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The impact of the Prevent Agenda on social work: a systematic literature review
Get PDFThe Prevent Agenda, introduced in 2006, is a counter-terrorism strategy aiming to address radicalisation and extremist behaviour. This systematic literature review (SLR) focuses on its impact on child protection social work, examining how it influences roles, responsibilities and decision-making processes. Analysing articles, governmental reports and relevant literature, the review explores outcomes, such as improved inter-agency communication and heightened awareness of radicalisation risk factors. However, much more pronounced in the literature are very significant concerns that arise about potential biases in targeting, marginalising Muslim minorities and alienating families from support. This SLR offers insights into the multifaceted effects of Prevent on child protection social work, families and communities. Identifying trends and knowledge gaps contributes to understanding how counterterrorism intersects with child welfare. The review’s implications inform policy, professional training and future research for a balanced approach to national security and child and family well-being.This work was not supported by funders
Navigating uncertainty: the role of auditor demographics in key audit matters reporting amid COVID-19 in Egypt
Get PDFData availability statement: Data is available on request from the authors.JEL classification M40, M42Purpose:
This study aims to explore the auditors’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt, with a focus on how their demographic characteristics – specifically gender, work experience and audit firm size – affect their ability to identify key audit matters (KAMs).
Design/methodology/approach:
The study used exploratory factor analysis to develop an index for evaluating auditors’ proficiency in distinguishing KAMs from non-KAMs, followed by multivariate regression analysis to analyze the impact of auditors’ demographics on this ability.
Findings:
The study’s findings are significant as they highlight the influence of auditors’ gender and work experience on their capability to correctly classify KAMs. However, the size of the audit firm showed no significant effect on the auditors’ decision-making efficacy in identifying KAMs.
Research limitations/implications:
While the study illuminates critical aspects of audit judgment during unprecedented times, it acknowledges limitations, including its geographical focus on Egypt and reliance on self-reported data. The implications stress the need for audit firms and regulators to consider auditors’ demographic characteristics when formulating policies to enhance audit quality and reliability during crises.
Originality/value:
This research breaks new ground in the auditing literature by shedding light on the distinct role of auditor demographics in shaping audit opinion during crises. It is one of the pioneering studies to quantitatively assess the impact of auditors’ gender, experience and firm size on KAM identification in a global health crisis. It provides a unique perspective on audit practices in emerging economies.The authors declared no funding was received for this article
Colour-evasive racial ideologies underpinning the hidden curriculum of a majority-minority occupational therapy school in London, England: an analysis of minoritised undergraduate students’ experiences
Get PDFData availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.The concept of ethnoracial ‘majority-minority’ was introduced to describe changing population demographics where racial or ethnic groups traditionally in the majority have become a numerical minority. Despite their increase in recent years, very little is known of how hidden curricula manifests in these settings. Hence, this study sought to interrogate the hidden curriculum of race at an Occupational Therapy school with a majority-minority student-educator population in London, England. We conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data from a larger action research project. The main data source was derived from two group interviews involving 11 racially minoritised student participants, and thematically analysed through a hidden curriculum lens. Trustworthiness of the analysis was enforced through crystallisation. The hidden curriculum of race was identified as embedded within (1) formal learning, (2) the null curriculum, (3) the informal curriculum, and (4) administrative structure and functioning. It is underpinned by pervasive colour-evasive racial ideologies which perpetuate health and workforce inequities. This paper concludes that majority-minority population demographics are insufficient to mitigate the impact of wider societal norms of oppression on hidden curricula. Thus, concerted and collective efforts involving all professional stakeholders are needed to embed intersectional, critical race-conscious approaches throughout formal learning across the academic curriculum.This study is part of a larger project jointly funded by Brunel University London Access and Participation Unit, and Health Education England (Capital AHP). For more information about the project and its outputs, please visit: https://www.brunel.ac.uk/coproducing-inclusive-learning
Unleashing the Lion’s Roar: A Grassroots Countercampaign and the Memorialization of the “Glorious” British Empire
Get PDFThe recent boom in studies on colonial statues bears witness to the global “statue wars” waged in response to the unfinished business of decolonization and civil rights campaigns for racial and social justice. However, the focus of scholarship on iconoclasm and “fallism” has resulted in a relative absence of research into cases where fallism has failed in the face of grassroots campaigns to preserve colonial statues and monuments. This article helps to address this gap by exploring the aims and motives of the countercampaigners, the anti-fallists, who defended the reputation of British colonists in Africa and succeeded in preserving a memorial honoring their legacy: the Lendy Memorial in Sunbury-on-Thames. Using untapped original sources from the National Archives, the article exposes the controversial history behind the Lendy Memorial and argues that the key to the countercampaign’s success was to revive a gilded view of British imperialism by deliberately distorting and censoring historical evidence while tapping into nationalist rhetoric and public and political objections to progressive political and social activism, ridiculed as “woke.”..
