723 research outputs found
A multilevel analysis of the effects of rurality and social deprivation on premature limiting long term illness
No full textSTUDY OBJECTIVE---To examine the geographical variation in self perceived morbidity in the south west of England, and assess the associations with rurality and social deprivation.DESIGN---A geographically based cross sectional study using 1991 census data on premature Limiting Long Term Illness (LLTI). The urban-rural and intra-rural variation in standardised premature LLTI ratios is described, and correlation and regression analyses explore how well this is explained by generic deprivation indices. Multilevel Poisson modelling investigates whether Customised Deprivation Profiles (CDPs) and area characteristics improve upon the generic indices.SETTING---Nine counties in the south west of EnglandPARTICIPANTS---The population of the south west enumerated in the 1991 census.MAIN RESULTS---Intra-rural variation is apparent, with higher rates of premature LLTI in remoter areas. Together with high rates in urban areas and lower rates in the semi-rural areas this indicates the existence of a U shaped relation with rurality. The generic deprivation indices have strong positive relations with premature LLTI in urban areas, but these are a lot weaker in semi-rural and rural locations. CDPs improve upon the generic indices, especially in the rural settings. A substantial reduction in unexplained variation in rural areas is seen after controlling for the level of local isolation, with higher isolation, at the wider geographical scale, being related to higher levels of LLTI.CONCLUSIONS---This study highlights the need to treat rural areas as heterogeneous, although this has not been the tendency in health research. Generic deprivation indices are unlikely to be a true reflection of levels of deprivation in rural environments. The importance of CDPs that are specific to the area type and health outcome is emphasised. The significance of physical isolation suggests that accessibility to public and health services may be an important issue, and requires further research
Polyphony and the anxiety of influence in the fiction of Henry James
No full textJames's fiction, especially in the Middle Phase, centres
on the figure of the artist and is characterized by, the two
interrelated aspects which previous criticism has largely
overlooked: the Bakhtinian 'polyphonic' -creation of
'author-thinkers'; and the conflict between ephebes and
precursors, for which Harold-Bloom's concept of 'the-anxiety of
influence' is the most illuminating model. Polyphony is the
narrative mode, and influence is the intra-artistic, theme.
These, as the Introduction to the thesis makes clear, are
rehearsed in James's inaugural novel, Roderick Hudson. Rowland
Mallet is an author-thinker, and his failure is caused by
authorial limitations. His monologism -is impaired by his
mistaking empathy for the authorial sympathy. Likewise,
Hudson's failure does not arise from a mercurial temperament,
but from a polyphonic shortcoming: not possessing the power of
fiction to contain the fiction of power in, his mentor. And the
relationships among the three artists - Gloriani, Hudson and
Singleton - perfectly exemplify the Bloomian-theme. It is these
two concepts, polyphony and influence, which are the major
preoccupation in the Middle Phase; as, the works chosen
demonstrate. These are a novella, a novel, and a number of
short stories all of which have been unjustifiably neglected.
Chapter One, on The Aspern Papers, argues that Tina Bordereau,
far from being, the artless victim seen by many critics,
actually challenges and defeats the narrator by the very form
of her narrative. Her 'realist' discourse undermines his
language of 'romance', and shows up its internal unstability.
Chapter Two is an extensive study of the critical reception of
The Tragic Muse. The most common areas of critical attention
have been its contemporary topicality, its relation to previous
novels on similar themes, and the possible genealogy of Gabriel
Nash. Those have all missed the core of the work. - Chapter Three
demonstrates how polyphony and the anxiety of influence make
the novel what it really is. Influence arises from the
juxtaposition of, and the wrestling between, artistic ephebes
and their precursors (Nick and Nash,, Miriam and Madame Carre).
