Rethinking the law and politics of democratic police accountability

This paper evaluates the work and impact of a number of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales and attempts to refocus public discourse and scrutiny on their Police and Crime Plans as a key prism through which their performance should be measured. Drawing upon the literature published by various PCCs, the Stevens Commission, the Home Affairs Committee and numerous academics, the paper will argue that a major reform of democratic police accountability in England and Wales is needed. Due to the often voluminous and piecemeal nature of the documents published on the PCCs’ websites, the textual analysis is limited to the Police and Crime Plans for Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and the London Metropolitan are

Early-life course factors and oral health among young Norwegian adults

Objective Using a national sample of young Norwegian adults, we examined whether unpleasant experience with dental care during childhood is associated with tooth loss and oral health–related quality of life in adulthood after accounting for early- and later-life socio-behavioural circumstances and dental avoidance behaviour. Methods 2433 individuals aged 25-35 years participated in an electronic survey. Oral quality of life was measured using the oral impact of daily performance (OIDP) inventory. Generalized linear models and negative binomial regression models were used to estimate the association of early unpleasant experiences with dental care and tooth loss and OIDP scores. Incidence rate ratio (IRR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were used to estimate the relative differences in prevalence of tooth loss and OIDP scores. Results Adjusting for early-life characteristics only, the prevalence of tooth loss was 1.42 (IRR = 1.42, 95% CI: 1.24-1.64) and 1.96 (IRR = 1.96, 95% CI: 1.70-2.26) times higher among individuals who reported unpleasant experiences a few times or several times, than in individuals who did not report unpleasant experiences with dental care in childhood. Adjusting further for educational level, smoking and tooth brushing attenuated the relative differences (IRR = 1.40, 95% CI: 1.22-1.62 and IRR = 1.88, 95% CI: 1.62-2.17, respectively). Lastly, when adjusting for dental avoidance behaviour, the prevalence of tooth loss was 1.29 (IRR = 1.29, 95% CI: 1.11-1.50) and 1.58 (IRR = 1.58, 95% CI: 1.32-1.88) times higher among individuals who reported unpleasant experiences a few times or several times than in those who did not. Corresponding associations of early unpleasant experience with OIDP were (IRR = 1.41 95% CI: 1.22-1.63) and (IRR = 1.69, 95% CI: 1.42-2.01) when adjusting for early-life characteristics, and (IRR = 1.39, 95% CI: 1.20-1.60) and (IRR = 1.51, 95% CI: 1.27-1.80) when adjusting for education, smoking and tooth brushing. When adjusting for dental avoidance behaviour, the association of early unpleasant experience with OIDP became nonsignificant. Conclusion Unpleasant dental care experiences during childhood are associated with poor oral health in adulthood, independent of later-life socio-behavioural characteristics including negative dental care seeking. This highlights the importance of tailoring regular contacts with dental healthcare services in childhood to build confidence in children and thus has implications for healthcare policy.publishedVersio

Lead levels in fur of rats treated with inorganic lead measured by inductively coupled argon plasma mass spectrometry

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between continuous lead exposure and the concentration of this metal in fur. The two main questions we wanted to answer were: 1) Are the fur lead concentrations different according to exposure level? 2) Is the kinetics of lead concentration linear in different compartments

Genomics accelerated isolation of a new stem rust avirulence gene - wheat resistance gene pair

Stem rust caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici (Pgt) is a devastating disease of the global staple crop wheat. Although this disease was largely controlled by genetic resistance in the latter half of the 20th century, new strains of Pgt with increased virulence, such as Ug99, have evolved by somatic hybridisation and mutation. These newly emerged strains have caused significant losses in Africa and other regions and their continued spread threatens global wheat production. Breeding for disease resistance provides the most cost-effective control of wheat rust diseases. A number of race-specific rust resistance genes have been characterised in wheat and most encode immune receptors of the nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) class. These receptors recognize pathogen effector proteins often known as avirulence (Avr) proteins. However, only two Avr genes have been identified in Pgt to date, AvrSr35 and AvrSr50 and none in other cereal rusts, which hinders efforts to understand the evolution of virulence in rust populations. The Sr27 resistance gene was first identified in a wheat line carrying an introgression of the 3R chromosome from Imperial rye. Although not deployed widely in wheat, Sr27 is widespread in the artificial crop species Triticosecale (triticale) which is a wheat-rye hybrid and is a host for Pgt. Sr27 is effective against Ug99 and other recently emerged Pgt strains. Here we identify both the Sr27 gene in wheat and the corresponding AvrSr27 gene in Pgt and show that virulence to Sr27 can arise experimentally and in the field through deletion mutations, copy number variation and expression level polymorphisms at the AvrSr27 locus

Melting of Single Lipid Components in Binary Lipid Mixtures: A Comparison between FTIR Spectroscopy, DSC and Monte Carlo Simulations

