Nutritional Status in Northern Nigeria, Prevalence and Determinants: A Review of Evidence Prepared for the ORIE Component of the WINNN Programme

The purpose of this paper is to review the evidence on the state and determinants of child and maternal under nutrition in Northern Nigeria. It reviews the most current evidence and also examines examples of interventions that have addressed (successful or not) under nutrition globally and in Nigeria. A review of findings on the determinants of under nutrition in northern Nigeria provides some evidence of the nature of the complex pathways between various levels of causes (immediate, underlying, basic) and interventions and policies, leading to some observations as to how far the global evidence on interventions to tackle under nutrition might be applied to the situation in northern Nigeria.UK Department for International Developmen

5 Published Articles on Studies on the Notostraca

This thesis consists of a series of reprints of publications in which are reported the results of researches on the systematica of the Notostracan Crustacea. Studies were made on the cytology, the biochemistry end the comparative ecology of the group and were utilised in a systematic study of the Notostrace. This research was initiated after the finding by the candidate of living Notostraca in a rain-pool in southern England, which proved to be the only known locality for the group in the British Isles in recent years, having been found there previously by Professors Hobson and Fox. Success in culturing Triops cancriformis from this pool under laboratory conditions stimulated efforts to obtain cultures of other species, and finally cultures of all four species of Triops and of two species of Lepidurus were maintained at Bedford College. These, together with the collections of preserved material in a number of European, American and Australian museums, formed the basis of the study. The cultures were utilised for investigations of the development of exoskeletal characters during growth, for the investigation of the variability of these characters in a single line of individuals under differing environmental conditions, for cytological studies resulting in some knowledge of the chromosome numbers within the group, and for an investigation of the specificity of blood pigments in different species and in different races of a single species. The study was recorded in five publications, which are bound together to form this thesis; a preliminary report of the discovery that the so-called parthenogenetic forms are in fact hermaphroditic is bound in as E in the thesis. The main paper, B, contains a review of Notostracan literature, the analysis of the validity to systeraatics of the exoskeletal characters used in the past, the chromosome counts, the investigation of biochemical specificity, and the basic systematic revision of the group. The conclusion reached in this paper was that the Hotostraca are composed of a small number of very widely dispersed species, all rather close to each other systematically but characterised by considerable individual variation. The number of species previously described was shown to be much too high. A separate account of the details of the cytology and reproductive qycle which were elucidated incidentally in the investigation of chromosome numbers appears as D and describes in considerably more detail than hitherto the cytology of the gonads during reproduction. An attempt was made in a separate publication. A, to explain the widespread nature of the distribution of llotostracan species and to relate it to the extreme longevity of the group in palaeontological terms, and an explanatory hypothesis is developed, derived from the ecology of the group. Finally, under C, there is an account of the existence of what appears to be a most unusually high proportion of abnormal individuals occurring in populations of Notostraca compared with the proportion in other animal groups, and this again is referred to the palaeontological longevity of the Botostraca. For convenience the constituent papers of the thesis are listed below: A: Evolution in the Notostraca. Evolution.; B: A review of the Notostraca. Bull. Brit. Mus. (N.H.); C: Abnormal variation in the Notostraca. Syst. Zool.; D: Reproduction in the Notostraca. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond.; E: Reproduction in the Notostraca. Nature, Lond.<p

Pregnancy and childbirth in English prisons : institutional ignominy and the pains of imprisonment

© 2020 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL.With a prison population of approximately 9000 women in England, it is estimated that approximately 600 pregnancies and 100 births occur annually. Despite an extensive literature on the sociology of reproduction, pregnancy and childbirth among women prisoners is under‐researched. This article reports an ethnographic study in three English prisons undertaken in 2015‐2016, including interviews with 22 prisoners, six women released from prison and 10 staff members. Pregnant prisoners experience numerous additional difficulties in prison including the ambiguous status of a pregnant prisoner, physical aspects of pregnancy and the degradation of the handcuffed or chained prisoner during visits to the more public setting of hospital. This article draws on Erving Goffman's concepts of closed institutions, dramaturgy and mortification of self, Crewe et al.'s work on the gendered pains of imprisonment and Crawley's notion of ‘institutional thoughtlessness’, and proposes a new concept of institutional ignominy to understand the embodied situation of the pregnant prisoner.Peer reviewe

Better together: Integrating biomedical informatics and healthcare IT operations to create a learning health system during the COVID-19 pandemic

The growing availability of multi-scale biomedical data sources that can be used to enable research and improve healthcare delivery has brought about what can be described as a healthcare data age. This new era is defined by the explosive growth in bio-molecular, clinical, and population-level data that can be readily accessed by researchers, clinicians, and decision-makers, and utilized for systems-level approaches to hypothesis generation and testing as well as operational decision-making. However, taking full advantage of these unprecedented opportunities presents an opportunity to revisit the alignment between traditionally academic biomedical informatics (BMI) and operational healthcare information technology (HIT) personnel and activities in academic health systems. While the history of the academic field of BMI includes active engagement in the delivery of operational HIT platforms, in many contemporary settings these efforts have grown distinct. Recent experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated greater coordination of BMI and HIT activities that have allowed organizations to respond to pandemic-related changes more effectively, with demonstrable and positive impact as a result. In this position paper, we discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with driving alignment between BMI and HIT, as viewed from the perspective of a learning healthcare system. In doing so, we hope to illustrate the benefits of coordination between BMI and HIT in terms of the quality, safety, and outcomes of care provided to patients and populations, demonstrating that these two groups can be better together

Can rates of ocean primary production and biological carbon export be related through their probability distributions?

