Instability and inequality in the British state

The UK state has been through many periods of perceived crisis, but the instability of the last decade has shaken some of the foundational institutions of British politics. Our main argument is that the rise of political instability relates to the failure of British politics to respond to structural inequality in society and politics. This includes growing economic and geographic disparities, as well as destabilizing divisions over long-standing social injustices. The infusion of these trends into the political process is the subject of the ‘asymmetric power model (APM)’, which acts as the theoretical underpinning of this paper and the special issue it introduces. In this editorial to the Parliamentary Affairs Special Issue on ‘Instability and inequality in the British state’, we elaborate these arguments and provide a brief overview of the eight papers in the issue, which cover the APM, the constitution, the UK Union, the Conservative Party, public policymaking, gender inequalities, intersectional inequalities, and geographical inequalities. Together, the papers identify the causes and features of the UK’s troubling inequality-instability dialectic and offer various practical and theoretical ways forward

The Most Beautiful Flag In The World

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/5691/thumbnail.jp

Microglial mechanisms of cell death and the role of the P2X7 receptor in relation to glaucoma

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to investigate mechanisms of cell death in microglia in the context of neurodegenerative disease including glaucoma. The effects of ATP stimulation on cell membrane disruption and cell death in microglia was investigated and inhibitors used to characterise the pathways involved. The mechanisms and pathways between microglia and macrophages were compared and finally the effects of pathophysiological insults on cell membrane disruption and cell death in microglia were explored using inhibitors again to characterise the pathways involved. Methods: BV2, P2X7K/O BV2 microglia and J774 macrophages were the cell lines used. Cell membrane disruption was measured using YO-PRO and propidium iodide (PI) dye, while cell death was investigated using cell death assays (LDH and MTS). Cell morphological changes were observed by phase contrast microscopy. Inhibitors for cell death associated proteins were utilised to investigate cell death pathways. Other methods used include SDS-PAGE and Western blot to detect the pyroptotic protein gasdermin D protein and qPCR for measuring mRNA gene expression levels of proteins associated with cell death. Results: ATP stimulation caused membrane disruption and cell death in BV2 microglia that was P2X7 dependent. However, inhibitors of apoptotic (Z-DEVD-FMK), pyroptotic (MCC950, Ac-YVAD-cmk and Necrosulfonamide) and necroptotic proteins (necrostatin), as well as, other caspase inhibitors (Z-VAD-FMK and Z-IETD-FMK) and calpain inhibitors (PD150606 and CAT811) caused no difference in these changes. The J774 macrophages underwent a pyroptotic cell death, in both LPS and non-LPS primed cells after ATP stimulation, that could be blocked with inhibitors of pyroptosis. LPS priming had no effect on parameters measured in BV2 microglia and cleaved gasdermin D was present in J774 macrophages and not the BV2 microglia after ATP stimulation. The pathophysiological stressors, amyloid-β, oxidative stress, ischaemia and pH, all caused cell death, but the inhibitors predominantly had no effect. Levels of mRNA of activation/pyroptosis-associated proteins levels showed a similar profile between LPS and most of the stressors. Conclusions: ATP and the pathophysiological stressors all caused damage to the microglia but the pathway this is occurring through is a non-pyroptotic mechanism. This is different to that seen in macrophages. The pathophysiological stressors also caused expression changes indicative of activation. Further elucidation could help in the understanding and development of novel therapies for neurodegenerative disease including Alzheimer’s disease and glaucoma

Ontological Social Policy Analysis: An investigation into the ontological assumptions underpinning the social security reforms of the UK Coalition Government 2010-2015

