Home accidents amongst elderly people: A locality study in Scotland

Aim The aim of this locality study was to collect information on reported and unreported accidents amongst elderly people living in one locality in Scotland. Method Postal Survey- A postal questionnaire was sent to 3,757 men and women aged 65+ years living in one locality. The questionnaire asked respondents to indicate how many accidents they had experienced in the past twelve months, plus to indicate type and location. Information was gathered on living arrangements, ethnicity, gender, age and deprivation. Respondents were asked if they would be willing to take part in an interview study. Interview Study - One hundred elders who had had at least one accident in the previous twelve months were interviewed. Results Postal Survey - Over a third of the respondents in the postal survey reported having had an accident in the previous twelve months. Bumps and drops and falls were the most common type of accident. Most accidents happened in the kitchen. Women reported more falls than men and those living alone reported more accidents than those living with others. Age was associated with the prevalence of accidents, but the association was somewhat curvilinear, with accidents decreasing with age and then increasing again. Interview Study – Interviewees found it hard to differentiate one accident from another. Considerable reluctance to visit the GP after an accident was noted, with many not attending even for serious accidents. Almost forty percent were ‘very’ distressed after their accident, and a quarter reported a loss of confidence. However, most did not worry about accidents. Few thought that their age, health or medications were a cause of their accidents

Using mutual information to measure order in model glass-formers

Whether or not there is growing static order accompanying the dynamical heterogeneity and increasing relaxation times seen in glassy systems is a matter of dispute. An obstacle to resolving this issue is that the order is expected to be amorphous and so not amenable to simple order parameters. We use mutual information to provide a general measurement of order that is sensitive to multi-particle correlations. We apply this to two glass-forming systems (2D binary mixtures of hard disks with different size ratios to give varying amounts of hexatic order) and show that there is little growth of amorphous order in the system without crystalline order. In both cases we measure the dynamical length with a four-point correlation function and find that it increases significantly faster than the static lengths in the system as density is increased. We further show that we can recover the known scaling of the dynamic correlation length in a kinetically constrained model, the 2-TLG.Comment: 10 pages, 12 Figure

The importance of formulation in the successful lyophilization of influenza reference materials.

© 2014.Lyophilized Influenza antigen reference reagents are a critical resource in the quality control of influenza vaccines. A standard formulation has been used successfully at NIBSC for many years however, following the unexpected occurrence of a collapsed appearance in a particular batch a study was carried out to establish the impact of the sugar concentration in the formulation using modulated differential scanning calorimetry (mDSC) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).There was a correlation between the presence and size of the mDSC eutectic temperature events and the freeze dried appearance of the cakes, which became progressively worse with increasing amounts of sugar. NMR spectroscopy could be used to positively identify and quantify the sugars in the formulations. MDSC can rapidly predict if the freeze dried appearance will be acceptable so as to assure the successful lyophilization of influenza reference preparations

Giving voters what they want? Party orientation perceptions and preferences in the British electorate

Some of the most important propositions in the political marketing literature hinge on assumptions about the electorate. In particular, voters are presumed to react in different ways to different orientations or postures. Yet there are theoretical reasons for questioning some of these assumptions, and certainly they have seldom been empirically tested. Here, we focus on one prominent example of political marketing research: Lees-Marshment’s orientations’ model. We investigate how the public reacts to product and market orientation, whether they see a trade-off between the two (a point in dispute among political marketing scholars), and whether partisans differ from non-partisan voters by being more inclined to value product over market orientation. Evidence from two mass sample surveys of the British public (both conducted online by YouGov) demonstrates important heterogeneity within the electorate, casts doubt on the core assumptions underlying some political marketing arguments and raises broader questions about what voters are looking for in a party

The difference that tenure makes

This paper argues that housing tenures cannot be reduced to either production relations or consumption relations. Instead, they need to be understood as modes of housing distribution, and as having complex and dynamic relations with social classes. Building on a critique of both the productionist and the consumptionist literature, as well as of formalist accounts of the relations between tenure and class, the paper attempts to lay the foundations for a new theory of housing tenure. In order to do this, a new theory of class is articulated, which is then used to throw new light on the nature of class-tenure relations

Forty years studying British politics : the decline of Anglo-America

The still present belief some 40 years ago that British politics was both exceptional and superior has been replaced by more theoretically sophisticated analyses based on a wider and more rigorously deployed range of research techniques, although historical analysis appropriately remains important. The American influence on the study of British politics has declined, but the European Union dimension has not been fully integrated. The study of interest groups has been in some respects a fading paradigm, but important questions related to democratic health have still to be addressed. Public administration has been supplanted by public policy, but economic policy remains under-studied. A key challenge for the future is the study of the management of expectations

The ‘Ombuds Watchers’: Collective Dissent and Legal Protest Among Users of Public Services Ombuds

This article examines the phenomenon of the ‘ombuds watchers’. These are groups of dissatisfied users of public service ombuds schemes who engage in legal protest against the current system of redress for citizen-state complaints. Through the lens of legal consciousness scholarship we propose a framework that conceptualizes the collectivized protest of the ombuds watchers. Based on an empirical dataset, our analysis has shown that the ombuds watchers meet each of the defining characteristics of dissenting collectivism and demonstrates the existence of forms of legal consciousness which present ‘opportunities to build alternative imaginaries and institutions’ (Morgan and Kutch 2015, p. 567). Our case study provides an insight into the potential for dissenting collectives to challenge the hegemonic structures of state law, while at the same time emphasising the continuing power of legal ideology in shaping popular understandings of justice. The article also suggests a pathway for future empirical research into ombuds

Creating citizen-consumers? Public service reform and (un)willing selves

About the book: Postmodern theories heralded the "death of the subject", and thereby deeply contested our intuition that we are free and willing selves. In recent times, the (free) will has come under attack yet again. Findings from the neuro- and cognitive sciences claim the concept of will to be scientifically untenable, specifying that it is our brain rather than our 'self' which decides what we want to do. In spite of these challenges however, the willing self has come to take centre stage in our society: juridical and moral practices ascribing guilt, or the organization of everyday life attributing responsibilities, for instance, can hardly be understood without taking recourse to the willing subject. In this vein, the authors address topics such as the genealogy of the concept of willing selves, the discourse on agency in neuroscience and sociology, the political debate on volition within neoliberal and neoconservative regimes, approaches toward novel forms of relational responsibility as well as moral evaluations in conceptualizing autonomy