Labour market experiences of young UK Bangladeshi men: Identity, inclusion and exclusion in inner-city London

Detailed qualitative data are used to explore the processes perpetuatinglabour market disadvantage among young UK-Bangladeshi men living in central London. Strong forces of inclusion within the Bangladeshi community are found to interact with forces of exclusion from ‘mainstream’ society to constrain aspirations and limit opportunities. Though diverse forms of young Bangladeshi masculinity are found, a common pattern is heavy dependency on intra-ethnic networks. Negative experiences of and isolation from ‘mainstream’ society further reinforce reliance on ‘our own people’. However, acute ambivalence towards belonging to a dense Bangladeshi community exists, exemplified in the widespread denigration of the restaurant trade. Many respondents express the desire to ‘break out’ and access new experiences. The findings support current policy emphasis on ‘connecting people to work’ but highlight the more fundamental need to connect people across ethnic boundaries. The paper urges researchers to ‘unpack’ ethnicity to consider carefully what ethnic identity implies in terms of access to resources and opportunities for different individuals in different contexts in order better to understand the diversity of labour market outcomes and the persistence of disadvantage

The consequence of fetal ethanol exposure and adolescent odor re-exposure on the response to ethanol odor in adolescent and adult rats

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>An epidemiologic predictive relationship exists between fetal ethanol exposure and the likelihood for adolescent use. Further, an inverse relationship exists between the age of first experience and the probability of adult abuse. Whether and how the combined effects of prenatal and adolescent ethanol experiences contribute to this progressive pattern remains unknown. Fetal ethanol exposure directly changes the odor attributes of ethanol important for both ethanol odor preference behavior and ethanol flavor perception. These effects persist only to adolescence. Here we tested whether adolescent ethanol odor re-exposure: (Experiment 1) augments the fetal effect on the adolescent behavioral response to ethanol odor; and/or (Experiment 2) perpetuates previously observed adolescent behavioral and neurophysiological responses into adulthood.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Pregnant rats received either an ethanol or control liquid diet. Progeny (observers) experienced ethanol odor in adolescence via social interaction with a peer (demonstrators) that received an intragastric infusion of either 1.5 g/kg ethanol or water. Social interactions were scored for the frequency that observers followed their demonstrator. Whole-body plethysmography evaluated the unconditioned behavioral response of observers to ethanol odor in adolescence (P37) or adulthood (P90). The olfactory epithelium of adults was also examined for its neural response to five odorants, including ethanol.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Experiment 1: Relative to fetal or adolescent exposure alone, adolescent re-exposure enhanced the behavioral response to ethanol odor in P37 animals. Compared to animals with no ethanol experience, rats receiving a single experience (fetal or adolescent) show an enhanced, yet equivalent, ethanol odor response. Fetal ethanol experience also increased olfactory-guided following of an intoxicated peer. Experiment 2: Combined exposure yielded persistence of the behavioral effects only in adult females. We found no evidence for persistence of neurophysiological effects in either sex.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Fetal ethanol exposure influences adolescent re-exposure, in part, by promoting interactions with intoxicated peers. Re-exposure subsequently enhances ethanol odor responsivity during a key developmental transition point for emergent abuse patterns. While persistence of behavioral effects occurred in females, the level of re-exposure necessary to uniformly yield persistence in both sexes remains unknown. Nonetheless, these results highlight an important relationship between fetal and adolescent experiences that appears essential to the progressive pattern of developing ethanol abuse.</p

An augmented correlation framework for the estimation of tumour translational and rotational motion during external beam radiotherapy treatments using intermittent monoscopic x-ray imaging and an external respiratory signal

© 2018 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. Increasing evidence shows that intrafraction tumour motion monitoring must include both six degrees of freedom (6DoF): 3D translations and 3D rotations. Existing real-time algorithms for 6DoF target motion estimation require continuous intrafraction fluoroscopic imaging at high frequency, thereby exposing patients to additional high imaging dose. This paper presents the first method capable of 6DoF motion monitoring using intermittent 2D kV imaging and a continuous external respiratory signal. Our approach is to optimise a state-augmented linear correlation model between an external signal and internal 6DoF motion. In standard treatments, the model can be built using information obtained during pre-treatment cone beam CT (CBCT). Real-time 6DoF tumor motion can then be estimated using just the external signal. Intermittent intrafraction kV images are used to update the model parameters, accounting for changes in correlation and baseline shifts. The method was evaluated in silico using data from 6 lung SABR patients, with the internal tumour motion recorded with electromagnetic beacons and the external signal from a bellows belt. Projection images from CBCT (10 Hz) and intermittent kV images were simulated by projecting the 3D Calypso beacon positions onto an imager. IMRT and VMAT treatments were simulated with increasing imaging update intervals: 0.1 s, 1 s, 3 s, 10 s and 30 s. For all the tested clinical scenarios, translational motion estimates with our method had sub-mm accuracy (mean) and precision (standard deviation) while rotational motion estimates were accurate to < and precise to . Motion estimation errors increased as the imaging update interval increased. With the largest imaging update interval (30 s), the errors were mm, mm and mm for translation in the left-right, superior-inferior and anterior-posterior directions, respectively, and , and for rotation around the aforementioned axes for both VMAT and IMRT treatments. In conclusion, we developed and evaluated a novel method for highly accurate real-time 6DoF motion monitoring on a standard linear accelerator without requiring continuous kV imaging. The proposed method achieved sub-mm and sub-degree accuracy on a lung cancer patient dataset

