Supporting self-help: charity, mutuality and reciprocity in nineteenth-century Britain

This chapter is important because the theoretical insights of Granovetter’s work on weak ties and Mauss’ on gift exchange are employed in order to invert the conventional taxonomy, which separates friendly societies and charities. In foregrounding the overlapping range of activities, functions, members and structures of friendly societies and charities the chapter demonstrates that both forms of organisation placed importance upon reciprocity and maintaining relationships, both drew upon the traditions of the guilds and both operated within the context of widespread familiarity with cycles of exchange. This illuminates how power circulated within and between charities and friendly societies and how, even as friendly societies became less dependent on patrons, ties of trust with charities were created and renewed. It also highlights the centrality of charities and mutual aid to the maintenance of social stability and to the development of civic politics and kinship survival strategies

A University Without Walls

During its formative years the development of prisoner education at the Open University (henceforth OU) was shaped by prisoners, prison and OU staff, and framed by a government desire to maintain and develop society through broadening prospects for social improvement. OU staff tended to see the university as part of a social democratic commitment to rehabilitation. Their pedagogy encouraged learners to be active in constructing knowledge by reflection on experience. For many prisoners, education was a means of escape, or at least engaging with ideas from beyond the walls

The Open University: A History

This historical perspective on The Open University, founded in 1969, frames its ethos (to be open to people, places, methods and ideas) within the traditions of correspondence courses, commercial television, adult education, the post-war social democratic settlement and the Cold War. A critical assessment of its engagement with teaching, assessment and support for adult learners offers an understanding as to how it came to dominate the market for part-time studies. It also indicates how, as the funding and status of higher education shifted, it became a loved brand and a model for universities around the world. Drawing on previously ignored or unavailable records, personal testimony and recently digitised broadcast teaching materials, it recognises the importance of students to the maintenance of the university and places the development of learning and the uses of technology for education over the course of half a century within a wider social and economic perspective

Book Review of Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland

This piece is a book review of Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland, by Dieter Reinisch

Dermatologists and radiotherapy

No Abstract

Oxidation status as a predictor of disease activity and response to therapy in pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel disease

INTRODUCTION: Physiologic and pathophysiologic inflammation is mediated, at least in part, by the generation and release of reactive oxygen species into the local tissue milieu. The chronic inflammation observed in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is thought to begin in the lining of the intestine and may progress to involve the entire bowel wall.In an effort to assess disease activity, clinicians rely on costly and technically invasive procedures such as colonoscopies. As such, there is currently a need for the development of less invasive and more cost-effective methods for use in the diagnosis and interval assessment of children and adults with these chronic intestinal inflammatory disorders. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to first determine if ambient redox status can be reliably measured in the stool of patients with IBD. A second aim of the study was to determine if ambient stool redox status was related to underlying diagnosis, clinical disease activity, or response to therapy in patients with IBD . METHODS: We first our ability to measure redox redox standards using three different commercially available devices. Once demonstrated, we then the process of performing sample analysis under various conditions (room tempererture, refrigerated, frozen, or spun/unspun) to determine the conditions under which we were able to achieve the most stable redox assessments. Finally, we conducted a small pilot cohort study in hospitalized pediatric patients with IBD to assess if stool redox status informed about disease activityWe collected stool samples from seven patients admitted to the inpatient gastrointestinal service at Boston Children’s Hospital during a period extending from November of 2018 to March of 2019. RESULTS: Preliminary studies confirmed our ability to accurately measure relative redox status (RRS) using three different apparatuses. Furthermore, we were able to generate dilution curves using juices known to include oxidants, with linear regression r2 values of 0.99. In our patient population, we confirmed our ability to generate a reliable readings and consistent RRS measurements over. Frozen samples displayed less stable and higher RRS than those either refrigerated or kept at room temperature for up to 8-hours. This suggests that freeze-thaw cycles may impact adversely on the stability of oxidants and antioxidants in our samples. The RRS measurements from stool samples collected from patients who were exhibiting active symptoms of their IBD measured about -400 mV, while samples collected from hospitalized patients without IBD manifest RRS readings of about 100 mV. CONCLUSION: This preliminary study demonstrates our ability to measure RRS in the stool of patients with and without IBD. The stability we observed in samples that were either stored at room temperature or refrigerated demonstrated that these represented optimal storage options. Additionally, measurements from homogenized stool samples appeared to be more variable when compared to the relatively smaller range from centrifuged samples. Initial studies indicated a strong difference in RRS measurements between patients with inflammatory and non-inflammatory GI disease or inactive IBD. This difference suggests that measurements of RRS could provide a quantitative real-time assessments of disease activity and response to therapy in patients with IBD