This thesis builds from a central premise: all social policy, like all social research, relies on a number of assumptions about the fundamental nature of social reality and human existence. These assumptions are ‘ontological’ in the sense that ‘ontology’ is the philosophy of being and existence. Ontological assumptions are effectively the positions we take in response to the fundamental, unavoidable, and controversial questions from which human understanding proceeds. These questions include: ‘is there an objective social reality?’; ‘do we have free-will?’; ‘are we the product of our social context?’; and ‘are institutions and cultures causally significant?’. It is increasingly accepted in the academic literature that these questions are a crucial aspect of social research, because they are the base level upon which knowledge is built. And yet, despite this acceptance, the academic literature largely ignores the role of ontological assumptions in policy making. It is the central argument of this thesis that ontological assumptions are a crucial aspect of social policy making. As well as asserting the importance of ontological assumptions in social policy, the thesis develops a critical realist framework for their analysis. This framework is named ‘ontological social policy analysis’, and it is applied here to UK social security policy. The empirical research takes the form of a textual analysis and considers a number of key social policy documents. The analysis begins with the post-2005 ‘modernisation’ projects in the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, and then goes on to consider their time in office as coalition partners (2010-2015), with a particular focus on the DWP and its flagship reform, Universal Credit. In the course of the analysis, a number of ontological contradictions are unearthed, each of which has the potential to significantly undermine the effectiveness of the policy reforms. Such findings demonstrate both the possibility and fecundity of ‘ontological social policy analysis’

Space-time thermodynamics and subsystem observables in a kinetically constrained model of glassy systems

In a recent article [M. Merolle et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 102, 10837 (2005)] it was argued that dynamic heterogeneity in $d$-dimensional glass formers is a manifestation of an order-disorder phenomenon in the $d+1$ dimensions of spacetime. By considering a dynamical analogue of the free energy, evidence was found for phase coexistence between active and inactive regions of spacetime, and it was suggested that this phenomenon underlies the glass transition. Here we develop these ideas further by investigating in detail the one-dimensional Fredrickson-Andersen (FA) model in which the active and inactive phases originate in the reducibility of the dynamics. We illustrate the phase coexistence by considering the distributions of mesoscopic spacetime observables. We show how the analogy with phase coexistence can be strengthened by breaking microscopic reversibility in the FA model, leading to a non-equilibrium theory in the directed percolation universality class.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, final version with minor change

7. The 1970s

From View from the Dean’s Office by Robert McKersie. “I had been on the job just a week when Keith Kennedy, vice provost, called and said we needed to make a trip to Albany to meet the chancellor of SUNY, Ernest Boyer. This was late August 1971. After a few pleasantries, it became clear that this was not just the courtesy call of a new dean reporting in to the top leader of the state university. Chancellor Boyer went right to the point: a new Labor College was going to open on the premises of Local 3 IBEW’s training facility on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and the ILR School had to be there as a partner. It was not clear what unit of SUNY would take over the Labor College, but it was clear that given its broad mandate for labor education, the ILR School was going to play a key role.” Includes: View from the Dean’s Office; From Eric Himself; Another Perspective; Labor College Graduation: VanArsdale’s Dream Fulfilled; The View of a Visiting Faculty Member; Another Perspective; and The Student’s View

MPS, Outside Interests, and Corporate Boards: Too Busy to Serve?

The corporate governance literature has often been concerned with whether individuals with a high number of board directorships are too busy to serve in their role. In the UK, many MPs also hold positions on boards of directors. This raises the question of whether MPs with board memberships are too busy to serve their constituents, party and parliament. To address this question, we construct a network of directors (including MPs) and the firms they are associated with. We then draw on measures from social network analysis to capture how embedded these individuals are in the UK corporate system. We employ a regression approach to examine the relationship between MPs’ position in the corporate system and their participation in Parliament. We find that that some positions within the corporate network are associated with increased participation and others with decreased participation. MP participation increases when they have high numbers of directorships or high levels of corporate opportunity, but it decreases for those who are deeply embedded in the corporate system, sitting on the boards of well-connected firms. The latter are potentially ‘too busy’ to serve

Glassy behaviour in an exactly solved spin system with a ferromagnetic transition

We show that applying simple dynamical rules to Baxter's eight-vertex model leads to a system which resembles a glass-forming liquid. There are analogies with liquid, supercooled liquid, glassy and crystalline states. The disordered phases exhibit strong dynamical heterogeneity at low temperatures, which may be described in terms of an emergent mobility field. Their dynamics are well-described by a simple model with trivial thermodynamics, but an emergent kinetic constraint. We show that the (second order) thermodynamic transition to the ordered phase may be interpreted in terms of confinement of the excitations in the mobility field. We also describe the aging of disordered states towards the ordered phase, in terms of simple rate equations.Comment: 11 page