The dialogic quality defined by Bakhtin is crucial to the
proper, and even-handed, characterization of all, the conflicts
in the novel. And since most of James's tales in the eighties
and nineties -are about 'masters - and acolytes, the anxiety of
influence remains central. Chapter Four is a study of 'The
Author of Beltraffiol' and 'The Lesson of the Master'. Again the
characters' manipulations are a crucial focus in a way that
G6rard Genette's terminology helps to illuminate. The fact that
the ephebe is the author-thinker emphasizes the inextricability
of the Bakhtinian and the Bloomian in James. Just as
polyphony offers a different focus for explicating the poetics
of James's fiction; so the ephebal conflict provides the basis
for a fresh perception of James's own artistic struggle
The inter-relationships between three proxies of health care need at the small area level: an urban/rural comparison
No full textStudy objective: To examine the relations between geographical variations in mortality, morbidity, and deprivation at the small area level in the south west of England and to assess whether these relations vary between urban and rural areas. Design: A geographically based cross sectional study using 1991 census data on premature limiting long term illness (LLTI) and socioeconomic characteristics, and 1991–1996 data on all cause premature mortality. The interrelations between the three widely used proxies of health care need are examined using correlation coefficients and scatterplots. The distribution of standardised LLTI residuals from a regression analysis on mortality are mapped and compared with the distribution of urban and rural areas. Multilevel Poisson modelling investigates whether customised deprivation profiles improve upon a generic deprivation index in explaining the spatial variation in morbidity and mortality after controlling for age and sex. These relations are examined separately for urban, fringe, and rural areas. Setting: Nine counties in the south west of England. Participants: Those aged between 0–64 who reported having a LLTI in the 1991 census, and those who died during 1991–1996 aged 0–74. Main results: Relations between both health outcomes and generic deprivation indices are stronger in urban than rural areas. The replacement of generic with customised indices is an improvement in all area types, especially for LLTI in rural areas. The relation between mortality and morbidity is stronger in urban than rural areas, with levels of LLTI appearing to be greater in rural areas than would be predicted from mortality rates. Despite the weak direct relations between mortality and morbidity, there are strong relations between the customised deprivation indices computed to predict these outcomes in all area types. Conclusions: The improvement of the customised deprivation indices over the generic indices, and the similarity between the mortality and morbidity customised indices within area types highlights the importance of modelling urban and rural areas separately. Stronger relations between mortality and morbidity have been revealed at the local authority level in previous research providing empirical evidence that the inadequacy of mortality as a proxy for morbidity becomes more marked at lower levels of aggregation, especially in rural areas. Higher levels of LLTI than expected in rural areas may reflect different perceptions or differing patterns of illness. The stronger relations between the three proxies in urban than rural areas suggests that the choice of indicator will have less impact in urban than rural areas and strengthens the argument to develop better measures of health care need in rural areas
A spectroscopic investigation of gallium lanthanum sulphide based glasses for optical devices
No full textThe optical communications network requires an efficient and cost effective 1.3 #mu#m optical fibre-amplifier. The Praseodynium ion (Pr"3"+) 1.3 #mu#m transition is the best candidate but requires a glass host with low phonon energy to produce a high radiative efficiency. Gallium Lanthanum Sulphide (GLS) based glasses are investigated as potential low phonon energy hosts. The work reported aims to link the spectroscopic results to the observed physical and optical properties and to the composition and atomic structure of the glasses. The Pr"3"+ doped GLS glass shows a high radiative quantum efficiency (RQE) for the 1.3 #mu#m transition and the lifetime of the transition is also long indicating a potentially useful glass dopant system. The Pr"3"+ enters the glass with a large coordination number and is sulphur coordinated. The Pr"3"+ doped GLS glass spectroscopic, optical and physical properties are found to be extremely susceptible to oxide impurities and added La_2O_3. In the Gallium Lanthanum Oxy-Sulphide (GLSO) glass the Pr"3"+ spectroscopy becomes excitation wavelength dependent. The temperature range of glass formation is increased as more oxide is added whilst the RQE and lifetime of the 1.3 #mu#m transition are strongly reduced. This is explained through new oxide coordination for the Pr"3"+, which experiences a higher energy phonon and a different nephelauxetic shift of the Stark levels. The increased temperature range for glass formation of the GLSO glass is beneficial since the range of GLS glass is small. By adding metal halides to the GLS glass it was hoped that the improved glass forming properties of the GLSO glass could be kept along with the high RQE and lifetime of the 1.3 #mu#m transition. The metal halide CsCI provided the largest increase in glass forming temperature range. The RQE was slightly reduced from the GLS value but much larger than the GLSO value. The lifetime was the longest measured. The dependence of the physical and optical properties on amount of metal halide was explained by changes in the bonding of the glass formers whilst the spectroscopic properties were most strongly influenced by bulk glass effects indicating a similar coordination for the Pr"3"+ in the GLS and CsCI GLS glasses. The doped GLS glass was not found to obey the simple multiphonon non-radiative decay formula with each rare-earth transition needing to be assessed individually. (author)SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN027875 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
A violence of gifts
No full textFor soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra, duration c.38 minutes. This work was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 as part of the composer’s residency at the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The text, by Owen Sheers, was commissioned with funding from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
The premiere took place on 18 April 2015 at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Martyn Brabbins with soloists Elizabeth Atherton & Roderick Williams.
A Violence of Gifts comprises six subsections cast in two main parts. The piece explores themes of origins: the origins of light and matter, and of life on Earth
Review of \u3ci\u3eHe Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western\u3c/i\u3e by Roderick McGillis
No full textIt takes something of a masochist to watch close to two hundred B westerns, but Roderick McGillis claims to have done that in researching this book. For those of you who are not film history buffs, a B movie was a cheap, relatively short (sixty to seventy-five minutes), formulaic genre film made to be the second half of a double feature. A lot of B movies were westerns because they were cheap and popular, particularly with boys and young men. They had their own stars, many of whom moved on to television, which killed the B movie: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), Bob Steele, and Johnny Mack Brown. John Wayne began in B westerns but graduated to the top of the bill in John Ford\u27s Stagecoach. Like author Roderick McGillis, I remember when B westerns were a staple of early afternoon television programming on just about every local channel. I also recall realizing by the time I was ten that these films, though bearing different titles, were so limited by generic conventions they were sometimes hard to tell apart: white hats versus black hats, the same set and stock footage, the inevitable chase on horseback, the climactic fight between hero and villain. For McGillis, the nostalgia for a mythic, morally unambiguous American past communicated by these movies reinforces his own nostalgia for them as a crucial part of his boyhood
Dynamical models for neonatal intensive care monitoring
No full textThe vital signs monitoring data of an infant receiving intensive care are a rich source of information
about its health condition. One major concern about the state of health of such patients
is the onset of neonatal sepsis, a life-threatening bloodstream infection. As early signs are subtle
and current diagnosis procedures involve slow laboratory testing, sepsis detection based on
the monitored physiological dynamics is a clinically significant task. This challenging problem
can be thoroughly modelled as real-time inference within a machine learning framework.
In this thesis, we develop probabilistic dynamical models centred around the goal of providing
useful predictions about the onset of neonatal sepsis. This research is characterised by
the careful incorporation of domain knowledge for the purpose of extracting the infant’s true
physiology from the monitoring data.
We make two main contributions. The first one is the formulation of sepsis detection as
learning and inference in an Auto-Regressive Hidden Markov Model (AR-HMM). The model
investigates the extent to which physiological events observed in the patient’s monitoring traces
could be used for the early detection of neonatal sepsis. In addition, the proposed approach
involves exact marginalisation over missing data at inference time. When applying the ARHMM
on a real-world dataset, we found that it can produce effective predictions about the
onset of sepsis.
Second, both sepsis and clinical event detection are formulated as learning and inference in
a Hierarchical Switching Linear Dynamical System (HSLDS). The HSLDS models dynamical
systems where complex interactions between modes of operation can be represented as a twolevel
hidden discrete hierarchical structure. For neonatal condition monitoring, the lower layer
models clinical events and is controlled by upper layer variables with semantics sepsis/nonsepsis.
The model parameterisation and estimation procedures are adapted to the specifics of
physiological monitoring data. We demonstrate that the performance of the HSLDS for the
detection of sepsis is not statistically different from the AR-HMM, despite the fact that the
latter model is given “ground truth” annotations of the patient’s physiology
Arthur William Upfield: a biography
No full textThis dissertation is an exhaustive account of the life and work of Arthur William Upfield (1890-1964). It is presented as a critical biography and narrates the life of the writer, in his socio-cultural milieu, from birth. It also positions Upfield as a writer who dealt with issues of Aboriginality at a time when this was a singularly polemical subject. My work is informed by the theory of Zygmunt Bauman and others and is posited in the context of late-modern biography theory.