The `Peace Arsenal' scheme: the campaign for non-munitions work at the Royal Ordnance Factories, Woolwich, after the First World War

Following the Armistice many Arsenal workers wanted to retain their well-paid employment. There was a well established community; there was little comparable work in the locality and accommodation was difficult to find elsewhere. In order to secure peacetime production at the Arsenal, the labour movement in Woolwich organised a campaign which drew in traders, councillors, ex-Servicemen and clerics. The effect of this was to aid the integration of the local labour movement into the national constitution which was being reconstructed at the time. Central aspects of this new constitution were an increase in the integration of representatives of labour and industry in the government, and a new role for the Labour Party. The reconstruction of the constitution involved a degree of economic and legal coercion, and the transmission of government propaganda. These were all orchestrated at national level. The new order also included the accommodation of the working class, which had become more assertive during the war. This meant that social stability could not simply be imposed; the new order had to involve the absorption of tensions and the encouragement of specific strands of working class tradition. The creation of common assumptions could not be done in Whitehall and Westminster alone, it required the active participation of the citizenry; a specific focus and contact with notions generated from within the working class. That the creation of the new order required these elements is shown through the particular circumstances of the causes, course and consequences of the 'Peace Arsenal 1 campaign. The campaign involved the chief architects of the new order, private armaments companies, the Cabinet and the civil service. It also it involved parochial notions derived from the experiences of Arsenal workers

PLOT-TAL -- Prompt Learning with Optimal Transport for Few-Shot Temporal Action Localization

This paper introduces a novel approach to temporal action localization (TAL) in few-shot learning. Our work addresses the inherent limitations of conventional single-prompt learning methods that often lead to overfitting due to the inability to generalize across varying contexts in real-world videos. Recognizing the diversity of camera views, backgrounds, and objects in videos, we propose a multi-prompt learning framework enhanced with optimal transport. This design allows the model to learn a set of diverse prompts for each action, capturing general characteristics more effectively and distributing the representation to mitigate the risk of overfitting. Furthermore, by employing optimal transport theory, we efficiently align these prompts with action features, optimizing for a comprehensive representation that adapts to the multifaceted nature of video data. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in action localization accuracy and robustness in few-shot settings on the standard challenging datasets of THUMOS-14 and EpicKitchens100, highlighting the efficacy of our multi-prompt optimal transport approach in overcoming the challenges of conventional few-shot TAL methods.Comment: Under Revie

Two-Stream Transformer Architecture for Long Video Understanding

Pure vision transformer architectures are highly effective for short video classification and action recognition tasks. However, due to the quadratic complexity of self attention and lack of inductive bias, transformers are resource intensive and suffer from data inefficiencies. Long form video understanding tasks amplify data and memory efficiency problems in transformers making current approaches unfeasible to implement on data or memory restricted domains. This paper introduces an efficient Spatio-Temporal Attention Network (STAN) which uses a two-stream transformer architecture to model dependencies between static image features and temporal contextual features. Our proposed approach can classify videos up to two minutes in length on a single GPU, is data efficient, and achieves SOTA performance on several long video understanding tasks