Why should the people wait any longer? How Labour built the NHS

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain showed the world that a universal health care system was possible. Anthony Broxton gives a brief account of Nye Bevan's vision and how he guided the National Health Service Act through parliament

God, Family, and Social Justice Education: A Narrative Study of Adult Learners in the Deep South

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the social learning experiences and influences on adults’ perceived abilities to teach for social justice in the Deep South. The Deep Southern U.S. is a unique region noted for social, political, economic, and religious conservatism that has strong historical correlations to changes in race and socioeconomic class relations. For these reasons, it is necessary to analyze the reciprocal connection between learning to teach for social justice and adults’ personal lives and relationships. Narrative methods are used to explore the lived experiences of six adult doctoral students taking an advanced course in diversity and oppression in K12 curriculum. Participants recount their lived experiences with people and situations which have served as social models of how issues of social justice have or have not been dealt with in the participants’ lives. Narratives are analyzed using the Voice-Centered Relational Method to highlight how individuals speak about themselves and their family, friends, coworkers, and instructors. The most prominent finding of the study is that the religious beliefs of participants’ families of origin have a significant impact on participants’ current identities, behaviors, and beliefs. Furthermore, participants cite the important role their families of origin play in career decisions and the importance of their own multiple and ever-changing identities as significant contributors to feelings of social justice self-efficacy and doubt. These findings suggest that adults’ native to and living in the Deep South have unique experiences when learning to teach for social justice. These findings further suggest that adult learners might benefit from critical reflection on how their social learning experiences can serve as lenses through which they approach new knowledge that affirms and/or challenges their own worldviews, and subsequently the relationships and identities they have built on their views. Author keywords: social justice education, transformative learning, adult learning, social cognitive theory, Voice-Centered Relational metho

Catching a Viral Video

The sharing and re-sharing of videos on social sites, blogs e-mail, and other means has given rise to the phenomenon of viral videos - videos that become popular through internet sharing. In this paper we seek to better understand viral videos on YouTube by analyzing sharing and its relationship to video popularity using millions of YouTube videos. The socialness of a video is quantified by classifying the referrer sources for video views as social (e.g. an emailed link, Facebook referral) or non-social (e.g. a link from related videos). We find that viewership patterns of highly social videos are very different from less social videos. For example, the highly social videos rise to, and fall from, their peak popularity more quickly than less social videos. We also find that not all highly social videos become popular, and not all popular videos are highly social. By using our insights on viral videos we are able develop a method for ranking blogs and websites on their ability to spread viral videos

Rivers of the Anthropocene Phase 1: A Comparative Study of the Tyne and Ohio River Valleys

poster abstractThe Rivers of the Anthropocene project is an international effort. Our part is an attempt to determine flood frequency and land use by American Indian tribes of the Mississippian Culture along the Ohio River. Methodologically, we will measure the physical and geochemical properties of lacustrine sediments recovered from Hovey Lake, a flood plane lake located on the Ohio River in southwestern Indiana. Sediment cores taken from Hovey Lake are being measured for bulk density and loss-on-ignition tests to determine organic composition by weight. Magnetic susceptibility is also being measured to determine variations in the delivery of terrestrial material (e.g. from flooding/land erosion) to the lake. Land use will be evaluated by measuring variations in the elemental abundance and isotopic composition of nitrogen and organic carbon, which has been used in the past to identify prehistoric land use. Here we present the initial results of our ongoing work, including sedimentological and chronological data. Ultimately, these data will help bring together historical records, geochemical records, and other contributions from scientists around the world in our attempt to better understand mankind’s impact on our environment

MILLENNIAL- TO ANNUAL-SCALE HOLOCENE CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE ALASKAN ARCTIC AND TROPICAL ANDES INFERRED FROM PHYSICAL SEDIMENTOLOGY AND GEOCHEMICAL INDICATORS PRESERVED IN FINELY LAMINATED ALPINE LAKE SEDIMENT ARCHIVES