Monte Carlo (MC) Simulations, Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy were used to study the melting behavior of single lipid components in two-component membranes of 1,2-Dimyristoyl-D54-sn-Glycero-3-Phosphocholine (DMPC-d54) and 1,2-Distearoyl-sn-Glycero-3-Phosphocholine (DSPC). Microscopic information on the temperature dependent melting of the single lipid species could be investigated using FTIR. The microscopic behavior measured could be well described by the results from the MC simulations. These simulations also allowed to calculate heat capacity profiles as determined with DSC. These ones provide macroscopic information about melting enthalpies and entropy changes which are not accessible with FTIR. Therefore, the MC simulations allowed us to link the two different experimental approaches of FTIR and DSC.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, corrected typo in table 1 in which previously it said Tm,1 instead of Tm,

Accommodating 'others'?: housing dispersed, forced migrants in the UK

Utilising insights from a qualitative study in the city of Leeds (UK), this paper considers issues related to the housing of dispersed forced migrants. The term 'dispersed forced migrants' is used here as a general label to include four groups of international migrants (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers, those with humanitarian protection status and failed asylum seekers) who have previously been dispersed, on a no choice basis, to a variety of locations across the UK under the requirements of the Immigration and Asylum Act (1999). The tiering of housing entitlement that exists within the generic population of dispersed forced migrants (a consequence of the particular socio-legal status assigned to individuals), and its role in rendering migrants susceptible to homelessness is outlined. The adequacy/standard of accommodation made available to forced migrants is also discussed. It is concluded that current arrangements fail to meet the basic housing needs of many forced migrants. Any future improvement in this situation will require a significant shift in government policy

Phase transitions in biological membranes

Native membranes of biological cells display melting transitions of their lipids at a temperature of 10-20 degrees below body temperature. Such transitions can be observed in various bacterial cells, in nerves, in cancer cells, but also in lung surfactant. It seems as if the presence of transitions slightly below physiological temperature is a generic property of most cells. They are important because they influence many physical properties of the membranes. At the transition temperature, membranes display a larger permeability that is accompanied by ion-channel-like phenomena even in the complete absence of proteins. Membranes are softer, which implies that phenomena such as endocytosis and exocytosis are facilitated. Mechanical signal propagation phenomena related to nerve pulses are strongly enhanced. The position of transitions can be affected by changes in temperature, pressure, pH and salt concentration or by the presence of anesthetics. Thus, even at physiological temperature, these transitions are of relevance. There position and thereby the physical properties of the membrane can be controlled by changes in the intensive thermodynamic variables. Here, we review some of the experimental findings and the thermodynamics that describes the control of the membrane function.Comment: 23 pages, 15 figure

Using narrative to construct accountability in cases of death after police contact

This paper examines the use of narrative verdicts in the coronial system in England and Wales to record findings in cases of death after police contact. It uses a dataset of 68 verdicts into such cases in the period 2004–2015. The paper considers how regulation is constructed in a way that makes complex cases comprehensible through narrative. The construction of these narratives is affected by legal structures, institutional structures, but also the structures imposed by narrative convention. The paper argues that the relationships between these structures affect what type of narrative is constructed in the aftermath of a death after police contact. It further suggests that devices within narratives enable the construction of a comprehensible narrative verdict in such cases

