Interpretation, translation and intercultural communication in refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France

This article explores the interplay between language and intercultural communication within refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, using material taken from ethnographic research that involved a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis in both countries over a two-year period (2007–2009). It is concerned, in particular, to examine the role played by interpreters in facilitating intercultural communication between asylum applicants and the different administrative and legal actors responsible for assessing or defending their claims. The first section provides an overview of refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, introducing the main administrative and legal contexts of the asylum process within which interpreters operate in the two countries. The second section compares the organisation of interpreting services, codes of conduct for interpreters and institutional expectations about the nature of interpreters’ activity on the part of the relevant UK and French authorities. The third section then explores some of the practical dilemmas for interpreters and barriers to communication that exist in refugee status determination procedures in the two countries. The article concludes by emphasising the complex and active nature of the interpreter's role in UK and French refugee status determination procedures

Numerical simulation of a linear stochastic oscillator with additive noise

The ability of numerical methods to reproduce long-time features of a linear stochastic oscillator is examined. It is shown that certain, widely-used, methods fail to capture the correct second moment growth rate, whereas a customized extension of the partitioned Euler method behaves well in this respect. It is also shown that the partitioned Euler method inherits an infinite-oscillation property. A weaker oscillation result is proved for a wide class of numerical methods

Mass of the B_c Meson in Three-Flavor Lattice QCD

We use lattice QCD to predict the mass of the $B_c$ meson. We use the MILC Collaboration's ensembles of lattice gauge fields, which have a quark sea with two flavors much lighter than a third. Our final result is $m_{B_c}=6304\pm12^{+18}_{- 0} MeV$. The first error bar is a sum in quadrature of statistical and systematic uncertainties, and the second is an estimate of heavy-quark discretization effects.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; shorten to fit in PRL; published versio

Progress Calculating Decay Constants with NRQCD and AsqTad Actions

We combine a light AsqTad antiquark with a nonrelativistic heavy quark to compute the decay constants of heavy-light pseudoscalar mesons using the ensemble of 3-flavor gauge field configurations generated by the MILC collaboration. Preliminary results for $f_{B_s}$ and $f_{D_s}$ are given and status of the chiral extrapolation to $f_B$ is reported. We also touch upon results of the perturbative calculation which matches matrix elements in the effective theory to the full theory at 1-loop order.Comment: Talk delivered at Lattice2003(heavy), 3 page

Glassy timescale divergence and anomalous coarsening in a kinetically constrained spin chain

We analyse the out of equilibrium behavior of an Ising spin chain with an asymmetric kinetic constraint after a quench to a low temperature T. In the limit T\to 0, we provide an exact solution of the resulting coarsening process. The equilibration time exhibits a `glassy' divergence \teq=\exp(const/T^2) (popular as an alternative to the Vogel-Fulcher law), while the average domain length grows with a temperature dependent exponent, \dbar ~ t^{T\ln 2}. We show that the equilibration time \teq also sets the timescale for the linear response of the system at low temperatures.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, includes two eps figures. Proof of energy barrier hierarchy added. Version to be published in Phys Rev Let

Finite-top-mass effects in NNLO Higgs production

We construct an accurate approximation to the exact NNLO cross section for Higgs production in gluon-gluon fusion by matching the dominant finite top mass corrections recently computed by us to the known result in the infinite mass limit. The ensuing corrections to the partonic cross section are very large when the center of mass energy of the partonic collision is much larger than the Higgs mass, but lead to a moderate correction at the percent level to the total Higgs production cross section at the LHC. Our computation thus reduces the uncertainty related to these corrections at the LHC from the percent to the per mille level.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; to be published in the proceedings of QCD2008. Reference adde

Generating social network data using partially described networks: an example informing avian influenza control in the British poultry industry

