Child protection and the modernised family justice system

This chapter sets out to examine the impending changes in law and practice in the context of child protection and goes on to explore the implications of these changes for the child protection system. It focuses on the Family Justice Review, the Munro review, the Government response to these and the proposals for a ‘modernised family justice system’. It is suggested that the changes heralded by these documents will not necessarily lead to better decision-making in relation to vulnerable children and their families. In addition, the changes will leave social workers and perhaps even judges more vulnerable than ever to criticism

Pyrolysis of asphaltenes and biomarkers for the fingerprinting of the _Amoco Cadiz_ oil spill after 23 years

The chemical composition of the petroleum products accidently or deliberately released in the environment varies considerably with time under the action of biological (biodegradation) and physico-chemical (photo-oxidation) processes. It becomes more and more difficult to trace the origin of the oil spilled. A technique widely used for monitoring ancient oil pollutions is the study of oil biomarkers like terpanes and steranes^1,2^. Here we show that the geochemical technique of asphaltenes pyrolysis can be successfully applied to environmental samples. This method allows the reconstitution of the original oil from the asphaltenes fraction of severely degraded oil residues. We applied the two techniques: biomarkers analysis and pyrolysis of asphaltenes to the long-term characterisation of the _Amoco Cadiz_ oil 23 years after the spill in the salt marshes of Ile Grande, Northern Brittany, France. The results show that the oil reached the ultimate degradation stage. The total biodegradation rate was 60% relatively to initial oil. The asphaltenes pyrolysis generated a gas-chromatographic profile very similar to the original _Amoco Cadiz_ oil. In the biomarkers fraction, gas chromatographic/mass spectrometric (GC/MS) analyses demonstrated that terpanes were conserved whereas steranes were partly degraded. We also showed that the class of seco-hopanes biomarkers are conserved and can be used in the long term monitoring of oil pollutions

Crippling Strength of Axially Loaded Rods

A new empirical formula was developed that holds good for any length and any material of a rod, and agrees well with the results of extensive strength tests. To facilitate calculations, three tables are included, giving the crippling load for solid and hollow sectioned wooden rods of different thickness and length, as well as for steel tubes manufactured according to the standards of Army Air Services Inspection. Further, a graphical method of calculation of the breaking load is derived in which a single curve is employed for determination of the allowable fiber stress. Finally, the theory is discussed of the elastic curve for a rod subject to compression, according to which no deflection occurs, and the apparent contradiction of this conclusion by test results is attributed to the fact that the rods under test are not perfectly straight, or that the wall thickness and the material are not uniform. Under the assumption of an eccentric rod having a slight initial bend according to a sine curve, a simple formula for the deflection is derived, which shows a surprising agreement with test results. From this a further formula is derived for the determination of the allowable load on an eccentric rod. The resulting relations are made clearer by means of a graphical representation of the relation of the moments of the outer and inner forces to the deflection

Fast global oscillations in networks of integrate-and-fire neurons with low firing rates

We study analytically the dynamics of a network of sparsely connected inhibitory integrate-and-fire neurons in a regime where individual neurons emit spikes irregularly and at a low rate. In the limit when the number of neurons N tends to infinity,the network exhibits a sharp transition between a stationary and an oscillatory global activity regime where neurons are weakly synchronized. The activity becomes oscillatory when the inhibitory feedback is strong enough. The period of the global oscillation is found to be mainly controlled by synaptic times, but depends also on the characteristics of the external input. In large but finite networks, the analysis shows that global oscillations of finite coherence time generically exist both above and below the critical inhibition threshold. Their characteristics are determined as functions of systems parameters, in these two different regimes. The results are found to be in good agreement with numerical simulations.Comment: 45 pages, 11 figures, to be published in Neural Computatio

Foreground separation methods for satellite observations of the cosmic microwave background

A maximum entropy method (MEM) is presented for separating the emission due to different foreground components from simulated satellite observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). In particular, the method is applied to simulated observations by the proposed Planck Surveyor satellite. The simulations, performed by Bouchet and Gispert (1998), include emission from the CMBR, the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects from galaxy clusters, as well as Galactic dust, free-free and synchrotron emission. We find that the MEM technique performs well and produces faithful reconstructions of the main input components. The method is also compared with traditional Wiener filtering and is shown to produce consistently better results, particularly in the recovery of the thermal SZ effect.Comment: 31 pages, 19 figures (bitmapped), accpeted for publication in MNRA

A Comparison Between Different Cycle Decompositions for Metropolis Dynamics

In the last decades the problem of metastability has been attacked on rigorous grounds via many different approaches and techniques which are briefly reviewed in this paper. It is then useful to understand connections between different point of views. In view of this we consider irreducible, aperiodic and reversible Markov chains with exponentially small transition probabilities in the framework of Metropolis dynamics. We compare two different cycle decompositions and prove their equivalence

French birds lag behind climate warming

Biodiversity responses to climate warming have been documented through the study of changes in distributions, abundances or phenologies of individual species or in more integrated measures such as species community richness and composition. However, whether these observed population and community changes are occurring fast enough to cope with new climatic conditions remain uncertain and hardly quantifiable. Here, using spatial and temporal trends from the French breeding bird survey, we show that although bird assemblages are strongly responding to climate warming, this response is slower than expected for catching up with the current temperature increase. During the last two decades, French birds have only achieved 54% of the response required to follow temperature increase, and have accumulated, in 18 years, a 97 km delay in their northward shift. We thus developed a framework to measure both the observed and predicted response of species assemblage to climate change, an approach which is flexible enough to be applicable to any taxa with large-scale survey data, using either abundance or distribution data. For example, it can be further used to test if different delays are found across groups or if, for a given group, the delay depends on the land-use contexts