Who Was King Arthur’s Sir Modred?

Sir Modred was nephew to the King Arthur of legend; Medrawd was loyal comrade to the Arthur of history. In legend, Modred is a traitor and rebel who kills his uncle. In history, Medrawd was a warrior who fell (with Arthur) in 537 CE at «Camlan» (identified as the fort of Castlesteads, near Carlisle, northern England). Welsh bards long remembered Medrawd as a hero; Spanish readers have known Modred as a traitor since the Middle Ages. So this paper has three purposes. First, to reveal Medrawd as a historical character, a sixthcentury hero of North Britain, like Arthur himself. Second, to show how Medrawd’s reputation was permanently blackened in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Third, to provide an etymology for Medrawd, a British form unrelated to the Cornish ‘Modred’ clamped upon the warrior by Geoffrey, with his usual cavalier attitude to history.Sir Modred fue sobrino del rey Arturo de la leyenda; Medrawd fue un leal camarada del Arturo histórico. En la leyenda, Modred es un traidor y rebelde que mata a su tío. En la historia, Medrawd fue un guerrero que cayó (junto a Arturo) en el año 537 d.C. en «Camlan» (identificado como la fortificación de Castlesteads, cerca de Carlisle, en el norte de Inglaterra). Los bardos galeses recordaron a Medrawd largo tiempo como un héroe, mientras que los lectores españoles han conocido a Modred como un traidor desde la Edad Media. Así pues, este trabajo tiene tres objetivos. Primero, mostrar a Medrawd como un personaje histórico, un héroe del norte de Inglaterra en el siglo VI, como fue el propio Arturo. Segundo, exponer cómo la reputación de Medrawd quedó ensombrecida para siempre en el siglo XII por obra de Godofredo de Monmouth. Tercero, proponer una etimología para Medrawd, que es una forma británica no relacionada con la córnica Modred que Godofredo aplicó al guerrero, con su habitual desdén hacia la historia.

Welsh Dawn ‘Gift’ and Doncaster, Yorkshire

Doncaster, known to the Romans as Danum, is a town on the River Don, Yorkshire. Its British-Latin name (deriving from that of the river) has been obscure: although interpretations ‘wet’ or ‘bold’ or ‘flowing’ have been proposed from alleged parallels with the Danube, Dnieper, Don, or Rhône of the European continent, they are inconclusive, because they lack equivalents in Brittonic. A new etymology is needed. The one suggested here is ‘gift; gifted one’ or even ‘she who brings gifts’ (designating a river nymph). It is supported directly by the Welsh worddawn ‘gift’ and indirectly by the River Annan of Scotland, recorded in British-Latin as Anava, a form related to Welsh anaw ‘wealth, riches, largess, bounty, gift’ and presumably reflecting Celtic belief in the stream as a bountiful goddess. The Y orkshire Don (like the River Don of T yneside) would thus have a name explicable in purely Celtic terms. Reference to IndoIranian, legitimately applied to continental rivers including the Russian Don and Dnieper, can here be dropped. Besides this, Doncaster can be proved as unrelated both to the “Cair Daun” of Historia Brittonum’s Twenty-Eight Cities of Britain (where the toponym is surely a corruption of Cair Dam or Cardiff), and to the goddess Dôn of the twelfth-century Four Branches of the Mabinogi. On the other hand, the Y orkshire Don can be shown as a namesake not only of the River Don of T yneside, but of the River Doon in south-west Scotland.Донкастер, именуемый в римских источниках Danum, — это город в Йоркшире на реке Дон. Его латинское название, производное от названия реки, остается неясным: предложенные интерпретации, возводящие топоним к лексемам со значением ‘мокрый’, ‘отвесный, крутой’, ‘текущий’ и предполагающие параллели между этим гидронимом и названиями таких континентальных рек, как Дунай, Днепр, Дон или Рона, остаются неубедительными, поскольку не обнаруживают бриттских параллелей. В данной работе предложена новая этимология, позволяющая интерпретировать название как ‘Дар’ или ‘Та, что несет дары’ (с отсылкой к речной нимфе). Эта этимология напрямую поддерживается валлийским dawn ‘дар’, а косвенно — названием реки Аннан в Шотландии, зафиксированным в латинских источниках в форме Anava, которая связана с валлийским anaw ‘богатство, благосостояние, изобилие, дар’ и предположительно отражает представления кельтов о реках как о щедрых богинях. Таким образом, название реки Дон в Йоркшире (а равно и реки Дон, протекающей в Тайнсайде) может быть объяснено на кельтской основе, что делает ненужными отсылки к индоиранским корням, через которые закономерно объясняют гидронимы Днепр и Дон. Кроме того, такая интерпретация позволяет еще раз подтвердить, что Донкастер не связан с Cair Daun в списке 28 городов Британии из «Истории бриттов» (где топоним необходимо читать как Cair Dam, т. е. Кардиф) и с богиней Дон из средневекового валлийского сборника сказок «Четыре ветви Мабиноги». В то же время предложенная в статье интерпретация позволяет добавить в ряд соименных рек Дон в Йоркшире и Тайнсайде реку Дун на юго-западе Шотландии

