Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry

Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry

Capturing cropland and grassland management impacts on soil carbon in the UK LULUCF inventory

This project aimed to identify the extent to which emissions due to changes in Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) stocks arising from Cropland and Grassland/Grazing Land management can be incorporated into the UK’s Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) inventory. Key management activities were identified which might affect SOC stocks. A literature review carried out as part of the project concluded that tillage reduction cannot be considered a reliable management option to increase the SOC content of UK soils. However increasing crop residue returns and increasing inputs of manure and fertiliser could increase SOC stock although the SOC stock increases resulting from manure and fertiliser inputs could be outweighed by increases nitrous oxide emissions and the risk of nitrate run-off. The review found that increasing crop yields through increased fertilisation and improved crop rotation could increase the annual input of crop residues and root exudate to soils and hence increase SOC on low fertility soils. Manure additions resulted in greater C sequestration than the addition of equivalent amounts of N as mineral fertiliser and the effect lasted longer. However, increasing inputs of nitrogen from fertiliser or manure risk increasing N2O emissions which could negate any increases in SOC stock. IPCC default stock change factors were judged to be inappropriate to the UK, based on expert opinion and the literature review findings. Therefore the project used the Daily DayCent and Landscape DNDC models to attempt to estimate stock change factors for Cropland management activities under UK conditions. Although based on a very limited dataset this suggested that the effect of Cropland management activities under UK conditions might be less than implied by the IPCC stock change factors. Tillage reduction was found to have little effect on SOC stocks. Increasing manure and crop residue inputs increased SOC stocks, with manure inputs being particularly effective. A framework for reporting SOC stock changes resulting from Cropland management was developed, and used to assess mitigation options. Overall the impact of Cropland Management on SOC is likely to be very small compared to other activities in the LULUCF inventory such as land use change. The most effective mitigation option was using Cropland from annual tillage crops to perennial crops, fallow and set aside. However given the need for food production there is limited scope for such change. Increasing manure, fertiliser and crop residue inputs gave smaller increases in SOC stocks, but practical considerations limit the scope of these actions. Lack of field data on the effect of Grassland improvement on SOC stocks was identified as a knowledge gap. The literature review suggested that intensification could increase SOC stocks under pasture on mineral soils. However, expert opinion suggested that this might not be the case for rough grazing on organo-mineral soils, where intensification might lead to SOC loss. This lack of data meant that it was not possible to calibrate or validate models to estimate UK specific stock change factors for Grassland. As the IPCC stock change factors were judged to be inappropriate to UK conditions assessment of the mitigation potential of Grassland management using these factors was not carried out to avoid presenting potentially misleading results. Suggested strategies for filling these knowledge gaps are outlined in the report. Attempts to assess grass/crop rotation patterns across the UK using data from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) used to handle Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments were hampered by difficulties in obtaining access to the data. However land use change matrices were generated for England and Wales, and used to map areas of change. Subject to data availability, this approach could be used in future inventories to give a better representation the effect of rotation patterns on SOC stocks

Investing in updating: how do conclusions change when Cochrane systematic reviews are updated?

BACKGROUND: Cochrane systematic reviews aim to provide readers with the most up-to-date evidence on the effects of healthcare interventions. The policy of updating Cochrane reviews every two years consumes valuable time and resources and may not be appropriate for all reviews. The objective of this study was to examine the effect of updating Cochrane systematic reviews over a four year period. METHODS: This descriptive study examined all completed systematic reviews in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) Issue 2, 1998. The latest version of each of these reviews was then identified in CDSR Issue 2, 2002 and changes in the review were described. For reviews that were updated within this time period and had additional studies, we determined whether their conclusion had changed and if there were factors that were predictive of this change. RESULTS: A total of 377 complete reviews were published in CDSR Issue 2, 1998. In Issue 2, 2002, 14 of these reviews were withdrawn and one was split, leaving 362 reviews to examine for the purpose of this study. Of these reviews, 254 (70%) were updated. Of these updated reviews, 23 (9%) had a change in conclusion. Both an increase in precision and a change in statistical significance of the primary outcome were predictive of a change in conclusion of the review. CONCLUSION: The concerns around a lack of updating for some reviews may not be justified considering the small proportion of updated reviews that resulted in a changed conclusion. A priority-setting approach to the updating of Cochrane systematic reviews may be more appropriate than a time-based approach. Updating all reviews as frequently as every two years may not be necessary, however some reviews may need to be updated more often than every two years

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on participants in pragmatic clinical trials for chronic pain: implications for trial outcomes and beyond

ObjectiveThe COVID-19 pandemic had profound effects on society, including those living with chronic pain. This study sought to examine pandemic impacts on individuals enrolled in pragmatic clinical trials focused on nonpharmacological treatments for chronic pain.MethodsWe evaluated responses to a questionnaire on COVID-19 impacts that had been administered to participants (n=2024) during study enrollment in 3 pragmatic clinical trials for chronic pain treatment. All trials were part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)-Department of Defense (DOD) Pain Management Collaboratory. COVID-19-related impacts on access to health care, mental health, finances, ability to meet basic needs, and social support were assessed.ResultsPandemic impacts were found in all domains assessed, including access to health care, mental and emotional health, ability to meet basic needs, finances, and social support. Impacts varied by demographic and clinical characteristics. The participants most negatively impacted by the pandemic were younger, Black or Latino, female, more educated, and unemployed and had screened positive for depression. No impact differences were found with regard to alcohol use disorder screenings or a prior history of COVID-19. Higher levels of pain were associated with worse pandemic impacts, and negative impacts declined over time.ConclusionsNegative impacts of the pandemic on individuals living with chronic pain cut across aspects of life that are also central to effective pain management, including access to health care, social support, and mental and emotional health, with differential impacts found across key demographic and clinical factors. These findings should yield consideration of pandemic impacts in clinical practice and as moderating effects of treatment outcomes in clinical trials conducted during the pandemic