Co-designing drug alerts for health and community workers for an emerging early warning system in Victoria, Australia

Background: Alerts about changes in unregulated drug markets may be useful for supporting health and community workers to anticipate, prevent, and respond to unexpected adverse drug events. This study aimed to establish factors influencing the successful design and implementation of drug alerts for use in clinical and community service settings in Victoria, Australia. Methods: An iterative mixed methods design was used to co-produce drug alert prototypes with practitioners and managers working across various alcohol and other drug services and emergency medicine settings. A quantitative needs-analysis survey (n = 184) informed five qualitative co-design workshops (n = 31). Alert prototypes were drafted based on findings and tested for utility and acceptability. Applicable constructs from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research helped to conceptualise factors that impact successful alert system design. Results: Timely and reliable alerts about unexpected drug market changes were important to nearly all workers (98%) yet many reported insufficient access to this kind of information (64%). Workers considered themselves ‘conduits’ for information-sharing and valued alerts for increasing exposure to drug market intelligence; facilitating communication about potential threats and trends; and improving capacity for effective responding to drug-related harm. Alerts should be ‘shareable’ across a range of clinical and community settings and audiences. To maximise engagement and impact, alerts must command attention, be easily recognisable, be available on multiple platforms (electronic and printable formats) in varying levels of detail, and be disseminated via appropriate notification mechanisms to meet the needs of diverse stakeholder groups. Three drug alert prototypes (SMS prompt, summary flyer, and a detailed poster) were endorsed by workers as useful for supporting their work responding to unexpected drug-related harms. Discussion: Alerts informed by coordinated early warning networks that offer close to real-time detection of unexpected substances can provide rapid, evidence-based drug market intelligence to inform preventive and responsive action to drug-related harm. The success of alert systems requires adequate planning and resourcing to support design, implementation, and evaluation, which includes consultation with all relevant audiences to understand how to maximise engagement with information, recommendations, and advice. Our findings about factors impacting successful alert design have utility to inform the development of local early warning systems

Seasonal winter forecasts and the stratosphere

Published© 2016 Royal Meteorological Society. We investigate seasonal forecasts of the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and their relationship with the stratosphere. Climatological frequencies of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) and strong polar vortex (SPV) events are well represented and the predicted risk of events varies between 25 and 90% from winter to winter, indicating predictability beyond the deterministic range. The risk of SSW and SPV events relates to predicted NAO as expected, with NAO shifts of -6.5 and +4.8hPa in forecast members containing SSW and SPV events. Most striking of all is that forecast skill of the surface winter NAO vanishes from these hindcasts if members containing SSW events are excluded.This work was supported by the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101), the UK Public Weather Service research program and the European Union Framework 7 SPECS project. The contribution of AYK is funded by FMI’s tenure track program and the Academy of Finland under grant 286298

Social relations in crowds: recognition, validation and solidarity

Social identity research on crowds demonstrates how cognitive self-definition as a crowd member results in conformity to identity-relevant norms. Less research addresses the social-relational changes within a crowd and how these impact collective experience positively. The present study investigates these processes at a month-long mass gathering in India. Analysis of 37 interviews with participants attending the annual Magh Mela pilgrimage evidences the concept of shared identity as underpinning their understanding of this mass gathering. Moreover, a theoretically-derived thematic analysis of these interviews shows the value of the analytic concepts of recognition, validation, and solidarity in illuminating the ways in which social relations in the crowd were experienced and contributed to the experience of the event. Through exploring the multi-dimensional nature of relational connectedness in crowds we contribute to an understanding of crowd experience and group processes

