New Ways of Working – Pharmacy and Medicines Management

Medicines play a key role in the treatment of most mental illnesses. The management of those medicines is of great importance to most mental health service users and also impacts on the daily professional life of many of those involved in caring, be they psychiatrists, nurses, pharmacists or others. The New Ways of Working (NWW) project began with a study of the potential to devolve many of the aspects of the dispensing of medicines within pharmacy departments from pharmacists to pharmacy technicians and then to pharmacy assistants. As this project evolved it became clear that perhaps the greatest impact of pharmacy staff and potential for NWW of medicines management was not just in the dispensary but within teams and wards. As further projects began to identify the potential for pharmacy staff to improve the way medicines are used across the whole spectrum of clinical care, it also became clear that medicines management and pharmacy had for many years been an area of neglect by Mental Health Trusts (MHTs) and for many to achieve safe and effective medicines use, would require significant investment. By the end of the programme a wide range of products associated with medicines management, involving pharmacy, service users, carers and others, had been developed (www.newwaysofworking.org.uk)

Quantum limits of localisation microscopy

Localisation microscopy of multiple weak, incoherent point sources with possibly different intensities in one spatial dimension is equivalent to estimating the amplitudes of a classical mixture of coherent states of a simple harmonic oscillator. This enables us to bound the multi-parameter covariance matrix for an unbiased estimator for the locations in terms of the quantum Fisher information matrix, which we obtained analytically. In the regime of arbitrarily small separations we find it to be no more than rank two—implying that no more than two independent parameters can be estimated irrespective of the number of point sources. We use the eigenvalues of the classical and quantum Fisher information matrices to compare the performance of spatial-mode demultiplexing and direct imaging in localisation microscopy with respect to the quantum limits

Gaussian systems for quantum enhanced multiple phase estimation

For a fixed average energy, the simultaneous estimation of multiple phases can provide a better total precision than estimating them individually. We show this for a multimode interferometer with a phase in each mode, using Gaussian inputs and passive elements, by calculating the covariance matrix. The quantum Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound provides a lower bound to the covariance matrix via the quantum Fisher information matrix, whose elements we derive to be the covariances of the photon numbers across the modes. We prove that this bound can be saturated. In spite of the Gaussian nature of the problem, the calculation of non-Gaussian integrals is required, which we accomplish analytically. We find our simultaneous strategy to yield no more than a factor-of-2 improvement in total precision, possibly because of a fundamental performance limitation of Gaussian states. Our work shows that no modal entanglement is necessary for simultaneous quantum-enhanced estimation of multiple phases

The utopianism of human enhancement : impacting our present through images of the future

This paper explores the idea that the desirability of human enhancement stems from the utopianism of human existence and argues that the “human enhancement movement” (HEM) should be understood as a utopian pursuit that impacts both the individual and society in distinct ways. Here, it is argued that the utopian character of HEM is not faithfully realised if it fails to improve life in both the individual and social sense. In particular, it is here highlighted that utopia entails a certain ‘perpetuality’ in both instances, defined as a ‘persistent utopia’ by Miguel Abensour. This illustrates the enduring value of utopian thinking within the discussion on human enhancement. Through this, it is argued, we are able to both appreciate the desirability of HEM and then reconstitute and re-articulate the kind of change sought through HEM as inextricably social and socially-advancing. In so doing, HEM accommodates and supports (or should be understood as doing so) the continuous push for progress, or “betterment”, thereby shedding light on the inadequacies of human society. Moreover, it is postulated that HEM aims to develop both individuals and society writ large through a reciprocal and interminable cycle of influence which should be acknowledged and nurtured. The conclusion is that images of an enhanced human future instilled through HEM—undoubtedly utopian images—can have a direct and positive, policy shaping impact on the progression of human societies and its institutions. This focus should reshape the debate on enhancement.peer-reviewe

Decoding 'balance': learning about the British Empire in English secondary schools