<p>Background: Targeted sampling can capture the characteristics of more vulnerable sectors of a population, but may bias the picture of population level disease risk. When sampling network data, an incomplete description of the population may arise leading to biased estimates of between-host connectivity. Avian influenza (AI) control planning in Great Britain (GB) provides one example where network data for the poultry industry (the Poultry Network Database or PND), targeted large premises and is consequently demographically biased. Exposing the effect of such biases on the geographical distribution of network properties could help target future poultry network data collection exercises. These data will be important for informing the control of potential future disease outbreaks.</p> <p>Results: The PND was used to compute between-farm association frequencies, assuming that farms sharing the same slaughterhouse or catching company, or through integration, are potentially epidemiologically linked. The fitted statistical models were extrapolated to the Great Britain Poultry Register (GBPR); this dataset is more representative of the poultry industry but lacks network information. This comparison showed how systematic biases in the demographic characterisation of a network, resulting from targeted sampling procedures, can bias the derived picture of between-host connectivity within the network.</p> <p>Conclusions: With particular reference to the predictive modeling of AI in GB, we find significantly different connectivity patterns across GB when network estimates incorporate the more demographically representative information provided by the GBPR; this has not been accounted for by previous epidemiological analyses. We recommend ranking geographical regions, based on relative confidence in extrapolated estimates, for prioritising further data collection. Evaluating whether and how the between-farm association frequencies impact on the risk of between-farm transmission will be the focus of future work.</p&gt

Students and staff working in partnership: experiences from a collaborative writing group

Higher education institutions are striving to enhance student engagement in learning (Carini et al, 2006). Increasing the degree of student ownership of the learning process and offering an authentic situated learning experience (Brown et al, 1989) are possible ways to enhance student engagement. In response to this, participants on a postgraduate programme in Professional Education at Queen Margaret University (QMU), Edinburgh, were invited to set up a writing group in partnership with a member of staff from the programme team. Participants on this course were either lecturers at QMU, lecturers at other higher education institutions or health professionals with an education remit. All participants were under differing degrees of pressure to publish written work related to their practice and only the member of staff from the programme team had published previously. Many of the participants were not confident in their ability to produce writing for publication (Dixon 2001). This paper outlines the experiences from this collaborative writing group in which members of the group wrote an article for publication about their perceptions of being involved in an action research project. An outline is given of the aims of the writing group, the writing approach adopted, the group processes involved and the outcomes from the group. This work offers insights into how partnership working between ‘students’ and ‘academics’ as part of a course, can enhance student engagement in learning and develop their confidence to write and publish

Static near-horizon geometries in five dimensions

We consider the classification of static near-horizon geometries of stationary extremal (not necessarily BPS) black hole solutions of five dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory coupled to a Chern-Simons term with coupling xi (with xi=1 corresponding to supergravity). Assuming the black holes have two rotational symmetries, we show that their near-horizon geometries are either the direct product AdS_3 X S^2 or a warped product of AdS_2 and compact 3d space. In the AdS_2 case we are able to classify all possible near-horizon geometries with no magnetic fields. There are two such solutions: the direct product AdS_2 X S^3 as well as a warped product of AdS_2 and an inhomogeneous S^3. The latter solution turns out to be near-horizon limit of an extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole in an external electric field. In the AdS_2 case with magnetic fields, we reduce the problem (in all cases) to a single non-linear ODE. We show that if there are any purely magnetic solutions of this kind they must have S^1 X S^2 horizon topology, and for xi^2 <1/4 we find examples of solutions with both electric and magnetic fields.Comment: Latex, 28 pages. v2: minor changes, reference adde

Maladaptive bias for extrahippocampal navigation strategies in aging humans.

Efficient spatial navigation requires not only accurate spatial knowledge but also the selection of appropriate strategies. Using a novel paradigm that allowed us to distinguish between beacon, associative cue, and place strategies, we investigated the effects of cognitive aging on the selection and adoption of navigation strategies in humans. Participants were required to rejoin a previously learned route encountered from an unfamiliar direction. Successful performance required the use of an allocentric place strategy, which was increasingly observed in young participants over six experimental sessions. In contrast, older participants, who were able to recall the route when approaching intersections from the same direction as during encoding, failed to use the correct place strategy when approaching intersections from novel directions. Instead, they continuously used a beacon strategy and showed no evidence of changing their behavior across the six sessions. Given that this bias was already apparent in the first experimental session, the inability to adopt the correct place strategy is not related to an inability to switch from a firmly established response strategy to an allocentric place strategy. Rather, and in line with previous research, age-related deficits in allocentric processing result in shifts in preferred navigation strategies and an overall bias for response strategies. The specific preference for a beacon strategy is discussed in the context of a possible dissociation between beacon-based and associative-cue-based response learning in the striatum, with the latter being more sensitive to age-related changes