The age of austerity: the impact of welfare reform on people in the North East of England

According to Mark Carney the Governor of the Bank of England the United Kingdom economic outlook is getting brighter: "For the first time in a long time you don’t have to be an optimist to see the glass is half full. The recovery has finally taken hold (Carney 2013).” Unemployment is falling; as have interest rates and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth has been upgraded from 2.5 per cent to 2.8 per cent for the year 2014. Despite these “green shoots of recovery”, the impact of government austerity measures and social policy decisions means the outlook for millions of citizens remains blea

Oral Health Advice for People With Serious Mental Illness

People with serious mental illness experience an erosion of functioning in day-to-day life over a protracted period of time. There is also evidence to suggest that people with serious mental illness have a greater risk of experiencing oral disease and have greater oral treatment needs than the general population. However, oral health has never been seen as a priority in people suffering with serious mental illness

Concealment, communication and stigma: The perspectives of HIV-positive immigrant Black African men and their partners living in the United Kingdom

This study explored the perspectives of Black men, originally from East Africa, living in the United Kingdom and their families on what it means to live with diagnosed HIV. This article reports on concealment of HIV-positive status as a strategy adopted by the affected participants to manage the flow of information about their HIV-positive status. Analysis of the data, collected using in-depth interviews involving 23 participants, found widespread selective concealment of HIV-positive status. However, a few respondents had ‘come out’ publicly about their condition. HIV prevention initiatives should recognise concealment as a vital strategy in managing communication about one’s HIV-positive status

A pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial of an oral health intervention for people with serious mental illness (three shires early intervention dental trial).

People with mental illness have poor oral health compared to those without due to medication side effects, issues with self-care, barriers to treatment and poor recognition of dental problems. Guidelines recommend giving oral health advice and monitoring oral health for people with mental illness, but this is not reflected in current practice and Cochrane reviews found no existing randomised trials of these interventions

Introduction: doing rural cultural studies

The guest editors of the Rural Cultural Studies section introduce the articles

On Shear-Driven Ventilation of Snow

A series of experiments have been made in a wind tunnel to investigate the ventilation of snow by shear. We argue that the zero-plane displacement can be used as a convenient indicator of ventilation, and that this can be obtained from measurements of mean velocity profiles in conditions of zero pressure gradient. Measurements made over a natural snow surface show a zero-plane displacement depth of less than 5mm, but practical considerations preclude extensive use of snow for these measurements. Instead, the influence of permeability is investigated using reticulated foams in place of snow. We demonstrate that the foam and snow have similar structure and flow-relevant properties. Although the surface of the foam is flat, the roughness lengths increase by two orders of magnitude as the permeability increases from 6 × 10−9 to 160 × 10−9 m2. The zero-plane displacement for the least permeable foams is effectively zero, but more than 15mm for the most permeable foams. Our data compare well to the few studies available in the literature. By analogy to conditions over snow surfaces, we suggest that shear-driven ventilation of snow is therefore limited to the upper few millimetres of snow surface

The Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE): The Dust Extinction Curve from Red Clump Stars

We use Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of red clump stars taken as part of the Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE) program to measure the average dust extinction curve in a ~ 200 pc x 100 pc region in the southwest bar of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The rich information provided by our 8-band ultra-violet through near-infrared photometry allows us to model the color-magnitude diagram of the red clump accounting for the extinction curve shape, a log-normal distribution of $A_{V}$, and the depth of the stellar distribution along the line of sight. We measure an extinction curve with $R_{475} = A_{475}/(A_{475}-A_{814})$ = 2.65 $\pm$ 0.11. This measurement is significantly larger than the equivalent values of published Milky Way $R_{V}$ = 3.1 ($R_{475} = 1.83$) and SMC Bar $R_{V}$ = 2.74 ($R_{475} = 1.86$) extinction curves. Similar extinction curve offsets in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been interpreted as the effect of large dust grains. We demonstrate that the line-of-sight depth of the SMC (and LMC) introduces an apparent "gray" contribution to the extinction curve inferred from the morphology of the red clump. We show that no gray dust component is needed to explain extinction curve measurements when a full-width half-max depth of 10 $\pm$ 2 kpc in the stellar distribution of the SMC (5 $\pm$ 1 kpc for the LMC) is considered, which agrees with recent studies of Magellanic Cloud stellar structure. The results of our work demonstrate the power of broad-band HST imaging for simultaneously constraining dust and galactic structure outside the Milky Way.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap

A Supersonic Argon/Air Coaxial Jet Experiment for Computational Fluid Dynamics Code Validation

A non-reacting experiment is described in which data has been acquired for the validation of CFD codes used to design high-speed air-breathing engines. A coaxial jet-nozzle has been designed to produce pressure-matched exit flows of Mach 1.8 at 1 atm in both a center jet of argon and a coflow jet of air, creating a supersonic, incompressible mixing layer. The flowfield was surveyed using total temperature, gas composition, and Pitot probes. The data set was compared to CFD code predictions made using Vulcan, a structured grid Navier-Stokes code, as well as to data from a previous experiment in which a He-O2 mixture was used instead of argon in the center jet of the same coaxial jet assembly. Comparison of experimental data from the argon flowfield and its computational prediction shows that the CFD produces an accurate solution for most of the measured flowfield. However, the CFD prediction deviates from the experimental data in the region downstream of x/D = 4, underpredicting the mixing-layer growth rate