Liberating the NHS; commissioning, outsourcing and a new politics debate

In the short months following the result of the UK 2010 General election, a new Government White Paper has been released entitled: Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS (Department of Health (DH), 2010a). It strives to distance itself from previous health-care proposals (DH, 2009), yet if the initiatives of this latest paper are combined against previous initiatives, also using high impact declarative terms, such as competition and choice, it is clear that little has changed and more important principles than saving money are at risk

Effective classroom practice: a mixed-method study of influences and outcomes: a research paper

This brief paper reports findings from a two-year research project, funded by the ESRC, which identified, described and analyzed variation in effective primary and secondary school teachers’ classroom practice. The study also explored these practices in relation to different school contexts and teachers’ professional life phases in order to draw out relevant implications for policy and practice

Adverse events following influenza immunization reported by healthcare personnel using active surveillance based on text messages

Studies have demonstrated that healthcare personnel (HCP) have concerns about the potential side effects of trivalent inactivate influenza vaccine (IIV3).1-3 A recent metaanalysis of reasons HCP refuse IIV3 indicates the strongest predictors of vaccine acceptance are belief that the vaccine is safe and belief the vaccine does not cause the disease it is meant to prevent.

Cosmic String Power Spectrum, Bispectrum and Trispectrum

We use analytic calculations of the post-recombination gravitational effects of cosmic strings to estimate the resulting CMB power spectrum, bispectrum and trispectrum. We place a particular emphasis on multipole regimes relevant for forthcoming CMB experiments, notably the Planck satellite. These calculations use a flat sky approximation, generalising previous work by integrating string contributions from last scattering to the present day, finding the dominant contributions to the correlators for multipoles l > 50. We find a well-behaved shape for the string bispectrum (without divergences) which is easily distinguishable from the inflationary bispectra which possess significant acoustic peaks. We estimate that the nonlinearity parameter characterising the bispectrum is approximately f_NL \sim -20 (given present string constraints from the CMB power spectrum. We also apply these unequal time correlator methods to calculate the trispectrum for parrallelogram configurations, again valid over a large range of angular scales relevant for WMAP and Planck, as well as on very small angular scales. We find that, unlike the bispectrum which is suppressed by symmetry considerations, the trispectrum for cosmic strings is large. Our current estimate for the trispectrum parameter is tau_NL \sim 10^5, which may provide one of the strongest constraints on the string model as estimators for the trispectrum are developed

Pharmacological characterization of losartan as a CCR2 antagonist and pre-clinical and pharmacodynamic assessment as a potential anti-metastatic therapy

2017 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

Neoarchean Arc Magmatism, Subsequent Collisional Orogenesis, and Paleoproterozoic Disruption within the Western Churchill Province: Implications for the Growth and Modification of Lower Continental Crust

The growth and modification of continental lithosphere are fundamental geologic processes that have had a profound effect on Earth’s evolution. The lower continental crust can play a myriad of roles pertaining to these processes depending on the strength, age, temperature, and composition of the rocks present. However, the lower continental crust is impossible to sample in-situ, and thus observations of modern lower continental crust are limited to seismic studies and xenolith studies, which provide mere snap shots of the lower crust. High pressure granulite terranes provide 4 dimensional, and spatially resolvable, analogues of lower continental crust. The Athabasca granulite terrane (AGT), along the eastern margin of the Rae subprovince of the western Churchill Province, is underlain by \u3e20,000 km2 of high pressure granulite, and is arguably to be the largest intact exposure of lower continental crust in the North America. Work presented herein provides a detailed temporal and tectonic framework for interpreting rocks of the AGT, and evaluates rocks ca. 400 km along strike to test for spatial consistency. Results suggest that the Paleoproterozoic involved the juxtaposition of various lithotectonic blocks along major ductile shear zones that vary in metamorphic conditions, timing and kinematics. Sinistral kinematics within the Cora Lake shear zone within the AGT, for instance, are explained by accretion of the Lynn-Lake and La Ronge arcs along the southern periphery of the Churchill Province at ca. 1.88 Ga at the waning phases of granulite-facies conditions. Ca. 1.9 Ga deformation involved upright folding, and the development of a regionally extensive dextral transpressive fabrics, and appears to be spatially related to the Chipman dike swarm. This event may have been driven by accretionary and collisional tectonics between the Slave and western Churchill Province. IN-SIMS micro zircon geochronology suggests a ca. 2.1 Ga emplacement age for the Chipman dikes, and may be indicative of an incipient rift, which was the locust for ca. 1.9 Ga reactivation. Preceding these events was a major crustal thickening event that occurred immediately after widespread arc-like magmatism interpreted to represent early subduction and subsequent collisional orogenisis. Rocks along strike, 400 km to the northeast of the AGT, share a similar Neoarchean history, and dike swarm, but contain little evidence of regionally extensive Paleoproterozoic granulite-facies reactivation. The reasoning for this is unknown at current, but perhaps it is due to an increasing distance from the bounding Paleoproterozoic orogens. These data provide a four dimensional framework to evaluate changes in lower crustal properties and behavior for greater than 600 my

Handling and Manipulation of Water- and Air- Borne Biological Samples Using Liquid-Infused Surfaces

Research on novel materials to handling water- and airborne samples for biological threats analysis is in great demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Work conducted on a new field of material science, called liquid-infused surfaces, demonstrate strong potential for the handling and manipulation of biological samples. As a result of the field’s infancy, only a limited number of studies have explored how liquid-infused surfaces can apply droplet manipulation strategies to address real-world problems. Presented in this dissertation are two platforms that leverage liquid-infused surfaces to address the challenges associated with handling water- and airborne biological samples. When dealing with waterborne biological samples, the paper-based materials commonly used in point-of-care devices rely on capillary forces to drive droplet movement, but this mechanism can result in significant sample loss. To simultaneously localize and concentrate with minimal loss, liquid-infused surfaces were fabricated by infusing silicone release paper with polydimethylsiloxane oil. Functionality was provided by folding the polymer surfaces into 3D geometries of the sample which enabled clean separation into predefined locations. The liquid-infused surfaces permitted ~3.4-fold increase in concentration of bacterial samples within a material that resisted adhesion, enabling downstream analysis. To capture airborne biological samples, many current methods suffer from pathogen recirculation, harsh chemical extraction protocols, and retention of captured airborne pathogens. Here, liquid nets are explored as a new method of filter-based air sampling, focused on improving the release of capture bioaerosols. Liquid nets were fabricated with traditional liquid-infused surface materials, polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) filters were infused with perfluoropolyether oil, as well as melt-blown polypropylene high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters wetted with perfluoropolyether oil. The PTFE liquid nets significantly improved the rate at which the captured Escherichia coli aerosol droplets were transferred for culturing on agar plates compared to the bare PTFE controls. Similarly, results from the HEPA filters demonstrated that the liquid nets improved the release of the captured E. coli, in comparison to the bare HEPA filters. The improvements to bacterial transfer provided by liquid nets present a new filter-based air sampling method to capture and detect biological threats within the surrounding environment