SYMPOSIUM on forecasting the state of the public finances

The level of public borrowing plays a central role in UK government policymaking, especially in the run-up to each Budget. Accurate forecasts of the overall fiscal stance are crucial in assessing the general health of the economy, the direction of tax policy and the volume of public services that can be supplied. But these forecasts have a relatively poor record in the UK in recent years. The government’s last Financial Statement and Budget Report noted that ‘The budget deficit is the difference between two large aggregates of spending and receipts and forecasts of it are inevitably subject to a wide margin of error. Over the past five years the average absolute errors have been around 1 per cent of GDP, or plus or minus £8 billion in today’s prices’.

The UK moves from March to December Budgets

Barring any very unexpected developments, next month’s Budget Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be the last such speech to occur in March for the foreseeable future (and perhaps for ever) in the UK. As part of last year’s budget package, the Government published a White Paper on budgetary reform (HMSO, 1992) which announced that in future, Budget Speeches would be made in December of each year rather than in March as at present. However, the tax year will continue to begin in April, so that the lead time between the announcement of tax proposals in the Budget and the coming into force of most of them will be extended from about three weeks to about 16.

Inferring diffusion in single live cells at the single molecule level

The movement of molecules inside living cells is a fundamental feature of biological processes. The ability to both observe and analyse the details of molecular diffusion in vivo at the single molecule and single cell level can add significant insight into understanding molecular architectures of diffusing molecules and the nanoscale environment in which the molecules diffuse. The tool of choice for monitoring dynamic molecular localization in live cells is fluorescence microscopy, especially so combining total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) with the use of fluorescent protein (FP) reporters in offering exceptional imaging contrast for dynamic processes in the cell membrane under relatively physiological conditions compared to competing single molecule techniques. There exist several different complex modes of diffusion, and discriminating these from each other is challenging at the molecular level due to underlying stochastic behaviour. Analysis is traditionally performed using mean square displacements of tracked particles, however, this generally requires more data points than is typical for single FP tracks due to photophysical instability. Presented here is a novel approach allowing robust Bayesian ranking of diffusion processes (BARD) to discriminate multiple complex modes probabilistically. It is a computational approach which biologists can use to understand single molecule features in live cells.Comment: combined ms (1-37 pages, 8 figures) and SI (38-55, 3 figures

An ethnographic study of the introduction of internal supervisors to an internal coaching scheme

Coach supervision is currently a hot topic. With the support of coaching bodies, supervision is increasingly regarded as a requirement to practice as a coach. However, the evidence base specific to coach supervision to support its effectiveness is limited. Thus far, very little research has focused specifically on the supervision of internal coaches, in spite of the reported growth in their use by organisations - and even less has been published relating to internal coach supervisors. The ‘voice’ of the internal practitioner, whether coach or coach supervisor, can still hardly be discerned in the current coaching literature. This paper, based upon an ethnographic study that followed the introduction of a group of internal supervisors to their internal coaching scheme, seeks to describe their journey, through their own ‘voices’

Performing Democracy

AbstractThe debate about the relationship between theatre and democracy rests on a presumption that both the artform and the political form share an intertwined history, based in their co-appearance in Greece. Equally well-known is the antagonism towards both theatre and democracy that emerges at the same moment, most clearly found in Plato. This essay revisits this history in order to set up an examination of two contemporary theatre performances that explicitly raise the relationship of democracy and theatre, the British company Punchdrunk’sThe Drowned Manand the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed’sFight Night. Both, in very different ways, approach democracy through a focus on audience experience. How, then, might these productions be read in terms of a democracy-to-come and a theatre-to-come?</jats:p

Taking Ex nihilo seriously : ontology and providence in creation

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

rendezvous:no longer not yet i

The pandemic returned me to photography. It heightened my awareness of movement. In common with many others, during lockdown, I took to walking, increasingly, in my case, with camera in hand. When lockdown lifted, it was Paris that I was drawn to.In a city such as Paris, one of the consequences of the pandemic was a re-enchantment of public spaces. If the lockdown prevented indoor encounters, the public park became a scene of meeting. A sharing of light and shadow.no longer not yet is a response to my encounter with the chairs as I walked in the parks: empty, clustered together in pairs and groups, abandoned at random or carefully arranged, they came to seem like the ghostly traces of a series of meetings that I was either too late or too early to witness. These chairs marked the dehiscence of the present moment; the no longer and the not yet. Who sat here? Who will sit here? Why? What desires filled the empty spaces? The chair is both open and indifferent to such questions, even as they in turn become the prompt to a desire for narratives that might give form to these hauntological meetings. Between documentation and imagination.The photographs and text here are mine, although there are traces of the voices of others, just as there are traces of meeting. The photograph shadows forth that which is no longer there. It produces ghosts, even if they cannot be seen or heard within the frame. The clusterings of words and images gathering here are part of a sequence continuing