Catch me if you can: gaps in the register of overseas entities

The Register of Overseas Entities (ROE) was introduced by the government in Spring 2022 with the commitment that it would “require anonymous foreign owners of UK property to reveal their real identities”.1 We use data released by Companies House and HM Land Registry to assess to what extent the ROE is currently delivering on this aim. We identify and quantify several major ‘gaps’ in the scope and operation of the register and make recommendations for how the register could be improved

Network analysis of the social and demographic influences on name choice within the UK (1838-2016)

<div><p>Chosen names reflect changes in societal values, personal tastes and cultural diversity. Vogues in name usage can be easily shown on a case by case basis, by plotting the rise and fall in their popularity over time. However, individual name choices are not made in isolation and trends in naming are better understood as group-level phenomena. Here we use network analysis to examine onomastic (name) datasets in order to explore the influences on name choices within the UK over the last 170 years. Using a large representative sample of approximately 22 million forenames from England and Wales given between 1838 and 2014, along with a complete population sample of births registered between 1996 and 2016, we demonstrate how trends in name usage can be visualised as network graphs. By exploring the structure of these graphs various patterns of name use become apparent, a consequence of external social forces, such as migration, operating in concert with internal mechanisms of change. In general, we show that the topology of network graphs can reveal naming vogues, and that naming vogues in part reflect social and demographic changes. Many name choices are consistent with a self-correcting feedback loop, whereby rarer names become common because there are virtues perceived in their rarity, yet with these perceived virtues lost upon increasing commonality. Towards the present day, we can speculate that the comparatively greater range of media, freedom of movement, and ability to maintain globally-distributed social networks increases the number of possible names, but also ensures they may more quickly be perceived as commonplace. Consequently, contemporary naming vogues are relatively short-lived with many name choices appearing a balance struck between recognisability and rarity. The data are available in multiple forms including via an easy-to-use web interface at <a href="http://demos.flourish.studio/namehistory" target="_blank">http://demos.flourish.studio/namehistory</a>.</p></div

Do doctors in dispensing practices with a financial conflict of interest prescribe more expensive drugs? A cross-sectional analysis of English primary care prescribing data.

OBJECTIVES: Approximately one in eight practices in primary care in England are 'dispensing practices' with an in-house dispensary providing medication directly to patients. These practices can generate additional income by negotiating lower prices on higher cost drugs, while being reimbursed at a standard rate. They, therefore, have a potential financial conflict of interest around prescribing choices. We aimed to determine whether dispensing practices are more likely to prescribe high-cost options for four commonly prescribed classes of drug where there is no evidence of superiority for high-cost options. DESIGN: A list was generated of drugs with high acquisition costs that were no more clinically effective than those with the lowest acquisition costs, for all four classes of drug examined. Data were obtained prescribing of statins, proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) and ACE inhibitors (ACEis). Logistic regression was used to calculate ORs for prescribing high-cost options in dispensing practices, adjusting for Index of Multiple Deprivation score, practice list size and the number of doctors at each practice. SETTING: English primary care. PARTICIPANTS: All general practices in England. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Mean cost per dose was calculated separately for dispensing and non-dispensing practices. Dispensing practices can vary in the number of patients they dispense to; we, therefore, additionally compared practices with no dispensing patients, low, medium and high proportions of dispensing patients. Total cost savings were modelled by applying the mean cost per dose from non-dispensing practices to the number of doses prescribed in dispensing practices. RESULTS: Dispensing practices were more likely to prescribe high-cost drugs across all classes: statins adjusted OR 1.51 (95% CI 1.49 to 1.53, p<0.0001), PPIs OR 1.11 (95% CI 1.09 to 1.13, p<0.0001), ACEi OR 2.58 (95% CI 2.46 to 2.70, p<0.0001), ARB OR 5.11 (95% CI 5.02 to 5.20, p<0.0001). Mean cost per dose in pence was higher in dispensing practices (statins 7.44 vs 6.27, PPIs 5.57 vs 5.46, ACEi 4.30 vs 4.24, ARB 11.09 vs 8.19). For all drug classes, the more dispensing patients a practice had, the more likely it was to issue a prescription for a high-cost option. Total cost savings in England available from all four classes are £628 875 per month or £7 546 502 per year. CONCLUSIONS: Doctors in dispensing practices are more likely to prescribe higher cost drugs. This is the largest study ever conducted on dispensing practices, and the first contemporary research suggesting some UK doctors respond to a financial conflict of interest in treatment decisions. The reimbursement system for dispensing practices may generate unintended consequences. Robust routine audit of practices prescribing higher volumes of unnecessarily expensive drugs may help reduce costs

