Homeric beginnings in the 'tattoo elegy'

The text given here is based on the edition of Huys (see below), updated in the light of more recent scholarship.1 I have standardized spelling in one respect, which is that I have not followed the papyrus’ doubling of initial consonants which lengthen the previous open syllable (thus I have given úπò λαπά[ρ]ην for the papyrus’ uπολλαπαρ[η]ν). Supplements to the Sorbonne fragment rendered redundant by the Brussels papyrus have been omitted. For further information (especially papyrological), the reader is referred to Huys’s edition

Greening outdoor practice

It’s a wild and beautiful day and you are walking in the hills – the Glyders, say – with a group of young people. Tryfan, Glyder Fawr, Glyder Fach; a horseshoe of craggy summits coming in and out of the clouds. Birds fly up, chattering and scolding as you pass. There’s a raven crarking over the sound of the river and, underfoot, mats of purple thyme amongst the rocks. The group is moving well and spirits are high. Just ahead of them, you pull over a small rise and there, spreading out in front of you... is a dirty great pile of litter. How would you respond? I’d bet a month’s salary and a bottle of Laphroaig that 99% of people reading this would stop and pick it up. You’d almost certainly engage the group in the task, and use the incident to open up a discussion about outdoor ethics. Litter is obvious; packing or not packing out poo considerably less so. Then there’s shutting gates, thinking how to minimise footpath erosion, and all those questions about where and how to camp. As outdoor professionals we are really good at this stuff. And it’s important not just because of the actual impact – visual, ecological and otherwise – of the litter or camping scars or misplaced sheep; but because of the message it sends out about caring for the environments we love to work and play in

Whose students are they anyway?

This paper draws on case study research which explored the support needs of those involved in social work practice learning in an English local authority. Data was collected through questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with 27 practice educators, students and team managers. Although issues relating to failing students were not intended as the primary focus of the research, this theme dominates the findings from practice educators and team managers. Practice educators cited problematic placements as a key factor in their decision not to continue in the role. A significant contributory factor in the negative impact of the failing experience is the participants’ dissatisfaction with the attitude and approach of the students’ universities. Particularly striking is the perception that universities present an obstruction to a fail decision resulting in students being passed who possibly should not do so. This paper considers whether the different institutional perceptions of the social work student and the organisations’ role in relation to them could be at the root of these difficulties in collaboration and fuel the ‘failure to fail’ debate

It's money that matters: the financial context of ethical decision-making in modern biomedicine

While the importance of patient autonomy is widely acknowledged and discussed in the bioethics literature, clinicians' autonomy, their ability to make the best choices about patients' care free from outside interference, is far less debated. This paper takes one form of external influence over clinical decisions - the cost of drugs - and applies it to a specific case, that of HER2 positive breast cancer and the use of the drug Herceptin in the UK. Drawing on interviews with clinicians, researchers and policymakers, I explore the way financial decisions about Herceptin shape clinicians' autonomy, and how clinicians as individuals and as professional groups respond to these limits and seek to provide treatment to the highest number of the most deserving patients they can. The point of this paper is not to castigate bioethicists for misguidedly focusing on patient autonomy but point out that clinicians' autonomy may be so circumscribed by external factors that it may make no sense to speak of their actions as stemming from ethical decisions. At the same time, I suggest that financial constraints create areas at the margin of clinical practice which are deserving of bioethical consideration

Facing independence: American Revolutionary portraits within the context of British identity

This paper examines the content of eighteenth-century American and British portraits within the ideologically-expanding context of eighteenth-century British identity. It explores the ways in which Britons and Americans negotiated who they were and, consequently, their claims on society, in the era preceding and including the American Revolution. It does so for three reasons: to advance a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of American portraiture; to motivate further dialogue on the relationship between American and British portraits; and to invoke the potential for American portraits as documentary evidence of social history.;Through historical examination of philosophical influences informing the development of British narratives, Part One considers the contexts within which portraits were produced and the implications of those contexts for the interpretation and presentation of identity. Against this ideological backdrop, Part Two deconstructs the content of selected portraits by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Ralph Earl, William Hogarth, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others in order to come to terms with contemporary perceptions of reality and identity vis-a-vis the dominant narrative.;Broadly speaking, American Revolutionary portraits suggest a standard for identity based on principles drawn from conflicting narratives. This standard intimates an effort to conflate the principal ideals of a dominant neo-Country narrative---those of natural progress, potentiality and virtue, for example---with Liberal and Reformed notions of autonomy, self-determination and industry that denied the doctrines of hierarchy, fixity and birth upon which the traditional ideals were said to depend. The results signaled a gap between British ideology and colonial experience visually manifest as conflicting perceptions of reality. Implicated in these conflicting perceptions was an alternative meaning of life whose suppression may have led, in the end, to revolution

