The Anglo-American military relationship: Institutional rules, practices, and narratives

The Anglo-American military relationship is a vital yet neglected area of study. This article argues that the British military have actively cultivated a relationship with the U.S. military that has contributed to the longevity of the broader so-called "Special Relationship", even in the Trump era. The article contends that the complexities of the military relationship can best be captured by the theoretical lens provided by Lowndes and Roberts that combines different strands of institutionalism to focus on rules, practices, and narratives. The intense linkages between the United States and United Kingdom have become routinized, enabling them to adapt their peacetime cooperation to conflicts, and thereby address post-Cold War security challenges. The article draws upon semi-structured interviews with senior British military officers as well as policy documents to explore how these patterns of collaboration have become ingrained in patterns of both thinking and behavior

Russian conflict management and European security governance 1991-2012: continuity and change in doctrine, policy and practice

Russian conflict management has been understood as being ‘quintessentially Russian’. This project demystifies this reading. By exploring Russia’s approach from the early 1990s to the end of Medvedev’s presidency in mid-2012, the thesis answers the following question: to what extent has Russia’s behaviour corresponded with security governance as understood in the literature and practiced by other European actors? The argument is that Russia has selectively engaged in the norms and processes of security governance developed in European conflict management. This is driven by a policy that combines the defence of its sovereignty/national interests with a declared commitment to collective decision-making and policy implementation in European security governance. The framework of security governance is employed to examine Russia’s behaviour across its regional space and the wider European neighbourhood, and to ‘map’ its behaviour in accordance with the evolution of European security governance. Using multi-case study analysis and relying on documentary evidence, supported by semi structured interviews, the thesis makes the following contributions. First, it offers a thorough empirical inspection of Russian conflict management. Second, it contributes to the debate on Russia and European security governance, and adds to the discipline of Security Studies by demonstrating the conceptual purchase of security governance

Needs Assessment of Lake McMurtry

Department of Health and Human Performanc

The Anglo-American military relationship: institutional rules, practices and narratives

This article contends that the Anglo-American military relationship is a vital yet neglected area of study. The British military have actively cultivated a relationship with the US military and its strength and durability help to account for the longevity of the broader so-called ‘Special Relationship’. The article argues that the complexities of the military relationship can best be captured by the theoretical lens provided by Lowndes and Roberts that combines different strands of institutionalism to focus on rules, practices and narratives. The intense linkages between the US and UK have become routinized, enabling them to adapt their peacetime cooperation to conflicts, and thereby address post-Cold War security challenges such as peace enforcement, counterinsurgency and post-conflict stabilisation. The article draws upon semi-structured interviews with senior military officers as well as policy documents to explore how these patterns of collaboration have become ingrained in patterns of both thinking and behaviour

Knowledge from Uncertainty in Evidential Deep Learning

This work reveals an evidential signal that emerges from the uncertainty value in Evidential Deep Learning (EDL). EDL is one example of a class of uncertainty-aware deep learning approaches designed to provide confidence (or epistemic uncertainty) about the current test sample. In particular for computer vision and bidirectional encoder large language models, the `evidential signal' arising from the Dirichlet strength in EDL can, in some cases, discriminate between classes, which is particularly strong when using large language models. We hypothesise that the KL regularisation term causes EDL to couple aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, we empirically investigate the correlations between misclassification and evaluated uncertainty, and show that EDL's `evidential signal' is due to misclassification bias. We critically evaluate EDL with other Dirichlet-based approaches, namely Generative Evidential Neural Networks (EDL-GEN) and Prior Networks, and show theoretically and empirically the differences between these loss functions. We conclude that EDL's coupling of uncertainty arises from these differences due to the use (or lack) of out-of-distribution samples during training

Citizen participation in news

The process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply

An integrated model of care for neurological infections: the first six years of referrals to a specialist service at a university teaching hospital in Northwest England

Background A specialist neurological infectious disease service has been run jointly by the departments of infectious disease and neurology at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital since 2005. We sought to describe the referral case mix and outcomes of the first six years of referrals to the service. Methods Retrospective service review. Results Of 242 adults referred to the service, 231 (95 %) were inpatients. Neurological infections were confirmed in 155 (64 %), indicating a high degree of selection before referral. Viral meningitis (35 cases), bacterial meningitis (33) and encephalitis (22) accounted for 38 % of referrals and 61 % of confirmed neurological infections. Although an infrequent diagnosis (n = 19), neurological TB caused the longest admission (median 23, range 5 – 119 days). A proven or probable microbiological diagnosis was found in 100/155 cases (64.5 %). For the whole cohort, altered sensorium, older age and longer hospital stay were associated with poor outcome (death or neurological disability); viral meningitis was associated with good outcome. In multivariate analysis altered sensorium remained significantly associated with poor outcome, adjusted odds ratio 3.04 (95 % confidence interval 1.28 – 7.22, p = 0.01). Conclusions A service of this type provides important specialist care and a focus for training and clinical research on complex neurological infections

