Introduction (to Dossier on Walter Benjamin and Education)

Although it is well known that Walter Benjamin played a leading role in the antebellum German Youth Movement, withdrawing from the presidency of the Berlin Independent Students Association and from other reformist activities only with the onset of World War I, scholars often do not ask whether this multifaceted student activism had any effect on his later thought and writing. This dossier proposes to investigate the early writings on youth and educational reform and their discernible afterlife in the better known historical-materialist phase of Benjamin’s career, including his writings on radio, film, children’s literature, and children’s theater, as well as his studies of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. The introduction provides brief summaries of the ten articles comprising the dossier and their relation to one another, and it addresses the question of the relevance of Benjamin’s ideas on education to contemporary debates concerning pedagogy

Protecting Information Privacy

This report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (the Commission) examines the threats to information privacy that have emerged in recent years, focusing on the activities of the state. It argues that current privacy laws and regulation do not adequately uphold human rights, and that fundamental reform is required. It identifies two principal areas of concern: the state’s handling of personal data, and the use of surveillance by public bodies. The central finding of this report is that the existing approach to the protection of information privacy in the UK is fundamentally flawed, and that there is a pressing need for widespread legislative reform in order to ensure that the rights contained in Article 8 are respected. The report argues for the establishment of a number of key ‘privacy principles’ that can be used to guide future legal reforms and the development of sector-specific regulation. The right to privacy is at risk of being eroded by the growing demand for information by government and the private sector. Unless we start to reform the law and build a regulatory system capable of protecting information privacy, we may soon find that it is a thing of the past

Inverse kinematics problem in robotics using neural networks

In this paper, Multilayer Feedforward Networks are applied to the robot inverse kinematic problem. The networks are trained with endeffector position and joint angles. After training, performance is measured by having the network generate joint angles for arbitrary endeffector trajectories. A 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) spatial manipulator is used for the study. It is found that neural networks provide a simple and effective way to both model the manipulator inverse kinematics and circumvent the problems associated with algorithmic solution methods

Antibodies to citrullinated alpha-enolase peptide in rheumatoid arthritis

Antibodies to cyclic citrullinated peptides (CCP) are diagnostically specific for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and provide valuable prognostic information. The antigens recognised in vivo by these antibodies are still a matter of investigation and the candidates include citrullinated α-enolase. This thesis describes the identification of an immunodominant epitope, citrullinated α-enolase peptide 1 (CEP-1) . Antibodies to CEP-1 showed a diagnostic specificity of 97%, and sensitivity of 38%. A quantitative CEP-1 ELISA was developed and tested in multiple cohorts of early and established RA with a sensitivity of 25-60%. The relationship of anti-CEP-1 antibodies with the major risk factors for RA, the HLA-DRB1 'shared epitope' (SE), PTPN22 and smoking, were examined in 1497 patients and 872 controls in a collaborative study involving patients from Sweden and the UK. A previously described association between SE and anti-CCP antibodies was found to be strongest in the subset that was also positive for anti-CEP-1 antibodies. In the Swedish case-control analysis, the combination of SE, PTPN22 and smoking was preferentially associated with this subset (odds ratio 37 versus 2 for the anti-CEP-1-/anti-CCP+ subset). A novel gene association with this subset, Bromodomain-containing protein 2, was also detected by dense SNP mapping of the MHC region. The prognostic value of anti-CEP-1 antibodies was examined in 680 patients from two early RA cohorts. Only a weak predictive value for clinical outcomes was found, with no significant differences when comparing anti-CCP antibody positive patients with and without anti-CEP-1 antibodies. Furthermore, no predictive value for response to anti-TNF agents was demonstrated in 450 patients from the British Society of Rheumatology Biologics Register. These findings suggest that autoimmunity to at least one epitope on citrullinated α-enolase is a powerful probe for the aetiology of RA (genes and environment), but not for the downstream results of pathogenesis such as clinical outcome and response to treatment

Non-conservation of dimension in divergence-free solutions of passive and active scalar systems

For any $h\in(1,2]$, we give an explicit construction of a compactly supported, uniformly continuous, and (weakly) divergence-free velocity field in $\mathbb{R}^2$ that weakly advects a measure whose support is initially the origin but for positive times has Hausdorff dimension $h$. These velocities are uniformly continuous in space-time and compactly supported, locally Lipschitz except at one point and satisfy the conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a Regular Lagrangian Flow in the sense of Di Perna and Lions theory. We then construct active scalar systems in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and $\mathbb{R}^3$ with measure-valued solutions whose initial support has co-dimension 2 but such that at positive times it only has co-dimension 1. The associated velocities are divergence free, compactly supported, continuous, and sufficiently regular to admit unique Regular Lagrangian Flows. This is in part motivated by the investigation of dimension conservation for the support of measure-valued solutions to active scalar systems. This question occurs in the study of vortex filaments in the three-dimensional Euler equations.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures. This preprint has not undergone peer review (when applicable) or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this article is published in Arch Rational Mech Anal, and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00205-021-01708-