Broken North

This paper is concerned with wilderness and desolation. It asks ‘How does Northern ‘emptiness’ function as a resource in the arts?’ It considers the formative context of key works by post-war artists, writers and film-makers, in particular the journeys which led to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Joseph Beuys’ Loch Awe Piece , and Thomas Struth’s Edinburgh photographs from the series Unconscious Places; each informed by their author’s perceptions of the North as naturally barren, socially deprived or simply uninhabited. The suggestion is that the journey to an empty northern landscape always offers the opportunity of a further North. However the North is a place of personal pilgrimage and arrival which has no ‘beyond’, a place one need not go beyond. While a special function of the North is as a space of art and as a resource in the arts, offering silence and withdrawal, its continued representation by visitors prolongs and strengthens this idea. However what emerges can be collectively represented in many ways, including as a ‘Broken North’

The reduced form as an empirical tool: a cautionary tale from the financial veil

An analysis of the limitations of the reduced-form empirical strategy as a method of testing the Modigliani-Miller model of corporate financial structure, demonstrating that an empirical strategy that is not closely tied to an underlying economic theory of behavior will usually yield estimates that are too imprecise or too unreliable to form a basis for policy.Corporations - Finance ; Investments

Talking about a Christine Borland sculpture: effective empathy in contemporary anatomy art (and an emerging counterpart in medical training?)

This Introduction and interview discusses the poetical and empathic insights that are a key to the effectiveness of contemporary artist Christine Borland's practice and its relevance to the medical humanities, visual art research and medical students’ training. It takes place in a context of intensive interest in reciprocity and conversation as well as expert exchange between the fields of Medicine and Contemporary Arts. The interview develops an understanding of medical research and the application of its historical resources and contemporary practice-based research in contemporary art gallery exhibitions. Artists tend not to follow prescriptive programmes towards new historical knowledge, however, a desire to form productive relationships between history and contemporary art practice does reveal practical advantages. Borland's research also includes investigations in anatomy, medical practices and conservatio

Wurster fluidised bed coating of microparticles: Towards scalable production of oral sustained-release liquid medicines for patients with swallowing difficulties

© 2019 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Suspension of microparticles in an easy-to-swallow liquid is one approach to develop sustained-release formulations for children and patients with swallowing difficulties. However, to date production of sustained-release microparticles at the industrial scale has proven to be challenging. The aim of this investigation was to develop an innovative concept in coating sustained-release microparticles using industrial scalable Wurster fluidised bed to produce oral liquid suspensions. Microcrystalline cellulose cores (particle size < 150 µm) were coated with Eudragit® NM 30 D and Eudragit® RS/RL 30 D aqueous dispersions using a fluidised bed coater. A novel approach of periodic addition of a small quantity (0.1% w/w) of dry powder glidant, magnesium stearate, to the coating chamber via an external port was applied throughout the coating process. This method significantly increased coating production yield from less than 50% to up to 99% compared to conventional coating process without the dry powder glidant. Powder rheology tests showed that dry powder glidants increased the tapped density and decreased the cohesive index of coated microparticles. Reproducible microencapsulation of a highly water-soluble drug, metoprolol succinate, was achieved, yielding coated microparticles less than 200 µm in size with 20-hour sustained drug release, suitable for use in liquid suspensions. The robust, scalable technology presented in this study offers an important solution to the long-standing challenges of formulating sustained-release dosage forms suitable for children and older people with swallowing difficulties.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Dirty Museum

A visual essay consisting of uncaptioned images which recover an item of past auto-ethnographic reflection. The images originate from only one roll of 35 mm B+W film which in 1991 documented the derelict fabric of a pre-restored emotive site in Irish national memory. In Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin the leaders of the Easter 1916 uprising were executed by firing squad. The essay describes author’s failed attempts to engage with the site beyond its solemn facticity