‘Who Is British Music?’ Placing Migrants in National Music History

In 2013, trucks and vans were driving across London, bearing the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ These mobile billboards declared the number of arrests that had taken place ‘in your area’ in the previous week and provided a number to which people could text the message ‘HOME’ to initiate voluntary repatriation. In 2016, Theresa May, who had organised this scheme as home secretary, became prime minister, following the upheaval caused by the country's plebiscite to leave the European Union. One of the main strands of argument of the successful ‘Brexit’ campaign centred on the ‘deep public anxiety . . . about uncontrolled immigration’ and promised to reduce numbers of immigrants to the country. This desire to control the nation's borders continued to dominate the official soundscape of Britain's government. At the 2016 annual Tory conference, May endeavoured to draw clear lines on issues of belonging, territory, citizenship, and the fuzzy notion of British values, discursively excluding not only migrants, but also anyone with an international(ist) outlook from the national debate: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world’, she posited, ‘you are a citizen of nowhere.

Jazz Meets Pop in the United Kingdom

Even in the “New Jazz Studies,” the popularity of jazz remains an “unpopular problem.” Moreover, the unpopularity of jazz receives even less frequent attention, and a spirit of advocacy threatens to overwhelm the objectivity of scholars. Recent history provides many examples of mainstream British pop artists performing jazz; in this chapter I focus on Robbie Williams’s Swings Both Ways (2013) and Annie Lennox’s Nostalgia (2014). I argue that jazz, rather than being at the cutting edge of musical development, can be readily positioned in the “middle of the road” and, rather than reflecting identities in a sophisticated way, can provide popular music that is commonly understood globally

An In-vivo 1H-MRS short-echo time technique at 7T: Quantification of metabolites in chronic multiple sclerosis and neuromyelitis optica brain lesions and normal appearing brain tissue

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) allows for the non-invasive quantification of neurochemicals and has the potential to differentiate between the pathologically distinct diseases, multiple sclerosis (MS) and AQP4Ab-positive neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (AQP4Ab-NMOSD). In this study we characterised the metabolite profiles of brain lesions in 11 MS and 4 AQP4Ab-NMOSD patients using an optimised MRS methodology at ultra-high field strength (7T) incorporating correction for T2 water relaxation differences between lesioned and normal tissue. MS metabolite results were in keeping with the existing literature: total N-acetylaspartate (NAA) was lower in lesions compared to normal appearing brain white matter (NAWM) with reciprocal findings for myo-Inositol. An unexpected subtlety revealed by our technique was that total NAA differences were likely driven by NAA-glutamate (NAAG), a ubiquitous CNS molecule with functions quite distinct from NAA though commonly quantified together with NAA in MRS studies as total NAA. Surprisingly, AQP4Ab-NMOSD showed no significant differences for total NAA, NAA, NAAG or myo-Inositol between lesion and NAWM sites, nor were there any differences between MS and AQP4Ab-NMOSD for a priori hypotheses. Post-hoc testing revealed a significant correlation between NAWM Ins:NAA and disability (as measured by EDSS) for disease groups combined, driven by the AP4Ab-NMOSD group. Utilising an optimised MRS methodology, our study highlights some under-explored subtleties in MRS profiles, such as the absence of myo-Inositol concentration differences in AQP4Ab-NMOSD brain lesions versus NAWM and the potential influence of NAAG differences between lesions and normal appearing white matter in MS

A deep mantle origin for the primitive signature of ocean island basalt

International audienceSeismological observations have identified large-scale compositional heterogeneities in the Earth's deep mantle(1-5). These heterogeneities may represent reservoirs of primitive material that differentiated early in Earth's history(6-8). The volcanic rocks that make up ocean islands are thought to be sourced, in part, from these deep reservoirs, with the primitive material transported to the surface via mantle plumes. Geochemical signatures within the erupted ocean island basalts further support the idea that the regions of heterogeneity are composed of primitive, undegassed mantle material(7,9-14). Here we perform numerical experiments of thermo-chemical convection to simulate the entrainment of primitive material by plumes generated at the top of primitive reservoirs in the deep mantle. We vary the chemical density contrast between the primitive, undegassed and regular, degassed mantle materials. We find that the simulations that reproduce the observed geometry of the heterogeneous regions also explain the geochemical signatures measured in ocean island basalts. In these simulations, the entrainment of primitive material into the mantle plume does not exceed 9%. We conclude that the presence of primitive reservoirs in the deep mantle is dynamically feasible and satisfies both seismological and geochemical constraints