Why Local Authorities should prepare Food Brexit Plans

The UK’s food supply will be affected by Brexit whatever the outcome of the Parliamentary vote on the Draft Withdrawal Agreement. As the 29 March 2019 date for leaving the EU approaches, preparations to ensure we maintain a safe, adequate and sustainable food supply need to start urgently. Local Authorities (LAs) have a vital part to play in these preparations. More guidance, paying attention to the food specifics, is felt to be needed. LAs have a key role in the UK’s food system, with responsibilities including the enforcement of food safety and standards regulation, the control of imported food at ports and airports and the certification of foods for export. They also have unique knowledge of relevant local professionals, institutions, businesses and networks. This briefing aims to help Local Authorities prepare for Food Brexit. It shows why LAs should prepare Food Brexit Plans, and outlines five courses of action they could consider. The briefing recommends that Local Authorities: • Create Food Resilience Teams • Anticipate and reduce the impact of Food Brexit, particularly on SMEs • Narrow the information gap and treat the public openly and fairly • Prepare for public engagement • Be a local food voice so that central government knows the local realities

Results of post-test psychological examinations of the crewmen from the 90-day manned test of an advanced regenerative life support system

The following material presents the results of two temporally remote administrations of an identical projective personality assessment device (Rorschach Inkblot) using crew members aboard the 90-day test. The first administration took place during preselection crew psychodiagnostic testing in the period extending from mid-December 1969 through mid-January 1970. Second administration took place in late May and early June, 1971, approximately one year after termination of the test. During the 90-day program duration, the subjects participated in the crew training program, were selected and served as onboard crew during the 90-day test. The testing was undertaken in order to determine the character and extent of change (if any) in basic personality dynamics accompanying or caused by participation in the 90-day test program. Results indicate that significant personality changes occurred in three of the four onboard crew members. A detailed discussion of the results is provided. Objective scores which served as the basis for the discussion are presented in the Appendix

Optimally defined Racah-Casimir operators for su(n) and their eigenvalues for various classes of representations

This paper deals with the striking fact that there is an essentially canonical path from the $i$-th Lie algebra cohomology cocycle, $i=1,2,... l$, of a simple compact Lie algebra \g of rank $l$ to the definition of its primitive Casimir operators $C^{(i)}$ of order $m_i$. Thus one obtains a complete set of Racah-Casimir operators $C^{(i)}$ for each \g and nothing else. The paper then goes on to develop a general formula for the eigenvalue $c^{(i)}$ of each $C^{(i)}$ valid for any representation of \g, and thereby to relate $c^{(i)}$ to a suitably defined generalised Dynkin index. The form of the formula for $c^{(i)}$ for $su(n)$ is known sufficiently explicitly to make clear some interesting and important features. For the purposes of illustration, detailed results are displayed for some classes of representation of $su(n)$, including all the fundamental ones and the adjoint representation.Comment: Latex, 16 page

Sex Industry and Sex Workers in Nevada

Las Vegas has long been known as the symbolic center of the commercial sex industry. Nevada is host to the only legal system of prostitution in the United States. From the early legalization of quickie divorce and marriage to the marketing of its large resorts, sexuality has been a key component of Nevada’s tourist economy. If trends continue, for good or for ill, the sex industry will be an even larger part of the economy in the future. The sex industry refers to all legal and illegal adult businesses that sell sexual products, sexual services, sexual fantasies, and actual sexual contact for profit in the commercial marketplace. The sex industry encompasses an exceedingly wide range of formal and informal, legal and illegal businesses, as well as a wide range of individuals who work in and around the industry. This report will review the context in which sexually oriented commercial enterprises have flourished, discuss general trends in the Nevada sex industry, and make policy recommendations

Automatic Classification of Tubing Defects by Analysis of Their Eddy Current Signals

