Long-Run Effects of BSE on Meat Consumption

This paper considers the long-run effects of BSE on meat consumption in the United Kingdom using data from the Expenditure and Food Survey. We estimate a dynamic AIDS demand system of household food consumption, with long-run effects captured via an adstock index of adverse media coverage. The results suggest that there are long-run impacts on meat consumption that extend well beyond the period of the scare. In addition, press articles with pictures have a greater, and more long-lasting effect, on long-run consumption than articles with words alone.Food health scares, Adstock, BSE, demand systems, meat demand

Text steganography

Since the exchange of encrypted data in interpersonal electronic messages is both rare and easily detected, steganographic techniques are needed to ensure that private communications do not raise suspicion. Previous work in this area is largely inapplicable to environments such as the Internet, as these schemes require the exchange of large data sets in the form of image or sound files, or the sharing of large databases used for the steganographic encoding and decoding, A class of novel systems is presented here which aims to provide a practical solution for steganography over text-based channels with minimal shared information required. The implementation of one of the four presented systems is described and initial experimental results are reported

Inositol Pyrophosphates and Their Unique Metabolic Complexity: Analysis by Gel Electrophoresis

Inositol pyrophosphates are a recently characterized cell signalling molecules responsible for the pyrophosphorylation of protein substrates. Though likely involved in a wide range of cellular functions, the study of inositol pyrophosphates has suffered from a lack of readily available methods for their analysis

Seeing behind the curtain: Reverse Mentoring within the Higher Education landscape

The following article presents the findings of a Reverse Mentoring evaluation project conducted at a modern university in northwest England, which has a high proportion of students from non-traditional educational backgrounds. Using a reverse mentoring framework, the traditional mentor–mentee relationship was flipped with students serving as senior partners and their tutors as junior partners. The purpose of this study was to investigate how staff–student relations could be strengthened by gaining a better understanding of one another’s perspectives. The concept of institutional habitus provided a theoretical framework within which to examine disparities in mentor–mentee cultural understanding. Using a mixed approach to data collection, composite narratives were constructed. They revealed subtle cultural mismatches between the positions of mentor and mentee. The study speculates that by gaining a better understanding and appreciation of students’ habitus, more inclusive teaching practises can be developed to ensure the inclusion of all students

Predicting the birth of a spoken word

Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition