Personality disorder: no longer a diagnosis of exclusion? Law, policy and practice in Scotland

Personality disorder has been and continues to be a contested diagnosis. Those who attract this form of diagnosis have been particularly vulnerable to the effects of stigma and have tended to be excluded from service provision. This thesis provides an examination of how recent developments in law, policy and practice have impacted upon the status of personality disorder as a diagnosis of exclusion in Scotland. The theoretical framework that provides this thesis with its structure is derived from the post-empiricist approach proposed by Derek Layder. This approach seeks to contextualise emergent inductive findings within a broader historical and contemporary analysis. In the case of this research the broader context consists of the interplay between mental health law, policy and practice in the field of mental health and the diagnosis of personality disorder more specifically. The empirical enquiry at the core of this thesis is based upon an analysis of the views, beliefs and expectations of front-line staff (psychiatrists and social workers qualified as mental health officers) involved in the process of assessment and service provision. In addition to front-line staff (n = 27) a range of key informants who were in a position to shed light on the strategic imperatives underpinning recent developments in law and policy were also interviewed. This analysis is contextualised within a review of key developments in law and policy that have particular significance for anyone who may attract a diagnosis of personality disorder. Despite the ostensibly inclusive approach towards those who may attract a diagnosis of personality disorder evident within the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003, the reality is a highly selective and very limited inclusion of those who attract this form of diagnosis. The effective inclusion of those who may attract a diagnosis of personality disorder has been obstructed by several key impediments: 1: an insufficiently robust policy framework to drive forward the process of inclusion; 2: residual ambivalence towards the legitimacy of the diagnosis of personality disorder itself and the legitimacy of the claims made upon services by those who may attract a diagnosis of personality disorder; 3: insufficient and inadequately focused resources; 4: service structures that have not been redesigned sufficiently to engage successfully with service users who may attract a diagnosis of personality disorder. As a consequence of these impediments to inclusion, the majority of those who may attract a diagnosis of personality disorder in Scotland are likely to continue to face high levels of marginalisation and exclusion

Dynamic Normalization for Compact Binary Coalescence Searches in Non-Stationary Noise

The output of gravitational-wave interferometers, such as LIGO and Virgo, can be highly non-stationary. Broadband detector noise can affect the detector sensitivity on the order of tens of seconds. Gravitational-wave transient searches, such as those for colliding black holes, estimate this noise in order to identify gravitational-wave events. During times of non-stationarity we see a higher rate of false events being reported. To accurately separate signal from noise, it is imperative to incorporate the changing detector state into gravitational-wave searches. We develop a new statistic which estimates the variation of the interferometric detector noise. We use this statistic to re-rank candidate events identified during LIGO-Virgo's second observing run by the PyCBC search pipeline. This results in a 7% improvement in the sensitivity volume for low mass binaries, particularly binary neutron stars mergers

Outer Hair Cell Somatic Electromotility In Vivo and Power Transfer to the Organ of Corti

AbstractThe active amplification of sound-induced vibrations in the cochlea, known to be crucial for auditory sensitivity and frequency selectivity, is not well understood. The outer hair cell (OHC) somatic electromotility is a potential mechanism for such amplification. Its effectiveness in vivo is putatively limited by the electrical low-pass filtering of the cell's transmembrane potential. However, the transmembrane potential is an incomplete metric. We propose and estimate two metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of OHC electromotility in vivo. One metric is the OHC electromechanical ratio defined as the amplitude of the ratio of OHC displacement to the change in its transmembrane potential. The in vivo electromechanical ratio is derived from the recently measured in vivo displacements of the reticular lamina and the basilar membrane at the 19 kHz characteristic place in guinea pigs and using a model. The ratio, after accounting for the differences in OHC vibration in situ due to the impedances from the adjacent structures, is in agreement with the literature values of the in vitro electromechanical ratio measured by others. The second and more insightful metric is the OHC somatic power. Our analysis demonstrates that the organ of Corti is nearly optimized to receive maximum somatic power in vivo and that the estimated somatic power could account for the active amplification