This thesis contains the results of a study conducted upon the application of pattern recognition techniques to the signals from a rotating eddy current probe in essentially two circumstances. These were (firstly) the inspection of 316 finned austenitic stainless steel heat exchanger tubes destined for an Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor using single frequency eddy currents with a differential probe, and secondly, the inspection of Inconel 600 tubing for Pressurised Water Reactor steam generators with a multiplexed 4 frequency pancake probe. In the first case, an automatic defect detection algorithm has been developed which will isolate any discernable axially oriented crack-type defect. Various classifiers (multiclass linear, k,1 nearest neighbour, nearest mean, scan cross correlation, and adaptive learning network) have been coded and tested on a 3 class sample set and 96.9% correct classification achieved with the two least easily separable classes, whilst the harmless third class was removed with the segmentation algorithm. In the second case, a new logging system was developed, and 38 tubes containing 45 synthesised defects were logged to disk and scans from each were plotted in the impedance plane, and against time. There were six types of defect, mostly in 4 different classes of depth. Seven different segmentation methods were devised and tested on the scans and a fitted linear threshold in the impedance plane was found to be best for sensitivity and speed of operation given the background (Pilger) noise present in the tube set,though another method which uses a convex hull algorithm is able to discriminate against any definable undesirable background signal. An automatically annulable method of generating a subtractive mix of two channels was also developed for use with simple magnitude-based. thresholding segmentation. Ad hoc geometrical and spectral featuresets were tested on the 7 class defect set with a multiclass linear and a nearest neighbour classifier. The correct classification rate achieved was 61.5%, and in view of this, and in an attempt to produce a site-trainable system, some development was done on parametrically-based feature extractors (FFT and Fourier Descriptors), and on a class distribution-independant feature set selector

The effect of an internet option and single-sided printing format to increase the response rate to a population-based study : a randomized controlled trial

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the Institute of Applied Health Sciences (IAHS) at the University of Aberdeen for funding the PhD studentship of EF. Furthermore, we would like to thank everyone who was involved in the study, including Professor Sir Lewis Ritchie (Director of Public Health, NHS Grampian), John Lemon (University of Aberdeen), Dr. Fiona Garton (University of Aberdeen) and the Aberdeen Service User Group. Lastly, we would like to acknowledge all data entry clerks (Maxx Livingstone, Rory Macfarlane, Georgia Mannion-Krase and Hazel Reilly) and participants of the study.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Dynamical Symmetries in q-deformed Quantum Mechanics

The dynamical algebra of the q-deformed harmonic oscillator is constructed. As a result, we find the free deformed Hamiltonian as well as the Hamiltonian of the deformed oscillator as a complicated, momentum dependent interaction Hamiltonian in terms of the usual canonical variables. Furthermore we construct a well-defined algebra SU$_q$(1,1) with consistent conjugation properties and comultiplication. We obtain non lowest weight representations of this algebra.Comment: 19 pages, latex, no figure

Showers, Sweating and Suing: Legionnaires’ Disease and ‘New’ Infections in Britain, 1977–90

Legionnaires’ disease is now routinely discussed as an ‘emerging infectious disease’ (EID) and is said to be one of the earliest such diseases to be recognised. It first appeared in 1976 and its cause was identified in 1977, the same year that Ebola fever, Hantaan virus and Campylobacter jejuni arrived. The designation of Legionnaires’ disease as an EID was retrospective; it was not and could not be otherwise as the category only gained currency in the early 1990s. In this article we reflect on the changing medical understanding and social profile of Legionnaires’ disease in the decade or so from its recognition to the creation of EIDs, especially its ambivalent position between public health and clinical medicine. However, we question any simple opposition, between public health experts who approached Legionnaires’ disease as a new and worrying environmental threat that could be prevented, and clinicians who saw it as another cause of pneumonia that could be managed by improved diagnosis and treatment. We argue that in the British context of public spending cuts and the reform of public health, the category of ‘new’ diseases, in which Legionnaires’ disease was central, was mobilised ahead of the EID lobby of the early 1990s, by interested groups in medicine to defend infectious diseases services

The prevalence of fibromyalgia in the general population : A comparison of the American College of Rheumatology 1990, 2010 and modified 2010 classification criteria

Copyright © 2014 American College of Rheumatology. Funded by University of Aberdeen Development TrustPeer reviewedPostprin