Factors associated with changing efficacy of emamectin benzoate against infestations of Lepeophtheirus salmonison Scottish salmon farms

The availability and use of medicines to control infestations of sea lice on Atlantic salmon, Salmosalar L., farms in Scotland has changed considerably in the last decade (Lees, Gettinby & Revie 2008b). Whereas hydrogen peroxide and organophosphate compounds were used widely throughout the 1990s and in the early 2000s, only two therapeutants have remained in common use since 2005: topical cypermethrin (Excis; Novartis Animal Health, Camberley, UK) and an oral formulation of emamectin benzoate (SLICE; Schering Plough Animal Health, Uxbridge, UK)

Improving low latency applications for reconfigurable devices

This thesis seeks to improve low latency application performance via architectural improvements in reconfigurable devices. This is achieved by improving resource utilisation and access, and by exploiting the different environments within which reconfigurable devices are deployed. Our first contribution leverages devices deployed at the network level to enable the low latency processing of financial market data feeds. Financial exchanges transmit messages via two identical data feeds to reduce the chance of message loss. We present an approach to arbitrate these redundant feeds at the network level using a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). With support for any messaging protocol, we evaluate our design using the NASDAQ TotalView-ITCH, OPRA, and ARCA data feed protocols, and provide two simultaneous outputs: one prioritising low latency, and one prioritising high reliability with three dynamically configurable windowing methods. Our second contribution is a new ring-based architecture for low latency, parallel access to FPGA memory. Traditional FPGA memory is formed by grouping block memories (BRAMs) together and accessing them as a single device. Our architecture accesses these BRAMs independently and in parallel. Targeting memory-based computing, which stores pre-computed function results in memory, we benefit low latency applications that rely on: highly-complex functions; iterative computation; or many parallel accesses to a shared resource. We assess square root, power, trigonometric, and hyperbolic functions within the FPGA, and provide a tool to convert Python functions to our new architecture. Our third contribution extends the ring-based architecture to support any FPGA processing element. We unify E heterogeneous processing elements within compute pools, with each element implementing the same function, and the pool serving D parallel function calls. Our implementation-agnostic approach supports processing elements with different latencies, implementations, and pipeline lengths, as well as non-deterministic latencies. Compute pools evenly balance access to processing elements across the entire application, and are evaluated by implementing eight different neural network activation functions within an FPGA.Open Acces

"It’s the hardest conversation I’ve had to have" - A psychosocial exploration of teachers’ experiences of talking to children about terrorism.

The UK government threat level, used to mark the likelihood of a terrorist attack, has fluctuated between ‘critical’ and ‘severe’ over recent years. As a result, increased consideration is being given to the impact of terrorism on schools. This study is a psychosocial exploration of the experiences primary school teachers in Central London have of talking to the children about terrorism. Existing research in this area is limited, with the majority of research pertaining to the unique context of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York. This study aimed to add to the literature teachers’ individual experiences of talking to children about terrorism, with a view of exploring the impact this responsibility on the teachers themselves. The psychosocial approach considers responses to a phenomenon by drawing attention to unconscious processes that may be contributing to a behaviour or language. By bringing attention to these underlying processes, this study aimed to help professionals be more informed in understanding and supporting teachers to talk to children about terrorism. The methodology for this study was psychoanalytically informed, using Free Association Narrative Interviewing (FANI) to interview seven participants. Two interviews were conducted per participant, with points of interest from the first interview being extended on in the second interview. Thematic Analysis was used to analyse interview data, supported by contextual information from participants and reflexive field notes. Five themes were identified; ‘Context’, ‘Content’, ‘Process’, ‘Role of the Teacher’ and ‘Impact on Children’, and a further, interpretive layer of analysis explored these themes on a deeper level. The findings are discussed in relation to existing literature and psychological theory. Strengths and limitations of the current study are proposed, with consideration to possible further research in this area. The implications of the findings to current Educational Psychology practice are explored

A comparison of methodologies for the staining and quantification of intracellular components of Arbuscular Mychorrizal (AM) fungi in the root cortex of two varieties of winter wheat

© 2019 The Authors. The definitive peer reviewed, edited version of this article is published in Access Microbiology, https://doi.org/10.1099/acmi.0.000083. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.Arbuscular Mychorrizal (AM) fungi are one of the most common fungal organisms to exist in symbiosis with terrestrial plants facilitating the growth and maintenance of arable crops. Wheat has been studied extensively for AM fungal symbiosis using the carcinogen trypan blue as the identifying stain for fungal components, namely arbuscles, vesicles and hyphal structures. The present study uses Sheaffer® blue ink with a lower risk as an alternative to this carcinogenic stain. Justification for this is determined by stained wheat root sections (n = 120), with statistically significant increases in the observed abundance of intracellular root cortical fungal structures stained with Sheaffer® blue ink compared to trypan blue for both Zulu (P = 0.003) and Siskin (P = 0.0003) varieties of winter wheat. This new alternative combines an improved quantification of intracellular fungal components with a lower hazard risk at a lower cost.Peer reviewe