Modelling and Characterisation of Orthotropic Damage in Aluminium Alloy 2024
Get PDFData Availability Statement: The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.The aim of the work presented in this paper was development of a thermodynamically consistent constitutive model for orthotopic metals and determination of its parameters based on standard characterisation methods used in the aerospace industry. The model was derived with additive decomposition of the strain tensor and consisted of an elastic part, derived from Helmholtz free energy, Hill’s thermodynamic potential, which controls evolution of plastic deformation, and damage orthotopic potential, which controls evolution of damage in material. Damage effects were incorporated using the continuum damage mechanics approach, with the effective stress and energy equivalence principle. Material characterisation and derivation of model parameters was conducted with standard specimens with a uniform cross-section, although a number of tests with non-uniform cross-sections were also conducted here. The tests were designed to assess the extent of damage in material over a range of plastic deformation values, where displacement was measured locally using digital image correlation. The new model was implemented as a user material subroutine in Abaqus and verified and validated against the experimental results for aerospace-grade aluminium alloy 2024-T3. Verification was conducted in a series of single element tests, designed to separately validate elasticity, plasticity and damage-related parts of the model. Validation at this stage of the development was based on comparison of the numerical results with experimental data obtained in the quasistatic characterisation tests, which illustrated the ability of the modelling approach to predict experimentally observed behaviour. A validated user material subroutine allows for efficient simulation-led design improvements of aluminium components, such as stiffened panels and the other thin-wall structures used in the aerospace industry.This research received no external funding
Enhancing wind energy forecasting efficiency through Dense and Dropout Networks (DDN): Leveraging grid search optimization
Get PDFThis thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis research investigates wind energy forecasting using a Deep Dense Network (DDN)
method enhanced by Grid Search Optimization. It begins with an introduction to wind
energy mechanics and machine learning principles, setting the stage for the study's main
problem. Further, a comprehensive literature review explores recent machine learning
trends for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) output estimation, including deep Neural
Networks (NN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and
other forecasting models, discussing their advantages and disadvantages.
The proposed methodology focuses on the Deep Dense Network (DDN) model, detailing
its algorithm. The dataset incorporates several variables, such as wind speed, wind
direction, temperature, and air pressure and was scaled. A DDN model with eight dense
layers of 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, and 8 neurons, each followed by dropout layers (rate
0.4) and using ReLU activation, was designed. The final output layer, with a single neuron,
predicts system power. The model was compiled with the Adam optimizer (learning rate
0.1), minimizing MSE and MAE. Early stopping (patience 50 epochs) was employed to
prevent overfitting. Grid Search Optimization was applied to fine-tune parameters such as
learning rate, dropout rate, batch size, and epochs, improving prediction results
The evaluation employs two key metrics: Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute
Error (MAE). Together, these metrics provide a comprehensive evaluation of the DDN
model's performance by capturing both the average error magnitude (MAE) and
emphasizing larger errors (MSE), offering a balanced assessment of prediction accuracy
and error distribution. The results demonstrate the model’s capability to converge,
indicating effective learning from the data. The application of MSE and MAE metrics
substantiates the model's accuracy, with significant reductions in these values reinforcing
the proposed approach's validity. Specifically, the MSE decreased from 0.0785 before Grid
Search Optimization to 0.0047 after optimization, achieving a 94.013% improvement.
