'The UK is not innocent' : Black Lives Matter, policing and abolition in the UK

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to show that racism is not only a US problem. Rather, racism is endemic and pervasive in the UK context, manifesting at every level of policing. From stop and search, to deaths after police contact, the authors highlight long-standing and widespread racist disparities in UK policing. The authors therefore pierce through any delusions of UK “post-racialism” in order to show that, as protesters have reminded us, “the UK is not innocent”. Design/methodology/approach: In this piece, the authors reflect on the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Whilst the catalyst was the death of George Floyd in the United States, the authors explore what the protests mean in the UK context. To do so, the authors draw upon recent high-profile examples of police racism, before situating those events within a wider landscape of racist policing. Findings: Demonstrating that UK policing has to be understood as institutionally racist, the authors suggest that responses to police racism need to be radical and uncompromising – tweaks to the system are not enough. The authors therefore look towards defunding and abolition as ways in which one can begin to seek change. Originality/value: The piece takes up the challenges set by this Black Lives Matter moment and offers a critical take on policing that seeks to push beyond reformism whilst also highlighting the realities of UK racism

A Collision of Crises: Racism, Policing, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government has introduced unprecedented police powers under the Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations and the Coronavirus Act. • At the same time, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests ignited intense public debates around policing, which have continued into 2021 with the ‘Kill the Bill’ protests against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. • Reflecting historical patterns, the policing of the pandemic has had the greatest impact on racially minoritised communities, with new police powers adding to and exacerbating pre-existing forms of racist policing. • Racial disparities are evident in official data on use of force, stop and search, Fixed Penalty Notices and use of Section 60, and apparent in widespread media reports of excessive policing across public settings. • Ongoing research conducted by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) aims to capture the in-depth experiences of racially minoritised individuals and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. • A number of emerging themes from the research take us beyond the statistics, offering a more detailed picture of the lives of those subject to police racism at this critical juncture

Preparing for a Northwest Passage: A Workshop on the Role of New England in Navigating the New Arctic

Preparing for a Northwest Passage: A Workshop on the Role of New England in Navigating the New Arctic (March 25 - 27, 2018 -- The University of New Hampshire) paired two of NSF\u27s 10 Big Ideas: Navigating the New Arctic and Growing Convergence Research at NSF. During this event, participants assessed economic, environmental, and social impacts of Arctic change on New England and established convergence research initiatives to prepare for, adapt to, and respond to these effects. Shipping routes through an ice-free Northwest Passage in combination with modifications to ocean circulation and regional climate patterns linked to Arctic ice melt will affect trade, fisheries, tourism, coastal ecology, air and water quality, animal migration, and demographics not only in the Arctic but also in lower latitude coastal regions such as New England. With profound changes on the horizon, this is a critical opportunity for New England to prepare for uncertain yet inevitable economic and environmental impacts of Arctic change

Case Study of a Digital Augmented Reality Intervention for Autism in School Classrooms: Associated With Improved Social Communication, Cognition, and Motivation via Educator and Parent Assessment

Background: Impairment in social communication is the primary deficit in school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research has shown that there are efficacious interventions to address social communication deficits, yet their delivery is hampered by the lack of human and time resources. Emerging assistive technologies, such as smartglasses, may be able to help augment the social communication interventions currently provided by human educators and therapists. While emerging research suggests assistive socio-emotional coaching smartglasses can be effective and usable in research settings, they have yet to be studied amidst the complex social, physical, and time-constrained environment of the school classroom. This structured case study reports on the feasibility and efficacy of 16 intervention sessions of the Empowered Brain Face2Face module, a smartglasses-based social communication intervention.Methods: A 13-year-old fully-verbal adolescent male student with a diagnosis of ASD received a total of 16 smartglasses-aided intervention sessions over a 2-week period. Interventions occurred twice-daily during school days and were facilitated by school professionals in a middle school in Massachusetts, USA. Outcomes were measured using the Social Responsiveness Scale 2 (SRS-2), a commonly used validated measure of social communication in children with ASD, by the participant's parent, paraprofessional, and two teachers. Difficulties in usability during the study were recorded through observation notes.Results: The participant completed the 3-week study [one pre-intervention week (baseline) and two intervention weeks] without any observations of adverse effects or usability concerns. The parent and three educators completed the SRS-2 for the baseline and intervention weeks, and results demonstrated significant improvement in social communication after the intervention relative to baseline. The parent, special education teacher, and general education teacher noted marked reductions in SRS-2 total T score, with improvement in SRS-2 social communication, social motivation, social cognition, and restricted interests and repetitive behavior subscales.Conclusion: Smartglasses are a novel assistive technology that can help facilitate social communication and behavioral coaching for students with ASD. The use of the Face2Face module by educators over a 2-week period was associated with improvements in social communication.This study supports the use of this novel technology to deliver assistive social communication and behavioral coaching in schools

Prevalence, Correlates, and Inter-hospital Variation of Early Outpatient Follow-up After Acute Myocardial Infarction

