"I Saw You": searching for lost love via practices of reading, writing and responding

How do emotions move and how do emotions move us? How are feelings and recognitions distributed socio-materially? Based on a multi-site ethnographic study of a romantic correspondance system, this article explores the themes of love, privacy, identity and public displays. Informed by ethnomethodology and actor-network theory its investigations into these informal affairs are somewhat unusual in that much of the research carried out by those bodies of work concentrates on institutional settings such as laboratories, offices and courtrooms. In common with ethnomethodology it attempts to re-specify some topics of interest in the social sciences and humanities; in this case, documents and practices of writing and reading those documents. A key element of the approach taken is restoring to reading and writing their situated nature as observable, knowable, distributed community practices. Re-specifying topics for the social sciences involves the detailed description of several situated ways in which the romantic correspondence system is used. Detailing the translations, transformations and transportations of documents as 'quasi-objects' through several orderings, the article suggests that documents have no essential meaning and that making them meaningful is part of the work of those settings

An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and analysing our ethnographic studies

Lawyer Disciplinary Processes: An Empirical Study of Solicitors’ Misconduct Cases in England and Wales in 2015

The Legal Services Act 2007 effected major changes in the disciplinary system for solicitors in England Wales. Both the practice regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and a disciplinary body, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, were reconstituted as independent bodies and given new powers. Our concern is the impact of the Act on the disciplinary system for solicitors. Examination of this issue involves consideration of changes to regulatory institutions and the mechanics of practice regulation. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, empirical evidence drawn from disciplinary cases handled by the SDT and the SRA in 2015 is used to explore potentially different conceptions of discipline informing the work of the regulatory institutions. The conclusion considers the implications of our findings for the future of the professional disciplinary system

An Explosion of Legal Philanthropy? The Transformation of Pro Bono Legal Services in England and Wales

This chapter considers the evolution of legal services pro bono publico (pro bono) in England and Wales. Since the medieval period there have been significant changes in patterns of pro bono delivery. This transformation has occurred in a number of different phases, with a significant period of development occurring in the 1990s. In the present day there has been an expansion of pro bono services to such an extent that their value rivals the provision of civil legal aid. This has been achieved with significant changes in the architecture of delivery and the typology of services delivered. The chapter considers whether the distinct phases in the development of the pro bono culture of the legal profession suggests a rupture in the genealogy of pro bono. It explains how the current phase is unlike any of its predecessors, characterised as it is by a marked increase in levels of pro bono activity, arguably fuelled by the growth in pro bono infrastructure and more positive culture of pro bono which this engendered. The chapter’s analysis concludes there is a new culture of lawyer pro bono in England and Wales, with an innovatory infrastructure and broader engagement from major players in the field of la

Data compression for full motion video transmission

Clearly transmission of visual information will be a major, if not dominant, factor in determining the requirements for, and assessing the performance of the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) communications systems. Projected image/video requirements which are currently anticipated for SEI mission scenarios are presented. Based on this information and projected link performance figures, the image/video data compression requirements which would allow link closure are identified. Finally several approaches which could satisfy some of the compression requirements are presented and possible future approaches which show promise for more substantial compression performance improvement are discussed

An explosion of legal philanthropy?: The transformation of pro bono legal services in England and Wales

A tradition of pro bono publico legal work (hereafter “pro bono”) existed in England and Wales for centuries and was adopted, along with many other traditions, in the legal systems of British colonies. The questions we address here are how pro bono legal services in the jurisdiction have changed and why. In considering these questions, we are concerned with the infrastructure of provision (the architecture of pro bono), the volumes and nature of work performed (the typology of pro bono), and the causative factors underlying current patterns (the genealogy of pro bono). The answers to our research questions are relevant to understanding the significance of pro bono services. This will assist with practical issues, such as the reliability of pro bono provision in supporting access to justice, and theoretical issues, such as the significance of pro bono to legal professionalism

The validity of capillary blood sampling in the determination of human growth hormone concentration during exercise in men

This is an open access article - Copyright © 2004 BMJ Publishing Group LtdBACKGROUND: Studies measuring human growth hormone (hGH) in blood during exercise have mainly used venous sampling. The invasive nature of this procedure makes evaluation of hGH impossible in various exercise environments. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether capillary sampling could offer an alternative sampling method. METHODS: Capillary and venous blood samples were collected for determination of hGH at the end of each exercise stage during an incremental exercise test in 16 male club level competitive cyclists (mean (SD) age 30.8 (8.0) years, body mass 72.2 (7.1) kg, body fat 12.9 (3.5)%, peak oxygen consumption 4.18 (0.46) l⋅min−1). Linear regression, from a plot of venous v capillary blood hGH concentration, showed a correlation coefficient of r = 0.986 (p<0.001). When geometric means and log transformations were used, a coefficient of variation of 14.2% was demonstrated between venous and capillary flow for hGH concentration. The mean ratio limits of agreement were 0.62 (1.72)—that is, 95% of the ratios were contained between 0.36 and 1.07, with a mean of 0.62. CONCLUSIONS: Capillary blood sampling is an acceptable alternative to venous sampling for determining hGH concentration during rest and exercise. Sample sites should not be used interchangeably: one site should be chosen and its use standardised

Digital CODEC for real-time processing of broadcast quality video signals at 1.8 bits/pixel

Advances in very large-scale integration and recent work in the field of bandwidth efficient digital modulation techniques have combined to make digital video processing technically feasible and potentially cost competitive for broadcast quality television transmission. A hardware implementation was developed for a DPCM-based digital television bandwidth compression algorithm which processes standard NTSC composite color television signals and produces broadcast quality video in real time at an average of 1.8 bits/pixel. The data compression algorithm and the hardware implementation of the CODEC are described, and performance results are provided

A comprehensive survey of hearing questionnaires: how many are there, what do they measure, and how have they been validated?

The self-report questionnaire is a popular tool for measuring outcomes in trials of interventions for hearing impairment. Many have been designed over the last fifty years, and there is no single standard questionnaire that is widely accepted and used. We felt it would be a valuable resource to have a comprehensive collection of all adult hearing-loss questionnaires (excluding those wholly devoted to tinnitus, children, or cochlear implants) and to survey their degree of validation. We collated copies of every published hearing difficulty questionnaire that we could find. The search was primarily done by iterative reference searching. Questionnaire topics were obtained by mapping the text of each questionnaire onto a set of categories; reports of validation methods were taken from the primary paper(s) on each questionnaire. In total we found 139 hearing-specific questionnaires (though many others were found that were primarily about something else). Though not formally systematic, we believe that we have included every questionnaire that is important, most of those of some notice, and a fair fraction of those obscure. We classified 111 as “primary” and the remaining 28 as “contractions”, being shortened versions of a primary without any new questions. In total, there were 3618 items across all the primary questionnaires. The median number of items per questionnaire was 20; the maximum was 158. Across all items, about one third were concerned with the person’s own hearing, another third with the repercussions of it, and about a quarter with hearing aids. There was a wide range in validation methods, from only using items chosen statistically from wider pools and with formal validation against independent measures of clinical outcomes, to just reporting a correlation with an audiogram measure of hearing loss. The “state of play” of the field of hearing questionnaires will be discussed