Numerical Implementation of Harmonic Polylogarithms to Weight w = 8

We present the FORTRAN-code HPOLY.f for the numerical calculation of harmonic polylogarithms up to w = 8 at an absolute accuracy of $\sim 4.9 \cdot 10^{-15}$ or better. Using algebraic and argument relations the numerical representation can be limited to the range $x \in [0, \sqrt{2}-1]$. We provide replacement files to map all harmonic polylogarithms to a basis and the usual range of arguments $x \in ]-\infty,+\infty[$ to the above interval analytically. We also briefly comment on a numerical implementation of real valued cyclotomic harmonic polylogarithms.Comment: 19 pages LATEX, 3 Figures, ancillary dat

The Conferences

This article surveys the breadth of conferences and scholarly events devoted to comics across the globe. We will use our contacts worldwide to be as inclusive as possible in our coverage of these events. The first half of the piece will give a historical introduction to the emergence of scholarly comics-related events, and changing attitudes towards them, and proceed to an inclusive survey that offers brief summaries of the size, scope and focus of each event, organised by country. There will be a focus on place of scholarship within the fan driven early events and the move towards the professionalisation of many of events, and the rise of a convention industry, and the place of scholarship within events that blend aspects of a convention and a conference. The second half of the article is comprised of a series of case studies of contemporary events, in which we focus on some key examples to reflect on the variance and implications of their different aims and approaches. We will draw on interviews with organisers and participants to consider: the place and impact of comics strands in larger international academic conferences (e.g. the PCA); large-scale events (e.g. Angouleme; San Diego Comic-Con); 'aca-fan' events (e.g. the Comic Arts Conference; Leeds Thought Bubble); and creator-organised events (e.g. the Lake Festival; Kapow Comic-Con). The article will conclude with reflections on the current position of comics events and their impact in shaping and sustaining the discipline's scholarly community and its field of study, for example regarding participants' identities, locations, research and so fort

A safer place for patients: learning to improve patient safety

1 Every day over one million people are treated successfully by National Health Service (NHS) acute, ambulance and mental health trusts. However, healthcare relies on a range of complex interactions of people, skills, technologies and drugs, and sometimes things do go wrong. For most countries, patient safety is now the key issue in healthcare quality and risk management. The Department of Health (the Department) estimates that one in ten patients admitted to NHS hospitals will be unintentionally harmed, a rate similar to other developed countries. Around 50 per cent of these patient safety incidentsa could have been avoided, if only lessons from previous incidents had been learned. 2 There are numerous stakeholders with a role in keeping patients safe in the NHS, many of whom require trusts to report details of patient safety incidents and near misses to them (Figure 2). However, a number of previous National Audit Office reports have highlighted concerns that the NHS has limited information on the extent and impact of clinical and non-clinical incidents and trusts need to learn from these incidents and share good practice across the NHS more effectively (Appendix 1). 3 In 2000, the Chief Medical Officer’s report An organisation with a memory 1 , identified that the key barriers to reducing the number of patient safety incidents were an organisational culture that inhibited reporting and the lack of a cohesive national system for identifying and sharing lessons learnt. 4 In response, the Department published Building a safer NHS for patients3 detailing plans and a timetable for promoting patient safety. The goal was to encourage improvements in reporting and learning through the development of a new mandatory national reporting scheme for patient safety incidents and near misses. Central to the plan was establishing the National Patient Safety Agency to improve patient safety by reducing the risk of harm through error. The National Patient Safety Agency was expected to: collect and analyse information; assimilate other safety-related information from a variety of existing reporting systems; learn lessons and produce solutions. 5 We therefore examined whether the NHS has been successful in improving the patient safety culture, encouraging reporting and learning from patient safety incidents. Key parts of our approach were a census of 267 NHS acute, ambulance and mental health trusts in Autumn 2004, followed by a re-survey in August 2005 and an omnibus survey of patients (Appendix 2). We also reviewed practices in other industries (Appendix 3) and international healthcare systems (Appendix 4), and the National Patient Safety Agency’s progress in developing its National Reporting and Learning System (Appendix 5) and other related activities (Appendix 6). 6 An organisation with a memory1 was an important milestone in the NHS’s patient safety agenda and marked the drive to improve reporting and learning. At the local level the vast majority of trusts have developed a predominantly open and fair reporting culture but with pockets of blame and scope to improve their strategies for sharing good practice. Indeed in our re-survey we found that local performance had continued to improve with more trusts reporting having an open and fair reporting culture, more trusts with open reporting systems and improvements in perceptions of the levels of under-reporting. At the national level, progress on developing the national reporting system for learning has been slower than set out in the Department’s strategy of 2001 3 and there is a need to improve evaluation and sharing of lessons and solutions by all organisations with a stake in patient safety. There is also no clear system for monitoring that lessons are learned at the local level. Specifically: a The safety culture within trusts is improving, driven largely by the Department’s clinical governance initiative 4 and the development of more effective risk management systems in response to incentives under initiatives such as the NHS Litigation Authority’s Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (Appendix 7). However, trusts are still predominantly reactive in their response to patient safety issues and parts of some organisations still operate a blame culture. b All trusts have established effective reporting systems at the local level, although under-reporting remains a problem within some groups of staff, types of incidents and near misses. The National Patient Safety Agency did not develop and roll out the National Reporting and Learning System by December 2002 as originally envisaged. All trusts were linked to the system by 31 December 2004. By August 2005, at least 35 trusts still had not submitted any data to the National Reporting and Learning System. c Most trusts pointed to specific improvements derived from lessons learnt from their local incident reporting systems, but these are still not widely promulgated, either within or between trusts. The National Patient Safety Agency has provided only limited feedback to trusts of evidence-based solutions or actions derived from the national reporting system. It published its first feedback report from the Patient Safety Observatory in July 2005

