Is Free School Meal Status a Valid Proxy for Socio-Economic Status (in Schools Research)?

School meals, family income,

British Imperialism and Oil : A History of British Petroleum,1901-2016

This thesis presents a history of British Petroleum (BP), from its origins in 1901 until 2016, in the context of the history of British imperialism as a whole. It draws on Marxist studies of imperialism and the international political economy of oil. BP was a company of Britain’s empire. Its history begins in the “classical” age of imperialism. Its concessions were the products not just of inter-imperial rivalries but of inter-imperial alliances too. The change in the relative strengths of Britain and America necessitated a redistribution of control over Middle Eastern oil. The thesis charts this redivision. After the company struck oil in Alaska in 1969, BP’s production, sales and assets Americanised. To minimise the political risks to its US assets, BP sought to limit its ownership by foreign states (in particular, Britain and Kuwait) and to expand its ownership by Americans. At the start of the 1990s, the company again Americanised its shareholder base and, at the turn of the millennium, it acquired two American oil companies. It did so, in part, to protect its assets outside America, via the US state. In terms of ownership and a measure of control, BP became bi-national, Anglo-American. The thesis examines the relations between BP and the British and American states in terms of Marxist theories of the state. In terms of structuralist mechanisms and instrumentalist processes of colonisation, BP was closer to the British than the American state. And the company received more support from the former than the latter in the international arena. Since 2003, Russia has been BP’s largest source of hydrocarbons and BP has been Russia’s largest foreign producer. The thesis examines BP’s partnerships with Russian “oligarchs” and then with the Russian state, in particular, its equity stake and positions on the board of state-controlled Rosneft

A Variational Approach to Particles in Lipid Membranes

A variety of models for the membrane-mediated interaction of particles in lipid membranes, mostly well-established in theoretical physics, is reviewed from a mathematical perspective. We provide mathematically consistent formulations in a variational framework, relate apparently different modelling approaches in terms of successive approximation, and investigate existence and uniqueness. Numerical computations illustrate that the new variational formulations are directly accessible to effective numerical methods

ISEEK, a tool for high speed, concurrent, distributed forensic data acquisition

Electronic discovery (also written as e-discovery or eDiscovery) and digital forensics are processes in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and processed with the expectation that it may be used as evidence in legal proceedings. Electronic evidence plays a fundamental role in many aspects of litigation (Stanfield, 2009). However, both eDiscovery and digital forensic approaches that rely on the creation of an index as part of their processing are struggling to cope with the huge increases in hard disk storage capacity. This paper introduces a novel technology that meets the existing and future data volume challenges faced by practitioners in these areas. The technology also addresses the concerns of those responsible for maintaining corporate networks as it does not require installation of ‘agents’ nor does it have any significant impact on network bandwidth during the search and collection process, even when this involves many computers. The technology is the embodiment of a patented process that opens the way for the development of new functionality, such as the detection of malware, compliance with corporate Information Technology (IT) policies and IT auditing. The technology introduced in this paper has been incorporated into a commercial tool called ISEEK that has already been successfully deployed in a variety of environments

The Advanced Data Acquisition Model (Adam): A Process Model for Digital Forensic Practice

As with other types of evidence, the courts make no presumption that digital evidence is reliable without some evidence of empirical testing in relation to the theories and techniques associated with its production. The issue of reliability means that courts pay close attention to the manner in which electronic evidence has been obtained and in particular the process in which the data is captured and stored. Previous process models have tended to focus on one particular area of digital forensic practice, such as law enforcement, and have not incorporated a formal description. We contend that this approach has prevented the establishment of generally-accepted standards and processes that are urgently needed in the domain of digital forensics. This paper presents a generic process model as a step towards developing such a generally-accepted standard for a fundamental digital forensic activity–the acquisition of digital evidence

Small deformations of Helfrich energy minimising surfaces with applications to biomembranes

