896 research outputs found
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The Legal Questing Beast: Vocational Studentsâ Research Strategies, Motivations and Emotions
In the context of the Bar Vocational Course, this project enquired how students perceive their research strategies when they interact with repositories of legal information. The research captured and analysed the students' descriptions of these engagements and their motivations for as well as their emotional responses to undertaking research tasks. Some tentative comparisons are made between the students' strategies and those reported by a small number of junior barristers
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The Well-educated Witness: Witness Familiarisation Training in England & Wales
The presentation at the 4th Applied Legal Storytelling Conference promoted respect for witnessesâ ownership of their narratives and explained how effective witness training can successfully avoid unethical coaching whilst remaining client-centred. Witnessesâ roles within the Common Law adversarial trial tradition were analysed, and the English and Welsh Court of Appealâs guidance to lawyers on acceptable and unacceptable forms of trial preparation for witnesses was outlined and critiqued in its historical context and compared with other common law jurisdictionsâ practices. It was argued that witnesses can be educated ethically to enhance their effectiveness in the witness box whilst respecting them as pristine evidence sources. This article develops these themes to argue that in England and Wales witness familiarisation trainers are educators rather than partisan trial strategists. Case law and research literature in the field of witness familiarisation and ethics are relied upon to support this argument. In addition, the author draws on several yearsâ experience of the courtroom and witness familiarisation training with witnesses of fact, expert witnesses, and criminal investigators
Exploring Human Experience
This essay argues that since human experience consists inseparably of mind, body and the material world, and that if were are to better understand the lives of people in the past we need to recognize that we cannot separate material culture, social process and life-tasks from the experiences of the people who carried them out. Personal experience of a thing can never produce an understanding of that thing that another might have without first discussing who this ?other? is and what their motivations are for being there. The constitution of experience, as an inseparable mix of mind, body and the world prevents the identification, in the present, of ?prehistoric? experiences in the present. An understanding of the theory of human experience can, however, demonstrate that change and the appropriation or alteration of activities and beliefs for new ends can easily be motivated by the power that certain experiences have on us. Thus understanding human experience helps us make new interpretations of the past
Rest and restitution : convalescence and the public mental hospital in England, 1919â39
Previous histories have tended to look beyond the asylum for innovations in
early twentieth-century mental healthcare. In contrast, this thesis appraises
the mental hospital as the nexus for a new approach to convalescent care
and makes the case for a more integrated conception of institutional and
community care in the interwar period. Despite a concentration of
convalescent facilities in certain areas, this study argues that the period
between 1919 and 1939 witnessed the emergence of a more standardised
and coordinated model of care that traversed institutional boundaries.
Consequently, it challenges a prevailing view that sees asylum care as
separate from developments in borderline care in this period. It is
demonstrated that public mental hospitals after 1919 widely added new
convalescent villas within their grounds, whilst voluntary organisations
diversified and extended their community-based cottage homes. This thesis
explores the reasons for this expansion and seeks to explain the functions it
served those who planned, managed and utilised mental convalescent
homes.
It is argued that those with professional interests in the mental hospital
focused on the âmodernâ convalescent villa partly as a strategic response to
the low status of mental hospitals in the 1920s, as well as to alleviate
overcrowding, and oversee recovery in managed and healthful
environments. The spatial and rhetorical connection between the admission
hospital and the convalescent villa allowed these interests to claim they
formed part of a broader movement of mental hygiene and early treatment.
In contrast, patient representations of cottage homes offer an alternative
perspective of convalescence as a holiday and break from social demands.
Particular attention is paid to the case of the London County Council.
The analysis focuses on descriptions of convalescent homes found in
organisational records. These are compared with plans and photographs to
make sense of the uses such homes served
Comparative genome analysis reveals an absence of leucine-rich repeat pattern-recognition receptor proteins in the kingdom Fungi.
