The Foreign Exchange Market and Central Counterparties

The financial crisis has led to considerable efforts to improve risk management practices in financial markets. One of the main proposals being suggested in international fora is to increase the use of central counterparties. This article discusses the potential for central counterparty arrangements to complement existing risk management practices in the foreign exchange market.foreign exchange; OTC derivatives; central counterparties; regulatory reform

Factors influencing the transformation of new teaching approaches from a programme of professional development to the classroom

A programme of professional development was designed consisting of 20 hours of workshops plus in-school activities. The implementation of new pedagogy was supported by teachers bringing examples of their work in the classroom to the workshops for discussion and reflection. The purpose of this study is to explore factors that influenced what teachers took from the professional development programme and how they used it in their own classrooms. It focuses on how the teachers’ perceived needs were affected by the programme and how the implementation of new pedagogy was affected the level of in-school support. Data were collected to evaluate the expertise of the teachers early in the programme, their learning through the programme and factors that affected their learning. These data included tape-recordings of selected discussions during workshops, field notes of the workshops, classroom evidence collected by the teachers and portfolios constructed from it, and interviews with teachers after the programme had finished. The results indicate that success in learning from the programme was affected by two key factors: how teachers' perceptions of their needs interacted with the learning opportunities offered by the programme and how the level of in-school support affected the introduction of new pedagogy in the classroom. Unless both factors were positive learning from the professional development programme was variable

Responding to research: An interview study of the teacher wellbeing support being offered in ten English schools

Purpose: Responding to research reporting low-levels of teacher wellbeing in England, policy makers have begun to implement strategies to support wellbeing. Given the recent introduction of such policy, this exploratory study describes the wellbeing support being offered to teachers, and perceptions of its impact on wellbeing. Method: A purposeful sample of ten schools (primary and secondary) in Greater London beginning to offer wellbeing support was selected and fifteen teachers were interviewed. Findings: Teachers describe a range of wellbeing support strategies being implemented in their schools and report, in some cases, activities designed with good intentions can harm their wellbeing. We apply the capabilities approach to analyse the interviews and argue wellbeing support should be matched to the needs of recipients and support should increase teachers’ freedoms to act, rather than simply mitigating in the moment feelings of stress. Limitations: Findings of this small-scale study cannot be generalised to other contexts

Contested cultures of care: research with and for the plus one community on the plus one experience - evaluation report

Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Collaborative Outreach Projec

Beyond Orange Slices: The Contested Cultural Terrain of Youth Soccer in the United States

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.June 2019. Major: Sociology. Advisor: Doug Hartmann. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 272 pages.This dissertation builds on my four-year ethnographic immersion into the world of youth soccer in the Twin Cities and dozens of interviews with players, parents, and coaches. My dissertation, titled “Beyond Orange Slices: The Contested Cultural Terrain of Youth Soccer in the United States”, demonstrates how various spaces of youth soccer in a metropolitan city are social environments where social inequalities, identities, and discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and community are constructed, challenged, and reproduced. In my dissertation I examine how the field of youth soccer raced, classed, and gendered; how larger social systems of inequality appear and shape taken for granted, but prevalent cultural spaces, such as sport; and how practices of youth soccer serve as a contested cultural site of meaning with regards to parenting culture, families, sporting discourse, youth development, community, identity, and social difference. The first section of my dissertation focuses on how youth soccer is a social field with seven different sites of youth soccer. Within these different locations of soccer’s social field, clubs create, maintain, and define a group identity that is centered on how they “do” youth soccer. Different communities “do” the sport in a manner that is informed by various parenting styles, ideals about community, and visions for proper youth development. The second section of my dissertation is about gender and how different forms of playing and coaching the game are shaped by cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity during youth. Throughout the field of soccer, players, coaches, and parents often intentionally strive to challenge gender norms about who can play and succeed in the game. Yet, many participants often still reproduce gender hierarchy and normativity through soft essentialism. In the final section I argue that soccer, and youth sport, is a useful and particular sociological window into how the dynamics of race and racism operate in the United States, particularly within diverse (racial and ethnic) social spaces. In this section, I show that in many cases youth soccer is a “cosmopolitan canopy” where social difference is supported and co-exists seemingly with ease and normality. Participants in these diverse social canopies of soccer frequently view such diversity as a positive feature of the sport and reproduce happy diversity talk. However, within these diverse soccer spaces, biological notions of race, racist microaggressions, and other forms of racial marginalization and exclusion appear frequently, simultaneously, and often with no formal challenges or reconciliation. These racist ruptures reveal the tenuous characteristics of diverse social spaces and sport, and highlights the limited inclusive potential of diversity discours

Rapid, cost-effective and scalable gmp-compliant simian adenovirus-vectored vaccine production for early-phase clinical trials using entirely disposable product-contact components

The Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, develops and produces a range of vaccines against emerging threats (such as Zika) and current global health challenges (including malaria, HIV and rabies). The Jenner Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility (CBF) manufactures multiple simian adenovirus-vectored vaccines for early phase clinical trials each year. Hitherto we have used shake flasks for upstream production and caesium chloride gradient ultracentrifugation for downstream purification. This process is robust and simple but also slow, human resource intensive and lacks scalability. Here we report the development of a novel process using a 2 x 3L single-use stirred tank bioreactor system (MilliporeSigma Mobius®), coupled to a tangential flow filtration (TFF) and anion exchange chromatography (AEX)-based downstream process. The process also includes particle lysis and nucleic acid digestion inside the bioreactor, as well as clarification of cells and debris using depth filters. As our test case, we used a novel simian adenovirus-vectored rabies vaccine (ChAdOx2 RabG), which we will manufacture to GMP standards in the coming year. Each process run yields \u3e5x1013 ChAdOx2 RabG virus particles (approximately 1000 human doses), with residual host cell DNA, host cell protein and nuclease levels suitable for clinical trial use. While similar processes have been previously reported for adenovirus manufacture, we will report a number of points of novelty. Firstly, we use single-use disposable product-contact components from beginning to end, greatly simplifying small-scale GMP manufacturing of multiple products. Secondly, we will report results of comparative testing with a range of modern ion exchange media (including resins, membrane adsorbers, monoliths and functionalized hydrogel formats). Thirdly, we will report the development and validation of novel quality control methods suitable for this process. The resulting process will allow the CBF to increase production yield and produce more vaccines that transfer more easily to larger facilities

Exploring the boundaries: gene and protein identification in biomedical text

Background: Good automatic information extraction tools offer hope for automatic processing of the exploding biomedical literature, and successful named entity recognition is a key component for such tools. Methods: We present a maximum-entropy based system incorporating a diverse set of features for identifying gene and protein names in biomedical abstracts. Results: This system was entered in the BioCreative comparative evaluation and achieved a precision of 0.83 and recall of 0.84 in the “open ” evaluation and a precision of 0.78 and recall of 0.85 in the “closed ” evaluation. Conclusions: Central contributions are rich use of features derived from the training data at multiple levels of granularity, a focus on correctly identifying entity boundaries, and the innovative use of several external knowledge sources including full MEDLINE abstracts and web searches. Background The explosion of information in the biomedical domain and particularly in genetics has highlighted the need for automated text information extraction techniques. MEDLINE, the primary research database serving the biomedical community, currently contains over 14 million abstracts, with 60,000 new abstracts appearing each month. There is also an impressive number of molecular biological databases covering a