The use of a pre-operative scoring system for the prediction of phacoemulsification case difficulty and the selection of appropriate cases to be performed by trainees

Background: To establish whether a previously validated scoring system (Habib) for the prediction of risk or likelihood of posterior capsule rupture during phacoemulsification surgery could be used to: 1. Predict the difficulty of a phacoemulsification case, and 2. Select appropriate phacoemulsification cases for trainees. Methods: The study sample was consecutive phacoemulsification cases undertaken by senior surgeons at a single ophthalmic unit over a three-week period (170 cases). Each case was scored using a potential difficulty scoring system. Immediately post-operatively, each case was given two scores by the operating surgeon (who was masked with regard to the potential complication score). The first score indicated the perceived difficulty of the case, and the second score, the degree of experience that they thought a trainee would require in order to have performed the same case without complication. Results: Using Cuzick's non-parametric test for trend, there was evidence for a trend of increasing perceived difficulty with increasing potential difficulty score (p = 0.05), and of increasing experience required with increasing potential difficulty score (p < 0.001) Conclusion: The authors advocate that Habib's potential difficulty scoring system can be used to inform the surgeon of the likely difficulty of a phacoemulsification case and to aid selection of appropriate cases for trainees prior to surgery

Varieties of labour administration in Europe and the consequences of the Great Recession

This article focuses on national public administration activities that relate to employment, social protection and industrial relations. The International Labour Organization (ILO) refers to these activities collectively as ‘labour administration’ and regards the bodies that conduct them within individual countries as together forming national systems of labour administration. This article explores the concept of ‘national system of labour administration’ and considers the potential contribution of comparative institutional analysis in understanding how national systems are organised and change over time. The article also compares the organisation of national labour administration systems in European Union (EU) countries and analyses how these systems have developed since the start of the economic crisis that erupted in 2008

Viewing the impact of Brexit on Britain’s financial centre through an historical lens: Can there be a third reinvention of the City of London?

This paper considers the question of how Brexit will affect the City of London from a long-term perspective, putting the changes induced by Brexit into the context of the City’s historical evolution over the past century. This perspective permits us to see that the City has continued to thrive because of a series of radical adjustments necessitated by the UK’s loss of its empire and by the emergence of global US financial power. Challenges to the global prominence of the City in Britain’s post-empire period have required two separate ‘reinventions’: the first, in the 1960s, involved localizing the Eurodollar markets; the second, in the 1990s, involved making London the preferred hub for providing sophisticated financial services within the European Union (EU)’s single market. The Great Financial Crisis put in motion several economic and political dynamics that have, however, undercut the City’s special global role. It is unclear whether maintaining the City’s offshore focus via a third reinvention, in a period of prolonged stagnation and increasing inequality in UK regions outside London, will be possible

A New Dual- Input Hybrid Buck DC-DC Converter

The proposed dual input hybrid buck C/hybrid buck L (HBCL) DC-DC converter, is suitable for power conversion in renewable energy, automotive and telecom power systems. It extends the use of the hybrid DC-DC converters in a dual-input structure, with high voltage-conversion ratio. Operation modes, analytical description, digital simulations and test results, in good correspondence, are presented and discussed in this paper

Industrial policy, place and democracy

Industrial policy is a potential vehicle for more participative and democratic forms of policy formation. But in Britain an ademocratic policy culture is transforming into an undemocratic one. This article explores the roots of this in major sea changes in the industrial policy climate of Western Europe, where non-discriminatory and aspatial policy stances are now giving way under pressure to openly discriminatory policies aimed at favoured industries or locations. The British case is contrasted with France, Germany and Italy, and their variety of responses. It is proposed that an extended notion of ‘place’ offers a basis for social dialogue

Gerrymandering and malapportionment, Romanian style: The 2008 electoral system

Varieties of gerrymandering and malapportionment can appear not only in electoral systems where all legislative seats are allocated to plurality winners in single-member districts but also in proportional Single-Member District (SMD)–based electoral systems and in settings where multi-partisan committees draw the district boundaries. This article investigates such a case, in which the main parliamentary parties collaborated in order to minimize the uncertainty regarding intra-party allocation of seats. The 2008 electoral reform in Romania created such opportunities, and both the SMD maps and the electoral results at the parliamentary election held in the same year indicate that the parties collaborated to design a number of safe seats for each of them. We draw on a novel data set that measures the degree to which the newly created SMDs reflect natural or artificial strongholds of concentrated partisan support in otherwise unfavorable political territories, and also assess the malapportionment of these districts. All three types of mechanisms were frequently used, and our logistic regression analyses indicate that nomination from the “right” type of SMD was the main factor deciding which of each party’s candidates got elected. The statistical analyses are complemented by a qualitative investigation of the political composition and design of 9 SMDs