A brief history of the British Neuroscience Association

As the British Neuroscience Association commemorates 50 years of existence in 2018, this article recalls its founding as a discussion group, its establishment as the Brain Research Association, its transition to a professional society encompassing all aspects of neuroscience research, both clinical and non-clinical, and its re-branding as the British Neuroscience Association in the late 1990s. Neuroscience as a branch of life science has expanded hugely in the last 25 years and the British Neuroscience Association has adapted, frequently working with partner societies, to serve as an interdisciplinary hub for professionals working in this exciting and crucial field. The authors have attempted to highlight some key events in the Association’s history and acknowledge the contributions made by many people over half a century

Housework and childcare in Italy: a persistent case of gender inequality

This article focuses on the gender gap in housework and childcare in Italian couples. Italian women still carry out three-quarters of domestic work and two-thirds of childcare. We focus on three possible theoretical explanations for the persistence of the gendered division of labor: time availability, relative resources, and conformity with traditional gender ideology. Time Use data from the 2008/09 Survey edition have been used: we considered couples, married or in consensual unions, with at least one child under 14 years of age and with the mother employed

The design and performance of a real-time self excited vocoder

This paper is concerned with a generic class of predictive speech coders that includes the newly proposed Self Excited Vocoder (SEV) and the well known Code-Excited Linear Predictive Coder (CELPC). All members of this class form an excitation sequence for a linear predictive model filter using the same general model for the excitation signal. The general excitation model is based on a block coding technique where each sequence is drawn from an ensemble of sequences. This paper reports on two developments related to this general model. The first development is a new type of excitation ensemble that can in general be populated by many different types of sequences. The second development is a means of populating this new type of ensemble based on a vector quantizer design procedure using a new distortion measure

What Have We Learned from Policy Transfer Research? Dolowitz and Marsh Revisited

Over the last decade, policy transfer has emerged as an important concept within public policy analysis, guiding both theoretical and empirical research spanning many venues and issue areas. Using Dolowitz and Marsh's 1996 stocktake as its starting point, this article reviews what has been learned by whom and for what purpose. It finds that the literature has evolved from its rather narrow, state-centred roots to cover many more actors and venues. While policy transfer still represents a niche topic for some researchers, an increasing number have successfully assimilated it into wider debates on topics such as globalisation, Europeanisation and policy innovation. This article assesses the concept's position in the overall ‘tool-kit’ of policy analysis, examines some possible future directions and reflects on their associated risks and opportunities

Ab-initio calculation of the Gilbert damping parameter via linear response formalism

A Kubo-Greenwood-like equation for the Gilbert damping parameter $\alpha$ is presented that is based on the linear response formalism. Its implementation using the fully relativistic Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker (KKR) band structure method in combination with Coherent Potential Approximation (CPA) alloy theory allows it to be applied to a wide range of situations. This is demonstrated with results obtained for the bcc alloy system Fe$_x$Co$_{1-x}$ as well as for a series of alloys of permalloy with 5d transition metals. To account for the thermal displacements of atoms as a scattering mechanism, an alloy-analogy model is introduced. The corresponding calculations for Ni correctly describe the rapid change of $\alpha$ when small amounts of substitutional Cu are introduced