Naomi's redemption

Draft libretto for an opera in two acts based on the Biblical tale of Ruth. Three main solo roles: Naomi, Ruth, Boaz; with four smaller roles and optional chorus. The libretto follows the Biblical story as closely as possible. Two questions still need resolving: What is Ruth's fate at the end? Is she simply a surrogate mother for Naomi? Why is Obed's ancestry traced through Boaz and not through Naomi's son Mahlon as Levirate marriage would dictate

Elizabeth von Arnim ~ The anonymous in poetry

Paper given at Re-evaluating Elizabeth von Arnim Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, Sunday, 13 September 2015

‘Place feeling’ in the Fiction of E.M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowen

‘Place feeling’ in the Fiction of E.M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowe

Developing sexual competence? Exploring strategies for the provision of effective sexualities and relationships education

School-based sexualities and relationships education (SRE) offers one of the most promising means of improving young people's sexual health through developing 'sexual competence'. In the absence of evidence on whether the term holds the same meanings for young people and adults (e.g. teachers, researchers, policy-makers), the paper explores 'adult' notions of sexual competence as construed in research data and alluded to in UK Government guidance on SRE, then draws on empirical research with young people on factors that affect the contexts, motivations and outcomes of sexual encounters, and therefore have implications for sexual competence. These data from young people also challenge more traditional approaches to sexualities education in highlighting disjunctions between the content of school-based input and their reported sexual experience. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these insights for developing a shared notion of what SRE is trying to achieve and suggestions for recognition in the content and approaches to SRE.</p

An analysis of the long-term variation in stream water quality for three upland catchments at Loch Dee (Galloway, S.W. Scotland) under contrasting land management

International audienceA long term record of water chemistry, consisting of twenty years of weekly spot samples, from three sub-catchments draining into a loch and the loch outflow in Galloway, S.W. Scotland have been analysed. The analysis undertaken consisted of a three component statistical trend model. The technique allows the identification of long-term, seasonal and short-term trends, as well as differentiation between base flow and high flow responses. The land usage in the three sub-catchments is moorland, forest and forest plus lime. The results show that, since the mid-1980s, there has been a gradual decline in stream-water sulphate of the same order as reductions in the deposition of non-marine sulphate. Superimposed on this trend are somewhat random but considerable perturbations to this decline, caused by sea-salt deposition. There is no evidence of changes in surface water nitrate concentrations. The influence of different land management is evident in the sulphate, nitrate and pH data, whilst variations in calcium concentrations are also a product of differences in hydrological routing and the impact of sea-salt episodes. Keywords: trend analysis, acid deposition, land management, water quality, sea-salts, Galloway, S.W. Scotlan

Exploring protein structural dissimilarity to facilitate structure classification

Background: Classification of newly resolved protein structures is important in understanding their architectural, evolutionary and functional relatedness to known protein structures. Among various efforts to improve the database of Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP), automation has received particular attention. Herein, we predict the deepest SCOP structural level that an unclassified protein shares with classified proteins with an equal number of secondary structure elements (SSEs). Results: We compute a coefficient of dissimilarity (omega) between proteins, based on structural and sequence-based descriptors characterising the respective constituent SSEs. For a set of 1,661 pairs of proteins with sequence identity up to 35%, the performance of omega in predicting shared Class, Fold and Super-family levels is comparable to that of DaliLite Z score and shows a greater than four-fold increase in the true positive rate (TPR) for proteins sharing the Family level. On a larger set of 600 domains representing 200 families, the performance of Z score improves in predicting a shared Family, but still only achieves about half of the TPR of omega. The TPR for structures sharing a Superfamily is lower than in the first dataset, but omega performs slightly better than Z score. Overall, the sensitivity of omega in predicting common Fold level is higher than that of the DaliLite Z score. Conclusion: Classification to a deeper level in the hierarchy is specific and difficult. So the efficiency of omega may be attractive to the curators and the end-users of SCOP. We suggest omega may be a better measure for structure classification than the DaliLite Z score, with the caveat that currently we are restricted to comparing structures with equal number of SSEs