From HORSA huts to ROSLA blocks : the school leaving age and the school building programme in England, 1943–1972

This paper examines the connections between the school building programme in England and the raising of the school leaving age (ROSLA) from 14 to 15 in 1947 and then to 16 in 1972. These two major developments were intended to help to ensure the realisation of ‘secondary education for all’ in the postwar period. The combination led in practice to severe strains in the education system as a whole, with lasting consequences for educational planning and central control. ROSLA was a key issue for the school building programme in terms of both finance and design. School building was also a significant constraint for ROSLA, which was marred by temporary expedients in building accommodation both in the 1940s with ‘HORSA huts’ and in the 1970s with ‘ROSLA blocks’, as well as by the cheap construction of new schools that soon became unfit for purpose. Together, school building needs and ROSLA helped to stimulate pressures towards centralisation of planning that were ultimately to undermine postwar partnerships in education, from the establishment of the Ministry of Education’s Architects and Building (A&B) Branch in 1948, through the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963, to the assertion of central state control by the 1970s. The pressures arising from such investment and growth in education again became a key issue in the early twenty-first century with the Labour Government’s support for raising the participation age to 18 combined with an ambitious ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme. The historical and contemporary significance of these developments has tended to be neglected but is pivotal to an understanding of medium-term educational change in its broader policy and political contexts

PhasePack: A Phase Retrieval Library

Phase retrieval deals with the estimation of complex-valued signals solely from the magnitudes of linear measurements. While there has been a recent explosion in the development of phase retrieval algorithms, the lack of a common interface has made it difficult to compare new methods against the state-of-the-art. The purpose of PhasePack is to create a common software interface for a wide range of phase retrieval algorithms and to provide a common testbed using both synthetic data and empirical imaging datasets. PhasePack is able to benchmark a large number of recent phase retrieval methods against one another to generate comparisons using a range of different performance metrics. The software package handles single method testing as well as multiple method comparisons. The algorithm implementations in PhasePack differ slightly from their original descriptions in the literature in order to achieve faster speed and improved robustness. In particular, PhasePack uses adaptive stepsizes, line-search methods, and fast eigensolvers to speed up and automate convergence

“Give me what I want” - enabling complex queries on rich multi-attribute data

Consumer and more generally, human preferences are highly complex, depending on a multitude of factors, most of which are not crisp, but uncertain/fuzzy in nature. Thus, user selection amongst a set of items is dependent on the complex comparison of items based on a large number of imprecise item-attributes such as price, size, colour, etc. This paper proposes the mechanisms to underpin the digital replication of such complex preference-based item selection with the view to enabling improved digital item search and recommendation systems. For example, a user may query “I would like a product of similar size but at a cheaper price.” The proposed method involves splitting query-attributes into two categories; those to remain similar (e.g., size) and those to be changed in a specific direction (e.g., price - to be lower). A combination of similarity and distance measures is then used to compare and rank recommendations. Initial results are presented indicating that the proposed method is effective at ranking items according to intuition and expected user preferences

8000 years of North Atlantic storminess reconstructed from a Scottish peat record: implications for Holocene atmospheric circulation patterns in Western Europe

North Atlantic storminess can affect human settlements, infrastructure and transport links, all of which strongly impact local, national and global economies. An increase in storm frequency and intensity is predicted over the Northeast Atlantic in the 21st century because of a northward shift in storm tracks and a persistently positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), driven by recent atmospheric warming. Although documentary records of North Atlantic storminess exist, these are generally limited to the last c. 1000‐2000 years. This paper presents a continuous high‐resolution proxy record of storminess spanning the last 8000 years from a 6 m long core taken from a peat bog in Northern Scotland. Bromine concentrations in the peat, derived from sea spray, are used to reconstruct storm frequency and storm intensity, and mire surface wetness is used as an indicator of longer‐term climate shifts. The results suggest a relationship between positive phases of the NAO and increased North Atlantic storminess. However, subtle differences between bromine concentrations and mire surface wetness suggest that high intensity but perhaps less frequent periods of storminess are not necessarily associated with a wetter climate

Tumour Lysis Syndrome Occurring in a Patient with Metastatic Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumour Treated with Glivec (Imatinib Mesylate, Gleevec, STI571)

Tumour lysis syndrome (TLS) is a rare side effect of chemotherapy for solid tumours. It describes the metabolic derangements following rapid and extensive tumour cell death following a good response to chemotherapy. Symptoms are those of metabolic derangement and renal failure. Treatment involves rehydration and correction of metabolic abnormalities. TLS should be considered in high risk groups. We report a case of TLS in a patient with metastatic gastrointestinal stromal tumour treated with imatinib mesylate. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case

Untargeted Metabolomics Analysis on Kidney Tissues from Mice Reveals Potential Hypoxia Biomarkers

Chronic hypoxia may have a huge impact on the cardiovascular and renal systems. Advancements in microscopy, metabolomics, and bioinformatics provide opportunities to identify new biomarkers. In this study, we aimed at elucidating the metabolic alterations in kidney tissues induced by chronic hypoxia using untargeted metabolomic analyses. Reverse phase ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy/mass spectroscopy (RP–UPLC–MS/MS) and hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC)–UPLC–MS/MS methods with positive and negative ion mode electrospray ionization were used for metabolic profiling. The metabolomic profiling revealed an increase in metabolites related to carnitine synthesis and purine metabolism. Additionally, there was a notable increase in bilirubin. Heme, N-acetyl-L-aspartic acid, thyroxine, and 3-beta-Hydroxy-5-cholestenoate were found to be significantly downregulated. 3-beta-Hydroxy-5-cholestenoate was downregulated more significantly in male than female kidneys. Trichome Staining also showed remarkable kidney fibrosis in mice subjected to chronic hypoxia. Our study offers potential intracellular metabolite signatures for hypoxic kidneys

Increased North Atlantic dust deposition linked to Holocene Icelandic glacier fluctuations

Mineral dust concentrations are coupled to climate over glacial-interglacial cycles with increased dust deposition occurring during major cold phases over the last ~100 ka. Holocene records suggest considerable spatial and temporal variability in the magnitude, frequency and timing of dust peaks that reflects regional or local drivers of dust emissions and transport. Here, we present stratigraphical, geochemical and isotopic evidence for dust deposition from two high-resolution peat sequences 200 km apart in northern Scotland spanning the last c. 8200 years. εNd isotope data suggest the dominant minerogenic dust source switches between a low latitude (likely Saharan) and a high latitude, Icelandic source. Marked peaks in increased minerogenic dust deposition at: c. 5.4–5.1, 4.0–3.9, 2.8–2.6, 1.0 and 0.3 ka BP occur against a backdrop of low dust deposition during the mid-Holocene (c. 5.0–4.0 ka BP) and increased background levels of dust during the neoglacial period (<4.0 ka BP). These dust peaks coincide with periods of glacial advance in Iceland and heightened storminess in the North Atlantic. Isotope data for additional dust peaks at c. 1.0 and 0.7 ka BP and the last ~50 years suggest these reflect increased dust from the Sahara associated with aridity and land-use change in North Africa during the Late-Holocene, and modern anthropogenic sources. This work highlights the complexity of Holocene records of dust deposition in the North Atlantic and emphasises the role of dynamic sub-Polar glaciers and their meltwater systems as a significant dust source.Output Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin