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Establishing a constitutional 'right of asylum' in early nineteenth-century Britain
Get PDFFor several generations before the First World War, the idea that the British constitution contained a ‘right of asylum' for foreign nationals was commonplace. Though this belief had profound consequences for Britain's treatment of political and religious exiles, its relations with foreign states, and the drafting of its extradition and immigration laws, there has been little enquiry into its origins. This article delineates the emergence of the idea of a constitutional ‘right of asylum', locating it in a series of political clashes over the ‘Alien Act' that took place during the decade after the Napoleonic Wars. This legislation, which established controls over foreigners during the French Revolution and the quarter-century of war that followed, was increasingly challenged by the Whig and radical oppositions after Waterloo, both for its specific arbitrary provisions and as a more fundamental violation of the rights of aliens guaranteed by key constitutional documents like Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act. By the mid-1820s these objections cohered into a conviction that asylum itself could be claimed as a right. This conviction and the arguments that spawned it were repeated for many subsequent decades, forming the basis of the widespread Victorian belief in the ‘right of asylum’
Operation Rubicon: Germany as an intelligence 'Great Power'?
Get PDFOperation Rubicon was probably one of the most successful intelligence operations of our time. Recent press revelations detail this secret partnership between the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), focused on the purchase and control of Crypto AG. Supported by German technical giants like Siemens, the company sold and produced compromised cypher machines. This article challenges the idea that the dominant sigint powers were within the anglosphere during the Cold War. Instead suggesting Rubicon evidences that the centre of gravity for intelligence lay ‘elsewhere’. It also explores the complex ethical implications of Germany’s involvement in Rubicon
The Periodical and Journalistic Writings of Dickens, “special correspondent for posterity”
Get PDFThis article is a translation by the author of “El periodismo de Charles Dickens: ‘corresponsal especial para la posteridad’,” their plenary paper read in February 2020 at the Congreso Internacional Charles Dickens hosted by San Pablo and Francisco de Vitoria universities, Madrid, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of Dickens’s death in 1870. It places Dickens's journalistic output in the context of his major works and the overall contours of his literary and public career, and reflects on some of the characteristic features of Dickensian style and sentiment, as well as on his editorial values and the estimation of them proffered by G. K. Chesterton in his 'Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens' (1911)
A systematic review and taxonomy of tools for evaluating Evidence-Based Medicine teaching in medical education
Get PDFThe importance of teaching the skills and practice of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) for medical professionals has steadily grown in recent years. Alongside this growth is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of EBM curriculum as assessed by competency in the five ‘A’s’: Asking, Acquiring, Appraising, Applying and Assessing (impact and performance). EBM educators in medical education will benefit from a compendium of existing assessment tools for assessing EBM competencies in their settings. The purpose of this review is to provide a systematic review and taxonomy of validated tools that evaluate EBM teaching in medical education
“They think it’s helpful, but it’s not”: A qualitative analysis of the experience of social support provided by peers in adolescents with type 1 diabetes
Get PDFBackground
Adherence in type 1 diabetes has previously been found to be improved with effective social support. However, research has so far been unable to elucidate the effect of social support from peers in adolescents with type 1 diabetes, with studies concluding they may be both positively and negatively related to self-care and glycaemic control. The present study explores the experience of social support from peers in adolescents with type 1 diabetes using a qualitative methodology to address this lack of consensus in the literature, using the research question: “what is the meaning and experience of social support from peers in adolescents with type 1 diabetes?”
Methods
Semi-structured interviews using the Diabetes Social Support Interview schedule were employed. Twelve participants aged 15-18 were recruited from paediatric outpatient services. Transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis.
Results
Two overarching themes were noted within transcripts; A Sense of Normality and "They Think It’s Helpful, But It’s Not". Overall, participants reported a desire for global support from peers, and explored how and why diabetes-specific support behaviours were more likely to be interpreted as harassing.
Conclusions
These findings suggest that diabetes-specific support may not always be advantageous in aiding adolescents to reach and maintain optimal self-care. In addition, participants emphasise the acceptability of advice provided by peers with type 1 diabetes, making peer support and mentoring programmes an excellent candidate for future research
Fluid Intelligence is Key to Successful Cryptic Crossword Solving
Get PDFBritish-style cryptic crossword solving is an under-researched domain of expertise, relatively unburdened by confounds found in other expertise research areas, such as early starting age, practice regimes, and high extrinsic rewards. Solving cryptic crosswords is an exercise in code-cracking detection work, requiring the segregation and interpretation of multiple clue components, and the deduction and application of their controlling rules. Following the Grounded Expert Components Approach (GECA, Friedlander & Fine, 2016) an earlier survey demonstrated that solvers were typically educated to at least degree level, often in mathematics and science-related disciplines. This study therefore hypothesized that as a group they would show higher-than-average fluid intelligence compared to a general population, with experts showing higher levels than ordinary solvers. Twenty-eight crossword solvers (18 objectively defined experts, and 10 non-experts) solved a bespoke cryptic crossword and completed the Alice Heim tests of fluid intelligence (AH5), a timed high-grade test, measuring verbal and numerical (Part I) and diagrammatic (Part 2) reasoning abilities. In the 45m allowed, 17 experts and 2 non-experts correctly finished the crossword (times ranging between 11m and 40m). Both solver groups scored highly on the AH5 (both overall and for Part I) compared to manual test norms, suggesting that cryptic crossword solving has a high cognitive entry threshold. The experts scored higher than the non-experts, both overall (p = .032) and on Part I (p = .002). The overall and Part I AH5 scores correlated negatively (rs =-.48;-.72 respectively) with extrapolated finishing times: faster finishing time being associated with higher AH5 scores. The experts and non-experts were matched in age, education, crossword solving experience, and weekly hours spent solving, leading to the suggestion that fluid intelligence differences between the groups may play an important role in cryptic crossword solving expertise. Although small in scale, the study thus adds to the growing body of literature which challenges the "deliberate practice only" framework of high expertise in a performance domain. Suggestions for future explorations in this domain are made
The Role of the Judicial System and Law Enforcement Agencies in Combating Terrorism in Pakistan
Get PDFTwo thousand years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher, orator, lawyer, and politician once stated that:
“The soul, mind, and meaning of a state lie in its laws.”
That is, laws are a reflection of the state’s mindset and commitment to fight issues like terrorism.
Terrorism is a global and seemingly intractable phenomenon that has become a global security concern in recent years with an ability to have an impact on virtually every country on the planet. Policymakers across the world have been working relentlessly to determine the most effective counter-terrorism response to this rising threat and it is fair to say that no single state has yet achieved a perfect solution.
Since the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of globalisation, terrorist movements with broad transnational reach have increasingly spread their ideologies to numerous different parts of the world and have achieved tremendous agility and impact. The 9/11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001 brought the Al Qaeda movement very firmly to the world’s attention and launched a new era of struggle against such decentralised and transnational ideological movements. More recently, the rise of Daesh in the Levant region has provided a further recruiting-ground for the most radical and violent members of society, not just in the Middle East but across many parts of the world. The United Nations has called on nations throughout the world to enact new anti-terrorism laws and to take steps to co-operate with other countries in various counter-terrorism measures
‘Trying to bring attention to your body when you’re not sure where it is’: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of drivers and barriers to mindfulness for people with neurological disabilities
Get PDFObjectives
Work is beginning to explore the impact of mindfulness in managing the physical and psychological health of people with neurological conditions. However, no previous work has sought to understand what drives people with such conditions to try mindfulness, and what barriers are experienced in accessing mindfulness.
Design
An exploratory, qualitative, interview design, utilising Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used.
Methods
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 people with spinal cord injury (SCI) who had experience of mindfulness since sustaining their injury. Verbatim transcripts were analysed using IPA to understand the lived experience of mindfulness post-SCI.
Results
Analysis suggested that managing physical and mental health, and viewing mindfulness as proactive and protective were key drivers for exploring mindfulness. However, multiple barriers to accessing opportunities and developing capability impeded engagement. These included the focus on areas of the body that participants had reduced sensation in, physical environments that could not be navigated in a wheelchair, social stigma surrounding the use of mindfulness, and a sense of obligation and risk of failure implied by course requirements.
Conclusions
The results demonstrate the need for specific interventions to accommodate the educed sensory and physical function experienced by people with neurological conditions and to enhance sense of control and autonomy. In addition, recommendations include minimising the stigma surrounding mindfulness, and the potentially demotivating impact of the perception of ‘failing’ to engage
Automated Analysis of Cellular Signalling Parameters based on Images and Videos of Fluorescence Microscopy
Get PDFRapid changes in computer vision technologies have enabled automatic perspectives for more disciplines that tend to need heavy intervention from human experts. Computational biology, which is the application field of this thesis, is one of those disciplines where computer technologies (software and hardware systems) are applied on cell biology research, drug discovery, and disease diagnosis. The research conducted in this thesis is primarily concerned with automating the analysis of calcium imaging data obtained by two-dimensional (2D) fluorescence microscopy (FM) over living cells. The thesis also presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the state-of-the-art object detection techniques used in Region based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) and proposes a new R-CNN scheme tailored for cellular object detection in FM data. The analysed images are either individual greyscale images or image stacks of cardiac myocytes stained with DNA markers or calcium indicators. The cells are special cardiac cells found in lung veins, called Pulmonary Vein sleeve Cells (PVC) and Neo-natal Rat Ventricular Myocytes (NRVM) extracted from heart muscle. PVC stains enable the analysis of Calcium signals effect on heart physiology, whereas NRVM images allow autophagy process measuring through accurate cell counting.
In the thesis, we demonstrated that automated hotspot detection can be achieved with 79.75% of precision by a two-level segmentation procedure combining thresholding and statistical filtering of cellular regions. We also showed that photobleaching can be corrected by exponential curve fitting and baseline adjustment from normalised calcium traces with respectively a mean square error (MSE) varying between [0.09013, 6.41796] and an overall accuracy of 78.75% for a real-life dataset. Finally, based on the investigation carried over state-of-the-art object detection techniques developed in the past such as the Edge Boxes, the Selective Search, the Objectness Measure, and the Sliding Window paradigm, we demonstrated that a customised R-CNN framework based on a data-driven proposal box generation outperforms with less sampling rate (61 proposals/image) and more ground truth coverage ratio (GTCR of 99.40%)
Sixty Years of Drug Discovery for Type 2 Diabetes: Where Are We Now?
Get PDFThe control of blood glucose is a dynamic interplay involving several complex systems. In diabetes these systems are perturbed, resulting in a disease continuum of progressive decline over many years. Today, excluding insulin, there are eight classes of anti-diabetic agent which have taken over 60 years to add to the pharmacy chest. In this review I have examined each of these classes with some bias towards drug discovery thinking. Based on history, future science here will be strong, progressive and innovative; the huge test for industry is their response to enormous challenges besetting drug discovery and successfully turn the drug discovery praxis into affordable, effective and safe medicines