Professional Football and its Supporters in Lancashire, circa 1946-1985

The academic study of Association Football and other sports is now regularly regarded as a valid and essential part of disciplines including psychology, history, philosophy, geography and sociology. The sociology and social history of Association Football in England for the period after the Second World War has, until recently, been dominated by the study of hooliganism and the recent commercialisation of the game. This has left a significant gap in the historiography of English foothall, particularly in terms of supporters' changing relationships with clubs in the period from 1946 onwards. This project has four principal aims. These are to assess the social make-up of postwar football crowds in Lancashire; to analyse the fall in attendances that occurred at most Lancashire football clubs in the post-war period; to assess the developing relationship between football and social identity in post-war Lancashire; and to evaluate attempts to reconnect football clubs with football communities from the late l970s to the mid-1980s. The project is focused on Lancashire as this region provides an exceptionally good context for analysing post-war football supporters, containing both declining town-based clubs such as Preston North End and Blackpool, and bigcity teams such as Liverpool and Manchester United. It centres on the period from circa 1946 to 1985 as most professional football clubs returned to normality after wartime dislocation in 1946, whilst the game underwent a number of fundamental changes after the Bradford City fire, Heysel Stadium disaster and other incidents that occurred in 1985. Through documentary analysis, the evaluation of socio-economic statistics, oral history interviews, and sociological debates concerning the respective influences of structure and agency on historical developments, the project produced a number of important conclusions. It was found that football crowds in the immediate post-war period were probably more heterogeneous than has previously been thought in terms of class, gender and geographical origins. It was also discovered that a variety of socio-economic influences including increasing affluence and consumption, rising marriage rates, geographical movement, increasing home ownership, and rising unemployment all acted as important factors in determining the frequency of people's football attendance in Lancashire at various points between 1946 and 1985. The project also found that football clubs were central agencies in producing feelings of local and regional identity in Lancashire in the 1940s and 1950s. However, it was noted that people came to construct their social and sporting identities differently from the early 1 960s onwards with the result that a bifurcation occurred between many football clubs and football communities. In the final section of the project, the successes and failures of responses to this situation are judged by studying formal football and community initiatives and changes in football fan culture in Lancashire in the l980s. These developments are used to partly explain how certain Lancashire football clubs and football communities came to be connected once more in the late 1980s and early 1990s

Professional football and its supporters in Lancashire, circa 1946-1985

The academic study of Association Football and other sports is now regularly regarded as a valid and essential part of disciplines including psychology, history, philosophy, geography and sociology. The sociology and social history of Association Football in England for the period after the Second World War has, until recently, been dominated by the study of hooliganism and the recent commercialisation of the game. This has left a significant gap in the historiography of English foothall, particularly in terms of supporters' changing relationships with clubs in the period from 1946 onwards. This project has four principal aims. These are to assess the social make-up of postwar football crowds in Lancashire; to analyse the fall in attendances that occurred at most Lancashire football clubs in the post-war period; to assess the developing relationship between football and social identity in post-war Lancashire; and to evaluate attempts to reconnect football clubs with football communities from the late l970s to the mid-1980s. The project is focused on Lancashire as this region provides an exceptionally good context for analysing post-war football supporters, containing both declining town-based clubs such as Preston North End and Blackpool, and bigcity teams such as Liverpool and Manchester United. It centres on the period from circa 1946 to 1985 as most professional football clubs returned to normality after wartime dislocation in 1946, whilst the game underwent a number of fundamental changes after the Bradford City fire, Heysel Stadium disaster and other incidents that occurred in 1985. Through documentary analysis, the evaluation of socio-economic statistics, oral history interviews, and sociological debates concerning the respective influences of structure and agency on historical developments, the project produced a number of important conclusions. It was found that football crowds in the immediate post-war period were probably more heterogeneous than has previously been thought in terms of class, gender and geographical origins. It was also discovered that a variety of socio-economic influences including increasing affluence and consumption, rising marriage rates, geographical movement, increasing home ownership, and rising unemployment all acted as important factors in determining the frequency of people's football attendance in Lancashire at various points between 1946 and 1985. The project also found that football clubs were central agencies in producing feelings of local and regional identity in Lancashire in the 1940s and 1950s. However, it was noted that people came to construct their social and sporting identities differently from the early 1 960s onwards with the result that a bifurcation occurred between many football clubs and football communities. In the final section of the project, the successes and failures of responses to this situation are judged by studying formal football and community initiatives and changes in football fan culture in Lancashire in the l980s. These developments are used to partly explain how certain Lancashire football clubs and football communities came to be connected once more in the late 1980s and early 1990s.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Getting to know you: Engagement and relationship building: First interim national positive futures case study research report