English-born, Upfield arrived in Australia in 1911 and took work in the bush, serving overseas with the Australian army at the outbreak of World War I and marrying an Australian army nurse in Egypt. Returning with his wife and son to Australia in 1921 he intermittently carried his swag until he was employed patrolling the Western Australian number 1 rabbit-proof fence for three years to 1931. By that time he had published four novels, including two crime novels featuring his fictional creation, the part-Aboriginal, part-European, Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte ('Bony'), arguably the first fully-developed character in Australian popular fiction.
Leaving the fence, Upfield settled with his family in Perth and wrote full-time until joining the Melbourne Herald in 1933. Retrenched, he resumed career writing to be further interrupted by a war-time intelligence posting in 1939. In 1943 the first Bony mysteries were published in America, where Upfield's critical success was maintained until his death. In 1945 he left his wife for Jessica Uren, to whom he remained devoted.
Upfield's in all twenty-nine Bony novels, many of which have been translated across eleven languages, afforded him notable success both at home and abroad, in good part due to his descriptive gifts and the uniqueness of his fictional character, the part-Aboriginal Bony
Social exclusion in british tennis: A history of privilege and prejudice
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This study focuses on the issue of social exclusion in British tennis. It commences with
a critique of current LTA policy, presenting exclusion as static, ahistorical and
underpinned by false dichotomies of age and social class. Aspects of Norbert Elias’s
theoretical approach are employed throughout as an analytical framework. Initially, the
roots of exclusion in British tennis are sought through historical analysis. Aspects of the
Civilising Process help direct attention towards wider social processes to explain the
prevalence of exclusion, particularly in tennis clubs. Cost was a crucial factor in
determining early access, but as tennis became more accessible to lower classes, codes of
behavioural etiquette helped demarcate members along status lines. Into the mid-20th
century, the globalisation, professionalisation and commercialisation of tennis pushed
the LTA to adopt a more performance-oriented outlook, but this has come to oppose the
more relaxed culture of tennis clubs. Thus, a power struggle emerged between these two
institutions, and, underpinned by thirty interviews with leading figures in British tennis
as well as extensive documentary analysis, the third section documents these
developments from the 1980s. Crucially, tennis clubs remain largely amateur and
voluntary-run organisations, yet are important locations for the implementation of the
LTA’s demanding talent development objectives. These recent developments are
understood with the help of Elias’s Game Models theory. The fourth section presents
findings from a ten-month ethnographic study of social exclusion in a tennis club; a
micro-analysis of club member relations underpinned by Elias’s Established-Outsider
Relations theory. Overall findings suggest that social exclusion in British tennis is far
more complex, multi-faceted and historically-rooted than what current LTA discourse
presents. Differences in age and class are less central, and instead preconceived notions
of social status based on longevity of membership, adherence to behavioural norms and
playing standard are powerful determinants of inclusion
ATG5 is essential for ATG8-dependent autophagy and mitochondrial homeostasis in Leishmania major
No full textMacroautophagy has been shown to be important for the cellular remodelling required for Leishmania differentiation. We now demonstrate that L. major contains a functional ATG12-ATG5 conjugation system, which is required for ATG8-dependent autophagosome formation. Nascent autophagosomes were found commonly associated with the mitochondrion. L. major mutants lacking ATG5 (Δatg5) were viable as promastigotes but were unable to form autophagosomes, had morphological abnormalities including a much reduced flagellum, were less able to differentiate and had greatly reduced virulence to macrophages and mice. Analyses of the lipid metabolome of Δatg5 revealed marked elevation of phosphatidylethanolamines (PE) in comparison to wild type parasites. The Δatg5 mutants also had increased mitochondrial mass but reduced mitochondrial membrane potential and higher levels of reactive oxygen species. These findings indicate that the lack of ATG5 and autophagy leads to perturbation of the phospholipid balance in the mitochondrion, possibly through ablation of membrane use and conjugation of mitochondrial PE to ATG8 for autophagosome biogenesis, resulting in a dysfunctional mitochondrion with impaired oxidative ability and energy generation. The overall result of this is reduced virulence
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