Designing and implementing a new appraisal system for the Ministry of Defence Police.

When I started the project. I was Chief Inspector and the Head of Training for the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Police Training Centre (PTC) at Wethersfield in Essex. As the PTC was considered to be at the centre of the organisation, my role was seen to be that of a change agent. Therefore, I was an inside researcher. This raised two crucial methodological issues for the study. To ensure that the study was objective, reliable and valid, I had to take different approaches. Firstly, as the Head of Training, my role allowed me to quickly get to the core of the problem and I was able to generate extensive amount of crucial data. This challenged the organisational values and the power base of a hierarchical institute. The effect was complex, it meant that my learning was captured in a "personal way". This study produced Volume I, which explains the design, test, implementation of the new appraisal process and my learning. It also demonstrates my capabilities as an inside researcher who is able to shape major organisational change. Secondly, I had to use extensive collaborative approach to counteract the possibility of subjectivity which I encountered as an inside researcher. The collaborative approach produced Volume II, which is the study's tangible outcome. Volume II makes a professional impact on the whole of the Ministry of Defence Police (MDP) with a significant change in the organisations appraisal process. Further, as advocated by Bell (1997), being an inside researcher I had to maintain strict ethical standards at all times

Adapting Sequence to Sequence models for Text Normalization in Social Media

Social media offer an abundant source of valuable raw data, however informal writing can quickly become a bottleneck for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Off-the-shelf tools are usually trained on formal text and cannot explicitly handle noise found in short online posts. Moreover, the variety of frequently occurring linguistic variations presents several challenges, even for humans who might not be able to comprehend the meaning of such posts, especially when they contain slang and abbreviations. Text Normalization aims to transform online user-generated text to a canonical form. Current text normalization systems rely on string or phonetic similarity and classification models that work on a local fashion. We argue that processing contextual information is crucial for this task and introduce a social media text normalization hybrid word-character attention-based encoder-decoder model that can serve as a pre-processing step for NLP applications to adapt to noisy text in social media. Our character-based component is trained on synthetic adversarial examples that are designed to capture errors commonly found in online user-generated text. Experiments show that our model surpasses neural architectures designed for text normalization and achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art related work.Comment: Accepted at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019

The Paying Guest

pages 52-7

Evaluation of perceptions of general physicians regarding the association of obstructive sleep apnoea with depression in the real world setting in the United Kingdom

Background: Patients with depression may also have obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Management of OSA in patients with depression may improve depression and neurocognitive functions. Hence it is important to identify OSA early when assessing patients with depression or cognitive impairment. Aim of the study was to evaluate the knowledge attitude and practices of general practitioners (GPs) in the United Kingdom (UK) regarding OSA in patients with depression.Methods: A questionnaire (11 questions) regarding OSA symptoms and relevant questions to be asked during history taking by the GP was prepared. Twenty GPs across UK were sent the questionnaire by email and were asked to send their responses to the questionnaire.Results: All the respondents concurred that OSA can have a correlation with depression. Yet, only 33% of respondents asked questions related to OSA to their patients. 67% of GPs reported not asking their patients relevant questions about OSA citing lack of time. The symptom most commonly reported by their patients was difficulty concentrating during the day. 79% GPs reported that they diagnosed OSA from the history in less than 10% of their patients. The chief barriers for initiating treatment for OSA in patients with depression included need for referral of patients with OSA to a specialist (50%), patient acceptance (34%) and 13% GPs were uncertain about the barriers to initiating treatment.Conclusions: Primary care physician should determine the underlying cause of depression rather than simply diagnosing the patient as depressed. OSA must be evaluated in patients with depression by the primary care physician

Case report of missed evolving cauda equina syndrome: pitfalls to avoid in remote consultations

A 44-year-old lady presented with complaints of lumbosacral back pain radiating to the front of both thighs and up to the front of both knees. She was offered Teleconsultation by 2 GPs and was treated with analgesics. But her pain was not relieved. The third GP took a detailed history and elicited the red flags pointing towards a cauda equina syndrome (CES) in progression. She was called for examination and then was referred to the specialist for immediate further investigations and action. She underwent surgery for CES and her recovery was uneventful. Teleconsultation has the chief limitation of not being able to examine the patient. The importance of taking a detailed clear history regarding the symptoms of cauda equina and documenting the presence or absence of each of the red flag symptoms cannot be overemphasised. Clear, candid and honest discussion of the concerns of the symptoms and the rationale for the referral to the spinal surgeon must be discussed with the patient so as to prevent any miscommunication which can lead to medicolegal claims later on

Firms and Technology in International Trade: Analysis of Indian Firms

The dissertation studies firms and technology in International Trade using data from India. In the first paper, I examine the relationship between exports and productivity. I control for firm variation in prices and retrieve measures of firm productivity. I compute within firm changes in firm productivity from entering into export markets and decompose gains to productivity from export market entry into two channels – the imports of intermediate inputs and investment in R & D. In the second paper (with Ivan Kandilov and Asli Leblebicioglu), we examine the impact of trade liberalization on investment in imported capital goods. We distinguish between tariffs on capital goods, intermediate inputs and final goods and examine three channels through which reduction in tariffs can impact investment in imported capital goods.Doctor of Philosoph