This is the final version of the article. Available from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this record.BACKGROUND: In plants and animals innate immunity is the first line of defence against attack by microbial pathogens. Specific molecular features of bacteria and fungi are recognised by pattern recognition receptors that have extracellular domains containing leucine rich repeats. Recognition of microbes by these receptors induces defence responses that protect hosts against potential microbial attack. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A survey of genome sequences from 101 species, representing a broad cross-section of the eukaryotic phylogenetic tree, reveals an absence of leucine rich repeat-domain containing receptors in the fungal kingdom. Uniquely, however, fungi possess adenylate cyclases that contain distinct leucine rich repeat-domains, which have been demonstrated to act as an alternative means of perceiving the presence of bacteria by at least one fungal species. Interestingly, the morphologically similar osmotrophic oomycetes, which are taxonomically distant members of the stramenopiles, possess pattern recognition receptors with similar domain structures to those found in plants. CONCLUSIONS: The absence of pattern recognition receptors suggests that fungi may possess novel classes of pattern-recognition receptor, such as the modified adenylate cyclase, or instead rely on secretion of anti-microbial secondary metabolites for protection from microbial attack. The absence of pattern recognition receptors in fungi, coupled with their abundance in oomycetes, suggests this may be a unique characteristic of the fungal kingdom rather than a consequence of the osmotrophic growth form.This work was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Rocking the Boat:The Participation Rhetoric Exposed: Why Should People Living in Poverty Have a Voice and Space at the United Nations?
Poverty is one of the most serious issues of our time, and the major seat of the poverty eradication discourse is at the United Nations. The term participation has increasingly featured in the high level poverty discourse in recent years, as well as in development practice. However, in contrast to other identity groups, such as women, indigenous people and people with disabilities, the participation of people living in poverty in high level UN processes is not given priority. They are not seen as an identity group in their own right, rather they are subsumed into others. Furthermore, any participation is assumed to be acceptably realised at the local level, with little priority placed on the facilitation of participation in transnational or global institutions such as the UN. NGOs are assumed to be able to represent the poor, a situation which is problematic and serves to further marginalise people living in poverty. As NGOs translate and represent, they effectively silence people living in poverty.
In the absence of the poor, perceptions held by the general public and by decision makers about the poor continue to hamper the debate and restrict possible solutions. Furthermore, the exclusionary statistics-dominated language of UN debate and procedural restrictions present barriers to people living in poverty being meaningfully involved in the poverty discourse. Additionally, the overuse of statistics in these debates serves to abstract and dehumanise the poor.
This thesis makes the normative argument that people living in poverty should have a place and space at the United Nations, as do other identity groups. Their participation represents an opportunity to force the debate beyond statistics, and expose the harsh realities of ongoing suffering resulting from the world's failure to act. Their testimony and input could provide an effective catalyst for mobilising political will. Drawing on critical theory, I argue that regular participation and testimony of the poor has the potential to pierce the political facade within which the powerful at the UN make decisions, with scant realisation of the often devastating consequences for the currently invisible poor. The conclusion drawn from this argument is that the poor must be allowed to be leaders of their own liberation and to reclaim their dignity
FAR1 and FAR2 regulate the expression of genes associated with lipid metabolism in the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae.
