Elizabeth I, the Succession and Foreign Policy

Part of a special section on the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. The writer examines the close links between Elizabeth's ascendancy, reign, and subsequent relationships with the states of Europe. Elizabeth had a coherent foreign policy, shaped by the unusual circumstances of her reign. These were less to do with her gender--a much-exaggerated subject--than her questionable legitimacy and the coincidence that the leading members of the wider Tudor royal family were Scots. For example, until her death in 1587, Mary Stuart was the focus around which Elizabeth's foreign policy revolved. Mary was Dauphine and, after July 1559, Queen of France, and the threat of her rival claim to the English throne was the decisive motive for Elizabeth's interventions in Scotland in 1560 and France in 1562

An almost-integral universal Vassiliev invariant of knots

A `total Chern class' invariant of knots is defined. This is a universal Vassiliev invariant which is integral `on the level of Lie algebras' but it is not expressible as an integer sum of diagrams. The construction is motivated by similarities between the Kontsevich integral and the topological Chern character.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol2/agt-2-29.abs.htm

Early diversion and empowerment policing : evaluating an adult female offender triage project

This paper provides an evaluation of a police pilot early-diversion scheme for adult females who were arrested for low-severity offences using a natural experiment design. The intervention is novel in that it diverts arrestees to a women’s centre for assistance to address their criminogenic needs rather than process them through the criminal justice system. The intervention is timely and attractive given its rehabilitative features and its potential for reducing demand on the criminal justice system through community resolution. The study found a promising effect of the intervention on rates of rearrest and daily risk of rearrest over a twelve month follow-up period, but a higher frequency of rearrest among those of the intervention group who were rearrested. The findings are discussed in relation to the political context, theoretical background and police performance and the gendered dynamics of offending

An Integrated Tracker for STAR

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC studies the new state of matter produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions and the spin structure of the nucleon in collisions of polarized protons. In order to improve the capabilities for heavy flavor measurements and the reconstruction of charged vector bosons an upgrade of the tracking system both in the central and the forward region is pursued. The integrated system providing high resolution tracking and secondary vertex reconstruction capabilities will use silicon pixel, strip and GEM technology.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of the 9th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP 2006), Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, May 30 - June 3, 200

Autophagy: A cyto-protective mechanism which prevents primary human hepatocyte apoptosis during oxidative stress

The role of autophagy in the response of human hepatocytes to oxidative stress remains unknown. Understanding this process may have important implications for the understanding of basic liver epithelial cell biology and the responses of hepatocytes during liver disease. To address this we isolated primary hepatocytes from human liver tissue and exposed them ex vivo to hypoxia and hypoxia-reoxygenation (H-R). We showed that oxidative stress increased hepatocyte autophagy in a reactive oxygen species (ROS) and class III PtdIns3K-dependent manner. Specifically, mitochondrial ROS and NADPH oxidase were found to be key regulators of autophagy. Autophagy involved the upregulation of BECN1, LC3A, Atg7, Atg5 and Atg 12 during hypoxia and H-R. Autophagy was seen to occur within the mitochondria of the hepatocyte and inhibition of autophagy resulted in the lowering a mitochondrial membrane potential and onset of cell death. Autophagic responses were primarily observed in the large peri-venular (PV) hepatocyte subpopulation. Inhibition of autophagy, using 3-methyladenine, increased apoptosis during H-R. Specifically, PV human hepatocytes were more susceptible to apoptosis after inhibition of autophagy. These findings show for the first time that during oxidative stress autophagy serves as a cell survival mechanism for primary human hepatocytes

Large Deviations in the Superstable Weakly Imperfect Bose Gas

The superstable Weakly Imperfect Bose Gas {(WIBG)} was originally derived to solve the inconsistency of the Bogoliubov theory of superfluidity. Its grand-canonical thermodynamics was recently solved but not at {point of} the {(first order)} phase transition. This paper proposes to close this gap by using the large deviations formalism and in particular the analysis of the Kac distribution function. It turns out that, as a function of the chemical potential, the discontinuity of the Bose condensate density at the phase transition {point} disappears as a function of the particle density. Indeed, the Bose condensate continuously starts at the first critical particle density and progressively grows but the free-energy per particle stays constant until the second critical density is reached. At higher particle densities, the Bose condensate density as well as the free-energy per particle both increase {monotonously}