An evaluation of Independent Child Trafficking Guardians – early adopter sites

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3This evaluation, conducted by the Home Office and the University of Bedfordshire has assessed the ICTG service in the three original early adopter sites (Greater Manchester, Hampshire, and Wales). The evaluation, conducted across a two-year period from February 2017 – January 2019, considers the original model for the ICTG service which provided one-to-one ICTG support for all children. The overall aim of the evaluation is to answer the question: What is the ‘added value’ of the ICTG service, and is this different for different groups of children and in different early adopter sites

The Relationship of Left Ventricular Trabeculation to Ventricular Function and Structure Over a 9.5-Year Follow-Up The MESA Study

Left ventricular (LV) trabeculation is highly variable among individuals and is increased in some diseases (e.g., congenital heart disease or cardiomyopathies), but its significance in population-representative individuals is unknown

Work, identity, place and population. A changing landscape

Taking a biographical approach, this paper uses life history narratives across four generations of families living and working in Wigan, Lancashire to analyse social and cultural changes in working life biographies over the past 80 years. Beginning with those who left school at 14, prior to the 1944 Education Act up to the present, where young people are required to remain in education until 18, the paper examines the decisions people have taken throughout their working lives. Inevitably these are shaped by structural changes, particularly to the industrial landscape. The biographical narratives allow a ‘bottom up’ approach to uncovering changes to life courses over three generations in a northern British former industrial town whilst also exploring the wider relations between self, society and place (conceptualised here as ‘taskscape’) in a post-industrial setting. Key changes over the generations are the increased ability of women to pursue careers in addition to having a family, the decrease in parental influence over career choice, and the loss of a ‘job for life’ and employment opportunities for manual workers

International Consensus Statement on Rhinology and Allergy: Rhinosinusitis

Background: The 5 years since the publication of the first International Consensus Statement on Allergy and Rhinology: Rhinosinusitis (ICAR‐RS) has witnessed foundational progress in our understanding and treatment of rhinologic disease. These advances are reflected within the more than 40 new topics covered within the ICAR‐RS‐2021 as well as updates to the original 140 topics. This executive summary consolidates the evidence‐based findings of the document. Methods: ICAR‐RS presents over 180 topics in the forms of evidence‐based reviews with recommendations (EBRRs), evidence‐based reviews, and literature reviews. The highest grade structured recommendations of the EBRR sections are summarized in this executive summary. Results: ICAR‐RS‐2021 covers 22 topics regarding the medical management of RS, which are grade A/B and are presented in the executive summary. Additionally, 4 topics regarding the surgical management of RS are grade A/B and are presented in the executive summary. Finally, a comprehensive evidence‐based management algorithm is provided. Conclusion: This ICAR‐RS‐2021 executive summary provides a compilation of the evidence‐based recommendations for medical and surgical treatment of the most common forms of RS

User-level state sharing in distributed systems

Ph.D.Mustaque Ahama

Indigo: User-level Support for Building Distributed Shared Abstractions

Distributed systems that consist of workstations connected by high performance interconnects offer computational power comparable to moderate size parallel machines. Middleware like Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) or Distributed Shared Objects (DSO) attempts to improve the programmability of such hardware by presenting to application programmers interfaces similar to those offered by shared memory machines. This paper presents the portable {\em Indigo} communications library which provides a small set of primitives with which arbitrary shared abstractions are easily and efficiently implemented across distributed hardware platforms. Sample shared abstractions implemented with Indigo include DSM and a variety of DSM protocols as well as fragmented objects, where object state is split across different machines and where fragment communications may be customized to application-specific consistency needs. The Indigo library's design and implementation are evaluated on two different target platforms, a workstation cluster and an IBM SP-2 machine. As part of this evaluation, a novel DSM system and consistency protocol are implemented and evaluated with several high performance applications. Application performance attained with the DSM system is compared to the performance experienced when utilizing the underlying basic message passing facilities or when employing Indigo to construct customized fragmented objects implementing the application's shared state. Such experimentation results in insights concerning the efficient implementation of DSM systems (e.g., how to deal with false sharing). It also leads to the conclusion that Indigo provides a sufficiently rich set of abstractions for efficient implementation of the next generation of parallel programming models for high performance machines

A Characterization of Scalable Shared Memories

The traditional consistency requirements of shared memory are expensive to provide both in large scale multiprocessor systems and also in distributed systems that implement a shared memory abstraction in software. As a result, several memory systems have been proposed that enhance performance and scalability of shared memories by providing weaker consistency guarantees. Often, different models are used to describe such memories which makes it difficult to relate and compare them. We develop a simple non-operational model and identify parameters that can be varied to describe not only the existing memories but also to identify new ones. We show how such a uniform framework makes it easy to compare and relate the various memories. We also use the model to show that a well known software solution to the critical section problem can be used to distinguish the RC[subscript sc] and RC[subscript pc] memories explored in the DASH architecture

Causal Memory: Definitions, Implementation, and Programming

The abstraction of a shared memory is of growing importance in distributed computing systems. Traditional memory consistency ensures that all processes agree on a common order of all operations on memory. Unfortunately, providing these guarantees entails access latencies that prevent scaling to large systems. This paper weakens such guarantees by defining causal memory, an abstraction that ensures that processes in a system agree on the relative ordering of operations that are causally related. Because causal memory is weakly consistent, it admits more executions, and hence more concurrency, than either atomic or sequentially consistent memories. This paper provides a formal definition of causal memory and gives an implementation for message-passing systems. In addition, it describes a practical class of programs that, if developed for a strongly consistent memory, run correctly with causal memory