Subordination in Children’s Writing

This paper reports an investigation into the use of subordinate clauses in the writing of a class of seven to nine year old children when attempting five different writing tasks. The investigation was undertaken in part-response to an inspection report on the school by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) which recommended that the school should extend the writing skills of pupils in this age-range. The importance of developing subordination in writing is related to previous research and to evidence from reviews of Ofsted inspection evidence. The different patterns of subordination are discussed, between tasks and pupils and in relation to variation in the writing of individual children when tackling the different tasks. The paper ends by suggesting how similar informal investigations can assist schools in promoting writing development. It also outlines how the teaching approaches outlined in the National Literacy Strategy will provide opportunities for this promotion, particularly by exploiting links between reading and writing

Putting Soybeans into Permanent Farming

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Velocity measurements in whole blood using acoustic resolution photoacoustic Doppler

Acoustic resolution photoacoustic Doppler velocimetry promises to overcome the spatial resolution and depth penetration limitations of current blood flow measuring methods. Despite successful implementation using blood-mimicking fluids, measurements in blood have proved challenging, thus preventing in vivo application. A common explanation for this difficulty is that whole blood is insufficiently heterogeneous relative to detector frequencies of tens of MHz compatible with deep tissue photoacoustic measurements. Through rigorous experimental measurements we provide new insight that refutes this assertion. We show for the first time that, by careful choice of the detector frequency and field-of-view, and by employing novel signal processing methods, it is possible to make velocity measurements in whole blood using transducers with frequencies in the tens of MHz range. These findings have important implications for the prospects of making deep tissue measurements of blood flow relevant to the study of microcirculatory abnormalities associated with cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis and other conditions

Acoustic resolution photoacoustic Doppler velocimetry in blood-mimicking fluids

Photoacoustic Doppler velocimetry provides a major opportunity to overcome limitations of existing blood flow measuring methods. By enabling measurements with high spatial resolution several millimetres deep in tissue, it could probe microvascular blood flow abnormalities characteristic of many different diseases. Although previous work has demonstrated feasibility in solid phantoms, measurements in blood have proved significantly more challenging. This difficulty is commonly attributed to the requirement that the absorber spatial distribution is heterogeneous relative to the minimum detectable acoustic wavelength. By undertaking a rigorous study using blood-mimicking fluid suspensions of 3 μm absorbing microspheres, it was discovered that the perceived heterogeneity is not only limited by the intrinsic detector bandwidth; in addition, bandlimiting due to spatial averaging within the detector field-of-view also reduces perceived heterogeneity and compromises velocity measurement accuracy. These detrimental effects were found to be mitigated by high-pass filtering to select photoacoustic signal components associated with high heterogeneity. Measurement under-reading due to limited light penetration into the flow vessel was also observed. Accurate average velocity measurements were recovered using "range-gating", which furthermore maps the cross-sectional velocity profile. These insights may help pave the way to deep-tissue non-invasive mapping of microvascular blood flow using photoacoustic methods

Muon spin rotation studies of niobium for superconducting RF applications

In this work we investigate superconducting properties of niobium samples via application of the muon spin rotation/relaxation (muSR) technique. We employ for the first time the muSR technique to study samples that are cutout from large and small grain 1.5 GHz radio frequency (RF) single cell niobium cavities. The RF test of these cavities was accompanied by full temperature mapping to characterize the RF losses in each of the samples. Results of the muSR measurements show that standard cavity surface treatments like mild baking and buffered chemical polishing (BCP) performed on the studied samples affect their surface pinning strength. We find an interesting correlation between high field RF losses and field dependence of the sample magnetic volume fraction measured via muSR. The muSR line width observed in ZF-muSR measurements matches the behavior of Nb samples doped with minute amounts of Ta or N impurities. An upper bound for the upper critical field Hc2 of these cutouts is found.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figure

Novel method for the analysis of clathrates

Recently various of applications of clathrates, such as the concentration of juices, water desalination and wastewater treatment have gained the attention in industry and research alike. In this paper we present a novel method based on photoacoustic spectroscopy for the analysis of clathrates in aqueous environments. The herein proposed self-referencing method poses a simple and robust approach identifying and determining the formation of clathrates via the measurement of the Grüneisen coefficient using a PVDF-based photoacoustic spectroscope. This research holds high potential for industrial applications of clathrates helping to save time, energy and resources during the clathrate forming process by indicating clathrate formation

Short-term effects of announcing revised lower risk national drinking guidelines on related awareness and knowledge: A trend analysis of monthly survey data in England.