Analytical Content Vulnerability Assessment Methodology for Earthquake Catastrophe Models

The scarcity of detailed claims data for building contents (Coverage C) from historical earthquake events poses a significant challenge for property insurance catastrophe models to reliably estimate the losses associated to building contents. To develop content vulnerability functions empirically, one would need to have access to data from a multitude of historical events; however, loss disaggregation by coverage is rarely reported even when claims data become available from recent significant events such as Maule (2010) and Tohoku (2011). While damage to the building structure (Coverage A) can be estimated analytically using simulation-based fragility functions to amend sparse historical observations, the adoption of analytical approaches for other coverages is limited in the current generation of catastrophe models. In the absence of analytical methods, content loss estimation often relies on a combination of expert opinion and abstract reasoning on top of precious-little available data which is often limited to residential properties. In this paper, the authors employ FEMA P-58’s component-based methodology to develop a framework for simulation-based derivation of content vulnerability functions. Following a review of published literature and the types of content components in FEMA P-58’s PACT library, the authors present the simulation-driven vulnerability function for a four-story office building in Los Angeles, and compare the results against respective functions for office buildings from commercial models. Moreover, this paper discusses the need for new content component types in offices and professional service occupancy. Through this study, the authors demonstrate the possibility of improving content loss estimates in catastrophe models by adopting approaches similar to those involved in the development of structural vulnerability functions

High-Pressure Research Applications Seminar

The United States‐Japan seminar on “High‐Pressure Research Applications in Geophysics and Geochemistry” was held in Honolulu, Hawaii, January 13–16, 1986, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). The seminar, the third in a series, was cocovened by Murli H. Manghnani (University of Hawaii, Honolulu) and Syun‐iti Akimoto (University of Tokyo). Coming together for this symposium were 25 researchers from Japan, 22 from the United States, and four others, from Australia, the People's Republic of China, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Of the 52 papers presented, 38 were presented orally at seven scientific sessions, and the rest were displayed at a poster session

Compressibility of titanosilicate melts

The effect of composition on the relaxed adiabatic bulk modulus (K0) of a range of alkali- and alkaline earth-titanosilicate [X 2 n/n+ TiSiO5 (X=Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs, Ca, Sr, Ba)] melts has been investigated. The relaxed bulk moduli of these melts have been measured using ultrasonic interferometric methods at frequencies of 3, 5 and 7 MHz in the temperature range of 950 to 1600°C (0.02 Pa s < s < 5 Pa s). The bulk moduli of these melts decrease with increasing cation size from Li to Cs and Ca to Ba, and with increasing temperature. The bulk moduli of the Li-, Na-, Ca- and Ba-bearing metasilicate melts decrease with the addition of both TiO2 and SiO2 whereas those of the K-, Rb- and Cs-bearing melts increase. Linear fits to the bulk modulus versus volume fraction of TiO2 do not converge to a common compressibility of the TiO2 component, indicating that the structural role of TiO2 in these melts is dependent on the identity of the cation. This proposition is supported by a number of other property data for these and related melt compositions including heat capacity and density, as well as structural inferences from X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XANES). The compositional dependence of the compressibility of the TiO2 component in these melts explains the difficulty incurred in previous attempts to incorporate TiO2 in calculation schemes for melt compressibility. The empirical relationship KV-4/3 for isostructural materials has been used to evaluate the compressibility-related structural changes occurring in these melts. The alkali metasilicate and disilicate melts are isostructural, independent of the cation. The addition of Ti to the metasilicate composition (i.e. X2TiSiO5), however, results in a series of melts which are not isostructural. The alkaline-earth metasilicate and disilicate compositions are not isostructural, but the addition of Ti to the metasilicate compositions (i.e. XTiSiO5) would appear, on the basis of modulus-volume systematics, to result in the melts becoming isostructural with respect to compressibility

In situ analysis of garnet inclusion in diamond using single-crystal X-ray diffraction and X-ray micro-tomography

none9A single crystal of garnet enclosed in a diamond from the Jericho kimberlite (Slave Craton, Canada) has been investigated using X-ray diffraction and X-ray micro-tomography. The novel experimental approach allowed us to determine the crystal structure of the garnet. The unit-cell edge a and fractional atomic coordinates of oxygen were used to determine the composition via an updated Margules model for garnets. The composition is Pyr(0.41(5))Alm(0.36(7))Gro(0.22(1))Uva(0.01(1)), which is indistinguishable from the eclogitic garnets found in other Jericho diamonds. We also demonstrated that residual pressures on the inclusion of up to 1 GPa do not affect significantly the determination of the garnet composition by structure refinement.noneFABRIZIO NESTOLA;M. MERLI;PAOLO NIMIS;M. PARISATTO;M. KOPYLOVA;A. DE;M. LONGO;L. ZIBERNA;M. MANGHNANINestola, Fabrizio; M., Merli; Nimis, Paolo; Parisatto, Matteo; M., Kopylova; A., De; Longo, Micaela; Ziberna, Luca; M., Manghnan