Growing Pains: Getting past the complexities of scaling social impact

In communities across the UK, organisations develop new ideas to improve the lives of those around them. And yet despite growing demand for charity services, concerted attempts to take proven approaches to scale are few and far between, and successful examples are rarer still. This paper aims to bring about a change in tack by proposing a way of assessing the viability of scaling in different contexts

Will Another White Male Be Elected President in 2008?

Barack Obama. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bill Richardson. The field of minority and female candidates for president has never been so strong. But the question remains: Despite the expected presence of an African- American, a woman, and a Latino, will America in 2008 elect yet another male president of northern European descent? No one can say for certain, but we hope this streak ends soon, because it\u27s important that America elect its leaders from the full breadth of talent available in its diverse population

Getting Grounded in the Post Hometown World

Remember when Americans had hometowns? Where are you from? we\u27d ask one another. And the answer would come back: New York City. St. Joseph, Mo. Atlanta. Santa Barbara, Calif. Chattanooga, Tenn. But odds are that now we\u27d get a more complicated response. It\u27d go something like this: Well, I was born in Atlanta but we moved to Baltimore when I was 11 and in my junior year of high school, we went out to L.A. I\u27ve been in Chicago for a year. And even this might not be quite accurate. The speaker may have been born in an Atlanta exurb and have moved with her parents to a Baltimore suburb and subsequently to a town some miles outside Los Angeles before migrating to a community close to but not in Chicago. So where should one consider her from? All over, maybe? Which raises the question: does this erosion of a sense of place matter? Yes, it does. For throughout history, people have derived their identity in part from where they lived. Now, every year an estimated 45 million Americans move

Too Many Options Dilute Shared Experience

Despite the red carpet glitter of the Oscars, it is no secret that Hollywood has had a far from perfect year at the box office. And unfortunately for Tinsel Town, its problems go beyond the obvious need for more successful films. The way we experience both movies and television has evolved. We don\u27t do things together the way we once did. We rent movies and watch them at home rather than going to a local movie theater with family and friends. Box office returns suffer and the centrality of film in our lives is weakened. The same fragmentation is true in television. Sadly, the kind of cultural reference points provided by the likes of Johnny Carson, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and more - including the superstar network news anchors in their prime - are fading. They provided a snug sense of intimacy that comes from a shared common experience. The result? Significant social change brought on by audience fragmentation. The root cause? A proliferation of entertainment options impelled by niche-driven marketing

Light harvesting for organic photovoltaics

The authors are grateful to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK (grants EP/J009016/1 and EP/L017008/1) and the European Research Council (grant number 321305) for financial support. IDWS also acknowledges a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.The field of organic photovoltaics has developed rapidly over the last 2 decades, and small solar cells with power conversion efficiencies of 13% have been demonstrated. Light absorbed in the organic layers forms tightly bound excitons that are split into free electrons and holes using heterojunctions of electron donor and acceptor materials, which are then extracted at electrodes to give useful electrical power. This review gives a concise description of the fundamental processes in photovoltaic devices, with the main emphasis on the characterization of energy transfer and its role in dictating device architecture, including multilayer planar heterojunctions, and on the factors that impact free carrier generation from dissociated excitons. We briefly discuss harvesting of triplet excitons, which now attracts substantial interest when used in conjunction with singlet fission. Finally, we introduce the techniques used by researchers for characterization and engineering of bulk heterojunctions to realize large photocurrents, and examine the formed morphology in three prototypical blends.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Variance propagation for density surface models

