Broadening Responsibilities: Consideration Of The Potential To Broaden The Role Of Uniformed Fire Service Employees

What is this report about? This report, commissioned by the National Joint Council for Local Authority Fire and Rescue Services (NJC), aims to identify what impact, if any, firefighters can have on the delivery of emergency medical response and wider community health interventions in the UK. What are the overall conclusions? Appropriately trained and equipped firefighters co-responding1 to targeted, specific time critical medical events, such as cardiac arrest, can improve patient survival rates. The data also indicate that there is support from fire service staff – and a potential need from members of the public, particularly the elderly, isolated or vulnerable – to expand ‘wider work’. This includes winter warmth assessments, Safe and Well checks, community defibrillator training and client referrals when staff believe someone may have dementia, are vulnerable or even, for example, have substance dependencies such as an alcohol addiction. However, there is currently insufficient data to estimate the net benefit of this work

Role of Topoisomerase IIβ in DNA Damage Response following IR and Etoposide

The role of topoisomerase IIβ was investigated in cell lines exposed to two DNA damaging agents, ionising radiation (IR) or etoposide, a drug which acts on topoisomerase II. The appearance and resolution of γH2AX foci in murine embryonic fibroblast cell lines, wild type and null for DNA topoisomerase IIβ, was measured after exposure to ionising radiation (IR) or etoposide. Topoisomerase II-DNA adduct levels were also measured. IR rapidly triggered phosphorylation of histone H2AX, less phosphorylation was seen in TOP2β−/− cells, but the difference was not statistically significant. IR did not produce topoisomerase II-DNA adducts above control levels. Etoposide triggered the formation of topoisomerase II-DNA adducts and the phosphorylation of histone H2AX, the γH2AX foci appeared more slowly with etoposide than with IR. Topoisomerase II-DNA complexes in WT cells but not TOP2β−/− cells increased significantly at 24 hours with the proteasome inhibitor MG132, suggesting topoisomerase IIβ adducts are removed by the proteasome

Bridging the gap: A case study of a partnership approach to skills development through student engagement in bristol’s green capital year

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. HEIs are well placed to engage with local communities, and can connect students with organisations through several pathways, such as volunteering opportunities, placements, internships, or projects. The University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE), the University of Bristol and their respective Students’ Unions have been working in partnership with the city and local communities, using HEFCE Catalyst funding to promote student involvement in sustainability activity during Bristol’s year as European Green Capital. The Green Capital Student Capital project has created a broad programme of citywide impact through mobilising the enthusiasm of the city’s student body. It delivered a wide-ranging programme of engagement in city sustainability and in so doing developed skills, knowledge and attributes in the student body that support the development of graduate attributes and amore sustainable lifestyle. The project demonstrates how institutions can collaborate across cities and communities to have internal and external impacts for sustainability

Seroprevalence of Pandemic Influenza H1N1 in Ontario from January 2009–May 2010

We designed a seroprevalence study using multiple testing assays and population sources to estimate the community seroprevalence of pH1N1/09 and risk factors for infection before the outbreak was recognized and throughout the pandemic to the end of 2009/10 influenza season.Residual serum specimens from five time points (between 01/2009 and 05/2010) and samples from two time points from a prospectively recruited cohort were included. The distribution of risk factors was explored in multivariate adjusted analyses using logistic regression among the cohort. Antibody levels were measured by hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) and microneutralization (MN) assays.Residual sera from 3375 patients and 1024 prospectively recruited cohort participants were analyzed. Pre-pandemic seroprevalence ranged from 2%-12% across age groups. Overall seropositivity ranged from 10%-19% post-first wave and 32%-41% by the end of the 2009/10 influenza season. Seroprevalence and risk factors differed between MN and HAI assays, particularly in older age groups and between waves. Following the H1N1 vaccination program, higher GMT were noted among vaccinated individuals. Overall, 20-30% of the population was estimated to be infected.Combining population sources of sera across five time points with prospectively collected epidemiological information yielded a complete description of the evolution of pH1N1 infection

The Bristol Method: Green Capital Student Capital - The power of student sustainability engagement

THE BRISTOL METHODThe Bristol Method is a knowledge-transfer programme aimed at helping people in other cities understand and apply the lessons that Bristol has learned in becoming a more sustainable city, not just in 2015 but in the last decade. Each module of the Bristol Method is presented as an easy-to-digest ‘how to’ guide on a particular topic, which use Bristol’s experiences as a case study. The modules contain generic advice and recommendations that each reader can tailor to their own circumstances.This module focusses on the Green Capital: Student Capital project, and explains how the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE) and the University of Bristol – with their respective students’ unions – have been working in partnership with the city and local communities, using Higher Education Funding Council for England Catalyst funding to promote student involvement in Green Capital activities across Greater Bristol.Student Capital created a broad programme of citywide impact during European Green Capital. It delivered a programme of student and staff engagement in enhancing sustainability within the city and has developed student and staff engagement with sustainability action. Through action research approaches it is also providing lessons for how institutions can collaborate across cities and communities to have internal and external impacts for sustainability. This report is for anyone seeking to increase sustainability engagement. In it we tell the story of the Student Capital project, explaining the processes and the outcomes, and suggesting pieces of advice and lessons for what went well, and what could have been done better or differently

The receptive-field organization of simple cells in primary visual cortex of ferrets under natural scene stimulation

The responses of simple cells in primary visual cortex to sinusoidal gratings can primarily be predicted from their spatial receptive fields, as mapped using spots or bars. Although this quasilinearity is well documented, it is not clear whether it holds for complex natural stimuli. We recorded from simple cells in the primary visual cortex of anesthetized ferrets while stimulating with flashed digitized photographs of natural scenes. We applied standard reverse-correlation methods to quantify the average natural stimulus that invokes a neuronal response. Although these maps cannot be the receptive fields, we find that they still predict the preferred orientation of grating for each cell very well (r � 0.91); they do not predict the spatial-frequency tuning. Using a novel application of the linear reconstruction method called regularized pseudoinverse, we were able to recover high-resolution receptive-field maps from the responses to a relatively small number of natural scenes. These receptive-field maps not only predict the optimum orientation of each cell (r � 0.96) but also the spatial-frequency optimum (r � 0.89); the maps also predict the tuning bandwidths of many cells. Therefore, our first conclusion is that the tuning preferences of the cells are primarily linear and constant across stimulus type. However, when we used these maps to predict the actual responses of the cells to natural scenes, we did find evidence of expansive output nonlinearity and nonlinear influences from outside the classical receptive fields, orientation tuning, and spatial-frequency tuning

The COSPAR Capacity Building Initiative

The COSPAR Capacity Building Workshops have been conceived to meet the following objectives: (1) To increase knowledge and use of public archives of space data in order both to broaden the scope of research programs in developing countries and to ensure that scientists in those countries are aware of the full range of facilities that are available to them; (2) To provide highly-practical instruction in the use of these archives and the associated publicly-available software; and (3) To foster personal links between participants and experienced scientists attending the workshops to contribute to reducing the isolation often experienced by scientists in developing countries. Since 2001 a total of twelve workshops have been successfully held in different scientific areas (X-ray, Gamma-ray, Space Optical and UV Astronomy, Magnetospheric Physics, Space Oceanography and Planetary Science) in nine developing countries (Brazil, India, China, South Africa, Morocco, Romania, Uruguay, Egypt and Malaysia). In this contribution we discuss the modalities of the workshops, the experience so-far gained, and the future including collaborations with other institutions sharing the aim of increasing the scientific activities in developing countries