Global Water Governance and Climate Change: Identifying Innovative Arrangements for Adaptive Transformation

A convoluted network of different water governance systems exists around the world. Collectively, these systems provide insight into how to build sustainable regimes of water use and management. We argue that the challenge is not tomake the systemless convoluted, but rather to support positive and promising trends in governance, creating a vision for future environmental outcomes. In this paper, we analyse nine water case studies from around the world to help identify potential ‘innovative arrangements’ for addressing existing dilemmas. We argue that such arrangements can be used as a catalyst for crafting new global water governance futures. The nine case studies were selected for their diversity in terms of location, scale and water dilemma, and through an examination of their contexts, structures and processes we identify key themes to consider in the milieu of adaptive transformation. These themes include the importance of acknowledging socio-ecological entanglements, understanding the political dimensions of environmental dilemmas, the recognition of different constructions of the dillema, and the importance of democratized processes.The research for this paper is a part of the “CADWAGO: Climate change adaptation and water governance—reconciling food security, renewable energy and the provision of multiple ecosystem services” project funded as part of the “Europe and Global Challenges programme” by Compagnia di San Paolo, VolkswagenStiftung and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/10/1/2

COMPare: a prospective cohort study correcting and monitoring 58 misreported trials in real time.

BACKGROUND: Discrepancies between pre-specified and reported outcomes are an important source of bias in trials. Despite legislation, guidelines and public commitments on correct reporting from journals, outcome misreporting continues to be prevalent. We aimed to document the extent of misreporting, establish whether it was possible to publish correction letters on all misreported trials as they were published, and monitor responses from editors and trialists to understand why outcome misreporting persists despite public commitments to address it. METHODS: We identified five high-impact journals endorsing Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) (New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine) and assessed all trials over a six-week period to identify every correctly and incorrectly reported outcome, comparing published reports against published protocols or registry entries, using CONSORT as the gold standard. A correction letter describing all discrepancies was submitted to the journal for all misreported trials, and detailed coding sheets were shared publicly. The proportion of letters published and delay to publication were assessed over 12 months of follow-up. Correspondence received from journals and authors was documented and themes were extracted. RESULTS: Sixty-seven trials were assessed in total. Outcome reporting was poor overall and there was wide variation between journals on pre-specified primary outcomes (mean 76% correctly reported, journal range 25-96%), secondary outcomes (mean 55%, range 31-72%), and number of undeclared additional outcomes per trial (mean 5.4, range 2.9-8.3). Fifty-eight trials had discrepancies requiring a correction letter (87%, journal range 67-100%). Twenty-three letters were published (40%) with extensive variation between journals (range 0-100%). Where letters were published, there were delays (median 99 days, range 0-257 days). Twenty-nine studies had a pre-trial protocol publicly available (43%, range 0-86%). Qualitative analysis demonstrated extensive misunderstandings among journal editors about correct outcome reporting and CONSORT. Some journals did not engage positively when provided correspondence that identified misreporting; we identified possible breaches of ethics and publishing guidelines. CONCLUSIONS: All five journals were listed as endorsing CONSORT, but all exhibited extensive breaches of this guidance, and most rejected correction letters documenting shortcomings. Readers are likely to be misled by this discrepancy. We discuss the advantages of prospective methodology research sharing all data openly and pro-actively in real time as feedback on critiqued studies. This is the first empirical study of major academic journals' willingness to publish a cohort of comparable and objective correction letters on misreported high-impact studies. Suggested improvements include changes to correspondence processes at journals, alternatives for indexed post-publication peer review, changes to CONSORT's mechanisms for enforcement, and novel strategies for research on methods and reporting

Acquiring variation in an artificial language: children and adults are sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic variation

Languages exhibit sociolinguistic variation, such that adult native speakers condition the usage of linguistic variants on social context, gender, and ethnicity, among other cues. While the existence of this kind of socially conditioned variation is well-established, less is known about how it is acquired. Studies of naturalistic language use by children provide various examples where children's production of sociolinguistic variants appears to be conditioned on similar factors to adults’ production, but it is difficult to determine whether this reflects knowledge of sociolinguistic conditioning or systematic differences in the input to children from different social groups. Furthermore, artificial language learning experiments have shown that children have a tendency to eliminate variation, a process which could potentially work against their acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. The current study used a semi-artificial language learning paradigm to investigate learning of the sociolinguistic cue of speaker identity in 6-year-olds and adults. Participants were trained and tested on an artificial language where nouns were obligatorily followed by one of two meaningless particles and were produced by one of two speakers (one male, one female). Particle usage was conditioned deterministically on speaker identity (Experiment 1), probabilistically (Experiment 2), or not at all (Experiment 3). Participants were given tests of production and comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2, both children and adults successfully acquired the speaker identity cue, although the effect was stronger for adults and in Experiment 1. In addition, in all three experiments, there was evidence of regularization in participants' productions, although the type of regularization differed with age: children showed regularization by boosting the frequency of one particle at the expense of the other, while adults regularized by conditioning particle usage on lexical items. Overall, results demonstrate that children and adults are sensitive to speaker identity cues, an ability which is fundamental to tracking sociolinguistic variation, and that children's well-established tendency to regularize does not prevent them from learning sociolinguistically conditioned variation

