Enhanced Support for High Intensity Users of the Criminal Justice System – an evaluation of mental health nurse input into Integrated Offender Management Services in the North East of England

The current UK Government’s focus on the development of services to manage and support offenders with mental health problems has resulted in a number of innovative project developments. This research examines a service development in the North East of England which co-located Mental Health nurses with two Integrated Offender Management teams. While not solving all problems, the benefits of co-location were clear – although such innovations are now at risk from government changes which will make Integrated Offender Management the responsibility of new providers without compelling them to co-operate with health services

Induced magnetic anisotropy features in FeCrSiBNbCu nanocrystalline alloy: Role of stress distribution proven by direct X-ray measurements

Fe73.5-xCrxSi13.5B9Nb 3Cu1 (x = 1, 2, and 3) amorphous ribbons were prepared by single roller rapid quenching technique. Both conventional and stress annealing at 520 C for 2 h at the value of the specific load of 150 MPa resulted in the formation of a nanocrystalline structure with average grain size about 13 nm. No significant differences in crystallite size were observed for all samples under consideration. The crystallite orientations were practically isotropic indicating no texture in the samples of all types. For all conventionally annealed ribbons a longitudinal effective magnetic anisotropy with an easy magnetization axis parallel to the ribbon axis was observed. For all stress annealed ribbons a transverse induced magnetic anisotropy with the anisotropy constant value of about 1800 ± 50 J/m3 was evident. Induced magnetic anisotropy features in FeCrSiBNbCu nanocrystalline alloy, namely an importance of the stress distribution was proven by direct X-ray measurements. A very good correlation between the induced magnetic anisotropy constant values and anisotropic stress distribution was observed. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Comment on "Geometrothermodynamics of a Charged Black Hole of String Theory"

We comment on the conclusions found by Larra\~naga and Mojica regarding the consistency of the Geoemtrothermodynamics programme to describe the critical behaviour of a Gibbons-Maeda-Garfinkle-Horowitz-Strominger charged black hole. We argue that making the appropriate choice of metric for the thermodynamic phase space and, most importantly, considering the homogeneity of the thermodynamic potential we obtain consistent results for such a black hole.Comment: Comment on arXiv:1012.207

Mining Markov Network Surrogates for Value-Added Optimisation

Surrogate fitness functions are a popular technique for speeding up metaheuristics, replacing calls to a costly fitness function with calls to a cheap model. However, surrogates also represent an explicit model of the fitness function, which can be exploited beyond approximating the fitness of solutions. This paper proposes that mining surrogate fitness models can yield useful additional information on the problem to the decision maker, adding value to the optimisation process. An existing fitness model based on Markov networks is presented and applied to the optimisation of glazing on a building facade. Analysis of the model reveals how its parameters point towards the global optima of the problem after only part of the optimisation run, and reveals useful properties like the relative sensitivities of the problem variables

Magnetic and magnetocaloric properties of Gd melt-spun ribbons

Structural features, magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect of pure Gd ribbons prepared by melt spinning method were carefully analyzed. The X-ray data show that there is no change in the cell parameters for the samples prepared at different copper-wheel speed. Average size of nanocrystalline grains was close to 30 nm. As compared to the bulk Gd sample, the Curie temperature was the same in the case of the ribbons. From the magnetic isotherms, the magnetic entropy change was derived using the Maxwell relation follow the standard procedure. Its value was comparable with the value of the bulk Gd. Good mechanical properties of fabricated Gd ribbon and their flexibility can be useful for design of flexible refrigerating elements. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Minobrnauka: 3.6121.2017ACTIMAT-3, KK-2018/00099, 2018-19This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation (project No. 3.6121.2017) and by ELKARTEK ACTIMAT-3 (2018-19) KK-2018/00099 grant of the Basque Country Government

Magnetic and magnetoimpedance properties of rapidly quenched ribbons of modified alloys based on FINEMET

Amorphous and nanocrystalline materials are attractive systems for basic research and technological applications. In a view of the energy economy and global warming concepts there is a request to search for soft magnetic materials for sensor applications, which do not request additional heat treatments and can be produced in most simple technological scheme. In this work the structure, static magnetic properties and magnetoimpedance (MI) were studied for FINEMET-type materials both with classic composition and for compositions with 10 % of iron substitution by Co, Ni, or Mn in initial state, i.e. without any additional heat treatmnet. The best MI responses were obtained for Mn-doped rapidly quenched ribbons. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Minobrnauka: 3.6121.2017/8.9The results were obtained under financial support of the state task of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia 3.6121.2017/8.9. We thank D. Schishkin for special support

Bactericidal Surfaces: An Emerging 21st Century Ultra-Precision Manufacturing and Materials Puzzle

Progress made by materials scientists in recent years has greatly helped the field of ultra-precision manufacturing. Ranging from healthcare to electronics components, phenomena such as twinning, dislocation nucleation, and high-pressure phase transformation have helped to exploit plasticity across a wide range of metallic and semiconductor materials. One current problem at the forefront of the healthcare sector that can benefit from these advances is that of bacterial infections in implanted prosthetic devices. The treatment of implant infections is often complicated by the growth of bacterial biofilms on implant surfaces, which form a barrier that effectively protects the infecting organisms from host immune defenses and exogenous antibiotics. Further surgery is usually required to disrupt the biofilm, or to remove the implant altogether to permit antibiotics to clear the infection, incurring considerable cost and healthcare burdens. In this review, we focus on elucidating aspects of bactericidal surfaces inspired by the biological world to inform the design of implant surface treatments that will suppress bacterial colonization. Alongside manufacturing and materials related challenges, the review identifies the most promising natural bactericidal surfaces and provides representative models of their structure, highlighting the importance of the critical slope presented by these surfaces. The scalable production of these complex hierarchical structures on freeform metallic implant surfaces has remained a scientific challenge to date and, as identified by this review, is one of the many 21st-century puzzles to be addressed by the field of applied physics

L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner

A new feature extraction method for signal classification applied to cat spinal cord signals

In the spinal cord of the anesthetized cat, spontaneous cord dorsum potentials (CDPs) appear synchronously along the lumbo-sacral segments. These CDPs have different shapes and magnitudes. Previous work has indicated that some CDPs appear to be specially associated with the activation of spinal pathways that lead to primary afferent depolarization and presynaptic inhibition. Visual detection and classification of these CDPs provides relevant information on the functional organization of the neural networks involved in the control of sensory information and allows the characterization of the changes produced by acute nerve and spinal lesions. We now present a novel feature extraction approach for signal classification, applied to CDP detection. The method is based on an intuitive procedure. We first remove by convolution the noise from the CDPs recorded in each given spinal segment. Then, we assign a coefficient for each main local maximum of the signal using its amplitude and distance to the most important maximum of the signal. These coefficients will be the input for the subsequent classification algorithm. In particular, we employ gradient boosting classification trees. This combination of approaches allows a faster and more accurate discrimination of CDPs than is obtained by other methods