The 'Provocatio Militiae' and Provincial Jurisdiction

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Independent Culture Review of London Fire Brigade

This review was established by the London Fire Commissioner in response to the tragic death of firefighter Jaden Matthew Francois-Esprit, who took his own life in August 2020. His family were concerned that he had been bullied because of his race. Yet while Jaden’s death is the catalyst for the review, it should not be seen in isolation. Cultural problems have long dogged LFB

Evaluation of machine-learning methods for ligand-based virtual screening

Machine-learning methods can be used for virtual screening by analysing the structural characteristics of molecules of known (in)activity, and we here discuss the use of kernel discrimination and naive Bayesian classifier (NBC) methods for this purpose. We report a kernel method that allows the processing of molecules represented by binary, integer and real-valued descriptors, and show that it is little different in screening performance from a previously described kernel that had been developed specifically for the analysis of binary fingerprint representations of molecular structure. We then evaluate the performance of an NBC when the training-set contains only a very few active molecules. In such cases, a simpler approach based on group fusion would appear to provide superior screening performance, especially when structurally heterogeneous datasets are to be processed