The politics of punishment in colonial Mauritius, 1766-1887

The history of imprisonment in British colonial Mauritius is intertwined with its political economy, most especially the relationship between metropolitan government and plantation owners. Whether labour was predominantly enslaved, apprenticed or indentured, incarceration was part of a broader process through which the regulation of the colonial workforce was taken from the private to the public sphere and became associated with economic development. Nevertheless, prisoners both challenged and used prison regimes as vehicles for the improvement of their lives. Mauritian jails were intensely political arenas in which the changing nature of colonial relations and the regulation of labour was both expressed and contested

Pure point diffraction implies zero entropy for Delone sets with uniform cluster frequencies

Delone sets of finite local complexity in Euclidean space are investigated. We show that such a set has patch counting and topological entropy 0 if it has uniform cluster frequencies and is pure point diffractive. We also note that the patch counting entropy is 0 whenever the repetitivity function satisfies a certain growth restriction.Comment: 16 pages; revised and slightly expanded versio

French DNCG management control versus UEFA Financial Fair Play: a divergent conception of financial regulation objectives

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The French Football Federation was the first football governing body to put in place, in 1990, a financial regulation system. It might be expected that UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) system established in 2010 would be similar to French DNCG (National Direction for Management Control) regulations. However, while FFP is concerned with profitability, DNCG is focused on solvency. Hence, a French club may be loss-making and not compliant with FFP, while at the same time being solvent in accordance with DNCG rules. Our research confirms that most French clubs do not conform to FFP rules. As such, it provides further evidence that DNCG has not prevented poor financial management within French clubs. The coexistence of DNCG and FFP– or any other domestic financial regulation and FFP –may result in disparities between domestic clubs. As a consequence, there should be consistent financial regulation in all European leagues

Microbial nitrogen limitation in the mammalian large intestine

Resource limitation is a fundamental factor governing the composition and function of ecological communities. However, the role of resource supply in structuring the intestinal microbiome has not been established and represents a challenge for mammals that rely on microbial symbionts for digestion: too little supply might starve the microbiome while too much might starve the host. We present evidence that microbiota occupy a habitat that is limited in total nitrogen supply within the large intestines of 30 mammal species. Lowering dietary protein levels in mice reduced their faecal concentrations of bacteria. A gradient of stoichiometry along the length of the gut was consistent with the hypothesis that intestinal nitrogen limitation results from host absorption of dietary nutrients. Nitrogen availability is also likely to be shaped by host-microbe interactions: levels of host-secreted nitrogen were altered in germ-free mice and when bacterial loads were reduced via experimental antibiotic treatment. Single-cell spectrometry revealed that members of the phylum Bacteroidetes consumed nitrogen in the large intestine more readily than other commensal taxa did. Our findings support a model where nitrogen limitation arises from preferential host use of dietary nutrients. We speculate that this resource limitation could enable hosts to regulate microbial communities in the large intestine. Commensal microbiota may have adapted to nitrogen-limited settings, suggesting one reason why excess dietary protein has been associated with degraded gut-microbial ecosystems

Lineage Regulators Direct BMP and Wnt Pathways to Cell-Specific Programs during Differentiation and Regeneration

SummaryBMP and Wnt signaling pathways control essential cellular responses through activation of the transcription factors SMAD (BMP) and TCF (Wnt). Here, we show that regeneration of hematopoietic lineages following acute injury depends on the activation of each of these signaling pathways to induce expression of key blood genes. Both SMAD1 and TCF7L2 co-occupy sites with master regulators adjacent to hematopoietic genes. In addition, both SMAD1 and TCF7L2 follow the binding of the predominant lineage regulator during differentiation from multipotent hematopoietic progenitor cells to erythroid cells. Furthermore, induction of the myeloid lineage regulator C/EBPα in erythroid cells shifts binding of SMAD1 to sites newly occupied by C/EBPα, whereas expression of the erythroid regulator GATA1 directs SMAD1 loss on nonerythroid targets. We conclude that the regenerative response mediated by BMP and Wnt signaling pathways is coupled with the lineage master regulators to control the gene programs defining cellular identity

Search for charginos in e+e- interactions at sqrt(s) = 189 GeV

An update of the searches for charginos and gravitinos is presented, based on a data sample corresponding to the 158 pb^{-1} recorded by the DELPHI detector in 1998, at a centre-of-mass energy of 189 GeV. No evidence for a signal was found. The lower mass limits are 4-5 GeV/c^2 higher than those obtained at a centre-of-mass energy of 183 GeV. The (\mu,M_2) MSSM domain excluded by combining the chargino searches with neutralino searches at the Z resonance implies a limit on the mass of the lightest neutralino which, for a heavy sneutrino, is constrained to be above 31.0 GeV/c^2 for tan(beta) \geq 1.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure

Assessing the Quality of Decision Support Technologies Using the International Patient Decision Aid Standards instrument (IPDASi)

Objectives To describe the development, validation and inter-rater reliability of an instrument to measure the quality of patient decision support technologies (decision aids). Design Scale development study, involving construct, item and scale development, validation and reliability testing. Setting There has been increasing use of decision support technologies – adjuncts to the discussions clinicians have with patients about difficult decisions. A global interest in developing these interventions exists among both for-profit and not-for-profit organisations. It is therefore essential to have internationally accepted standards to assess the quality of their development, process, content, potential bias and method of field testing and evaluation. Methods Scale development study, involving construct, item and scale development, validation and reliability testing. Participants Twenty-five researcher-members of the International Patient Decision Aid Standards Collaboration worked together to develop the instrument (IPDASi). In the fourth Stage (reliability study), eight raters assessed thirty randomly selected decision support technologies. Results IPDASi measures quality in 10 dimensions, using 47 items, and provides an overall quality score (scaled from 0 to 100) for each intervention. Overall IPDASi scores ranged from 33 to 82 across the decision support technologies sampled (n = 30), enabling discrimination. The inter-rater intraclass correlation for the overall quality score was 0.80. Correlations of dimension scores with the overall score were all positive (0.31 to 0.68). Cronbach's alpha values for the 8 raters ranged from 0.72 to 0.93. Cronbach's alphas based on the dimension means ranged from 0.50 to 0.81, indicating that the dimensions, although well correlated, measure different aspects of decision support technology quality. A short version (19 items) was also developed that had very similar mean scores to IPDASi and high correlation between short score and overall score 0.87 (CI 0.79 to 0.92). Conclusions This work demonstrates that IPDASi has the ability to assess the quality of decision support technologies. The existing IPDASi provides an assessment of the quality of a DST's components and will be used as a tool to provide formative advice to DSTs developers and summative assessments for those who want to compare their tools against an existing benchmark