The role of the Special Constabulary within Contemporary Policing A qualitative study into the role and use of Special Constables during a period of fiscal constraint and organisational adaptation.

The central contention of this thesis is that the recent budgetary cuts and associated developments within policing in the UK challenge the historically voluntary nature of the Special Constabulary. This thesis developed the existing literature which has focused almost exclusively upon the regular paid police officers engagement with the policing frontline by the extensive examination of Special Constabulary recruitment, retention, training, duties and deployments, leadership, relationship with paid officers and changes associated with the budgetary cuts. The role of citizens within policing is nothing new; however recent economic necessity and paid workforce reductions mean the use of unpaid volunteers in providing policing services has substantially increased and has been widely promoted by police leadership and government. Drawing upon numerous semi-structured interviews with serving members of the Special Constabulary across four police forces within England and Wales; members of three Police and Crime Commissions, representatives of the National Crime Agency, the South West Police Federation, the Home Office, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies and high ranking paid police officers, this thesis highlights how the role of the Special Constabulary has changed substantially in the last eight years. The interplay between police leadership and Government messages of the Special Constabulary being a supplementary rather than replacement force, the everyday operational accounts of Special Constables are in stark contrast. Increasingly used as frontline response officers without adequate training or supervision, this raises critical debate about the position of police as policing experts, when unpaid, volunteers with limited training are fulfilling the same role. To use a voluntary force in a reservist capacity amounts to a misuse of these volunteers with inherent risks and vulnerabilities being exposed. This thesis concludes by critically exploring the future of this voluntary police workforce in the context of profound and ongoing organisational reforms

Supervision and culture: Meetings at thresholds

Counsellors are required to engage in supervision in order to reflect on, reflexively review, and extend their practice. Supervision, then, might be understood as a partnership in which the focus of practitioners and supervisors is on ethical and effective practice with all clients. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, there has recently been interest in the implications for supervision of cultural difference, particularly in terms of the Treaty of Waitangi as a practice metaphor, and when non-Māori practitioners counsel Māori clients. This article offers an account of a qualitative investigation by a group of counsellors/supervisors into their experiences of supervision as cultural partnership. Based on interviews and then using writing-as-research, the article explores the playing out of supervision’s contribution to practitioners’ effective and ethical practice in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, showing a range of possible accounts and strategies and discussing their effects. Employing the metaphor of threshold, the article includes a series of reflections and considerations for supervision practice when attention is drawn to difference

EXECUTABLE ARCHIVES: Software integrity for data readability and validation of archived studies

© 2021 author(s). The text of this paper is published under a CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)This paper presents practices and processes for managing software integrity to support data archiving for long term use in response to the regulatory requirements. Through a case study of a scientific software decommissioning, we revisit the issues of archived data readability. Established software lifecycle management processes are extended with archiving and data integrity requirements for retention of data and revalidation of data analyses. That includes the software transition from operational to archival use within the Executable Archive model that extends the traditional data archive with computing environments with software installations required to reproduce study results from the archived records. The content use requirements are an integral part of both data access and the software management considerations, assuring that data integrity is fully supported by the software integrityPeer reviewe

Ant Colony Optimisation for Exploring Logical Gene-Gene Associations in Genome Wide Association Studies.

In this paper a search for the logical variants of gene-gene interactions in genome-wide association study (GWAS) data using ant colony optimisation is proposed. The method based on stochastic algorithms is tested on a large established database from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and is shown to discover logical operations between combinations of single nucleotide polymorphisms that can discriminate Type II diabetes. A variety of logical combinations are explored and the best discovered associations are found within reasonable computational time and are shown to be statistically significantThis study makes use of data generated by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. A full list of the investigators who contributed to the generation of the data is available from http://www.wtccc.org.uk. Funding for the project was provided by the Wellcome Trust under award 076113. The work contained in this paper was funded by an EPSRC First Grant (EP/J007439/1) and we acknowledge their kind support

Piecing together the FTO jigsaw

Two recent studies of the FTO gene provide more information on how it affects body mass index

Subset-Based Ant Colony Optimisation for the Discovery of Gene-Gene Interactions in Genome Wide Association Studies

In this paper an ant colony optimisation approach for the discovery of gene-gene interactions in genome-wide association study (GWAS) data is proposed. The subset-based approach includes a novel encoding mechanism and tournament selection to analyse full scale GWAS data consisting of hundreds of thousands of variables to discover associations between combinations of small DNA changes and Type II diabetes. The method is tested on a large established database from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and is shown to discover combinations that are statistically significant and biologically relevant within reasonable computational time.The work contained in this paper was supported by an EPSRC First Grant (EP/J007439/1). This study makes use of data generated by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. A full list of the inves- tigators who contributed to the generation of the data is available from http://www.wtccc.org.uk. Funding for the project was provided by the Wellcome Trust under award 076113

Contextual Knowledge Learning For Dialogue Generation

Incorporating conversational context and knowledge into dialogue generation models has been essential for improving the quality of the generated responses. The context, comprising utterances from previous dialogue exchanges, is used as a source of content for response generation and as a means of selecting external knowledge. However, to avoid introducing irrelevant content, it is key to enable fine-grained scoring of context and knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel approach to context and knowledge weighting as an integral part of model training. We guide the model training through a Contextual Knowledge Learning (CKL) process which involves Latent Vectors for context and knowledge, respectively. CKL Latent Vectors capture the relationship between context, knowledge, and responses through weak supervision and enable differential weighting of context utterances and knowledge sentences during the training process. Experiments with two standard datasets and human evaluation demonstrate that CKL leads to a significant improvement compared with the performance of six strong baseline models and shows robustness with regard to reduced sizes of training sets.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables. Accepted as a full paper in the main conference by ACL 202