© The Author(s), 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles 32 (2018): 954-970, doi:10.1029/2017GB005797.We describe the basis of a theory for interpreting measurements of two key biogeochemical fluxes—primary production by phytoplankton (p, μg C · L−1 · day−1) and biological carbon export from the surface ocean by sinking particles (f, mg C · m−2 · day−1)—in terms of their probability distributions. Given that p and f are mechanistically linked but variable and effectively measured on different scales, we hypothesize that a quantitative relationship emerges between collections of the two measurements. Motivated by the many subprocesses driving production and export, we take as a null model that large‐scale distributions of p and f are lognormal. We then show that compilations of p and f measurements are consistent with this hypothesis. The compilation of p measurements is extensive enough to subregion by biome, basin, depth, or season; these subsets are also well described by lognormals, whose log‐moments sort predictably. Informed by the lognormality of both p and f we infer a statistical scaling relationship between the two quantities and derive a linear relationship between the log‐moments of their distributions. We find agreement between two independent estimates of the slope and intercept of this line and show that the distribution of f measurements is consistent with predictions made from the moments of the p distribution. These results illustrate the utility of a distributional approach to biogeochemical fluxes. We close by describing potential uses and challenges for the further development of such an approach.National Science Foundation Grant Number: OCE-1315201; Simons Foundation Grant Numbers: 329108, 553242; National Aeronautics and Space Administration Grant Numbers: NNX16AR47G, NNX16AR49

Fusion Safety Program Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1996

This report summarizes the major activities of the Fusion Safety Program in FY 1996. The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) is the designated lead laboratory, and Lockheed Martin Idaho Technologies Company is the prime contractor for this program. The Fusion Safety Program was initiated in 1979. The objective is to perform research and develop data needed to ensure safety in fusion facilities. Activities include experiments, analysis, code development and application, and other forms of research. These activities are conducted at the INEL, at other DOE laboratories, and at other institutions. Among the technical areas covered in this report are tritium safety, chemical reactions and activation product release, risk assessment failure rate database development, and safety code development and application to fusion safety issues. Most of this work has been done in support of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Work done for ITER this year has focused on developing the needed information for the Non- Site- Specific Safety Report (NSSR-1). A final area of activity described is development of the new DOE Technical Standards for Safety of Magnetic Fusion Facilities

Academic motherhood and fieldwork: Juggling time, emotions and competing demands

The idea and practice of going ‘into the field’ to conduct research and gather data is a deeply rooted aspect of Geography as a discipline. For global North Development Geographers, amongst others, this usually entails travelling to, and spending periods of time in, often far-flung parts of the global South. Forging a successful academic career as a Development Geographer in the UK, is therefore to some extent predicated on mobility. This paper aims to critically engage with the gendered aspects of this expected mobility, focusing on the challenges and time constraints that are apparent when conducting overseas fieldwork as a mother, unaccompanied by her children. The paper emphasises the emotion work that is entailed in balancing the competing demands of overseas fieldwork and mothering, and begins to think through the implications of these challenges in terms of the types of knowledge we produce, as well as in relation to gender equality within the academy

Participation in Transition(s):Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

This paper brings the transitions literature into conversation with constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation for the first time. In doing so we put forward a conception of public and civil society engagement in sustainability transitions as co-produced, relational, and emergent. Through paying close attention to the ways in which the subjects, objects, and procedural formats of public engagement are constructed through the performance of participatory collectives, our approach offers a framework to open up to and symmetrically compare diverse and interconnected forms of participation that make up wider socio-technical systems. We apply this framework in a comparative analysis of four diverse cases of civil society involvement in UK low carbon energy transitions. This highlights similarities and differences in how these distinct participatory collectives are orchestrated, mediated, and subject to exclusions, as well as their effects in producing particular visions of the issue at stake and implicit models of participation and ‘the public’. In conclusion we reflect on the value of this approach for opening up the politics of societal engagement in transitions, building systemic perspectives of interconnected ‘ecologies of participation’, and better accounting for the emergence, inherent uncertainties, and indeterminacies of all forms of participation in transitions

Storage and Assay of Tritium in STAR

The Safety and Tritium Applied Research (STAR) facility has recently been commissioned to investigate tritium-related safety questions for fusion and other technologies. The authorized inventory of tritium is 1.6 grams, the threshold quantity for nuclear facility classification. A key capability in successful operation of the STAR facility is the ability to receive, inventory, and dispense tritium to the various experiments underway there. The system central to that function is the Tritium Storage and Assay System (SAS). The SAS has four major functions: (1) receiving and holding tritium from shipping containers brought into the STAR facility, (2) assaying the amount of tritium in the SAS, (3) dispensing tritium to secondary beds or containers used for transferring it to the experimental systems in the STAR facility, and (4) purifying hydrogen isotopes from non-hydrogen species. To that may be added a fifth, optional function, isotopic separation of hydrogen isotopes using bed-to-bed transfer techniques. This paper documents the design and operation of the STAR SAS and the procedures used for tritium accountancy in the STAR facility