The UK's exit charge from the EU: insights from modes of accounting

Whatever the final charge on the UK for leaving the EU, the money itself is relatively marginal to the former's public finances. However, this charge is politically sensitive and financially aggravating during one of the longest periods of fiscal austerity in the UK's history. The ways in which leaving is conceptualized have implications for any continuing financial obligations that must be managed within the context of fiscal austerity and political uncertainty. Yet, leaving the EU is a unique transaction: it is not analogous, for example, to a divorce settlement, the leaving of a club, the termination of a commercial contract, the leaving of a treaty‐based international organization, or secession from a state. Analysing the formulation of the charge in terms of the four modes of government accounting—financial reporting, statistical accounting, budgeting, and fiscal sustainability projections—enhances its fiscal transparency. It evidences not only the weakness and inconsistency of the UK's negotiating position but also the dominance in EU thinking of the short‐term budgetary calculations of the 2014–20 Multiannual Financial Framework over its long‐term sustainability without a large net contributor. The final amount paid by the UK will depend on the resolution of competing perspectives as well as on liabilities and contingent liabilities associated with the increasingly complex EU financial architecture

A question of quality: do children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive lower quality early childhood education and care?

This paper examines how the quality of early childhood education and care accessed by three and four year olds in England varies by children’s background. Focusing on the free entitlement to early education, the analysis combines information from three administrative datasets for 2010-11, the Early Years Census, the Schools Census and the Ofsted inspections dataset, to obtain two main indicators of quality: staff qualification levels and Ofsted ratings. These data are combined with child-level indicators of area deprivation (IDACI scores) as a proxy measure of children’s background. The paper finds that children from more disadvantaged areas have access to better qualified staff, largely because they are more likely than children from richer areas to attend maintained nursery classes staffed by teachers, and less likely to attend services in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sectors. However, within both maintained and PVI sectors, services catering for more disadvantaged children receive poorer quality ratings from Ofsted, with a higher concentration of children from disadvantaged areas itself appearing to reduce the likelihood of top Ofsted grades. This may be in part because Ofsted ratings reflect levels of child development, and therefore reward settings where children enter at a more advanced starting point, but it may also be that it is genuinely harder to deliver an outstanding service to a more disadvantaged intake. The result point to the need for funding to support better qualified staff in PVI settings in disadvantaged areas

EUD-MARS: End-User Development of Model-Driven Adaptive Robotics Software Systems

Empowering end-users to program robots is becoming more significant. Introducing software engineering principles into end-user programming could improve the quality of the developed software applications. For example, model-driven development improves technology independence and adaptive systems act upon changes in their context of use. However, end-users need to apply such principles in a non-daunting manner and without incurring a steep learning curve. This paper presents EUD-MARS that aims to provide end-users with a simple approach for developing model-driven adaptive robotics software. End-users include people like hobbyists and students who are not professional programmers but are interested in programming robots. EUD-MARS supports robots like hobby drones and educational humanoids that are available for end-users. It offers a tool for software developers and another one for end-users. We evaluated EUD-MARS from three perspectives. First, we used EUD-MARS to program different types of robots and assessed its visual programming language against existing design principles. Second, we asked software developers to use EUD-MARS to configure robots and obtained their feedback on strengths and points for improvement. Third, we observed how end-users explain and develop EUD-MARS programs, and obtained their feedback mainly on understandability, ease of programming, and desirability. These evaluations yielded positive indications of EUD-MARS

Establishing a 'Corstonian continuous care pathway for drug using female prisoners: Linking Drug Recovery Wings and Womens Community Services

This article outlines the findings from a rapid assessment of pilot Drug Recovery Wings (DRWs) in two women’s prisons and compares the DRW approach with work undertaken in Women’s Community Services (WCSs) commended by the Corston Report. The findings indicate that DRW1 was working more successfully in providing a ‘Corstonian’ approach than DRW2 and the reasons behind this are explored. The article argues that, while pockets of good practice such as WCSs and ‘Corstonian’ DRWs are to be commended, unless there is a continuous care pathway, modelled on Corston’s ideas for working with vulnerable female offenders such as recovering drug users, such work will be limited in its effectiveness. Ideas for how such a systematic approach might work will be outlined

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

RNA editing at a limited number of sites is sufficient to prevent MDA5 activation in the mouse brain.

Adenosine deaminase acting on RNA 1 (ADAR1), an enzyme responsible for adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing, is composed of two isoforms: nuclear p110 and cytoplasmic p150. Deletion of Adar1 or Adar1 p150 genes in mice results in embryonic lethality with overexpression of interferon-stimulating genes (ISGs), caused by the aberrant recognition of unedited endogenous transcripts by melanoma differentiation-associated protein 5 (MDA5). However, among numerous RNA editing sites, how many RNA sites require editing, especially by ADAR1 p150, to avoid MDA5 activation and whether ADAR1 p110 contributes to this function remains elusive. In particular, ADAR1 p110 is abundant in the mouse brain where a subtle amount of ADAR1 p150 is expressed, whereas ADAR1 mutations cause Aicardi-Goutières syndrome, in which the brain is one of the most affected organs accompanied by the elevated expression of ISGs. Therefore, understanding RNA editing-mediated prevention of MDA5 activation in the brain is especially important. Here, we established Adar1 p110-specific knockout mice, in which the upregulated expression of ISGs was not observed. This result suggests that ADAR1 p150-mediated RNA editing is enough to suppress MDA5 activation. Therefore, we further created Adar1 p110/Adar2 double knockout mice to identify ADAR1 p150-mediated editing sites. This analysis demonstrated that although the elevated expression of ISGs was not observed, only less than 2% of editing sites were preserved in the brains of Adar1 p110/Adar2 double knockout mice. Of note, we found that some sites were highly edited, which was comparable to those found in wild-type mice, indicating the presence of ADAR1 p150-specific sites. These data suggest that RNA editing at a very limited sites, which is mediated by a subtle amount of ADAR1 p150, is sufficient to prevents MDA5 activation, at least in the mouse brain