Learners’ use of communication strategies in text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication environments: opportunities for language learning

This study investigates the different learning opportunities enabled by text-based and video-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) from an interactionist perspective. Six Chinese-speaking learners of English and six English-speaking learners of Chinese were paired up as tandem (reciprocal) learning dyads. Each dyad participated in four kinds of interactions, namely, English text-based SCMC, Chinese text-based SCMC, English video-based SCMC and Chinese video-based SCMC. Their use of communication strategies (CSs) were analyzed along with an after-task questionnaire and with stimulated reflection to explore systematically and comprehensively the differences between text-based and video-based SCMC. In addition to the main role of qualitative analysis, the quantitative analysis was undertaken to provide an overview of the relative frequencies of the occurrence of the different strategies and to understand their distribution in the different conditions. A MANOVA was applied to understand to what extent the differences are likely to have occurred by chance. The results showed that learners used CSs differently in text-based and video-based SCMC and indicated different learning opportunities provided by these two modes of SCMC. While text-based SCMC appears to have greater potential for learning target-like language forms, video-based SCMC seems particularly effective for fluency development as well as pronunciation improvement

Exploiting High-Throughput Indoor Phenotyping to Characterize the Founders of a Structured B. napus Breeding Population

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.Saskatchewan Agricultural Development Fund, SaskCanola, Alberta Canola Producers. Canada First Research Excellence Fund through the “Designing Crops for Global Food Security” at the University of Saskatchewan.Peer ReviewedPhenotyping is considered a significant bottleneck impeding fast and efficient crop improvement. Similar to many crops, Brassica napus, an internationally important oilseed crop, suffers from low genetic diversity, and will require exploitation of diverse genetic resources to develop locally adapted, high yielding and stress resistant cultivars. A pilot study was completed to assess the feasibility of using indoor high-throughput phenotyping (HTP), semi-automated image processing, and machine learning to capture the phenotypic diversity of agronomically important traits in a diverse B. napus breeding population, SKBnNAM, introduced here for the first time. The experiment comprised 50 spring-type B. napus lines, grown and phenotyped in six replicates under two treatment conditions (control and drought) over 38 days in a LemnaTec Scanalyzer 3D facility. Growth traits including plant height, width, projected leaf area, and estimated biovolume were extracted and derived through processing of RGB and NIR images. Anthesis was automatically and accurately scored (97% accuracy) and the number of flowers per plant and day was approximated alongside relevant canopy traits (width, angle). Further, supervised machine learning was used to predict the total number of raceme branches from flower attributes with 91% accuracy (linear regression and Huber regression algorithms) and to identify mild drought stress, a complex trait which typically has to be empirically scored (0.85 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, random forest classifier algorithm). The study demonstrates the potential of HTP, image processing and computer vision for effective characterization of agronomic trait diversity in B. napus, although limitations of the platform did create significant variation that limited the utility of the data. However, the results underscore the value of machine learning for phenotyping studies, particularly for complex traits such as drought stress resistance

Attributing changes in the distribution of species abundance to weather variables using the example of British breeding birds

The BBS is undertaken by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and jointly funded by the BTO, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.1. Modelling spatio-temporal changes in species abundance and attributing those changes to potential drivers such as climate, is an important but difficult problem. The standard approach for incorporating climatic variables into such models is to include each weather variable as a single covariate whose effect is expressed through a low-order polynomial or smoother in an additive model. This, however, confounds the spatial and temporal effects of the covariates. 2. We developed a novel approach to distinguish between three types of change in any particular weather covariate. We decomposed the weather covariate into three new covariates by separating out temporal variation in weather (averaging over space), spatial variation in weather (averaging over years) and a space-time anomaly term (residual variation). These three covariates were each fitted separately in the models. We illustrate the approach using generalized additive models applied to count data for a selection of species from the UK’s Breeding Bird Survey, 1994-2013. The weather covariates considered were the mean temperatures during the preceding winter and temperatures and rainfall during the preceding breeding season. We compare models that include these covariates directly with models including decomposed components of the same covariates, considering both linear and smooth relationships. 3. The lowest QAIC values were always associated with a decomposed weather covariate model. Different relationships between counts and the three new covariates provided strong evidence that the effects of changes in covariate values depended on whether changes took place in space, in time, or in the space-time anomaly. These results promote caution in predicting species distribution and abundance in future climate, based on relationships that are largely determined by environmental variation over space. 4. Our methods estimate the effect of temporal changes in weather, while accounting for spatial effects of long-term climate, improving inference on overall and/or localized effects of climate change. With increasing availability of large-scale data sets, need is growing for appropriate analytical tools. The proposed decomposition of the weather variables represents an important advance by eliminating the confounding issue often inherent in analyses of large-scale data sets.PostprintPeer reviewe

British Association of Dermatologists and British Society for Rheumatology living guideline for managing people with Behçets 2024

The overall objective of the current iteration of this living guideline is to provide up-to-date, evidence-based recommendations for the management of Behçets disease/syndrome (henceforth termed ‘Behçets’ for simplicity, and as approved by the patient support group) in adults, children and young people. The document aims to: *offer an appraisal of all relevant literature up to 25 August 2023 focusing on any key developments // *address important, practical clinical questions relating to the primary guideline objective// *provide guideline recommendations and appropriate research recommendations.// The guideline is presented as a detailed review with highlighted recommendations for practical use in all appropriate community and hospital settings (see Section 3.0), in addition to a patient information leaflet (PIL; available on the BAD website: www.skinhealthinfo.org.uk)