“Drawing lines on a map”: English Regionalism and Regional Identity in Post-war Yorkshire and Humberside

The failure of either a regional tier of government, or a strong and coherent regional political movement to emerge in England – in contrast to the Post-war devolution developments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, not to mention Europe – has led to the general dismissal of regionalism as a significant political force in England, and led to its characterization as the ‘dog that never barked’; merely the preserve of a handful of committed regionalists. This thesis builds on recent scholarship in Post-war British history, broadly categorized as the ‘new political history’, to challenge these traditional narratives. It explores how regional identities were constructed and articulated in a number of official, semi-official and unofficial spheres. It also considers how these interacted with central government and other interests. It does so through a number of case studies, or ‘core samples’, exploring various dimensions of regional action in different contexts. These include regional economic development and industrial promotion agencies; local government; airports and other transport considerations; and regional arts policy. The thesis focuses on Yorkshire and Humberside, a region that has not received much scholarly interest with regards to regionalism, but which has been considered prominently on literature exploring ‘the North’. Through this case study, this thesis highlights not only the potency of regionalism and regional identity, but also its complexities, contingencies and constraints. Through its core samples into economic planning, regional boosterism, local government reorganisation, transport and arts policy, this study adds additional perspectives to on-going historical discourses in contemporary British and European history. It also provides some insight into contemporary political concerns around the re-emergence of identity politics. It argues that complex, pluralist and distinct regionalisms – as were articulated and mobilized in Yorkshire during this period – form an important and often neglected dimension of contemporary British history that requires more concerted study

On the Distributed Compression of Quantum Information

The problem of distributed compression for correlated quantum sources is considered. The classical version of this problem was solved by Slepian and Wolf, who showed that distributed compression could take full advantage of redundancy in the local sources created by the presence of correlations. Here it is shown that, in general, this is not the case for quantum sources, by proving a lower bound on the rate sum for irreducible sources of product states which is stronger than the one given by a naive application of Slepian–Wolf. Nonetheless, strategies taking advantage of correlation do exist for some special classes of quantum sources. For example, Devetak and Winter demonstrated the existence of such a strategy when one of the sources is classical. Optimal nontrivial strategies for a different extreme, sources of Bell states, are presented here. In addition, it is explained how distributed compression is connected to other problems in quantum information theory, including information-disturbance questions, entanglement distillation and quantum error correction

Preparations for Variable-Gravity Regolith Penetration with an Ultrasonically-Active Probe

The set of experiments proposed in this paper intend to investigate the properties of ultrasonic penetration through granular materials in hypergravity. As part of ESA's 6 th 'Spin Your Thesis' campaign, the University of Glasgow will be allowed to use the Large Diameter Centrifuge at the ESTEC facilities in Noordwijk, Netherlands, to achieve these hypergravity conditions. This paper describes the progress of the design and manufacture of the experimental apparatus, analysis of structural integrity to insure the rig can be subjected to the rigors of hypergravity, and discussion of the anticipated results and implications

Predictors of Quitting Smoking in Cardiac Rehabilitation

Quitting smoking and participation in cardiac rehabilitation (CR) are effective strategies in reducing morbidity and mortality. However, little is known about the predictors of quitting smoking in those who attend CR. This study aimed to determine the sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with the likelihood of CR attendees who are quitting smoking. Data from the UK National Audit of Cardiac Rehabilitation (NACR) database, between April 2013 and March 2016, were used. Smoking status is categorized as smokers and quitters, assessed by patient self-report. The study used patient demographics, cardiovascular risk factors, comorbidities, and physical and psychosocial health measures. Binary logistic regression was performed to identify the predictors of quitting smoking among CR attendees. Of the 3290 patients who started CR and were entered into the NACR database, 2052 were continued smokers (mean age 58.59 ± 10.49 years, 73.6% men) and 1238 were quitters (mean age 57.63 ± 10.36 years, 75.8% men). The median duration of CR was 9 weeks. Compared to smokers, the quitters were younger, weighed more, were less anxious and depressed, and were more likely to be employed. Single patients had 0.60 times lower odds (95% CI 0.43 to 0.82) of quitting smoking than patients with partners, and low-risk patients had 1.71 times higher odds (95% CI 1.12 to 2.62) of quitting smoking than high-risk patients. Increasing number of comorbidities and depression scores were associated with decreasing likelihood of quitting. This study highlights the routine factors that determine smoking cessation outcomes, which could inform the delivery of CR to better help patients to quit smoking

Inter-residue distances derived from fold contact propensities correlate with evolutionary substitution costs

BACKGROUND: The wealth of information on protein structure has led to a variety of statistical analyses of the role played by individual amino acid types in the protein fold. In particular, the contact propensities between the various amino acids can be converted into folding energies that have proved useful in structure prediction. The present study addresses the relationship of protein folding propensities to the evolutionary relationship between residues. RESULTS: The contact preferences of residue types observed in a representative sample of protein structures are converted into a residue similarity matrix or inter-residue distance matrix. Remarkably, these distances correlate excellently with evolutionary substitution costs. Residue vectors are derived from the distance matrix. The residue vectors give a concrete picture of the grouping of residues into families sharing properties crucial for protein folding. CONCLUSIONS: Inter-residue distances have proved useful in showing the explicit relationship between contact preferences and evolutionary substitution rates. It is proposed that the distance matrix derived from structural analysis may be useful in aligning proteins where remote homologs share structural features. Residue vectors derived from the distance matrix illustrate the spatial arrangement of residues and point to ways in which they can be grouped

