Mandarins, Ministers and the Bar on Married Women

Until November 1966 clauses in the Public Service Act prevented married women from being permanent employees in the Commonwealth Public Service (or in State public services outside of NSW). Examination of National Archives records reveals that removal of the Marriage Bar was a much more complicated process than hitherto generally realised. Study of the stuttering and convoluted pursuit of its removal over an eight year period through two Inter-Departmental Committees, a Permanent Heads Committee, a Cabinet Committee and through three formal Submissions to Cabinet itself casts an interesting light on the interface between the varying goals of centralized public sector management and the political criteria and ambitions of its political masters. In this period before second wave feminism reached Australia organised labour had various axes to grind, often hidden, sometimes conflicting. At all times macroeconomic currents were at least as persuasive as social pre-conditioning.

The re-dating of some Scottish specimens by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU)

The purpose of this note is to alert readers to the fact that some AMS dates determined by ORAU on Scottish material between 2000 and 2002 have had to be deleted and re-determined, because of a problem in the ultrafiltration system used to pretreat bone samples during that period (see C Bronk Ramsey, T Higham, A Bales and R Hedges 2004, Improvements in the pretreatment of bone at Oxford, Radiocarbon 46(1), 155–63, for details). In many cases it has been possible to undertake the re-dating using left over material from the original (unprocessed) samples; in other cases, re-sampling will be necessary. Lists of both sets of material are appended here, and readers are requested to use only the new dates, and to delete the old versions

Special Section Introduction: Mass Observation as Method

Since Mass Observation's foundation in 1937, the organisation has played witness to the great and the small events of everyday life during the last eight decades, recording people's opinions, beliefs and experiences, and making them available for researchers to develop new interpretations of British social life. Although the data produced is often messy and unwieldy and apparently contradicts many sociological assumptions about methodological rigour, the Archive is uniquely placed to offer detailed and exceptionally rich accounts of the fibre of everyday life and to reveal the deep complexities of family, personal and intimate life. As Mike Savage notes in Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940, 'Mass-Observation is the most studied, and arguably the most important, social research institution of the mid-twentieth century' (Savage 2010: 57). He situates this significance in it providing the focus for the emergence of a new intellectual class in late 1930s Britain of people who identified with a social scientific outlook. Until that point in time, the main point of entry into intellectual circles for newly educated classes was through literary culture, which was often implicitly elitist and hierarchical in its attitude to wider society

N-Cyclo­pentyl-N-(3-oxo-2,3-dihydro-1H-inden-1-yl)acetamide

The title mol­ecule, C16H19NO2, consists of an indane moiety, which is connected through an N atom to an acetamide group and a cyclo­pentane ring. The N atom adopts planar triangular geometry. Inter­molecular inter­actions, such as π–π stacking or hydrogen bonding, were not observed

Opposition, Factions and Candidates in A.E.U. Elections in Australia 1907-72

This paper analyses 65 years of data on elections to paid office in Australia's largest manufacturing union. Attention is mainly concentrated on the changing nature of both candidates and opposition within the AEU. The closeness of elections, the supply of candidates and differences between ballots for vacant and occupied positions are noted. The period of most intense combat between two organised parties within the AEU seems to be causally connected with the subsequent slump of interest in elections among the union's members.

Identification and Characterization of Key Human Performance Issues and Research in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen)

This report identifies key human-performance-related issues associated with Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) research in the NASA NextGen-Airspace Project. Four Research Focus Areas (RFAs) in the NextGen-Airspace Project - namely Separation Assurance (SA), Airspace Super Density Operations (ASDO), Traffic Flow Management (TFM), and Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) - were examined closely. In the course of the research, it was determined that the identified human performance issues needed to be analyzed in the context of NextGen operations rather than through basic human factors research. The main gaps in human factors research in NextGen were found in the need for accurate identification of key human-systems related issues within the context of specific NextGen concepts and better design of the operational requirements for those concepts. By focusing on human-system related issues for individual concepts, key human performance issues for the four RFAs were identified and described in this report. In addition, mixed equipage airspace with components of two RFAs were characterized to illustrate potential human performance issues that arise from the integration of multiple concepts

Gene duplication drives genome expansion in a major lineage of Thaumarchaeota

Acknowledgements This work and P.O.S. were financially supported by UKRI through the NERC grant NE/R001529/1. In addition, C.G.-R. and T.A.W. were both supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF150571 and UF140626). C.Q. was funded through an MRC fellowship (MR/M50161X/1) as part of the CLoud Infrastructure for Microbial Genomics (CLIMB) consortium (MR/L015080/1). S.R. was funded through the BBSRC grant BB/R015171/1. The Thames Metagenome Database was funded through the NERC grants NE/M011674/1, NE/M011259/1 and NE/M01133X/1. We thank Dr Tony Travis for his support with Biolinux and acknowledge Prof Jim Prosser for his critical reading of the manuscript. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the Maxwell computer cluster funded by the University of Aberdeen.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Biological efficacy of low versus medium dose aspirin after coronary surgery: results from a randomized trial [NCT00262275]

BACKGROUND: The beneficial effect of aspirin after coronary surgery is established; however, a recent study reported the inability of low doses (100 mg) to inhibit postoperative platelet function. We conducted a double-blind randomised trial to establish the efficacy of low dose aspirin and to compare it against medium dose aspirin. METHODS: Patients undergoing coronary surgery were invited to participate and consenting patients were randomised to 100 mg or 325 mg of aspirin daily for 5 days. Our primary outcome was the difference in platelet aggregation (day 5 – baseline) using 1 μg/ml of collagen. Secondary outcomes were differences in EC50 of collagen, ADP and epinephrine (assessed using the technique of Born). RESULTS: From September 2002 to April 2004, 72 patients were randomised; 3 patients discontinued, leaving 35 and 34 in the low and medium dose aspirin arms respectively. The mean aggregation (using 1.1 μg/ml of collagen) was reduced in both the medium and low dose aspirin arms by 37% and 36% respectively. The baseline adjusted difference (low – medium) was 6% (95% CI -3 to 14; p = 0.19). The directions of the results for the differences in EC50 (low – medium) were consistent for collagen, ADP and epinephrine at -0.07 (-0.53 to 0.40), -0.08 (-0.28 to 0.11) and -4.41 (-10.56 to 1.72) respectively, but none were statistically significant. CONCLUSION: Contrary to recent findings, low dose aspirin is effective and medium dose aspirin did not prove superior for inhibiting platelet aggregation after coronary surgery