Differences in Outcomes and Factors Associated With Mortality Among Patients With SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Cancer Compared With Those Without Cancer A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

IMPORTANCE: SARS-CoV-2 infection has been associated with more severe disease and death in patients with cancer. However, the implications of certain tumor types, treatments, and the age and sex of patients with cancer for the outcomes of COVID-19 remain unclear. OBJECTIVE: To assess the differences in clinical outcomes between patients with cancer and SARS-CoV-2 infection and patients without cancer but with SARS-CoV-2 infection, and to identify patients with cancer at particularly high risk for a poor outcome. DATA SOURCES: PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases were searched for articles published in English until June 14, 2021. References in these articles were reviewed for additional studies. STUDY SELECTION: All case-control or cohort studies were included that involved 10 or more patients with malignant disease and SARS-CoV-2 infection with or without a control group (defined as patients without cancer but with SARS-CoV-2 infection). Studies were excluded if they involved fewer than 10 patients, were conference papers or abstracts, were preprint reports, had no full text, or had data that could not be obtained from the corresponding author. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: Two investigators independently performed data extraction using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) reporting guideline. Meta-analysis was performed using a random-effects model. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The difference in mortality between patients with cancer and SARS-CoV-2 infection and control patients as well as the difference in outcomes for various tumor types and cancer treatments. Pooled case fatality rates, a random-effects model, and random-effects meta-regressions were used. RESULTS: A total of 81 studies were included, involving 61 532 patients with cancer. Among 58 849 patients with available data, 30 557 male individuals (52%) were included and median age ranged from 35 to 74 years. The relative risk (RR) of mortality from COVID-19 among patients with vs without cancer when age and sex were matched was 1.69 (95% CI, 1.46-1.95; P < .001; I(2) = 51.0%). The RR of mortality in patients with cancer vs control patients was associated with decreasing age (exp [b], 0.96; 95% CI, 0.92-0.99; P = .03). Compared with other cancers, lung cancer (RR, 1.68; 95% CI, 1.45-1.94; P < .001; I(2) = 32.9%), and hematologic cancer (RR, 1.42; 95% CI, 1.31-1.54; P < .001; I(2) = 6.8%) were associated with a higher risk of death. Although a higher point estimate was found for genitourinary cancer (RR, 1.11; 95% CI, 1.00-1.24; P = .06; I2 = 21.5%), the finding was not statistically significant. Breast cancer (RR, 0.51; 95% CI, 0.36-0.71; P < .001; I(2) = 86.2%) and gynecological cancer (RR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.62-0.93; P = .009; I(2) = 0%) were associated with a lower risk of death. Chemotherapy was associated with the highest overall pooled case fatality rate of 30% (95% CI, 25%-36%; I(2) = 86.97%; range, 10%-100%), and endocrine therapy was associated with the lowest at 11% (95% CI, 6%-16%; I(2) = 70.68%; range, 0%-27%). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Results of this study suggest that patients with cancer and SARS-CoV-2 infection had a higher risk of death than patients without cancer. Younger age, lung cancer, and hematologic cancer were also risk factors associated with poor outcomes from COVID-19

Measuring processes and the Heisenberg picture

In this paper, we attempt to establish quantum measurement theory in the Heisenberg picture. First, we review foundations of quantum measurement theory, that is usually based on the Schr\"{o}dinger picture. The concept of instrument is introduced there. Next, we define the concept of system of measurement correlations and that of measuring process. The former is the exact counterpart of instrument in the (generalized) Heisenberg picture. In quantum mechanical systems, we then show a one-to-one correspondence between systems of measurement correlations and measuring processes up to complete equivalence. This is nothing but a unitary dilation theorem of systems of measurement correlations. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of the statistical approach to quantum measurement theory, we focus on the extendability of instruments to systems of measurement correlations. It is shown that all completely positive (CP) instruments are extended into systems of measurement correlations. Lastly, we study the approximate realizability of CP instruments by measuring processes within arbitrarily given error limits.Comment: v

An ensemble of structures of Burkholderia pseudomallei 2,3-bisphosphoglycerate-dependent phosphoglycerate mutase

An ensemble of crystal structures are reported for 2,3-bisphosphoglycerate-dependent phosphoglycerate mutase from B. pseudomallei. The structures include two vanadate complexes, revealing the structure of a close analogue of the transition state for phosphate transfer