Similarly, the MAE reduced from 0.2376 to 0.0548, reflecting a 76.8474% improvement.
These substantial enhancements validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Given
the relatively nascent state of renewable energy and deep learning fields, this study offers
valuable insights and proposes several directions for future research, establishing a solid
foundation for further advancements in this area
Frontal brain volume correlates of impaired executive function in schizophrenia
Get PDFData availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Supplementary data are available online at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395624004680?via%3Dihub#appsec1 .Cognitive impairments affect functional capacity in individuals with schizophrenia (SZH), but their neural basis remains unclear. The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), and the Stroop Task (SCWT), are paradigmatic tests which have been used extensively for examining executive function in SZH. However, few studies have explored how deficits on these tasks link to brain volume differences commonly seen in SZH. Here, for the first time, we tested associations between FreeSurfer-derived frontal brain volumes and performance on both WCST and SCWT, in a well-matched sample of 57 SZH and 32 control subjects. We also explored whether these associations were dissociable from links to symptom severity in SZH. Results revealed correlations between volumes and task performance which were unique to SZH. In SZH only, volumes of right middle frontal regions correlated with both WCST and Stroop performance: correlation coefficients were significantly different to those present in the control group, highlighting their specificity to the patient group. In the Stroop task, superior frontal regions also showed associations with Stroop interference scores which were unique to SZH. These findings provide important detail around how deficits on these two paradigmatic executive function tasks link to brain structural differences in SZH. Results align with converging evidence suggesting that neuropathology within right middle frontal regions (BA9 and BA46) might be of particular import in SZH. No volumetric associations with symptom severity were found, supporting the notion that the structural abnormalities underpinning cognitive deficits in SZH differ from those associated with symptomatology.The study was supported by funds from the Wellcome Trust, UK (067427/z/02/z)
Breast cancer risk and prevention in 2024: An overview from the Breast Cancer UK - Breast Cancer Prevention Conference
Get PDFData Availability Statement:
Not applicable.The Breast Cancer UK—Breast Cancer Prevention Conference addressed risk from environmental pollutants and health behaviour-related breast-cancer risk. Epidemiological studies examining individual chemicals and breast cancer risk have produced inconclusive results including endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) Bisphenol A, per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances as well as aluminium. However, laboratory studies have shown that multiple EDCs, can work together to exhibit effects, even when combined at levels that alone are ineffective. The TEXB-α/β assay measures total estrogenic load, and studies have provided evidence of a link between multiple-chemical exposures and breast cancer. However, prospective studies using TEXB-α/β are needed to establish a causative link. There is also a need to assess real-life exposure to environmental-chemical mixtures during pregnancy, and their potential involvement in programming adverse foetal health outcomes in later life.
Higher rates of breast cancer have occurred alongside increases in potentially-modifiable risk factors such as obesity. Increasing body-mass index is associated with increased risk of developing postmenopausal breast cancer, but with decreased risk of premenopausal breast cancer. In contrast, lower rates of breast cancer in Asian compared to Western populations have been linked to soya/isoflavone consumption. Risk is decreased by breastfeeding, which is in addition to the decrease in risk observed for each birth and a young first-birth. Risk is lower in those with higher levels of self-reported physical activity. Current evidence suggests breast-cancer survivors should also avoid weight gain, be physically active, and eat a healthy diet for overall health.
