The UK moves from March to December Budgets

Barring any very unexpected developments, next month’s Budget Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be the last such speech to occur in March for the foreseeable future (and perhaps for ever) in the UK. As part of last year’s budget package, the Government published a White Paper on budgetary reform (HMSO, 1992) which announced that in future, Budget Speeches would be made in December of each year rather than in March as at present. However, the tax year will continue to begin in April, so that the lead time between the announcement of tax proposals in the Budget and the coming into force of most of them will be extended from about three weeks to about 16.

Inferring diffusion in single live cells at the single molecule level

The movement of molecules inside living cells is a fundamental feature of biological processes. The ability to both observe and analyse the details of molecular diffusion in vivo at the single molecule and single cell level can add significant insight into understanding molecular architectures of diffusing molecules and the nanoscale environment in which the molecules diffuse. The tool of choice for monitoring dynamic molecular localization in live cells is fluorescence microscopy, especially so combining total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) with the use of fluorescent protein (FP) reporters in offering exceptional imaging contrast for dynamic processes in the cell membrane under relatively physiological conditions compared to competing single molecule techniques. There exist several different complex modes of diffusion, and discriminating these from each other is challenging at the molecular level due to underlying stochastic behaviour. Analysis is traditionally performed using mean square displacements of tracked particles, however, this generally requires more data points than is typical for single FP tracks due to photophysical instability. Presented here is a novel approach allowing robust Bayesian ranking of diffusion processes (BARD) to discriminate multiple complex modes probabilistically. It is a computational approach which biologists can use to understand single molecule features in live cells.Comment: combined ms (1-37 pages, 8 figures) and SI (38-55, 3 figures

An ethnographic study of the introduction of internal supervisors to an internal coaching scheme

Coach supervision is currently a hot topic. With the support of coaching bodies, supervision is increasingly regarded as a requirement to practice as a coach. However, the evidence base specific to coach supervision to support its effectiveness is limited. Thus far, very little research has focused specifically on the supervision of internal coaches, in spite of the reported growth in their use by organisations - and even less has been published relating to internal coach supervisors. The ‘voice’ of the internal practitioner, whether coach or coach supervisor, can still hardly be discerned in the current coaching literature. This paper, based upon an ethnographic study that followed the introduction of a group of internal supervisors to their internal coaching scheme, seeks to describe their journey, through their own ‘voices’

SYMPOSIUM on forecasting the state of the public finances

The level of public borrowing plays a central role in UK government policymaking, especially in the run-up to each Budget. Accurate forecasts of the overall fiscal stance are crucial in assessing the general health of the economy, the direction of tax policy and the volume of public services that can be supplied. But these forecasts have a relatively poor record in the UK in recent years. The government’s last Financial Statement and Budget Report noted that ‘The budget deficit is the difference between two large aggregates of spending and receipts and forecasts of it are inevitably subject to a wide margin of error. Over the past five years the average absolute errors have been around 1 per cent of GDP, or plus or minus £8 billion in today’s prices’.

Performing Democracy

AbstractThe debate about the relationship between theatre and democracy rests on a presumption that both the artform and the political form share an intertwined history, based in their co-appearance in Greece. Equally well-known is the antagonism towards both theatre and democracy that emerges at the same moment, most clearly found in Plato. This essay revisits this history in order to set up an examination of two contemporary theatre performances that explicitly raise the relationship of democracy and theatre, the British company Punchdrunk’sThe Drowned Manand the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed’sFight Night. Both, in very different ways, approach democracy through a focus on audience experience. How, then, might these productions be read in terms of a democracy-to-come and a theatre-to-come?</jats:p

Efficient Follow-Up of Exoplanet Transits Using Small Telescopes

11 pages, 5 figures, to be published in PASP, comments welcomeHere, we introduce an online tool for the prediction of exoplanet transit light curves. Small telescopes can readily capture exoplanet transits under good weather conditions when the combination of a bright star and a large transiting exoplanet results in a significant depth of transit. However, in reality there are many considerations that need to be made to obtain useful measurements. This paper and the accompanying website lay out a procedure based on timeseries differential photometry that has been successfully employed using 0.4 m aperture telescopes to predict the expected precision for a whole light curve. This enables robust planning to decide whether the observation of a particular exoplanet transit should be attempted, and in particular to be able to readily see when it should not to be attempted. This may result in a significant increase in the number of transit observations captured by non-specialists. The technique and website are also appropriate for planning a variety of variable star observations where a prediction of the light curve can be made.Peer reviewe

Exposure assessment of traditional and IPM farmers on using pesticides: A case study at Bang Rieng Sub District, Khuan Nieng District, Songkhla Province

A questionnaire was developed to quantitatively evaluate the exposure to pesticides and to gauge the concentration of organophosphate pesticides such as chlorpyrifos and methyl-parathion while the farmers of Bang Rieng were spraying these pesticides. The results were applied to the exposure assessment and to compare the quantity of exposure to these pesticides between 33 traditional and 40 integrated pest management (IPM) farmers of Bang Rieng. There was a significant difference in the level of exposure between the traditional farmers, who had the average pesticide exposure scores of 58.30 points and the IPM farmers, whose average scores were 53.50 points, (p < 0.015). Concentrations of organophosphate pesticides chlorpyrifos and methyl-parathion were measured. Thirty-three air samples were collected by personal sampling during the period of pesticide spraying. Traditional farmers were exposed to higher levels of the pesticide(s) with a mean concentration of 0.1865 mg/m compared to the IPM farmers who were exposed to a mean pesticide concentration of 0.037 mg/m3. It was estimated that the farmers of Bang Rieng would be exposed to 186-19,616.6 mg of the organophosphatepesticide(s) via inhalation throughout their lifetime (65 years). Moreover, according to the exposure assessment, the traditional farmers exposed to a greater amount of the pesticide(s) via inhalation compared to the IPM farmers

Herbivore: A Scalable and Efficient Protocol for Anonymous Communication

Anonymity is increasingly important for networked applications amidst concerns over censorship and privacy. In this paper, we describe Herbivore, a peer-to-peer, scalable, tamper-resilient communication system that provides provable anonymity and privacy. Building on dining cryptographer networks, Herbivore scales by partitioning the network into anonymizing cliques. Adversaries able to monitor all network traffic cannot deduce the identity of a sender or receiver beyond an anonymizing clique. In addition to strong anonymity, Herbivore simultaneously provides high efficiency and scalability, distinguishing it from other anonymous communication protocols. Performance measurements from a prototype implementation show that the system can achieve high bandwidths and low latencies when deployed over the Internet