Oxygen therapy for acute myocardial infarction

Background Oxygen (O2) is widely used in people with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) although it has been suggested it may do more harm than good. Previous systematic reviews have concluded that there was insufficient evidence to know whether oxygen reduced, increased or had no effect on heart ischaemia or infarct size, as did our original Cochrane review on this topic in 2010. The wide dissemination of the lack of evidence to support this widely-used intervention since 2010 may stimulate the needed trials of oxygen therapy, and it is therefore important that this review is updated regularly. Objectives To review the evidence from randomised controlled trials to establish whether routine use of inhaled oxygen in acute myocardial infarction (AMI) improves patient-centred outcomes, in particular pain and death. Search methods The following bibliographic databases were searched last in July 2012: the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library), MEDLINE (OVID), EMBASE (OVID), CINAHL (EBSCO) and Web of Science (ISI). LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature) and PASCAL were last searched in May 2013. We also contacted experts to identify any studies. We applied no language restrictions. Selection Criteria Randomised controlled trials of people with suspected or proven AMI (ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) or non-STEMI), less than 24 hours after onset, in which the intervention was inhaled oxygen (at normal pressure) compared to air and regardless of cotherapies provided these were the same in both arms of the trial. Data collection and analysis Two authors independently reviewed the titles and abstracts of identified studies to see if they met the inclusion criteria, and independently undertook the data extraction. The quality of studies and the risk of bias were assessed according to guidance in the Cochrane Handbook. The primary outcomes were death, pain and complications. The measure of effect used was the risk ratio (RR) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). Main results The updated search identified one new trial. In total, four trials involving 430 participants were included and 17 deaths occurred. The pooled RR of death was 2.05 (95% CI 0.75 to 5.58) in an intention-to-treat analysis and 2.11 (95% CI 0.78 to 5.68) in participants with confirmed AMI. While suggestive of harm, the small number of deaths recorded means that this could be a chance occurrence. Pain was measured by analgesic use. The pooled RR for the use of analgesics was 0.97 (95% CI 0.78 to 1.20). Author's conclusions There is no conclusive evidence from randomised controlled trials to support the routine use of inhaled oxygen in people with AMI. A definitive randomised controlled trial is urgently required, given the mismatch between trial evidence suggestive of possible harm from routine oxygen use and recommendations for its use in clinical practice guidelines

Educating for professional judgement: how social work students develop skills in practice

This thesis presents a hermeneutic phenomenological study into how social work students develop the skills required for professional judgement. Professional judgement is an important and complex facet of social work. A review of the literature indicates that there has been a recent increase in empirical research into the sensemaking and reasoning of social workers’ decision making and professional judgement, yet little research exists into the development of this expertise. One of the Standards of Proficiency of the Health and Care Professionals Council is that a registered social worker in England should “Be able to practise as an autonomous professional exercising their own professional judgement” (HCPC 2017 p6). It is therefore incumbent upon social work education to enable students to develop this expertise and research is needed in order to understand how this can best be achieved. The intention of the research was to seek answers to the following questions •How do social work students develop skills for professional judgement? •What enables, facilitates and enhances this development? The research was framed within a constructionist epistemological paradigm and conceptually influenced by a combination of Authentic Professional Learning, Appreciative Inquiry and Practice-based Research. The methodology was hermeneutic phenomenology and the method was semi-structured interviews constructed around critical incidents of learning on placement. The participants were 14 MSc Social Work students from a university in England who were at the point of graduation. Nvivo10 was used to code the data and the data were analysed thematically. The findings indicate that the phenomenological essence of the development of skills for social work professional judgement lies in the presence and interrelation of three domains. These are professional responsibility, facilitation of the professional voice and learner agency. Philosophical and psychological concepts of autonomy are discussed and presented as a means to understand what is taking place for social work students. I suggest that a re-appraisal of autonomy as relational and a consideration of the value of autonomy-supportive learning and teaching could prove instructive to understanding both the development of skills for professional judgement for social work students and the way in which this can be enabled

Lysimeleia (Thucydides 7.53, Theocritus 16.84):What Thucydides does not tell us about the Sicilian Expedition

Abstract:In this paper, it is proposed that the lake Lysimeleia, mentioned by Thucydides in his account of the latter part of the Sicilian Expedition and by Theocritus in his encomium of Hieron II of Sicily, is likely to have been a sacred lake to the two goddesses Demeter and Kore. This suggestion is integrated into a way of reading the relevant passages in Thucydides and Theocritus, and its possible implications in the context of early discourses concerning the Athenian campaign at Syracuse are explored. In particular, this episode is read as one which can help us to consider the significance of Thucydides’ tendency to downplay religious aspects of the events he describes and to speculate about what sorts of discourses about the Sicilian Expedition might have circulated among others, who would have been likely to consider such questions very differently.</jats:p

Latent State Estimation Helps UI Agents to Reason

A common problem for agents operating in real-world environments is that the response of an environment to their actions may be non-deterministic and observed through noise. This renders environmental state and progress towards completing a task latent. Despite recent impressive demonstrations of LLM's reasoning abilities on various benchmarks, whether LLMs can build estimates of latent state and leverage them for reasoning has not been explicitly studied. We investigate this problem in the real-world domain of autonomous UI agents. We establish that appropriately prompting LLMs in a zero-shot manner can be formally understood as forming point estimates of latent state in a textual space. In the context of autonomous UI agents we then show that LLMs used in this manner are more than $76\%$ accurate at inferring various aspects of latent state, such as performed (vs. commanded) actions and task progression. Using both public and internal benchmarks and three reasoning methods (zero-shot, CoT-SC & ReAct), we show that LLM-powered agents that explicitly estimate and reason about latent state are able to successfully complete up to 1.6x more tasks than those that do not