Computational Infrastructure and Informatics Poster SessionBackground: Early outpatient follow-up (EFU) after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is strongly endorsed in guidelines and has been emphasized nationally as a means to improve transitions of care, medication adherence and outcomes. Currently, little is known about associations between patient characteristics and EFU or the variability in EFU across different hospitals. Methods: We compared patients with and without EFU within 1-month of discharge in the 24-center TRIUMPH registry of AMI patients. We excluded patients who died or did not complete 1-month follow-up. Since the 1-month follow-up interview occurred 4 weeks from enrollment at the time of hospital admission, we also excluded patients with long hospital stays (≥ 7 days) since these patients had less outpatient exposure time for follow-up. We used multivariable Poisson regression to identify the independent association between patient characteristics and site with EFU. Results: Of 2484 patients, 76% had EFU within 1 month of discharge. There was marked variation in the rate of EFU between hospitals (54% to 100%; Figure). Site differences remained significant after adjustment for patient characteristics. The independent patient-level correlates of achieved EFU were health insurance (RR 1.15, 95% CI 1.06-1.25) and African American race (RR 1.08, 95% CI 1.02-1.15). Other sociodemographic characteristics, co-morbidities, clinical factors, and discharge documentation of follow-up arrangements were not indpendent predictors of EFU. Conclusion: Almost 1 in 4 patients enrolled in TRIUMPH did not receive EFU after AMI. The rate of EFU varies substantially across hospitals and is related to insurance status. The lack of association between EFU and discharge documentation of follow-up arrangements suggests achieved follow-up may be a superior quality indicator. Further characterization of the approach for providing EFU is warranted

Autonomous Seawater \u3ci\u3ep\u3c/i\u3eCO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e and pH Time Series From 40 Surface Buoys and the Emergence of Anthropogenic Trends

Ship-based time series, some now approaching over 3 decades long, are critical climate records that have dramatically improved our ability to characterize natural and anthropogenic drivers of ocean carbon dioxide (CO2) uptake and biogeochemical processes. Advancements in autonomous marine carbon sensors and technologies over the last 2 decades have led to the expansion of observations at fixed time series sites, thereby improving the capability of characterizing sub-seasonal variability in the ocean. Here , we present a data product of 40 individual autonomous moored surface ocean pCO2 (partial pressure of CO2) time series established between 2004 and 2013, 17 also include autonomous pH measurements. These time series characterie a wide range of surface ocean carbonate conditions in diffferent oceanic (17 sites), coastal (13 sites), and coral reef (10 sites) regimes. A time of trend emergence (ToE) methodology applied ot the time series that exhibit well-constrained daily to interannual variability and an estimate of decadal variability indicates that the length of sustained observations necessary to detect statistically significant anthropogenic trends varies by marine environment. The ToE estisites, and 9 to 22 years at the coral reef sites. Only two open ocean pCO2 and pH range from 8 to 15 years at the open ocean sites, 16 to 41 years at the coastal sites, and 9 to 22 years at the coral reef sites. Only two open ocean pCO2 time series, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Hawaii Ocean Time-series Station (WHOTS) in the subtropical North Pacific and Stratus n the South Pacific gyre, have been deployed longer than the estimated trend detection time and, for these, deseasoned monthly means show estimated anthropogenic trends of 1.9 ± 0.3 and 1.6 ± 0.3 μatm yr-1, respectively. In the future, it is possible that updates to this product will allow for the estimation of anthropogenic trends at more sites; however, the product currently provides a valuable tool in an accessible format for evaluating climatology and natural variability of surface ocean carbonate chemistry in a variety of regions. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.7289/V5DB8043 and https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/ocads/oceans/Moorings/ndp097.html (Sutton et al., 2018)

Atmospheric conditions during the Arctic Clouds in Summer Experiment (ACSE): Contrasting open-water and sea-ice surfaces during melt and freeze-up seasons

The Arctic Clouds in Summer Experiment (ACSE) was conducted during summer and early autumn 2014, providing a detailed view of the seasonal transition from ice melt into freeze-up. Measurements were taken over both ice-free and ice-covered surfaces near the ice edge, offering insight into the role of the surface state in shaping the atmospheric conditions. The initiation of the autumn freeze-up was related to a change in air mass, rather than to changes in solar radiation alone; the lower atmosphere cooled abruptly, leading to a surface heat loss. During melt season, strong surface inversions persisted over the ice, while elevated inversions were more frequent over open water. These differences disappeared during autumn freeze-up, when elevated inversions persisted over both ice-free and ice-covered conditions. These results are in contrast to previous studies that found a well-mixed boundary layer persisting in summer and an increased frequency of surface-based inversions in autumn, suggesting that knowledge derived from measurements taken within the pan-Arctic area and on the central ice pack does not necessarily apply closer to the ice edge. This study offers an insight into the atmospheric processes that occur during a crucial period of the year; understanding and accurately modeling these processes is essential for the improvement of ice-extent predictions and future Arctic climate projections

Warm‐air advection, air mass transformation and fog causes rapid ice melt

Direct observations during intense warm-air advection over the East Siberian Sea reveal a period of rapid sea-ice melt. A semi-stationary, high-pressure system north of the Bering Strait forced northward advection of warm, moist air from the continent. Air-mass transfor-mation over melting sea ice formed a strong, surface-based temperature inversion in which dense fog formed. This induced a positive net longwave radiation at the surface, while reduc-ing net solar radiation only marginally; the inversion also resulted in downward turbulent heat flux. The sum of these processes enhanced the surface energy flux by an average of ~15 W m-2 for a week. Satellite images before and after the episode show sea-ice concentrations decreasing from > 90% to ~50% over a large area affected by the air-mass transformation. We argue that this rapid melt was triggered by the increased heat flux from the atmosphere due to the warm-air advection

Sensory Communication

Contains table of contents on Section 2, an introduction, reports on eleven research projects and a list of publications.National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00117National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00270National Institutes of Health Contract 2 P01 DC00361National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00100National Institutes of Health Contract 7 R29 DC00428National Institutes of Health Grant 2 R01 DC00126U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research Grant AFOSR 90-0200U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-90-J-1935National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R29 DC00625U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-91-J-1454U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-181