When Personalities Dominate, Stability Fails: Great Britain’s Shifting North American Military Strategy, 1768-1775

History may be written by the victors, but war is not a solo act. Yet the narrative surrounding the American Revolutionary War makes it seem as though the other major actor in the conflict, Great Britain, only reacted to the events in the North American colonies and yielded no personal motives to ultimately declare war. Responsibility for deciding to go to war in 1775 is essentially removed from British pre-war political and military leaders. Limited discussion is held about the exogenous factors that would have influenced British decision makers. This thesis, however, seeks to fill that gap. It assesses how and why Great Britain’s North American military strategy evolved the way it did. I map changes in strategy starting in 1768 when the first schooner, packed with British military forces, arrived in Boston Harbor until April 1775 with the march on Concord. Through three chapters looking at the important English personalities in charge of the military decision-making process, the actions of Great Britain’s neighboring countries, and the strength of England’s economy from 1768–1775, the nuances of the causes of warfare are discussed

The governance of complaints in UK higher education:critically examining ‘remedies’ for staff sexual misconduct

Complaints processes and their governance in UK higher education (HE) have received little critical scrutiny, despite their expanded role under the increasing marketisation of HE. This article draws on interviews with students who attempted to make complaints of staff sexual misconduct to their HE institution. It outlines four groups among the interviewees according to the ‘remedy’ that they obtained, describing how most interviewees could not access the services of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education in England as they could not complete internal institutional complaints processes. The failure of most complainants to obtain remedy, and the difficult experiences of those who did, reveals the inadequacies of using an individualist, consumer-oriented model for addressing discrimination complaints in HE. The article also contributes to discussions of justice for sexual violence survivors, suggesting that community-oriented remedies are needed alongside formal administrative justice processes to address power-based sexual misconduct in institutions

Moving Toward Assured Access to Treatment in Microbicide Trials

Anna Forbes discusses the Global Campaign for Microbicides' consensus statement on access to treatment and standards of care in microbicide trials

Making power visible: ‘Slow activism’ to address staff sexual misconduct

This article examines activism to address staff-to-student sexual misconduct in higher education in the UK from our perspective as founders and members of the research and lobby organisation The 1752 Group. We argue that in order to tackle staff sexual misconduct in higher education, the problem has first to be made visible. We theorise this as ‘slow activism’ and outline the activities that we and others have been engaged in towards this end: conducting research; using complaints processes within institutions; naming the experiences of staff sexual misconduct and/or institutions and perpetrators; and carrying out discipline-led and sector-level initiatives

Understanding the magnetic resonance spectrum of nitrogen vacancy centers in an ensemble of randomly-oriented nanodiamonds

Nanodiamonds containing nitrogen vacancy (NV-) centers show promise for a number of emerging applications including targeted in vivo imaging and generating nuclear spin hyperpolarization for enhanced NMR spectroscopy and imaging. Here, we develop a detailed understanding of the magnetic resonance behavior of NV- centers in an ensemble of nanodiamonds with random crystal orientations. Two-dimensional optically detected magnetic resonance spectroscopy reveals the distribution of energy levels, spin populations, and transition probabilities that give rise to a complex spectrum. We identify overtone transitions that are inherently insensitive to crystal orientation and give well-defined transition frequencies that access the entire nanodiamond ensemble. These transitions may be harnessed for high-resolution imaging and generation of nuclear spin hyperpolarization. The data are well described by numerical simulations from the zero- to high-field regimes, including the intermediate regime of maximum complexity. We evaluate the prospects of nanodiamond ensembles specifically for nuclear hyperpolarization and show that frequency-swept dynamic nuclear polarization may transfer a large amount of the NV- center's hyperpolarization to nuclear spins by sweeping over a small region of its spectrum.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Educational use cases from a shared exploration of e-books and iPads

E-books and e-book readers are becoming increasingly widely available, particularly for the general reader, and there have been many studies on their adoption. However, less is known about their use for educational and academic purposes. We report here on work carried out on e-books and e-book applications using iPads by academic and teaching staff. After considering pedagogical issues and reporting survey results, we identify a spiral of six key use case areas for e-books. This spiral of use cases moves from basic e-book use, through situational reading, e-books and learning, using multiple learning resources, collaborative/group learning, to e-book production. We discuss each of these use case areas and provide guidelines that will be of interest to practitioners and researchers alike

Combined STAT3 and BCR-ABL1 inhibition induces synthetic lethality in therapy-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia

manuscriptSupporting information to Combined STAT3 and BCR-ABL1 Inhibition Induces Synthetic Lethality in Therapy-Resistant Chronic Myeloid Leukemi

Dynamics of actinotrichia regeneration in the adult zebrafish fin

The skeleton of adult zebrafish fins comprises lepidotrichia, which are dermal bones of the rays, and actinotrichia, which are non-mineralized spicules at the distal margin of the appendage. Little is known about the regenerative dynamics of the actinotrichia- specific structural proteins called Actinodins. Here, we used immunofluorescence analysis to determine the contribution of two paralogous Actinodin proteins, And1/2, in regenerating fins. Both proteins were detected in the secretory organelles in the mesenchymal cells of the blastema, but only And1 was detected in the epithelial cells of the wound epithelium. The analysis of whole mount fins throughout the entire regenerative process and longitudinal sections revealed that And1-positive fibers are complementary to the lepidotrichia. The analysis of another longfin fish, a gain-of- function mutation in the potassium channel kcnk5b, revealed that the long-fin phenotype is associated with an extended size of actinotrichia during homeostasis and regeneration. Finally, we investigated the role of several signaling pathways in actinotrichia formation and maintenance. This revealed that the pulse-inhibition of either TGFβ/Activin-βA or FGF are sufficient to impair deposition of Actinodin during regeneration. Thus, the dynamic turnover of Actinodin during fin regeneration is regulated by multiple factors, including the osteoblasts, growth rate in a potassium channel mutant, and instructive signaling networks between the epithelium and the blastema of the regenerating fin