Computational optical imaging with a photonic lantern

[EN] The thin and flexible nature of optical fibres often makes them the ideal technology to view biological processes in-vivo, but current microendoscopic approaches are limited in spatial resolution. Here, we demonstrate a route to high resolution microendoscopy using a multicore fibre (MCF) with an adiabatic multimode-to-single-mode "photonic lantern" transition formed at the distal end by tapering. We show that distinct multimode patterns of light can be projected from the output of the lantern by individually exciting the single-mode MCF cores, and that these patterns are highly stable to fibre movement. This capability is then exploited to demonstrate a form of single-pixel imaging, where a single pixel detector is used to detect the fraction of light transmitted through the object for each multimode pattern. A custom computational imaging algorithm we call SARA-COIL is used to reconstruct the object using only the pre-measured multimode patterns themselves and the detector signals.This work was funded through the "Proteus" Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) (EP/K03197X/1), by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) through STFC-CLASP grants ST/K006509/1 and ST/K006460/1, STFC Consortium grants ST/N000625/1 and ST/N000544/1. S.L. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 61705073. DBP acknowledges support from the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the European Research Council (PhotUntangle, 804626). The authors thank Philip Emanuel for the use of his confocal image of A549 cells and Eckhardt Optics for their image of the USAF 1951 target. The authors sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their detailed and considered feedback which helped us to improve the quality of this paper significantly.Choudhury, D.; Mcnicholl, DK.; Repetti, A.; Gris-Sánchez, I.; Li, S.; Phillips, DB.; Whyte, G.... (2020). Computational optical imaging with a photonic lantern. Nature Communications. 11(1):1-9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18818-6S19111Wood, H. A. C., Harrington, K., Birks, T. A., Knight, J. C. & Stone, J. M. High-resolution air-clad imaging fibers. Opt. Lett. 43, 5311–5314 (2018).Akram, A. R. et al. In situ identification of Gram-negative bacteria in human lungs using a topical fluorescent peptide targeting lipid A. Sci. Transl. Med. 10, eaal0033 (2018).Shin, J., Bosworth, B. T. & Foster, M. A. Compressive fluorescence imaging using a multi-core fiber and spatially dependent scattering. Opt. Lett. 42, 109–112 (2017).Papadopoulos, I. N., Farahi, S., Moser, C. & Psaltis, D. Focusing and scanning light through a multimode optical fiber using digital phase conjugation. Opt. Express 20, 10583–10590 (2012).Čižmár, T. & Dholakia, K. Exploiting multimode waveguides for pure fibre-based imaging. Nat. Commun. 3, 1027 (2012).Plöschner, M., Tyc, T. & Čižmár, T. Seeing through chaos in multimode fibres. Nat. Photon. 9, 529–535 (2015).Birks, T. A., Gris-Sánchez, I., Yerolatsitis, S., Leon-Saval, S. G. & Thomson, R. R. The photonic lantern. Adv. Opt. Photon. 7, 107–167 (2015).Birks, T. A., Mangan, B. J., Díez, A., Cruz, J. L. & Murphy, D. F. Photonic lantern’ spectral filters in multi-core fiber. Opt. Express 20, 13996–14008 (2012).Edgar, M. P., Gibson, G. M. & Padgett, M. J. Principles and prospects for single-pixel imaging. Nat. Photon. 13, 13–20 (2019).Mahalati, R. N., Yu, Gu. R. & Kahn, J. M. Resolution limits for imaging through multi-mode fiber. Opt. Express 21, 1656–1668 (2013).Amitonova, L. V. & de Boer, J. F. Compressive imaging through a multimode fiber. Opt. Lett. 43, 5427–5430 (2018).Mallat, S. A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing 2nd edn (Academic Press, Burlington, MA, 2009).Lustig, M., Donoho, D. & Pauly, J. M. Sparse MRI: the application of compressed sensing for rapid MR imaging. Magn. Reson. Med. 58, 1182–1195 (2007).Davies, M., Puy, G., Vandergheynst, P. & Wiaux, Y. A compressed sensing framework for magnetic resonance fingerprinting. SIAM J. Imaging Sci. 7, 2623–2656 (2014).Wiaux, Y., Puy, G., Scaife, A. M. M. & Vandergheynst, P. Compressed sensing imaging techniques in radio interferometry. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 395, 1733–1742 (2009).Carrillo, R. E., McEwen, J. D. & Wiaux, Y. Sparsity averaging reweighted analysis (SARA): a novel algorithm for radio-interferometric imaging. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 426, 1223–1234 (2012).Katz, O., Bromberg, Y. & Silberberg, Y. Compressive ghost imaging. Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 131110 (2009).Sun, B., Welsh, S. S., Edgar, M. P., Shapiro, J. H. & Padgett, M. J. Normalized ghost imaging. Opt. Express 20, 16892–16901 (2012).Kim, M., Park, C., Rodriguez, C., Park, Y. & Cho, Y.-H. Superresolution imaging with optical fluctuation using speckle patterns illumination. Sci. Rep. 5, 16525 (2015).Combettes, P. L. & Pesquet, J. -C. in Fixed-Point Algorithms for Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering (Springer, New York, 2011).Komodakis, N. & Pesquet, J.-C. Playing with duality: an overview of recent primal dual approaches for solving large-scale optimization problems. IEEE Signal Proc. Mag. 32, 31–54 (2015).Chandrasekharan, H. K. et al. Multiplexed single-mode wavelength-to-time mapping of multimode light. Nat. Commun. 8, 14080 (2017).Wadsworth, W. J. et al. Very high numerical aperture fibers. Photon. Technol. Lett. 16, 843–845 (2004).Pesquet, J.-C. & Repetti, A. A class of randomized primal-dual algorithms for distributed optimization. J. Nonlinear Convex Anal. 16, 2353–2490 (2015).Chambolle, A., Ehrhardt, M. J., Richtárik, P. & Schönlieb, C.-B. Stochastic primal-dual hybrid gradient algorithm with arbitrary sampling and imaging applications. SIAM J. Optim. 28, 2783–2808 (2018).Bolte, J., Sabach, S. & Teboulle, M. Proximal alternating linearized minimization for nonconvex and nonsmooth problems. Math. Program. 146, 459–494 (2014).Chouzenoux, E., Pesquet, J.-C. & Repetti, A. A block coordinate variable metric forward-backward algorithm. J. Glob. Optim. 66, 457–485 (2016).Flusberg, B. A. et al. Fiber-optic fluorescence imaging. Nat. Methods 2, 941–950 (2005).Tsvirkun, V. et al. Bending-induced inter-core group delays in multicore fibers. Opt. Express 25, 31863–31875 (2017).Candès, E. J., Wakin, M. B. & Boyd, S. Enhancing sparsity by reweighted l1 minimization. J. Fourier Anal. Appl. 14, 877–905 (2008).Condat, L. A primal–dual splitting method for convex optimization involving lipschitzian, proximable and linear composite terms. J. Optim. Theory Appl. 158, 460–479 (2013).Vu, B. C. A splitting algorithm for dual monotone inclusions involving cocoercive operators. Adv. Comp. Math. 38, 667–681 (2013)