High-resolution sediment archives from small alpine lakes in the Alaskan Arctic and tropical Andes were used to investigate Holocene climate change in these climatically sensitive and important regions. Varved minerogenic sediments from glacial-fed Blue Lake, Brooks Range Alaska (1275 m asl), were used to derive a proxy temperature record between AD 730-2005. Cool temperatures characterize the late Holocene (last millennial average, or LMA = 4.2 °C) with 20th century warming anomalous within the context of the last 1275 years (0.8°C above LMA). However, temperatures between AD 1350-1450 and AD 1500-1620 approached modern values (0.4 and 0.3°C above LMA, respectively). Prolonged cooling at Blue Lake occurred from AD 1620-1880, during the Little Ice Age (LIA). LIA cooling and 20th century warming correspond to radiative minima and maxima, respectively. However, the relationship between radiative forcing and temperature is not consistent through the record, suggesting that other factors contributed to temperature variability in this region. In the tropics, South American summer monsoon (SASM) variability during the last 2300 years was reconstructed from oxygen isotope ratios of authigenic carbonate (δ18Ocal) preserved in varved sediments from Laguna Pumacocha (4300 m asl), Peru. High δ18Ocal values and reduced variability during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; AD 920-1050) suggest that the SASM and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) were weak due to reduced easterly tropospheric flow and cooling within the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP). Low δ18Ocal from during the LIA (AD 1415-1820) and enhanced variability from AD 1415-1770 suggest that the SASM and ENSO were strong as a result of enhanced easterly tropospheric flow and warm, but variable, sea surface temperatures in the ETP, respectively. These ocean-atmosphere responses reflect the tropical Pacific's response to radiative forcing described by the ocean dynamical thermostat model (Clement et al. 1996). Long-term δ18Ocal trends at Pumacocha suggest that the SASM was weak during the early Holocene and then strengthened through the Holocene as Southern Hemisphere insolation increased. This confirms the importance of orbital controls on SASM dynamics. However, the Andean SASM strengthened to a greater extent than the SASM over the Amazon basin, indicating that these regions respond differently to similar forcing mechanisms

Stable isotope compositions (δ2H, δ18O and δ17O) of rainfall and snowfall in the central United States

Stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen (δ2H, δ18O and δ17O) can be used as natural tracers to improve our understanding of hydrological and meteorological processes. Studies of precipitation isotopes, especially 17O-excess observations, are extremely limited in the mid-latitudes. To fill this knowledge gap, we measured δ2H, δ18O and δ17O of event-based precipitation samples collected from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA over two years and investigated the influence of meteorological factors on precipitation isotope variations. The results showed that the daily temperature played a major role in controlling the isotope variations. Precipitation experienced kinetic fractionation associated with evaporation at the moisture source in the spring and summer and for rainfall, while snowfall, as well as precipitation in the fall and winter, were mainly affected by equilibrium fractionation. The 17O-excess of both rainfall and snowfall were not affected by local meteorological factors over the whole study period. At the seasonal scale, it was the case only for the spring. Therefore, 17O-excess of rainfall, snowfall and the spring precipitation could be considered as tracers of evaporative conditions at the moisture source. This study provides a unique precipitation isotope dataset for mid-latitudes and provides a more mechanistic understanding of precipitation formation mechanisms in this region

SOD Enzymes in a Human Fungal Pathogen: Oxidative Stress Protection Versus Cellular Signaling

Candida albicans is a human opportunistic pathogen of important public health relevance. The capacity of this organism to adapt to drastic changes in nutrient availability in the host allows C. albicans to be a successful pathogen. More specifically C. albicans adapts to fluctuations in bioavailability of the metal nutrient copper by substituting a copper requiring superoxide dismutase enzyme (Cu/Zn SOD1) with a non-copper alternative (Mn SOD3). Both are antioxidant enzymes that remove superoxide free radicals. However, the exact function of these two SOD enzymes inside the cell and whether they perform redundant or diverging roles remained largely unknown, and is the focus of investigation in this thesis. We found that Cu/Zn SOD1 but not Mn SOD3 enters the mitochondria intermembrane space to protect against mitochondrial oxidative stress (Chapter 2). During copper starvation when cells repress Cu/Zn SOD1, C. albicans induces an iron requiring alternative oxidase (AOX) to maintain mitochondrial superoxide at low levels. We find that this replacement of Cu/Zn SOD1 with non-copper alternatives (Mn SOD3 and Fe AOX) helps spare copper for cytochrome c oxidase respiration, which is essential for pathogenesis. Both Cu/Zn SOD1 and Mn SOD3 localize to the cytosol and in Chapter 3 we investigate their possible role in cell signaling involving reactive oxygen species (ROS). In the related yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cu/Zn SOD1 participates in a cell signaling process involving ROS that promotes glucose uptake and represses respiration. Whether C. albicans Cu/Zn SOD1 and/or Mn SOD3 were capable of similar cytosolic cellular signaling was unknown. We established that both SODs of C. albicans participate in glucose signaling, however as a fungal pathogen, C. albicans has rewired the SODs such that they signal repression of glucose uptake, rather than activation of glucose uptake as is seen in the fermentative yeast S. cerevisiae. C. albicans heavily relies on respiration, not fermentation for pathogenesis, consistent with the repurposing of its SODs in glucose signaling. Altogether, this work illustrates unique mechanisms in C. albicans for responding to changes in nutrients, specifically copper and glucose. These traits likely reflect the need to adapt rapidly to changes in environment within the human host