Objectives: To evaluate short-term effects of publishing revised lower-risk national drinking guidelines on related awareness and knowledge. To examine where drinkers heard about guidelines over the same period. Design: Trend analysis of the Alcohol Toolkit Study, a monthly repeat cross-sectional national survey. Setting: England, November 2015 to May 2016. Participants: A total of 11,845 adults (18+) living in private households in England Intervention: Publication of revised national drinking guidelines in January 2016 which reduced the male guideline by approximately one-third to 14 units per week. Measurements: Whether drinkers (i) had heard of drinking guidelines (awareness), (ii) stated the guideline was above, exactly or below 14 units (knowledge), and (iii) reported seeing the stated guideline number of units in the last month in each of 11 locations (exposure). Sociodemographics: sex, age (18-34, 35-64, 65+), social grade (AB, C1C2, DE). Alcohol consumption derived from graduated frequency questions: low risk (<14 units/week), increasing/high risk (14+ units/week). Results: Following publication of the guidelines, the proportion of drinkers aware of guidelines did not increase from its baseline level of 85.1% (CI:82.7-87.1). However, the proportion of male drinkers saying the guideline was 14 units or less increased from 22.6% (CI:18.9-26.7) in December to 43.3% (CI:38.9-47.8) in January and was at 35.6% (CI:31.6-39.9) in May. Last month exposure to the guidelines was below 25% in all locations except television/radio where exposure increased from 33% (CI:28.8-36.2) in December to 65% (CI:61.2-68.3) in January. Awareness and knowledge of guidelines was lowest in social grade DE and this gap remained after publication. Conclusions: Publication of new or revised lower risk drinking guidelines can improve drinkers’ knowledge of these guidelines within all sociodemographic groups; however, in the absence of sustained promotional activity, positive effects may not be maintained and social inequalities in awareness and knowledge of guidelines are likely to persist

Molecular Identification of Eimeria Species in Broiler Chickens in Trinidad, West Indies

Coccidiosis is an intestinal disease of chickens of major economic importance to broiler industries worldwide. Species of coccidia found in chickens include Eimeria acervulina, Eimeria brunetti, Eimeria maxima, Eimeria mitis, Eimeria necatrix, Eimeria praecox, and Eimeria tenella. In recent years, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has been developed to provide accurate and rapid identification of the seven known Eimeria species of chickens. The aim of this study was to use species-specific real-time PCR (qPCR) to identify which of the seven Eimeria species are present in Trinidad poultry. Seventeen pooled fecal samples were collected from 6 broiler farms (2–5 pens per farm) across Trinidad. Feces were also collected from birds showing clinical signs of coccidiosis in two live bird markets (pluck shops). qPCR revealed the presence of five species of Eimeria (E. acervulina, E. maxima, E. mitis, E. necatrix, and E. tenella), but not E. brunetti or E. praecox. Mixed infections were detected on all broiler farms, and DNA of two highly pathogenic Eimeria species (E. tenella and E. necatrix) was detected in feces taken from clinically sick birds sampled from the two pluck shops

QCD as a Quantum Link Model

QCD is constructed as a lattice gauge theory in which the elements of the link matrices are represented by non-commuting operators acting in a Hilbert space. The resulting quantum link model for QCD is formulated with a fifth Euclidean dimension, whose extent resembles the inverse gauge coupling of the resulting four-dimensional theory after dimensional reduction. The inclusion of quarks is natural in Shamir's variant of Kaplan's fermion method, which does not require fine-tuning to approach the chiral limit. A rishon representation in terms of fermionic constituents of the gluons is derived and the quantum link Hamiltonian for QCD with a U(N) gauge symmetry is expressed in terms of glueball, meson and constituent quark operators. The new formulation of QCD is promising both from an analytic and from a computational point of view.Comment: 27 pages, including three figures. ordinary LaTeX; Submitted to Nucl. Phys.