Quantifying the value of ecosystem services: a case study of honeybee pollination in the UK

There is concern that insect pollinators, such as honey bees, are currently declining in abundance, and are under serious threat from environmental changes such as habitat loss and climate change; the use of pesticides in intensive agriculture, and emerging diseases. This paper aims to evaluate how much public support there would be in preventing further decline to maintain the current number of bee colonies in the UK. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to obtain the willingness to pay (WTP) for a theoretical pollinator protection policy. Respondents were asked whether they would be WTP to support such a policy and how much would they pay? Results show that the mean WTP to support the bee protection policy was £1.37/week/household. Based on there being 24.9 million households in the UK, this is equivalent to £1.77 billion per year. This total value can show the importance of maintaining the overall pollination service to policy makers. We compare this total with estimates obtained using a simple market valuation of pollination for the UK

Gender-specific changes in well-being in older people with coronary heart disease: evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Objectives: The objective of this study is to investigate gender-specific trajectories in well-being among older people with coronary heart disease (CHD) and to compare them with those of healthy people. Method: The study included a sample of 4496 participants from the first three waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2002–2003 to 2006–2007). We measured well-being using quality of life (CASP-19; ‘control’, ‘autonomy’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘self-realization’) and depressive caseness (three or more symptoms on the CESD-8; Centre for Epidemiologic Study Depression scale). Results: After adjustment, at two– and four–years follow-ups, women had three points higher quality of life than men (p < 0.001). When looking at each quality of life's domain we found that women reported higher scores of autonomy compared to men. The gender difference in the probability of having depressive caseness reduced to 7 percentage points at four-year follow-up from 13 percentage points in the previous occasions. Men's quality of life declined progressively over time by 3 points (p < 0.001) (equivalent to the effect of having diabetes) but no changes in prevalence of depressive caseness were found. Women's quality of life only declined after four-year follow-up by less than 2 points (p < 0.001), while in the same period their probability of reporting depressive caseness reduced by 6 percentage points (p < 0.001). Conclusion: Women had better quality of life than men in the two and four years following a CHD event, and were not more likely than men to report depressive caseness in the long term. Men's quality of life deteriorated progressively over time, among women it did not deteriorate in the first two years following a CHD event; women had a long-term improvement in depressive caseness

Continuous-wave room-temperature diamond maser

The maser, older sibling of the laser, has been confined to relative obscurity due to its reliance on cryogenic refrigeration and high-vacuum systems. Despite this it has found application in deep-space communications and radio astronomy due to its unparalleled performance as a low-noise amplifier and oscillator. The recent demonstration of a room-temperature solid- state maser exploiting photo-excited triplet states in organic pentacene molecules paves the way for a new class of maser that could find applications in medicine, security and sensing, taking advantage of its sensitivity and low noise. However, to date, only pulsed operation has been observed in this system. Furthermore, organic maser molecules have poor thermal and mechanical properties, and their triplet sub-level decay rates make continuous emission challenging: alternative materials are therefore required. Therefore, inorganic materials containing spin-defects such as diamond and silicon carbide have been proposed. Here we report a continuous-wave (CW) room-temperature maser oscillator using optically pumped charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect centres in diamond. This demonstration unlocks the potential of room-temperature solid-state masers for use in a new generation of microwave devices.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Magnon-photon coupling in the noncollinear magnetic insulator Cu 2 OSeO 3

