At the end of the day: Macmillan's account of the Cuban missile crisis

Pre-publicity for the final volume of Harold Macmillan’s memoirs, At the End of the Day, stressed that it would provide the British side of the Cuban missile crisis for the first time. The Churchillian model chosen, changes required by the Cabinet Office and Macmillan’s desire to rebuke those political opponents who claimed that the crisis demonstrated a lack of British influence in Washington, however ensured a focus on his personal relationship with President Kennedy. His larding the text with contemporary observations from his diaries also skewed Macmillan’s account and, in particular, underplayed the significance of British moves at the United Nations in New York to secure a credible United Nations inspection regime and a US guarantee of the inviolability of Cuba. Careful reconstruction of Macmillan’s real-time experience of the Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the limitations of his own account of this event

A review of dynamic Bayesian network techniques with applications in healthcare risk modelling

Coping with an ageing population is a major concern for healthcare organisations around the world. The average cost of hospital care is higher than social care for older and terminally ill patients. Moreover, the average cost of social care increases with the age of the patient. Therefore, it is important to make efficient and fair capacity planning which also incorporates patient centred outcomes. Predictive models can provide predictions which their accuracy can be understood and quantified. Predictive modelling can help patients and carers to get the appropriate support services, and allow clinical decision-makers to improve care quality and reduce the cost of inappropriate hospital and Accident and Emergency admissions. The aim of this study is to provide a review of modelling techniques and frameworks for predictive risk modelling of patients in hospital, based on routinely collected data such as the Hospital Episode Statistics database. A number of sub-problems can be considered such as Length-of-Stay and End-of-Life predictive modelling. The methodologies in the literature are mainly focused on addressing the problems using regression methods and Markov models, and the majority lack generalisability. In some cases, the robustness, accuracy and re-usability of predictive risk models have been shown to be improved using Machine Learning methods. Dynamic Bayesian Network techniques can represent complex correlations models and include small probabilities into the solution. The main focus of this study is to provide a review of major time-varying Dynamic Bayesian Network techniques with applications in healthcare predictive risk modelling.

Utopia and its Discontents: Dreams of Catastrophe and the End of 'the End of History'

The institutionalization of Utopia Studies in the last decade is premised upon a specifically aesthetic reception of Ernst Bloch’s theory of the “utopian impulse” during the 1980s and 1990s. A postmodern uneasiness to both left and right formulations of the "End of History" during this period imposes a resistance to concepts of historical and political closure or totality, resulting in a "Utopianism without Utopia". For all the attractiveness of this pan-utopianism, its failure to consider the relation between historical representation and fulfillment renders it consummate with liberalism as a merely inverted conservatism. In contrast to this specific recuperation of a Bloch, the continuing importance of Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image and the speculative concept of historical experience which underlies it becomes apparent. The intrusion of the historical Absolute is coded throughout Benjamin’s thought as the eruptive and mortuary figure of catastrophe, which stands as the dialectical counterpart to the utopian wish images of the collective dream. Indeed, the motto under which the Arcades Project was to be constructed derives from Adorno: “Each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophe”.