A broad scientific perspective on breast cancer risk requires focus on both environmental exposure to chemicals and health behaviour-related risk. Research into chemical exposure needs to focus on chemical mixtures and prospective epidemiological studies in order to test the effects on breast cancer risk. Behaviour-related research needs to focus on implementation as well as deeper understanding of the mechanisms of cancer prevention.Breast Cancer UK as the funder of the Breast Cancer Prevention Conference at Middlesex University in June 2023. D Gareth Evans is supported by the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (IS-BRC-1215-20007) and Cancer Research UK ACED Alliance Early Detection Centre C19941/A27859
Continuing Contestation of the Concept of Democracy: A Norm or a Right?
Get PDF20 slides.Democracy was one of the concepts given by Gallie as contested, and the practice and articulation of the concept since Gallie wrote in the 1950s suggest the understanding of democracy as a jural concept remains disputed. Gallie’s theory of an essentially contested concept supposed there exists recognised or shared ideas of political or philosophical importance subject nonetheless to ongoing contestation as to their meaning that is not marginal. More recent scholarship has tended to affirm Gallie’s analysis of democracy, with refinements about how to articulate the extent or character of contestedness, and notwithstanding the widespread adoption of democratic systems of government after the Cold War. Held identifies over ten different conceptions as to how a democracy can be structured, while scholars also disagree about the measurement of a democratic standard whatever the structural form self-described democratic institutions may take, especially regarding the concept of participation and regarding procedural and substantive accounts of democracy (or of the quality of democracy). Scholars have also recently disputed the status of democracy as a ‘right’, in the sense of it having a normative status beyond what recognition may be given to it in particular national systems. While the notion of democracy as a right may be considered the strongest expression of its normative value, international practice, including, for example, in the EU and Council of Europe, has strengthened claims for the global normative standing of democracy beyond individual States. Taking Gallie’s concept of essentially contested concepts as a starting point, this paper considers to what extent a core normative content of the concept of democracy can be identified, including to what extent the concept overlaps or interacts with other politically and legally endorsed norms such as rights and the rule of law
Search for pair production of heavy particles decaying to a top quark and a gluon in the lepton+jets final state in proton–proton collisions at √ = 13 TeV
Get PDFA version of the article is available at arXiv:2410.20601v2 [hep-ex] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20601). Comments: Replaced with the published version. Added the journal reference and the DOI. All the figures and tables can be found at https://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/B2G-22-005 (CMS Public Pages). Report number: CMS-B2G-22-005, CERN-EP-2024-266. Journal reference: Eur. Phys. J. C 85 (2025) 342. Submission history: From: The CMS Collaboration: [v1] Sun, 27 Oct 2024 21:20:48 UTC (620 KB); [v2] Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:26:51 UTC (608 KB).Data Availability Statement: Release and preservation of data used by the CMS Collaboration as the basis for publications is guided by the CMS data preservation, re-use and open access policy (https://cms-docdb.cern.ch/cgi-bin/PublicDocDB/RetrieveFile?docid=6032&filename=CMSDataPolicyV1.2.pdf&version=2).Code Availability Statement: The CMS core software is publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/cms-sw/cmssw).A search is presented for the pair production of new heavy resonances, each decaying into a top quark (t) or antiquark and a gluon (g). The analysis uses data recorded with the CMS detector from proton–proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138
fb⁻¹. Events with one muon or electron, multiple jets, and missing transverse momentum are selected. After using a deep neural network to enrich the data sample with signal-like events, distributions in the scalar sum of the transverse momenta of all reconstructed objects are analyzed in the search for a signal. No significant deviations from the standard model prediction are found. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set on the product of cross section and branching fraction squared for the pair production of excited top quarks in the t* → tg decay channel. The upper limits range from 120 to 0.8 fb for a t* with spin-1/2 and from 15 to 1.0 for a t* with spin-3/2. These correspond to mass exclusion limits up to 1050 and 1700 GeV for spin-1/2 and spin-3/2 particles, respectively. These are the most stringent limits to date on the existence of t* → tg resonances.SCOAP³
Data sources:
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