Mapping the Social Organization of Labour in Moscow: Beyond the Formal/informal Labour Dualism

The starting point of this paper is recognition that the depiction of a formal/informal labour dualism, which views formal and informal labour as separate and hostile realms, is inappropriate for capturing the range of labour practices in societies. This is because labour practices cannot be neatly separated into discrete formal and informal realms, the differences within the formal and informal spheres are as great as the differences between the two realms, and formal and informal labour are not always embedded in different economic relations, values and motives. Here, an alternative more nuanced conceptual lens is proposed that resolves these problems and in so doing captures the multifarious labour practices in societies, namely the total social organization of labour (TSOL) perspective. This depicts labour practices as existing along a spectrum from more formal-oriented to more informal-oriented practices and cross-cuts this with a further spectrum from non-monetized, through in-kind and reciprocal labour, to monetized labour. Applying this conceptual lens, the results of a survey of the anatomy of labour practices in an affluent, mixed and deprived district of Moscow, comprising 313 face-to-face interviews, are then analysed. This reveals that socio-spatial variations in the organisation of labour are not solely about the degree of formalization of working life. Instead, this study unravels that populations range from relatively affluent \'work busy\' populations undertaking, and voluntarily selecting from, a multiplicity of labour practices, to relatively disadvantaged \'work deprived\' populations engaged in a narrower range of practices and more commonly out of necessity and in the absence of alternatives. The outcome is call for both the wider application and refinement of this TSOL approach when mapping the social organisation of labour and evaluations of whether the findings from Moscow are more widely valid in other societal contexts.Informal Sector; Labour Practices; Livelihoods; Household Work Practices; Economic Sociology; Uneven Development; Eastern Europe; Russia; Moscow

3-loop Massive O(TF2)O(T_F^2) Contributions to the DIS Operator Matrix Element AggA_{gg}

Contributions to heavy flavour transition matrix elements in the variable flavour number scheme are considered at 3-loop order. In particular a calculation of the diagrams with two equal masses that contribute to the massive operator matrix element $A_{gg,Q}^{(3)}$ is performed. In the Mellin space result one finds finite nested binomial sums. In $x$-space these sums correspond to iterated integrals over an alphabet containing also square-root valued letters.Comment: 4 pages, Contribution to the Proceedings of QCD '14, Montpellier, July 201

Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 112 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones (two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes. Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.1. Introduction 1.1 Motivations 1.2 Phonotactics as a source of historical signal 2. Phylogenetic signal 3. Materials 3.1 Language sample 3.2 Wordlists 3.3 Reference phylogeny 4. Phylogenetic signal in binary phonotactic data 4.1 Results for binary phonotactic data 4.2 Robustness checks 5. Phylogenetic signal in continuous phonotactic data 5.1 Robustness checks 5.2 Forward transitions versus backward transitions 5.3 Normalization of character values 6. Phylogenetic signal in natural-class-based characters 6.1 Natural-class-based characters versus biphones 7. Discussion 7.1 Overall robustness 7.2 Limitations 8. Conclusio

3-Loop Heavy Flavor Corrections in Deep-Inelastic Scattering with Two Heavy Quark Lines

We consider gluonic contributions to the heavy flavor Wilson coefficients at 3-loop order in QCD with two heavy quark lines in the asymptotic region $Q^2 \gg m_{1(2)}^2$. Here we report on the complete result in the case of two equal masses $m_1 = m_2$ for the massive operator matrix element $A_{gg,Q}^{(3)}$, which contributes to the corresponding heavy flavor transition matrix element in the variable flavor number scheme. Nested finite binomial sums and iterated integrals over square-root valued alphabets emerge in the result for this quantity in $N$ and $x$-space, respectively. We also present results for the case of two unequal masses for the flavor non-singlet OMEs and on the scalar integrals ic case of $A_{gg,Q}^{(3)}$, which were calculated without a further approximation. The graphs can be expressed by finite nested binomial sums over generalized harmonic sums, the alphabet of which contains rational letters in the ratio $\eta = m_1^2/m_2^2$.Comment: 10 pages LATEX, 1 Figure, Proceedings of Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory, Weimar April 201

Recent progress on the calculation of three-loop heavy flavor Wilson coefficients in deep-inelastic scattering

We report on our latest results in the calculation of the three-loop heavy flavor contributions to the Wilson coefficients in deep-inelastic scattering in the asymptotic region $Q^2 \gg m^2$. We discuss the different methods used to compute the required operator matrix elements and the corresponding Feynman integrals. These methods very recently allowed us to obtain a series of new operator matrix elements and Wilson coefficients like the flavor non-singlet and pure singlet Wilson coefficients.Comment: 11 pages Latex, 2 Figures, Proc. of Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory, April 2014, Weimar, German

Management Of Academic Quality: A Comparison Of Online Versus Lecture Course Outcomes

This study compared the final grades of courses taught both through distance learning (online) and the traditional classroom (lecture) delivery mode. This research sought to determine if a significant difference existed between the grades of the two identified delivery modes. Four courses taught by Embry Riddle Aeronautical University were selected for the study. Grades for the 2005 and 2006 calendar years were compared to determine if significance exists between the two modes. The study found that in the case of all four classes a significant difference was found in the final grades. In each case, the mean grade for the online courses was significantly less than those of the traditional lecture classes

3-Loop Corrections to the Heavy Flavor Wilson Coefficients in Deep-Inelastic Scattering

A survey is given on the status of 3-loop heavy flavor corrections to deep-inelastic structure functions at large enough virtualities $Q^2$.Comment: 13 pages Latex, 8 Figures, Contribution to the Proceedings of EPS 2015 Wie