Dual Forgetting Operators in the Context of Weakest Sufficient and Strongest Necessary Conditions

Forgetting is an important concept in knowledge representation and automated reasoning with widespread applications across a number of disciplines. A standard forgetting operator, characterized in [Lin and Reiter'94] in terms of model-theoretic semantics and primarily focusing on the propositional case, opened up a new research subarea. In this paper, a new operator called weak forgetting, dual to standard forgetting, is introduced and both together are shown to offer a new more uniform perspective on forgetting operators in general. Both the weak and standard forgetting operators are characterized in terms of entailment and inference, rather than a model theoretic semantics. This naturally leads to a useful algorithmic perspective based on quantifier elimination and the use of Ackermman's Lemma and its fixpoint generalization. The strong formal relationship between standard forgetting and strongest necessary conditions and weak forgetting and weakest sufficient conditions is also characterized quite naturally through the entailment-based, inferential perspective used. The framework used to characterize the dual forgetting operators is also generalized to the first-order case and includes useful algorithms for computing first-order forgetting operators in special cases. Practical examples are also included to show the importance of both weak and standard forgetting in modeling and representation

Pulling apart the intermolecular interactions of the Parkinson’s disease linked protein alpha synuclein

Amyloidoses are a group of protein misfolding diseases that are characterised by the abnormal accumulation of highly ordered filamentous assemblies known as amyloid. This phenomenon is associated with more than 50 human diseases, some of which are the most debilitating disorders that threaten human health today. Many of these disorders have age as the main contributing risk factor and, therefore, pose an ever-increasing risk in the developed world with aging societies. Despite intense research, much remains unknown about the fundamental processes driving protein aggregation in these diseases and there are few disease modifying treatments available. A protein that undergoes amyloid formation and causes disease is the intrinsically disordered neuronal protein α-synuclein (αSyn), the aggregation of which leads to several diseases including Parkinson’s disease (PD) which is the second-most common neurodegenerative disorder that affects 2–3% of the population ≥65 years of age. Importantly, the toxic species on the aggregation pathway are difficult to identify and determine in molecular detail. This thesis was motivated by this fact and aimed to study the initial intermolecular events in αSyn self-assembly (dimerisation) on a single molecule scale. Single molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS) methodologies were therefore utilised in order to study these early protein-protein interaction events. A display system was firstly designed and validated in which small regions of highly aggregation-prone sequences can be presented in a protein scaffold in a robust and reproducible manner for SMFS studies. It was demonstrated that intermolecular interactions of these sequences could be analysed by implementing this system. A novel heterodimeric interaction between the central aggregation-prone regions of αSyn (residues 71-82) and the same region of its human homologue γSynuclein (γSyn), were revealed by using this system. Further study led to the finding that this interaction played a role in the inhibiting the aggregation of αSyn. The dimerisation interaction of full length αSyn has also been analysed in this thesis and several important findings have been demonstrated. The SMFS experiments show that force-resistant structure forms in the dimeric species of αSyn and that this structure is dependent on the environmental conditions. SMFS utilising different immobilisation regimes of αSyn have also allowed the location of a novel interaction interface involving the N-terminal region of the protein. Further SMFS experiments investigating the effects of salt and hydrophobicity have on dimerisation, alongside bioinformatics analyses of the protein sequence led to the hypotheses that the dimeric interaction is driven by hydrophobic stretches in the N-terminal region, but modulated by local electrostatics. In vitro aggregation assays and SMFS on non-aggregation-prone synuclein homologues (β- and γSyn) indicated that that this interaction is protective against aggregation, considering these finding with existing literature prompted speculation that the interactions observed in SMFS may indeed be physiologically relevant. This may therefore be an important finding in regards to targeting the aggregation process with disease modifying agents

Does cardiac rehabilitation favour the young over the old?

BACKGROUND: Although cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is a proven intervention in reducing cardiovascular mortality and morbidity there is concern that CR programme delivery may not yield comparable outcomes across age groups. PURPOSE: This study sought to determine if the outcomes achieved after completing CR were influenced by age in patients with coronary heart disease. METHOD: Patients were stratified into 2 age groups: young (18-65 years) and elderly (>65 years). Pre-CR and post-CR assessments were used to compute changes in 9 CR outcomes (body mass index (BMI), waist size, hyperlipidaemia, hypertension, smoking, walking fitness, physical activity, anxiety and depression). Pearson's χ(2) test was used to examine the association between the age groups and outcome. Data was extracted from the UK National Audit from July 2010 to June 2015. RESULTS: A total of 203 012 young patients (55.1±7.9 years, 78% male) and 262 813 elderly patients (76.1±6.9 years, 63.9% male) were analysed. Young patients had a better ratio of improvement across a wide range of risk factors in particular smoking cessation (OR=3.3, p<0.001) while elderly patients had a better ratio of improvement in body shape risk factors BMI (OR=1.3, p<0.001), waist size in women (OR=1.3, p=0.016). CONCLUSIONS: Age is significant predictor of outcomes following CR. While elderly patients achieve better outcomes in body shape risk factors, younger patients clearly achieve better outcomes across a wider range of risk factors in particular smoking cessation