Data from the SCANS-II project were supported by the EU LIFE Nature programme (project LIFE04NAT/GB/000245) and governments of range states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and UK. This work was funded by OPNAV N45 and the SURTASS LFA Settlement Agreement, and being managed by the US Navy’s Living Marine Resources program under Contract No. N39430-17-C-1982, US Navy, Chief of Naval Operations (Code N45), grant number N00244-10-1-0057 and the International Whaling Commission.Spatially explicit estimates of population density, together with appropriate estimates of uncertainty, are required in many management contexts. Density surface models (DSMs) are a two-stage approach for estimating spatially varying density from distance sampling data. First, detection probabilities—perhaps depending on covariates—are estimated based on details of individual encounters; next, local densities are estimated using a GAM, by fitting local encounter rates to location and/or spatially varying covariates while allowing for the estimated detectabilities. One criticism of DSMs has been that uncertainty from the two stages is not usually propagated correctly into the final variance estimates. We show how to reformulate a DSM so that the uncertainty in detection probability from the distance sampling stage (regardless of its complexity) is captured as an extra random effect in the GAM stage. In effect, we refit an approximation to the detection function model at the same time as fitting the spatial model. This allows straightforward computation of the overall variance via exactly the same software already needed to fit the GAM. A further extension allows for spatial variation in group size, which can be an important covariate for detectability as well as directly affecting abundance. We illustrate these models using point transect survey data of Island Scrub-Jays on Santa Cruz Island, CA, and harbour porpoise from the SCANS-II line transect survey of European waters. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear on-line.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Capacity Assessment and Information Provision for Voluntary Psychiatric Patients: a service evaluation in a UK NHS Trust

Since the Cheshire West judgement, yearly applications for the Mental Health Act (MHA) and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) have increased, though many patients are still admitted informally. To ensure lawfulness, informal admissions must be capacitous, informed, and without coercion. If fully capacitous consent is not obtained, then there is a risk of “de facto” detention and deprivation of liberty.  Deprivation of liberty is only lawful through appropriate legal frameworks (DoLS for incapacitous, non-objecting hospital inpatients, or MHA otherwise).  Use of such legal frameworks might be hampered by the perceived stigma associated with them, though this may not be in the best interests of the patient.We aimed to examine the assessment of capacity and provision of adequate information required for an informed voluntary psychiatric admission, and any evidence of possible coercion into informal admission. We postulate variable use of legal frameworks designed to empower patients and prevent illegal deprivation of liberty

High aldehyde dehydrogenase and expression of cancer stem cell markers selects for breast cancer cells with enhanced malignant and metastatic ability

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have recently been identified in leukaemia and solid tumours; however, the role of CSCs in metastasis remains poorly understood. This dearth of knowledge about CSCs and metastasis is due largely to technical challenges associated with the use of primary human cancer cells in pre-clinical models of metastasis. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop suitable pre-clinical model systems for studying stem-like cells in breast cancer metastasis, and to test the hypothesis that stem-like cells play a key role in metastatic behaviour. We assessed four different human breast cancer cell lines (MDA-MB-435, MDA-MB-231, MDA-MB-468, MCF-7) for expression of prospective CSC markers CD44/CD24 and CD133, and for functional activity of aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), an enzyme involved in stem cell self-protection. We then used fluorescence-activated cell sorting and functional assays to characterize differences in malignant/metastatic behaviour in vitro (proliferation, colony-forming ability, adhesion, migration, invasion) and in vivo (tumorigenicity and metastasis). Sub-populations of cells demonstrating stem-cell-like characteristics (high expression of CSC markers and/or high ALDH) were identified in all cell lines except MCF-7. When isolated and compared to ALDHlowCD44low/- cells, ALDHhiCD44+CD24- (MDA-MB-231) and ALDHhiCD44+CD133+ (MDA-MB-468) cells demonstrated increased growth (P \u3c 0.05), colony formation (P \u3c 0.05), adhesion (P \u3c 0.001), migration (P \u3c 0.001) and invasion (P \u3c 0.001). Furthermore, following tail vein or mammary fat pad injection of NOD/SCID/IL2 gamma receptor null mice, ALDHhiCD44+CD24- and ALDHhiCD44+CD133+ cells showed enhanced tumorigenicity and metastasis relative to ALDHlowCD44low/- cells (P \u3c 0.05). These novel results suggest that stem-like ALDHhiCD44+CD24- and ALDHhiCD44+CD133+ cells may be important mediators of breast cancer metastasis

Uncommon causes of ischaemic stroke: how to approach the diagnosis

Stroke is a common neurological emergency and although most cases are associated with traditional vascular risk factors leading to cerebral ischaemia by well-recognised pathophysiological mechanisms, around 4% of ischaemic strokes are due to rare conditions. These are important to recognise due to their different management, which is often specific and effective, and due to their different prognosis from otherwise cryptogenic ischaemic strokes. We outline a practical approach to identifying uncommon causes of ischaemic stroke by highlighting diagnostic 'red flags' and propose a structured approach to investigating them