphases