Revisiting the history of the British coal industry: the politics of legacy, memory and heritage

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Waseda University Research Center for Humanities in Waseda Rilas Journal on 12 Oct 2020. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published versionThis paper revisits the history of the British coal industry in the context of deindustrialisation, ruptures in electoral politics, and attempts by former miners to preserve a mining past. Methodologically it draws on an oral history project that involved over 100 participants in England, Scotland and Wales. The life stories conveyed by the former miners provide entry points to various aspects of the industrial, social and cultural life of coal communities. The specific focus here is on the ways in which the miners themselves are striving to create and curate their own stories and experiences through local heritage projects in the town of Leigh in north west England and the former mining villages of the north Wales coast. The interviews are indicative of the sense of the isolation they continue to experience in the contemporary economic context of deindustrialisation and challenges to their sense of class, community and nation. Tensions between former miners and the wider social and political culture of their communities hinge on narratives and histories of the 1984/5 miners’ strike. Heritage projects developed in both localities have become battlegrounds for what kind of history should be presented to the public, where memorials should be located, and which memories and experiences should be preserved. Miners who took part in the strike understandably want to centre their histories and narratives through the lens of 1984/5, while those who continued to work through the dispute argue that it should be given a more marginal position in commemoration and heritage. The interviews offer more complex readings of the social and cultural politics of the coal industry and challenge some of the prevailing orthodoxies in the historiograph

Fighting for the soul of coal: Colliery closures and the moral economy of nationalization in Britain, 1947–1994

© 2024 The Authors. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2024.6In this article, we explore the impact of colliery closure programs across the nationalized British coal industry. We chart the regional disparities in these and the mobilization of community opposition to national protests, leading to the national miners’ strikes of 1972, 1974, and 1984–5. This article demonstrates how closures have changed the industrial politics of mining unions for miners, junior officials, and managers and have increasingly alienated NCB officials and mining communities. We demonstrate how this undermined the ideals of nationalization. This is examined through moral economic frameworks and within the context of changes to the UK’s energy mix, with implications for contemporary deliberations on public ownership, energy transitions, and regional development.The authors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their funding of the project, ‘On Behalf of the People: Work, Community and Class in the British Coal Industry, 1947–1994’ (AH/P007244/1) on which this article is based.Published onlin

Glycolaldehyde formation via the dimerization of the formyl radical

Glycolaldehyde, the simplest monosaccharide sugar, has recently been detected in low- and high-mass star-forming cores. Following our previous investigation into glycolaldehyde formation, we now consider a further mechanism for the formation of glycolaldehyde that involves the dimerization of the formyl radical, HCO. Quantum mechanical investigation of the HCO dimerization process upon an ice surface is predicted to be barrierless and therefore fast. In an astrophysical context, we show that this mechanism can be very efficient in star-forming cores. It is limited by the availability of the formyl radical, but models suggest that only very small amounts of CO are required to be converted to HCO to meet the observational constraints

“I\u27m making a positive change in my life”: A mixed method evaluation of a well-being tertiary education unit

Issue Addressed: Mental health disorders (MHDs) are prevalent amongst university students with detrimental impacts on individual students, universities and the wider community. There is an urgent need for proactive and preventative strategies to address the mental health crisis in the university population. This study evaluated the efficacy of a 13-week unit developed to directly educate university students about ways to improve and maintain well-being. Methods: Fifty-eight university students from five disciplines participated in a 13-week elective undergraduate unit “Well-Being Fundamentals for Success” as part of their degree. The Act Belong Commit mental health promotion campaign framework formed the basis of teaching materials. Outcome well-being measures were self-assessed at weeks 1, 6 and 12 using four scales: (1) Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS); (2) Perceived Stress Scale (PSS); (3) Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) and (4) Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS). Post-unit group interviews (n = 11) were analysed for key themes. Results: Linear mixed models demonstrated a significant improvement in BRS over the semester; well-being (WEMBS) and mindful attention (MAAS) did increase but not significantly. There was a significant increase in stress (PSS) over the semester. Key themes that emerged from the group interviews were that (1) University life contributes to well-being; (2) University life contributes to stress; (3) The well-being unit helped students see and do things differently; (4) An overall endorsement of the unit. Conclusion: University students’ resilience increased over the semester following participation in a curriculum focused on well-being which featured a combination of theoretical content and experiential workshops. So what? Incorporating mental well-being curriculum into tertiary education is proactive preventive health strategy which may assist with the increasing prevalence of MHD in Australia

The response of the tandem pore potassium channel TASK-3 (K2P9.1) to voltage : gating at the cytoplasmic mouth

Although the tandem pore potassium channel TASK-3 is thought to open and shut at its selectivity filter in response to changes of extracellular pH, it is currently unknown whether the channel also shows gating at its inner, cytoplasmic mouth through movements of membrane helices M2 and M4.We used two electrode voltage clamp and single channel recording to show that TASK-3 responds to voltage in a way that reveals such gating. In wild-type channels, Popen was very low at negative voltages, but increased with depolarisation. The effect of voltage was relatively weak and the gating charge small, ∼0.17.Mutants A237T (in M4) and N133A (in M2) increased Popen at a given voltage, increasing mean open time and the number of openings per burst. In addition, the relationship between Popen andvoltagewas shifted to lesspositive voltages. Mutation of putative hinge glycines (G117A, G231A), residues that are conserved throughout the tandem pore channel family, reduced Popen at a given voltage, shifting the relationship with voltage to a more positive potential range. None of these mutants substantially affected the response of the channel to extracellular acidification. We have used the results from single channel recording to develop a simple kinetic model to show how gating occurs through two classes of conformation change, with two routes out of the open state, as expected if gating occurs both at the selectivity filter and at its cytoplasmic mouth

Face morphology: Can it tell us something about body weight and fat?

This paper proposes a method for an automatic extraction of geometric features, related to weight parameters, from 3D facial data acquired with low-cost depth scanners. The novelty of the method relies both on the processing of the 3D facial data and on the definition of the geometric features which are conceptually simple, robust against noise and pose estimation errors, computationally efficient, invariant with respect to rotation, translation, and scale changes. Experimental results show that these measurements are highly correlated with weight, BMI, and neck circumference, and well correlated with waist and hip circumference, which are markers of central obesity. Therefore the proposed method strongly supports the development of interactive, non-obtrusive systems able to provide a support for the detection of weight-related problems

Genomic-scale Analysis of Bacterial Gene and Protein Expression in the Host

DNA microarrays and proteomics are used to study bacterial gene and protein expression during infections

Квазиклассическое описание излучения электрона в графене

Supplementary Item 12: Tracer isotope data