Drawing a veil

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The TRC; Commissioning the Past, 11-14 June, 199

The English primary curriculum and its assessment: a critique of three recent reports

This brief article provides a critique of three major reports on English primary education – arguing that two are essentially conservative (though one appears more liberal at first sight than the other) while the third may go a considerable way to providing the fundamental reappraisal that English primary education requires

Abolishing, not reforming, the grading of schools by Ofsted

To be honest almost all schools and inspections are… – ish Only a few schools are clearly and uncontroversially “outstanding”; only a few are undoubtedly “inadequate”. The vast majority are good-ish or requiring improvement-ish. Inspection is not a science but an art; it involves complex judgments all of which don’t necessarily point in the same direction. Does the recently announced new consultation on short inspections recognise this? Because of the value judgments involved in school inspection inspectors can never claim that their interpretation of a school is the only correct one . Nor can inspectors claim a monopoly of objective, authoritative, judgment as expressed in an overall grade or description. Equally importantly, the unique set of judgments they give cannot be directly or robustly compared with the equally unique judgments of the same school (which never remains “the same school”) inspected at a different time. Each set of inspection judgments is in a sense sui generis. Direct comparison of inspection judgements over time is at best highly problematic and at worst invalid. But of course Ofsted does not recognise this. It persists in wanting to place schools into one of four supposedly “water-tight “categories or it has until now when a new consultation on changes to short inspections has been announced.. Under these proposals “good” schools that are not definitely good (whatever that means) are be given up to two years to prove their “goodness” and hence in the meantime are only “good-ish” or even “probably in need of considerable-ish improvement”. Similarly “good” schools that are “outstanding-ish” are promised a full inspection later to confirm their status

Prognostic Value of Computed Tomography : Measured Parameters of Body Composition in Primary Operable Gastrointestinal Cancers

Professor Graeme Murray, Department of Pathology, University of Aberdeen provided us access to the colorectal cancer pathology databases from which the colorectal component of the research was based. Conflict of interest There are no conflicts of interest.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Evaluation of a tumor microenvironment-based prognostic score in primary operable colorectal cancer

Purpose: The tumor microenvironment is recognized as an important determinant of progression and outcome in colorectal cancer. The aim of the present study was to evaluate a novel tumor microenvironment–based prognostic score, based on histopathologic assessment of the tumor inflammatory cell infiltrate and tumor stroma, in patients with primary operable colorectal cancer. Experimental Design: Using routine pathologic sections, the tumor inflammatory cell infiltrate and stroma were assessed using Klintrup–Mäkinen (KM) grade and tumor stroma percentage (TSP), respectively, in 307 patients who had undergone elective resection for stage I–III colorectal cancer. The clinical utility of a cumulative score based on these characteristics was examined. Results: On univariate analysis, both weak KM grade and high TSP were associated with reduced survival (HR, 2.42; P = 0.001 and HR, 2.05; P = 0.001, respectively). A cumulative score based on these characteristics, the Glasgow Microenvironment Score (GMS), was associated with survival (HR, 1.93; 95% confidence interval, 1.36–2.73; P < 0.001), independent of TNM stage and venous invasion (both P < 0.05). GMS stratified patients in to three prognostic groups: strong KM (GMS = 0), weak KM/low TSP (GMS = 1), and weak KM/high TSP (GMS = 2), with 5-year survival of 89%, 75%, and 51%, respectively (P < 0.001). Furthermore, GMS in combination with node involvement, venous invasion, and mismatch repair status further stratified 5-year survival (92% to 37%, 93% to 27%, and 100% to 37%, respectively). Conclusions: The present study further confirms the clinical utility of assessment of the tumor microenvironment in colorectal cancer and introduces a simple, routinely available prognostic score for the risk stratification of patients with primary operable colorectal cancer

Clebsch-Gordan Construction of Lattice Interpolating Fields for Excited Baryons

Large sets of baryon interpolating field operators are developed for use in lattice QCD studies of baryons with zero momentum. Operators are classified according to the double-valued irreducible representations of the octahedral group. At first, three-quark smeared, local operators are constructed for each isospin and strangeness and they are classified according to their symmetry with respect to exchange of Dirac indices. Nonlocal baryon operators are formulated in a second step as direct products of the spinor structures of smeared, local operators together with gauge-covariant lattice displacements of one or more of the smeared quark fields. Linear combinations of direct products of spinorial and spatial irreducible representations are then formed with appropriate Clebsch-Gordan coefficients of the octahedral group. The construction attempts to maintain maximal overlap with the continuum SU(2) group in order to provide a physically interpretable basis. Nonlocal operators provide direct couplings to states that have nonzero orbital angular momentum.Comment: This manuscript provides an anlytical construction of operators and is related to hep-lat/0506029, which provides a computational construction. This e-print version contains a full set of Clebsch-Gordan coefficients for the octahedral grou