Cavendish Square and Spencer House: Neo-classicism, opportunity and nostalgia

The Society of Dilettanti planned a temple-fronted academy of arts on the north side of Cavendish Square in the early 1750s. It can now be shown that stone bought and cut for this building was used in the Green Park elevation of Spencer House (1756–9), shedding new light on design there. The Cavendish Square site stayed empty until speculative pairs of houses were built in 1768–70. Their temple-fronted stone façades, hitherto explained as incorporating stone from the 1750s, must now be understood not as the result of salvage, but as a conscious echo of the abandoned academy project

Subjective experience of episodic memory and metacognition: a neurodevelopmental approach.

Episodic retrieval is characterized by the subjective experience of remembering. This experience enables the co-ordination of memory retrieval processes and can be acted on metacognitively. In successful retrieval, the feeling of remembering may be accompanied by recall of important contextual information. On the other hand, when people fail (or struggle) to retrieve information, other feelings, thoughts, and information may come to mind. In this review, we examine the subjective and metacognitive basis of episodic memory function from a neurodevelopmental perspective, looking at recollection paradigms (such as source memory, and the report of recollective experience) and metacognitive paradigms such as the feeling of knowing). We start by considering healthy development, and provide a brief review of the development of episodic memory, with a particular focus on the ability of children to report first-person experiences of remembering. We then consider neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) such as amnesia acquired in infancy, autism, Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, or 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. This review shows that different episodic processes develop at different rates, and that across a broad set of different NDDs there are various types of episodic memory impairment, each with possibly a different character. This literature is in agreement with the idea that episodic memory is a multifaceted process

Vernacular Revival and Ideology - What's Left?

This essay derives from a lecture first given at a Vernacular Architecture Group conference on vernacular revivals in 2015, reprised to generally younger audiences at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the University of Westminster. Its retrospection about vernacular architecture, anonymity, revival and left-wing ideologies was prompted primarily by a bemused awareness of recent advances in self-building. It seemed timely to try to get at how and why certain ideas retain traction. Then, coincidentally, young and old were recombining behind Jeremy Corbyn to reinvigorate Labour, and the self-styled design ‘collective’ Assemble won the Turner Prize. John Ruskin, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and Romanticism arise (how could they not?), but only in passing, for a revisionist view of what has come since. It is taken as read that a strong commitment to architectural design as being rooted in labour and everyday or subaltern agency tallied with the emergence of socialism and was an important part of architectural thinking and history in late-19th-century England. This is an attempt to relate that history to the present in a new overview for a new framework. It adopts an unconventional or purist definition of what vernacular means that will clash with many preconceptions

Quantifying tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte subsets : a practical immuno-histochemical method

Background: Efficient histological quantification of tumour-infiltrating T and B lymphocyte (TIL) subsets in archival tissues would greatly facilitate investigations of the role of TIL in human cancer biology. We sought to develop such a method. Methods: Ten ×40 digital images of 4 μ sections of 16 ductal invasive breast carcinomas immunostained for CD3, CD4, CD8, and CD20 were acquired (a total of 640 images). The number of pixels in each image matching a partition of Lab colour space corresponding to immunostained cells were counted using the ‘Color range’ and ‘Histogram’ tools in Adobe Photoshop 7. These pixel counts were converted to cell counts per mm2 using a calibration factor derived from one, two, three or all 10 images of each case/antibody combination. Results: Variations in the number of labelled pixels per immunostained cell made individual calibration for each case/antibody combination necessary. Calibration based on two fields containing the most labelled pixels gave a cell count minimally higher (+ 5.3%) than the count based on 10-field calibration, with 95% confidence limits − 14.7 to + 25.3%. As TIL density could vary up to 100-fold between cases, this accuracy and precision are acceptable. Conclusion: The methodology described offers sufficient accuracy, precision and efficiency to quantify the density of TIL sub-populations in breast cancer using commonly available software, and could be adapted to batch processing of image files

HOBBES: A VOLUNTARIST ABOUT THE PERMISSIBILITY OF STATE ENFORCEMENT?

Trato a questão de saber que argumento tem Hobbes a favor da legitimidade do Estado, um termo que uso para designar a permissão geral e exclusiva para impor a obediência com as directivas e leis que os Estados tipicamente têm. Irei argumentar que, ao contrário do que possamos imaginar, o fundamento da legitimidade do Estado para Hobbes não se encontra no contrato social ou na autorização dos súbditos do Estado, mas antes no facto de o soberano não estar sujeito ao tipo de leis que retiram aos súbditos a autoridade de impor. O direito do soberano impor a lei baseia-se exactamente no mesmo tipo de direito que todos têm quando não estão submetidos a um poder soberano superior. Embora isto deva ser qualificado (o soberano não mantém literalmente o seu direito natural a todas as coisas, uma vez que não existia qualquer soberano no estado de natureza), a permissibilidade da autoridade encontra-se, em Hobbes, simplesmente na falta de algo que poderia tornar essa autoridade inaceitável.I take up the question of what argument, if any, Hobbes has for state legitimacy, which term I stipulatively use to mean the general, exclusive permission to enforce compliance with their directives or laws that states are standardly taken to have. I will argue that, contrary to what one might imagine, the ground of state legitimacy for Hobbes is not to be found in the social contract or the authorisation of the state’s subjects, but rather in the sovereign’s simply not being subject to the kind of laws that rule out enforcement for subjects. The sovereign’s right to enforce is based in exactly the same sort of right that all have when not subject to any higher sovereign power. Though this must be nuanced (the sovereign does not literally retain its right to all things from the state of nature, since no sovereign existed in the state of nature), the permissibility of enforcement for Hobbes is to be found simply in the lack of anything that might make it impermissible

Tourism and marginalisation

The social (as opposed to environmental) harms of tourism are not yet much discussed in the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, residents in hyper-touristed areas commonly express sentiments of marginalisation and estrangement from the social practices present in their place of dwelling. In this paper, we argue that indeed, as common pre-theoretical ideas suggest, residents in a touristic neighbourhood can be marginalised in their relationship with tourists in a morally objectionable way, similarly to how longstanding residents may be marginalised with respect to gentrifiers in a gentrifying neighbourhood. An important difference, however, between the gentrification and tourism cases, is that while in the former residents and gentrifiers have a more-or-less stable relationship with each other, residents and tourists typically interact only in quite fleeting ways. This might seem to suggest that residents and tourists do not have the right kind of ongoing relationship that would make marginalisation possible in the first place. Here we contend that this is not the case, and in doing so we make two contributions to the literature. First, we present a refined conception of marginalisation, differentiate it from other relational wrongs, and explain how, though marginalisation does depend on an ongoing relationship, a relationship of the right kind is possible in spite of the transience of some of its members. Second, we explain how excessive tourism in particular might generate marginalisation in the spatially defined relationship among fellow users of a shared physical space. Thereby, we contribute to the assessment of the harms of overtourism, identifying a specific moral wrong that residents are likely to experience in certain touristic cities

Germans, guns and gas in south London

In the closing stages of its work on Woolwich and Battersea, the Survey of London has encountered important but unexpected German contributions to each area’s industrial history