Skilful seasonal predictions of Summer European rainfal

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from American Geophysical Union (AGU) via the DOI in this record.Year-to-year variability in Northern European summer rainfall has profound societal and economic impacts; however current seasonal forecast systems show no significant forecast skill. Here we show skilful predictions are possible (r~0.5, p80 members) are required for skilful predictions. This work is promising for the development of European summer rainfall climate services.This work was supported by the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101), the EU FP7 SPECS project. We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://www.ecad.eu). We also would like to thank Gerard van der Schrier and Else Van Den Besselaar for kindly providing us the pre-release E-OBS dataset version 'v16e' and further support. Model data used to create the figures are available from the authors upon request for academic use

Luminous infrared galaxies as possible sources of the UHE cosmic rays

Ultra High Energy (UHE) particles coming from discrete extragalactic sources are potential candidates for EAS events above a few tens of EeV. In particular, galaxies with huge infrared luminosity triggered by collision and merging processes are possible sites of UHECR acceleration. Using the PSCz catalogue of IR galaxies we calculate a large scale anisotropy of UHE protons originating in the population of the luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs). Small angle particle scattering in weak irregular extragalactic magnetic fields as well as deflection by regular Galactic field are taken into account. We give analytical formulae for deflection angles with included energy losses on cosmic microwave background (CMB). The hypotheses of the anisotropic and isotropic distributions of the experimental data above 40 EeV from AGASA are checked, using various statistical tests. We show that on the basis of the small scale clustering analysis there is a much better correlation of the UHECRs data below GZK cut-off with the predictions of the LIRG origin than with those of isotropy. We derive analytical formulae for a probability of a given number of doublets, triplets and quadruplets for any density distribution of independent events on the sky. The famous AGASA UHE triple event is found to be very well correlated on the sky with the brightest extragalactic infrared source within 70 Mpc - merger galaxies Arp 299 (NGC 3690 + IC 694).Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publ: Journal of Physics

The first clinical treatment with kilovoltage intrafraction monitoring (KIM): A real-time image guidance method

PURPOSE: Kilovoltage intrafraction monitoring (KIM) is a real-time image guidance method that uses widely available radiotherapy technology, i.e., a gantry-mounted x-ray imager. The authors report on the geometric and dosimetric results of the first patient treatment using KIM which occurred on September 16, 2014. METHODS: KIM uses current and prior 2D x-ray images to estimate the 3D target position during cancer radiotherapy treatment delivery. KIM software was written to process kilovoltage (kV) images streamed from a standard C-arm linear accelerator with a gantry-mounted kV x-ray imaging system. A 120° pretreatment kV imaging arc was acquired to build the patient-specific 2D to 3D motion correlation. The kV imager was activated during the megavoltage (MV) treatment, a dual arc VMAT prostate treatment, to estimate the 3D prostate position in real-time. All necessary ethics, legal, and regulatory requirements were met for this clinical study. The quality assurance processes were completed and peer reviewed. RESULTS: During treatment, a prostate position offset of nearly 3 mm in the posterior direction was observed with KIM. This position offset did not trigger a gating event. After the treatment, the prostate motion was independently measured using kV/MV triangulation, resulting in a mean difference of less than 0.6 mm and standard deviation of less than 0.6 mm in each direction. The accuracy of the marker segmentation was visually assessed during and after treatment and found to be performing well. During treatment, there were no interruptions due to performance of the KIM software. CONCLUSIONS: For the first time, KIM has been used for real-time image guidance during cancer radiotherapy. The measured accuracy and precision were both submillimeter for the first treatment fraction. This clinical translational research milestone paves the way for the broad implementation of real-time image guidance to facilitate the detection and correction of geometric and dosimetric errors, and resultant improved clinical outcomes, in cancer radiotherapy

Is London open? Mediating and ordering cosmopolitanism in crisis

This article analyses cosmopolitan imagination and ambivalent morality at times of urban crisis. It focuses on #LondonIsOpen – the city’s media campaign in response to the nation’s Brexit vote. In this case, cosmopolitanism’s discursive tools – especially the ideals of the Open city and hospitality – are mobilised to summon a range of actors in defence of the city. The article analyses the mediation of cosmopolitanism in a campaign film and in Londoners’ online and offline responses to it. These responses reveal #LondonIsOpen as a compelling example of cosmopolitan imagination, but also of cosmopolitanism’s moral fragility in the neoliberal city. As shown, urban dwellers overwhelmingly embrace the cosmopolitan value of openness. Yet, their visions are divided between neoliberal cosmopolitanism and vernacular cosmopolitanism. By analysing the moral space of mediated cosmopolitanism, I argue that, unlike the nation, representational struggles in the city increasingly take place within, rather than against, cosmopolitanis