“Teach colonial histories in schools” became a placard slogan in 2020 England. This vindicated history teachers who in the preceding years were early adopters of a new module on the British Empire: Migration, Empires and the People. A key feature of this General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) module for 14 to 16-year-olds is that it does not require teachers to teach the supposed ‘pros and cons’ of empire, known as ‘the balance sheet’ approach, which is common at Key Stage 3 (KS3) when students are 11 to 14 years old. This study of students’ reception of the module is a useful test case for the broader movement to expand the teaching of imperialism. Using classroom ethnographies, focus groups and surveys allowed for a multi-dimensional exploration of students’ changing discourses of empire over the course of the module. To analyse this data, I drew on critical socioculturalism from within the history education subfield of difficult histories and supplemented this framework with specific concepts from the work of Stuart Hall including his model of encoding and decoding. In terms of how messages about empire were encoded, some teachers and textbooks used balance sheet approaches during the module while others did not. However, these encoded messages to students did not in themselves determine whether students framed empire as a balance sheet of ‘pros and cons’. Classmates decoded the same messages in different ways, with some asserting the virtue of ‘balanced’ views of empire and others taking a more critical stance towards empire. I describe how these differences are related to students’ identities, contexts and agency. As well as analysing others’ critiques of the balance sheet approach, I identify within students’ discourses the specific ways in which this framework limits and distorts students’ understanding of the imperial past

‘I’m not Catholic and I’m not Protestant’: Identity, individualisation and challenges for history education in Northern Ireland

Teaching sensitive histories in post-conflict societies makes particular demands on educators to understand students’ identities and their relationships to the past. This paper expands our understanding of post-conflict youth identities and experiences of history education through a small-scale study of students’ life stories in Northern Ireland which defied sectarian boundaries in different ways: some were children of interfaith marriages, while others attended integrated schools or were part of cross-community peace-building organisations. Participants saw themselves as forging new identities and ‘moving on’ from the past, although this process was fraught with ambivalence. I describe these expressions of identity through Ulrich Beck’s (1992) model of triple individualisation. For these ‘post-sectarian’ students, school history was seen largely as a tool towards achieving qualification, far removed from their everyday struggles of self-fashioning

Some Dictionary Descriptions of Grammatical Structure

This paper examines some points in the treatment of grammatical structure in four recent dictionaries of English as Ll. These are viewed against the background concepts of "Iexicogrammar" (Halliday 1978) and of the interdependence of lexicographical and syntactic descriptions of language. Its scope is necessari1y exploratory. The first of its three main sections is theoretical; the second examines some contemporary dictionary treatments of sentence, clause, and phrase; the third presents selected specifica, focussing on treatments of determiners, intensifiers and patterns of complementation, and on the "goodness of fit" between dictionary labelJings and "structural descriptions" and the actual language system. Some necessarily tentative conclusions are drawn.Keywords: Lexicogrammar, lexicographical description of language, syntactic description of languag

Pharmacogenetics of analgesic drugs

• Individual variability in pain perception and differences in the efficacy of analgesic drugs are complex phenomena and are partly genetically predetermined. • Analgesics act in various ways on the peripheral and central pain pathways and are regarded as one of the most valuable but equally dangerous groups of medications. • While pharmacokinetic properties of drugs, metabolism in particular, have been scrutinised by genotype–phenotype correlation studies, the clinical significance of inherited variants in genes governing pharmacodynamics of analgesics remains largely unexplored (apart from the µ-opioid receptor). • Lack of replication of the findings from one study to another makes meaningful personalised analgesic regime still a distant future. • This narrative review will focus on findings related to pharmacogenetics of commonly used analgesic medications and highlight authors’ views on future clinical implications of pharmacogenetics in the context of pharmacological treatment of chronic pain

A novel method for the injection and manipulation of magnetic charge states in nanostructures

Realising the promise of next-generation magnetic nanotechnologies is contingent on the development of novel methods for controlling magnetic states at the nanoscale. There is currently demand for simple and flexible techniques to access exotic magnetisation states without convoluted fabrication and application processes. 360 degree domain walls (metastable twists in magnetisation separating two domains with parallel magnetisation) are one such state, which is currently of great interest in data storage and magnonics. Here, we demonstrate a straightforward and powerful process whereby a moving magnetic charge, provided experimentally by a magnetic force microscope tip, can write and manipulate magnetic charge states in ferromagnetic nanowires. The method is applicable to a wide range of nanowire architectures with considerable benefits over existing techniques. We confirm the method's efficacy via the injection and spatial manipulation of 360 degree domain walls in Py and Co nanowires. Experimental results are supported by micromagnetic simulations of the tip-nanowire interaction.Comment: in Scientific Reports (2016