This report represents the culmination of the first phase of the Positive Futures (PF) Case Studies Research Project rather than a definitive set of findings as such. Rather like the PF programme itself it is very much a work in progress which is evolving all the time in the context of the action research approach we have adopted. This approach involves a cycle of action and reflection, with both the projects and research adapting in relation to the themes that emerge from the study as it progresses. Nevertheless whilst this element of the research has been concerned as much with the establishment of relations with projects and participants as investigating the relationships between them, we have begun to identify a number of tentative themes and findings. These themes are presented in a fashion which is intended to guide the future direction of projects every bit as much as to gain abstract theoretical insight. Yet this recognition of the importance of practicality and direction should not distract from the importance of gaining a wider contextual feel for the programme. For whilst this summary is intended to highlight the key themes emerging from the research and the policy and practice issues associated with them, it is in the detail of the main report that a full appreciation of the PF approach emerges. It is from the more narrative accounts in these subsequent parts that we have drawn the conclusions and recommendations presented here and which will provide the baselines against which we assess future progress. Indeed these accounts are themselves drawn from three regional reports focused on the seven case studies that constitute the overall national research project

VisANT 3.0: new modules for pathway visualization, editing, prediction and construction

With the integration of the KEGG and Predictome databases as well as two search engines for coexpressed genes/proteins using data sets obtained from the Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, VisANT 3.0 supports exploratory pathway analysis, which includes multi-scale visualization of multiple pathways, editing and annotating pathways using a KEGG compatible visual notation and visualization of expression data in the context of pathways. Expression levels are represented either by color intensity or by nodes with an embedded expression profile. Multiple experiments can be navigated or animated. Known KEGG pathways can be enriched by querying either coexpressed components of known pathway members or proteins with known physical interactions. Predicted pathways for genes/proteins with unknown functions can be inferred from coexpression or physical interaction data. Pathways produced in VisANT can be saved as computer-readable XML format (VisML), graphic images or high-resolution Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Pathways in the format of VisML can be securely shared within an interested group or published online using a simple Web link. VisANT is freely available at http://visant.bu.edu

VisANT 3.0: new modules for pathway visualization, editing, prediction and construction

With the integration of the KEGG and Predictome databases as well as two search engines for coexpressed genes/proteins using data sets obtained from the Stanford Microarray Database (SMD) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database, VisANT 3.0 supports exploratory pathway analysis, which includes multi-scale visualization of multiple pathways, editing and annotating pathways using a KEGG compatible visual notation and visualization of expression data in the context of pathways. Expression levels are represented either by color intensity or by nodes with an embedded expression profile. Multiple experiments can be navigated or animated. Known KEGG pathways can be enriched by querying either coexpressed components of known pathway members or proteins with known physical interactions. Predicted pathways for genes/proteins with unknown functions can be inferred from coexpression or physical interaction data. Pathways produced in VisANT can be saved as computer-readable XML format (VisML), graphic images or high-resolution Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Pathways in the format of VisML can be securely shared within an interested group or published online using a simple Web link. VisANT is freely available at http://visant.bu.edu

MCL-CAw: A refinement of MCL for detecting yeast complexes from weighted PPI networks by incorporating core-attachment structure