Isolation of a wide range of minerals from a thermally treated plant: Equisetum arvense, a Mare’s tale

Silica is the second most abundant biomineral being exceeded in nature only by biogenic CaCO3. Many land plants (such as rice, cereals, cucumber, etc.) deposit silica in significant amounts to reinforce their tissues and as a systematic response to pathogen attack. One of the most ancient species of living vascular plants, Equisetum arvense is also able to take up and accumulate silica in all parts of the plant. Numerous methods have been developed for elimination of the organic material and/or metal ions present in plant material to isolate biogenic silica. However, depending on the chemical and/or physical treatment applied to branch or stem from Equisetum arvense; other mineral forms such glass-type materials (i.e. CaSiO3), salts (i.e. KCl) or luminescent materials can also be isolated from the plant material. In the current contribution, we show the chemical and/or thermal routes that lead to the formation of a number of different mineral types in addition to biogenic silica

Is there scope for community health nurses to address lifestyle risk factors? : the community nursing SNAP trial

Background: This paper examines the opportunity and need for lifestyle interventions for patients attending generalist community nursing services in Australia. This will help determine the scope for risk factor management within community health care by generalist community nurses (GCNs).Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study conducted in four generalist community nursing services in NSW, Australia. Prior to service contacts, clients were offered a computer-assisted telephone interview to collect baseline data on socio-demographics, health conditions, smoking status, physical activity levels, alcohol consumption, height and weight, fruit and vegetable intake and 'readiness-to-change' for lifestyle risk factors.Results: 804 clients participated (a response rate of 34.1%). Participants had higher rates of obesity (40.5% vs 32.1%) and higher prevalence of multiple risk factors (40.4% vs 29.5%) than in the general population. Few with a SNAPW (Smoking-Nutrition-Alcohol-Physical-Activity-Weight) risk factor had received advice or referral in the previous 3 months. The proportion of clients identified as at risk and who were open to change (i.e. contemplative, in preparation or in action phase) were 65.0% for obese/overweight; 73.8% for smokers; 48.2% for individuals with high alcohol intake; 83.5% for the physically inactive and 59.0% for those with poor nutrition.Conclusions: There was high prevalence of lifestyle risk factors. Although most were ready to change, few clients recalled having received any recent lifestyle advice. This suggests that there is considerable scope for intervention by GCNs. The results of this trial will shed light on how best to implement the lifestyle risk factor management in routine practice

BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey – XIII. The nature of the most luminous obscured AGN in the low-redshift universe

We present a multiwavelength analysis of 28 of the most luminous low-redshift narrow-line, ultra-hard X-ray-selected active galactic nuclei (AGN) drawn from the 70-month Swift/BAT all-sky survey, with bolometric luminosities of log(L_(bol)/ergs^(-1)) ≳ 45.25⁠. The broad goal of our study is to determine whether these objects have any distinctive properties, potentially setting them aside from lower luminosity obscured AGN in the local Universe. Our analysis relies on the first data release of the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS/DR1) and on dedicated observations with the VLT, Palomar, and Keck observatories. We find that the vast majority of our sources agree with commonly used AGN selection criteria which are based on emission line ratios and on mid-infrared colours. Our AGN are pre-dominantly hosted in massive galaxies (9.8 ≲ log (M*/M⊙) ≲ 11.7); based on visual inspection of archival optical images, they appear to be mostly ellipticals. Otherwise, they do not have distinctive properties. Their radio luminosities, determined from publicly available survey data, show a large spread of almost four orders of magnitude – much broader than what is found for lower X-ray luminosity obscured AGN in BASS. Moreover, our sample shows no preferred combination of black hole masses (MBH) and/or Eddington ratio (λ_(Edd)), covering 7.5 ≲ log (M_(BH)/M⊙) ≲ 10.3 and 0.01 ≲ λ_(Edd) ≲ 1. Based on the distribution of our sources in the λ_(Edd)−N_H plane, we conclude that our sample is consistent with a scenario where the amount of obscuring material along the line of sight is determined by radiation pressure exerted by the AGN on the dusty circumnuclear gas