‘Warsaw Pact Military Doctrines in the 70s and 80s: Findings in the East German Archives’

This article draws on Warsaw Treaty Organisation and East German military archives to demonstrate that the WTO's military exercises until the mid-1990s always envisaged an offensive strategy with the aim of reaching the Channel in a few days. Only gradually did this change under Gorbachev and to include also defensive strategies, very much against the opposition of East Germany.

Ribosome modulation factor protects Escherichia coli during heat stress, but this may not be dependent on ribosome dimerisation

The role of ribosome modulation factor (RMF) in protecting heat-stressed Escherichia coli cells was identified by the observation that cultures of a mutant strain lacking functional RMF (HMY15) were highly heat sensitive in stationary phase compared to those of the parent strain (W3110). No difference in heat sensitivity was observed between these strains in exponential phase, during which RMF is not synthesised. Studies by differential scanning calorimetry demonstrated that the ribosomes of stationary-phase cultures of the mutant strain had lower thermal stability than those of the parent strain in stationary phase, or exponential-phase ribosomes. More rapid breakdown of ribosomes in the mutant strain during heating was confirmed by rRNA analysis and sucrose density gradient centrifugation. Analyses of ribosome composition showed that the 100S dimers dissociated more rapidly during heating than 70S particles. While ribosome dimerisation is a consequence of the conformational changes caused by RMF binding, it may not therefore be essential for RMF-mediated ribosome stabilisation.

Iris Murdoch

This is an analysis of Iris Murdoch's plays, including The Italian Girl, The Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Three Arrows and The Servants and the Snow. It also assesses Murdoch's significance for theatre in the early 1960s and 70s, as Women's Theatre was beginning to make its mark.

Contemporary ordinary language philosophy

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention.

Workers with elderly dependants: employment law’s response to the latest care-giving conundrum

This paper considers how employment laws are being used in response to what we have termed ‘the eldercare/workplace conundrum’. It is well known that people are now living longer but health is still failing in a significant percentage of older people, meaning that many adults require care for longer, albeit to varying degrees and for varying amounts of time. Many of these individuals will receive care from relatives or close friends who are participating in the labour market: this is increasingly likely as adults are expected / wanting to remain in paid work for longer, often into their 60s and 70s. The requirements of elderly dependants can cause these workers huge difficulties and dilemmas as they attempt, across time, to accommodate the particular needs of the person for whom they wish to provide care, often a loved one, and meet the particular demands of their employment relationship. In this paper we consider why this is an area of social policy that warrants effective legal engagement and consider, drawing on various examples of legal responses in other countries that face similar conundrums, what might improve legal engagement in this area.

Categories & order systems: Claude Parent and The Serving Library intersections of architecture, art and editorial design

This paper discusses the work of Claude Parent and The Serving Library, considering the critiques generated by their intersecting of architecture, art and editorial design. Through focus on the ways in which hosting environment, architecture and forms of expanded publishing can serve to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and activities of production, spectatorship and reception, it draws on the lineage of 1960s/70s Conceptual Art in considering these practices as a means through which to escape medium specificity and spatial confinement. Relationships between actual and virtual space are then read against this broadening of aesthetic ideas and the theory of critical modernity.

Large contribution of supercooled liquid clouds to the solar radiation budget of the Southern Ocean

The Southern Ocean is a critical region for global climate, yet large cloud and solar radiation biases over the Southern Ocean are a long-standing problem in climate models and are poorly understood, leading to biases in simulated sea surface temperatures. This study shows that supercooled liquid clouds are central to understanding and simulating the Southern Ocean environment. A combination of satellite observational data and detailed radiative transfer calculations is used to quantify the impact of cloud phase and cloud vertical structure on the reflected solar radiation in the Southern Hemisphere summer. It is found that clouds with supercooled liquid tops dominate the population of liquid clouds. The observations show that clouds with supercooled liquid tops contribute between 27% and 38% to the total reflected solar radiation between 40° and 70°S, and climate models are found to poorly simulate these clouds. The results quantify the importance of supercooled liquid clouds in the Southern Ocean environment and highlight the need to improve understanding of the physical processes that control these clouds in order to improve their simulation in numerical models. This is not only important for improving the simulation of present-day climate and climate variability, but also relevant for increasing confidence in climate feedback processes and future climate projections.