Abstract Background The reconstruction of protein complexes from the physical interactome of organisms serves as a building block towards understanding the higher level organization of the cell. Over the past few years, several independent high-throughput experiments have helped to catalogue enormous amount of physical protein interaction data from organisms such as yeast. However, these individual datasets show lack of correlation with each other and also contain substantial number of false positives (noise). Over these years, several affinity scoring schemes have also been devised to improve the qualities of these datasets. Therefore, the challenge now is to detect meaningful as well as novel complexes from protein interaction (PPI) networks derived by combining datasets from multiple sources and by making use of these affinity scoring schemes. In the attempt towards tackling this challenge, the Markov Clustering algorithm (MCL) has proved to be a popular and reasonably successful method, mainly due to its scalability, robustness, and ability to work on scored (weighted) networks. However, MCL produces many noisy clusters, which either do not match known complexes or have additional proteins that reduce the accuracies of correctly predicted complexes. Results Inspired by recent experimental observations by Gavin and colleagues on the modularity structure in yeast complexes and the distinctive properties of "core" and "attachment" proteins, we develop a core-attachment based refinement method coupled to MCL for reconstruction of yeast complexes from scored (weighted) PPI networks. We combine physical interactions from two recent "pull-down" experiments to generate an unscored PPI network. We then score this network using available affinity scoring schemes to generate multiple scored PPI networks. The evaluation of our method (called MCL-CAw) on these networks shows that: (i) MCL-CAw derives larger number of yeast complexes and with better accuracies than MCL, particularly in the presence of natural noise; (ii) Affinity scoring can effectively reduce the impact of noise on MCL-CAw and thereby improve the quality (precision and recall) of its predicted complexes; (iii) MCL-CAw responds well to most available scoring schemes. We discuss several instances where MCL-CAw was successful in deriving meaningful complexes, and where it missed a few proteins or whole complexes due to affinity scoring of the networks. We compare MCL-CAw with several recent complex detection algorithms on unscored and scored networks, and assess the relative performance of the algorithms on these networks. Further, we study the impact of augmenting physical datasets with computationally inferred interactions for complex detection. Finally, we analyse the essentiality of proteins within predicted complexes to understand a possible correlation between protein essentiality and their ability to form complexes. Conclusions We demonstrate that core-attachment based refinement in MCL-CAw improves the predictions of MCL on yeast PPI networks. We show that affinity scoring improves the performance of MCL-CAw.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/1/1471-2105-11-504.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/2/1471-2105-11-504-S1.PDFhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/3/1471-2105-11-504-S2.ZIPhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78256/4/1471-2105-11-504.pdfPeer Reviewe

Industrial Relations Climate and Union Commitment: An Evaluation of Workplace-Level Effects

This paper examines the relationship between industrial relations (IR) climate and union commitment. Using a multi-workplace sample from North East England, aggregation analysis provided support for treating IR climate as a workplace-level variable, and workplace IR climate was negatively associated with union commitment. However, IR climate moderated none of the relationships between individual-level antecedents and union commitment

Temperature Dependence of the Extrinsic Incubation Period of Orbiviruses in Culicoides Biting Midges

The rate at which viruses replicate and disseminate in competent arthropod vectors is limited by the temperature of their environment, and this can be an important determinant of geographical and seasonal limits to their transmission by arthropods in temperate regions.Here, we present a novel statistical methodology for estimating the relationship between temperature and the extrinsic incubation period (EIP) and apply it to both published and novel data on virus replication for three internationally important orbiviruses (African horse sickness virus (AHSV), bluetongue virus (BTV) and epizootic haemorrhagic disease virus (EHDV)) in their Culicoides vectors. Our analyses show that there can be differences in vector competence for different orbiviruses in the same vector species and for the same orbivirus in different vector species. Both the rate of virus replication (approximately 0.017-0.021 per degree-day) and the minimum temperature required for replication (11-13°C), however, were generally consistent for different orbiviruses and across different Culicoides vector species. The estimates obtained in the present study suggest that previous publications have underestimated the replication rate and threshold temperature because the statistical methods they used included an implicit assumption that all negative vectors were infected.Robust estimates of the temperature dependence of arbovirus replication are essential for building accurate models of transmission and for informing policy decisions about seasonal relaxations to movement restrictions. The methodology developed in this study provides the required robustness and is superior to methods used previously. Importantly, the methods are generic and can readily be applied to other arbovirus-vector systems, as long as the assumptions described in the text are valid