In this paper we introduce a mathematical model for small deformations induced by external forces of closed surfaces that are minimisers of Helfrich-type energies. Our model is suitable for the study of deformations of cell membranes induced by the cytoskeleton. We describe the deformation of the surface as a graph over the undeformed surface. A new Lagrangian and the associated Euler-Lagrange equations for the height function of the graph are derived. This is the natural generalisation of the well known linearisation in the Monge gauge for initially flat surfaces. We discuss energy perturbations of point constraints and point forces acting on the surface. We establish existence and uniqueness results for weak solutions on spheres and on tori. Algorithms for the computation of numerical solutions in the general setting are provided. We present numerical examples which highlight the behaviour of the surface deformations in different settings at the end of the paper

Community experiences of organised crime in Scotland

The research explored community experiences of serious organised crime in Scotland (SOC). The report provides information on the nature and extent of the impact of SOC on everyday life in the community, as well as offering suggestions for policy development. The study sought to answer the following questions: 1)What are the relationships that exist between SOC and communities in Scotland? 2)What are the experiences and perceptions of residents, stakeholders and organisations of the scope and nature of SOC within their local area? and 3)How does SOC impact on community wellbeing, and to what extent can the harms associated with SOC be mitigated

Investigating social class inequalities in educational attainment : The effects of schools and the validity of free school meal status as a proxy for scio-economic status

I examine one explanation of social class differences in educational achievement, school allocation. Class differences in achievement are decomposed. One term of the decomposition is class differences in "Type A" school effectiveness. This is the effect of class differences in school allocation on class differences in achievement. Sufficient conditions to estimate causal "Type A" school effects in non-experimental data are stated. \ud Uniquely rich birth cohort data, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), matched to the National Pupil Database (NPD), are used. The difference in effectiveness of the 20 percent most and least effective schools is two-thirds to threequarters of a standard deviation during Key Stage 2 (KS2). The majority of class differences in school effectiveness are significant. Over 20 percent of class differences in KS2 progress are explained by class differences in school allocation. \ud Much quantitative educational research in the UK relies on free school meal (FSM) status to proxy measures of socio-economic status. In ALSP AC-NPD data, FSM status is a quite imperfect measure of low income or employment, or one-parenthood. There is a large bias when using FSM status to estimate differences in average KS2 achievement by low-income status. When used as a control variable in a model ofKS2 achievement, FSM status reduces the bias from omitting measures of socio-economic status to a limited extent only.\u

Formation of Polyglutamine Inclusions in a Wide Range of Non-CNS Tissues in the HdhQ150 Knock-In Mouse Model of Huntington's Disease

BACKGROUND:Huntington's disease (HD) is an inherited progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by a CAG repeat expansion in the ubiquitously expressed HD gene resulting in an abnormally long polyglutamine repeat in the huntingtin protein. Polyglutamine inclusions are a hallmark of the neuropathology of HD. We have previously shown that inclusion pathology is also present in the peripheral tissues of the R6/2 mouse model of HD which expresses a small N-terminal fragment of mutant huntingtin. To determine whether this peripheral pathology is a consequence of the aberrant expression of this N-terminal fragment, we extend this analysis to the genetically precise knock-in mouse model of HD, HdhQ150, which expresses mutant mouse huntingtin. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We have previously standardized the CAG repeat size and strain background of the R6/2 and HdhQ150 knock-in mouse models and found that they develop a comparable and widespread neuropathology. To determine whether HdhQ150 knock-in mice also develop peripheral inclusion pathology, homozygous Hdh(Q150/Q150) mice were perfusion fixed at 22 months of age, and tissues were processed for histology and immunohistochemistry with the anti-huntingtin antibody S830. The peripheral inclusion pathology was almost identical to that found in R6/2 mice at 12 weeks of age with minor differences in inclusion abundance. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:The highly comparable peripheral inclusion pathology that is present in both the R6/2 and HdhQ150 knock-in models of HD indicates that the presence of peripheral inclusions in R6/2 mice is not a consequence of the aberrant expression of an N-terminal huntingtin protein. It remains to be determined whether peripheral inclusions are a pathological feature of the human disease. Both mouse models carry CAG repeats that cause childhood disease in humans, and therefore, inclusion pathology may be a feature of the childhood rather than the adult forms of HD. It is important to establish the extent to which peripheral pathology causes the peripheral symptoms of HD from the perspective of a mechanistic understanding and future treatment options