Some considerations on a new edition of the expostulatio spongiae

Note on Julián González-Barrera,  <em>Expostulatio Spongiae. Fuego cruzado en el nombre de</em><br /><em>Lope</em>, Reichenberger, Kassel, 2011

Politicians are more likely to forward constituent inquiries to the appropriate level if they are of the same party as the recipient

The UK has enjoyed a significant degree of multi-tiered governance since the introduction of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, with recent events suggesting this dynamic will intensify further. Here, Audrey André, Jonathan Bradbury, and Sam Depauw look at constituent correspondence patterns, and find that politicians are much more likely to forward correspondence to the appropriate level if they are of the same party as the recipient, creating blurred lines of accountability and increasing confusion for the constituent

The 1929 Local Government Act : the formulation and implementation of the poor law (health care) and exchequer grant reforms for England and Wales (outside London).

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX189694 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

How, why, for whom and in what context, do sexual health clinics provide an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence: protocol for a realist review

Introduction Supporting people subjected to sexual violence includes provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare. There is a need to ensure an environment for safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence in these clinical settings. The purpose of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of how, why, for whom and in what circumstances safe and supported disclosure occurs in sexual health services. Methods and analysis To understand how safe and supported disclosure of sexual violence works within sexual health services a realist review will be undertaken with the following steps: (1) Focussing of the review including a scoping literature search and guidance from an advisory group. (2) Developing the initial programme theories and a search strategy using context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) configurations. (3) Selection, data extraction and appraisal based on relevance and rigour. (4) Data analysis and synthesis to further develop and refine programme theory, CMO configurations with consideration of middle-range and substantive theories. Data analysis A realist logic of analysis will be used to align data from each phase of the review, with CMO configurations being developed. Programme theories will be sought from the review that can be further tested in the field. Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the ethics committee at University of Birmingham, and has Health Research Authority approval. Findings will be disseminated through knowledge exchange with stakeholders, publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations and formal and informal reports. In addition, as part of a doctoral study, the findings will be tested in multisite case studies. PROSPERO registration details CRD4201912998. Dates of the planned realist review, from protocol design to completion, January 2019 to July 2020

NTT software optimization using an extended Harvey butterfly

Software implementations of the number-theoretic transform (NTT) method often leverage Harvey’s butterfly to gain speedups. This is the case in cryptographic libraries such as IBM’s HElib, Microsoft’s SEAL, and Intel’s HEXL, which provide optimized implementations of fully homomorphic encryption schemes or their primitives. We extend the Harvey butterfly to the radix-4 case for primes in the range [2^31, 2^52). This enables us to use the vector multiply sum logical (VMSL) instruction, which is available on recent IBM Z^(R) platforms. On an IBM z14 system, our implementation performs more than 2.5x faster than the scalar implementation of SEAL we converted to native C. In addition, we implemented a mixed-radix implementation that uses AVX512-IFMA on Intel’s Ice Lake processor, which happens to be ~1.1 times faster than the super-optimized implementation of Intel’s HEXL. Finally, we compare the performance of some of our implementation using GCC versus Clang compilers and discuss the results