Anticrossing behavior between magnons in the noncollinear chiral magnet Cu2OSeO3 and a two-mode X-band microwave resonator was studied in the temperature range 5–100 K. In the field-induced ferrimagnetic phase, we observed a strong-coupling regime between magnons and two microwave cavity modes with a cooperativity reaching 3600. In the conical phase, cavity modes are dispersively coupled to a fundamental helimagnon mode, and we demonstrate that the magnetic phase diagram of Cu2OSeO3 can be reconstructed from the measurements of the cavity resonance frequency. In the helical phase, a hybridized state of a higher-order helimagnon mode and a cavity mode—a helimagnon polariton—was found. Our results reveal a class of magnetic systems where strong coupling of microwave photons to nontrivial spin textures can be observed

The impact of a local sugar sweetened beverage health promotion and price increase on sales in public leisure centre facilities

BACKGROUND: We aimed to evaluate the impact of a local sugar sweetened beverages (SSB) health promotion and 20p price increase in leisure centre venues and estimate the impact on consumption. METHOD: Monthly cold drinks sales data and attendance at leisure centres across the city of Sheffield were analysed over the period January 2015-July 2017. Interrupted time-series methods were employed to estimate changes in consumption per attendance of SSB and non-SSB cold drinks following the introduction of the SSB policy from August 2016 adjusting for seasonal variation and autocorrelation. SSB price elasticities were estimated with fixed effects log-log models by SSB product type (soda can, soda bottle, soda post mix, energy drinks, juice from concentrate). FINDINGS: We estimated a 31% (95% CI 4%, 59%) reduction in units of SSB sold per attendance in the year since the policy was introduced. We did not observe substitution effects to fruit juice or water but found sales of other artificially sweetened non-SSB products increased by 27% (95% CI 6%, 47%) after the introduction of the tax. Price elasticity analysis identified that a 1% increase in price alongside health promotion leads to a 3.8% (95% CI 3.1% 4.4%) decrease in demand for SSB's. Price elasticity of demand was highest for child friendly and high caffeine energy drinks. INTERPRETATION: Demand for SSB drinks at leisure centre venues is highly responsive to the policy, particularly for child-friendly and high caffeine energy drinks, compared with other SSB tax policy evaluations. The policy also increased purchases of carbonated non-SSB

A systematic review of methods to predict weight trajectories in health economic models of behavioral weight management programs : the potential role of psychosocial factors

Objectives. There is limited evidence on the long-term effectiveness of behavioral weight management interventions, and thus, when conducting health economic modeling, assumptions are made about weight trajectories. The aims of this review were to examine these assumptions made about weight trajectories, the evidence sources used to justify them, and the impact of assumptions on estimated cost-effectiveness. Given the evidence that some psychosocial variables are associated with weight-loss trajectories, we also aimed to examine the extent to which psychosocial variables have been used to estimate weight trajectories and whether psychosocial variables were measured within cited evidence sources. Methods. A search of databases (Medline, PubMed, Cochrane, NHS Economic Evaluation, Embase, PSYCinfo, CINAHL, EconLit) was conducted using keywords related to overweight, weight management, and economic evaluation. Economic evaluations of weight management interventions that included modeling beyond trial data were included. Results. Within the 38 eligible articles, 6 types of assumptions were reported (weight loss maintained, weight loss regained immediately, linear weight regain, subgroup-specific trajectories, exponential decay of effect, maintenance followed by regain). Fifteen articles cited at least 1 evidence source to support the assumption reported. The assumption used affected the assessment of cost-effectiveness in 9 of the 19 studies that tested this in sensitivity analyses. None of the articles reported using psychosocial factors to estimate weight trajectories. However, psychosocial factors were measured in evidence sources cited by 11 health economic models. Conclusions. Given the range of weight trajectories reported and the potential impact on funding decisions, further research is warranted to investigate how psychosocial variables measured in trials can be used within health economic models to simulate heterogeneous weight trajectories and potentially improve the accuracy of cost-effectiveness estimates