Improving the Sensitivity of Advanced LIGO Using Noise Subtraction

This paper presents an adaptable, parallelizable method for subtracting linearly coupled noise from Advanced LIGO data. We explain the features developed to ensure that the process is robust enough to handle the variability present in Advanced LIGO data. In this work, we target subtraction of noise due to beam jitter, detector calibration lines, and mains power lines. We demonstrate noise subtraction over the entirety of the second observing run, resulting in increases in sensitivity comparable to those reported in previous targeted efforts. Over the course of the second observing run, we see a 30% increase in Advanced LIGO sensitivity to gravitational waves from a broad range of compact binary systems. We expect the use of this method to result in a higher rate of detected gravitational-wave signals in Advanced LIGO data.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Pathfinders On-Line: Adding Pathfinders to a NOTIS On-Line System

For decades, print pathfinders have complemented card catalogs and been useful reference tools. They\u27re overlooked as components of on-line catalogs, even though they can extend the depth of the catalog. To encourage librarians to consider integrating pathfinders into on-line catalogs, the authors discuss problems in OPAC searching, describe the value and styles of pathfinders, and illustrate how to include them in a NOTIS system

The Issues of Mismodelling Gravitational-Wave Data for Parameter Estimation

Bayesian inference is used to extract unknown parameters from gravitational wave signals. Detector noise is typically modelled as stationary, although data from the LIGO and Virgo detectors is not stationary. We demonstrate that the posterior of estimated waveform parameters is no longer valid under the assumption of stationarity. We show that while the posterior is unbiased, the errors will be under- or overestimated compared to the true posterior. A formalism was developed to measure the effect of the mismodelling, and found the effect of any form of non-stationarity has an effect on the results, but are not significant in certain circumstances. We demonstrate the effect of short-duration Gaussian noise bursts and persistent oscillatory modulation of the noise on binary-black-hole-like signals. In the case of short signals, non-stationarity in the data does not have a large effect on the parameter estimation, but the errors from non-stationary data containing signals lasting tens of seconds or longer will be several times worse than if the noise was stationary. Accounting for this limiting factor in parameter sensitivity could be very important for achieving accurate astronomical results, including an estimation of the Hubble parameter. This methodology for handling the non-stationarity will also be invaluable for analysis of waveforms that last minutes or longer, such as those we expect to see with the Einstein Telescope.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Comments welcom

The c-terminal extension of a hybrid immunoglobulin A/G heavy chain is responsible for its Golgi-mediated sorting to the vacuole

We have assessed the ability of the plant secretory pathway to handle the expression of complex heterologous proteins by investigating the fate of a hybrid immunoglobulin A/G in tobacco cells. Although plant cells can express large amounts of the antibody, a relevant proportion is normally lost to vacuolar sorting and degradation. Here we show that the synthesis of high amounts of IgA/G does not impose stress on the plant secretory pathway. Plant cells can assemble antibody chains with high efficiency and vacuolar transport occurs only after the assembled immunoglobulins have traveled through the Golgi complex. We prove that vacuolar delivery of IgA/G depends on the presence of a cryptic sorting signal in the tailpiece of the IgA/G heavy chain. We also show that unassembled light chains are efficiently secreted as monomers by the plant secretory pathway

Large-Scale Image Processing with the ROTSE Pipeline for Follow-Up of Gravitational Wave Events

Electromagnetic (EM) observations of gravitational-wave (GW) sources would bring unique insights into a source which are not available from either channel alone. However EM follow-up of GW events presents new challenges. GW events will have large sky error regions, on the order of 10-100 square degrees, which can be made up of many disjoint patches. When searching such large areas there is potential contamination by EM transients unrelated to the GW event. Furthermore, the characteristics of possible EM counterparts to GW events are also uncertain. It is therefore desirable to be able to assess the statistical significance of a candidate EM counterpart, which can only be done by performing background studies of large data sets. Current image processing pipelines such as that used by ROTSE are not usually optimised for large-scale processing. We have automated the ROTSE image analysis, and supplemented it with a post-processing unit for candidate validation and classification. We also propose a simple ad hoc statistic for ranking candidates as more likely to be associated with the GW trigger. We demonstrate the performance of the automated pipeline and ranking statistic using archival ROTSE data. EM candidates from a randomly selected set of images are compared to a background estimated from the analysis of 102 additional sets of archival images. The pipeline's detection efficiency is computed empirically by re-analysis of the images after adding simulated optical transients that follow typical light curves for gamma-ray burst afterglows and kilonovae. We show that the automated pipeline rejects most background events and is sensitive to simulated transients to limiting magnitudes consistent with the limiting magnitude of the images