This is the final version of the article. Available from Public Library of Science via the DOI in this record.The rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae causes plant disease via specialised infection structures called appressoria. These dome-shaped cells are able to generate enormous internal pressure, which enables penetration of rice tissue by invasive hyphae. Previous studies have shown that mobilisation of lipid bodies and subsequent lipid metabolism are essential pre-requisites for successful appressorium-mediated plant infection, which requires autophagic recycling of the contents of germinated spores and germ tubes to the developing appressorium. Here, we set out to identify putative regulators of lipid metabolism in the rice blast fungus. We report the identification of FAR1 and FAR2, which encode highly conserved members of the Zn2-Cys6 family of transcriptional regulators. We generated Îfar1, Îfar2 and Îfar1Îfar2 double mutants in M. oryzae and show that these deletion mutants are deficient in growth on long chain fatty acids. In addition, Îfar2 mutants are also unable to grow on acetate and short chain fatty acids. FAR1 and FAR2 are necessary for differential expression of genes involved in fatty acid ÎČ-oxidation, acetyl-CoA translocation, peroxisomal biogenesis, and the glyoxylate cycle in response to the presence of lipids. Furthermore, FAR2 is necessary for expression of genes associated with acetyl-CoA synthesis. Interestingly, Îfar1, Îfar2 and Îfar1Îfar2 mutants show no observable delay or reduction in lipid body mobilisation during plant infection, suggesting that these transcriptional regulators control lipid substrate utilization by the fungus but not the mobilisation of intracellular lipid reserves during infection-related morphogenesis.This work was supported by grants from the Malaysia Ministry of Higher Education and Universiti Putra Malaysia and a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award 294702 GENBLAST to NJT
A Relational Database for the Discovery of Genes Encoding Amino Acid Biosynthetic Enzymes in Pathogenic Fungi
Fungal phytopathogens continue to cause major economic impact, either directly, through crop losses, or due to the costs of fungicide application. Attempts to understand
these organisms are hampered by a lack of fungal genome sequence data. A
need exists, however, to develop specific bioinformatics tools to collate and analyse the
sequence data that currently is available. A web-accessible gene discovery database
(http://cogeme.ex.ac.uk/biosynthesis.html) was developed as a demonstration tool for
the analysis of metabolic and signal transduction pathways in pathogenic fungi using
incomplete gene inventories. Using Bayesian probability to analyse the currently available
gene information from pathogenic fungi, we provide evidence that the obligate
pathogen Blumeria graminis possesses all amino acid biosynthetic pathways found
in free-living fungi, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Phylogenetic analysis was also
used to deduce a gene history of succinate-semialdehyde dehydrogenase, an enzyme
in the glutamate and lysine biosynthesis pathways. The database provides a tool and
methodology to researchers to direct experimentation towards predicting pathway
conservation in pathogenic microorganisms
The foraging behaviour of seabirds: defining and predicting home range areas
In recent years, seabird tracking studies have become ever more popular as a means of informing and evaluating the effectiveness of marine protected areas and offshore energy developments as well as in understanding the ecology and behaviour of seabirds. This study uses tracking data collected from the European shag, Black-legged kittiwake, Northern gannet and Brown booby to identify important foraging areas around four seabird colonies located in the UK, Channel Islands and Anguilla and examines the impact of offshore renewable energy developments in the Channel Islands. As well as providing examples of how seabird tracking data can be useful in informing marine spatial planning, this study also considers the impact that sample size and the sample composition may have on the foraging areas predicted for any colony. Small sample sizes are a common feature of tracking studies, often due to logistical and financial constraints, meaning that seabirds are often tracked over short spatial and temporal scales which may not fully represent the important foraging areas and behaviours of the colony or individual. This study therefore provides recommendations to improve the predictions of area use and foraging strategy for future tracking studies to ensure the most representative and useful data is collected and used to inform marine spatial planning issues
Defining and Exploring Broadband Connections and Education Solutions in Canadaâs North
The use of technology and need for connection across distance permeates all education environments; nowhere is this more important than in Canadaâs Northwest Territories. Broadband and telecommunications issues within the Northwest Territories are complex due to its vast geographical area and community dispersion, making connectivity and accessibility inconsistent. Due to these conditions, the North relies on a variety of broadband solutions to improve Internet speeds and access to education at a distance. This paper analyzes the impacts that broadband capacity and Internet access have on remote education by examining geographic information system data, which offers a framework that connects spatial and temporal data to analyse accessibility of remote education. Characteristics such as spatial location of communities, infrastructure (road systems), and the overlay of various broadband options will illustrate constraints and (dis)connectivity in various regions and inform readers about the complexity of remote connections. Analysis of current upload and download speeds from various regions and their impact on access to education supports geospatial data and analysis that the digital divide in remote regions of Canada has increased and is widening. Improving equitable access to postsecondary education will require a greater reliance on technology-enabled practices to improve learning opportunities.
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