Police interviews with women reporting rape: a critical discourse analysis

This study investigates the discursive patterns of interactions between police interviewers and women reporting rape in significant witness interviews. Data in the form of video recorded interviews were obtained from a UK police force for the purposes of this study. The data are analysed using a multi-method approach, incorporating tools from micro-sociology, Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology, to reveal patterns of interactional control, negotiation, and interpretation. The study adopts a critical approach, which is to say that as well as describing discursive patterns, it explains them in light of the discourse processes involved in the production and consumption of police interview talk, and comments on the relationship between these discourse processes and the social context in which they occur. A central focus of the study is how interviewers draw on particular interactional resources to shape interviewees? accounts in particular ways, and this is discussed in relation to the institutional role of the significant witness interview. The discussion is also extended to the ways in which mainstream rape ideology is both reflected in, and maintained by, the discursive choices of participants. The findings of this study indicate that there are a number of issues to be addressed in terms of the training currently offered to officers at Level 2 of the Professionalising Investigation Programme (PIP) (NPIA, 2009) who intend to conduct significant witness interviews. Furthermore, a need is identified to bring the linguistic and discursive processes of negotiation and transformation identified by the study to the attention of the justice system as a whole. This is a particularly pressing need in light of judicial reluctance to replace written witness statements, the current „end product? of significant witness interviews, with the video recorded interview in place of direct examination in cases of rape.

The characterisation and optimisation of modified herbaceous grasses for identifying pyrolisis-oil quality traits

The primary objective of this work is to relate the biomass fuel quality to fast pyrolysis-oil quality in order to identify key biomass traits which affect pyrolysis-oil stability. During storage the pyrolysis-oil becomes more viscous due to chemical and physical changes, as reactions and volatile losses occur due to aging. The reason for oil instability begins within the pyrolysis reactor during pyrolysis in which the biomass is rapidly heated in the absence of oxygen, producing free radical volatiles which are then quickly condensed to form the oil. The products formed do not reach thermodynamic equilibrium and in tum the products react with each other to try to achieve product stability. The first aim of this research was to develop and validate a rapid screening method for determining biomass lignin content in comparison to traditional, time consuming and hence costly wet chemical methods such as Klason. Lolium and Festuca grasses were selected to validate the screening method, as these grass genotypes exhibit a low range of Klason /Acid Digestible Fibre lignin contents. The screening methodology was based on the relationship between the lignin derived products from pyrolysis and the lignin content as determined by wet chemistry. The second aim of the research was to determine whether metals have an affect on fast pyrolysis products, and if any clear relationships can be deduced to aid research in feedstock selection for fast pyrolysis processing. It was found that alkali metals, particularly Na and K influence the rate and yield of degradation as well the char content. Pre-washing biomass with water can remove 70% of the total metals, and improve the pyrolysis product characteristics by increasing the organic yield, the temperature in which maximum liquid yield occurs and the proportion of higher molecular weight compounds within the pyrolysis-oil. The third aim identified these feedstock traits and relates them to the pyrolysis-oil quality and stability. It was found that the mineral matter was a key determinant on pyrolysis-oil yield compared to the proportion of lignin. However the higher molecular weight compounds present in the pyrolysis-oil are due to the lignin, and can cause instability within the pyrolysis-oil. The final aim was to investigate if energy crops can be enhanced by agronomical practices to produce a biomass quality which is attractive to the biomass conversion community, as well as giving a good yield to the farmers. It was found that the nitrogen/potassium chloride fertiliser treatments enhances Miscanthus qualities, by producing low ash, high volatiles yields with acceptable yields for farmers. The progress of senescence was measured in terms of biomass characteristics and fast pyrolysis product characteristics. The results obtained from this research are in strong agreement with published literature, and provides new information on quality traits for biomass which affects pyrolysis and pyrolysis-oils.

An evaluation of TCP over wired-to-wireless networks

To exploit the popularity of TCP as still the dominant sender and protocol of choice for transporting data reliably across the heterogeneous Internet, this thesis explores end-to-end performance issues and behaviours of TCP senders when transferring data to wireless end-users. The theme throughout is on end-users located specifically within 802.11 WLANs at the edges of the Internet, a largely untapped area of work. To exploit the interests of researchers wanting to study the performance of TCP accurately over heterogeneous conditions, this thesis proposes a flexible wired-to-wireless experimental testbed that better reflects conditions in the real-world. To exploit the transparent functionalities between TCP in the wired domain and the IEEE 802.11 WLAN protocols, this thesis proposes a more accurate methodology for gauging the transmission and error characteristics of real-world 802.11 WLANs. It also aims to correlate any findings with the functionality of fixed TCP senders. To exploit the popularity of Linux as a popular operating system for many of the Internet’s data servers, this thesis studies and evaluates various sender-side TCP congestion control implementations within the recent Linux v2.6. A selection of the implementations are put under systematic testing using real-world wired-to-wireless conditions in order to screen and present a viable candidate/s for further development and usage in the modern-day heterogeneous Internet. Overall, this thesis comprises a set of systematic evaluations of TCP senders over 802.11 WLANs, incorporating measurements in the form of simulations, emulations, and through the use of a real-world-like experimental testbed. The goal of the work is to ensure that all aspects concerned are comprehensively investigated in order to establish rules that can help to decide under which circumstances the deployment of TCP is optimal i.e. a set of paradigms for advancing the state-of-the-art in data transport across the Internet.

Towards an operations strategy for the infusion of product-centric services into manufacturing:service systems implementation

The work in this chapter is concerned with product-centric servitization. This is where a portfolio of services are formed and integrated to support product availability and use. Such servitization can be a valuable source of revenue for a manufacturer, yet little attention has been given to the configuration of the wider operations strategy that needs to be in place to deliver integrated products and services successfully. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to put forward a generic set of characteristics for such operations. Our intention is that these characteristics will be valuable to practitioners contemplating sophisticated forms of servitization, as they suggest the likely and significant changes that will be needed to the operations strategy of a conventional manufacturing organisation.

Beyond theory:an examination of lean new product introduction practices in the UK

Interest is growing around the application of lean techniques to new product introduction (NPI). Although a relatively emergent topic compared with the application of ‘lean’ within the factory, since 2000 there has been an exponential rise in the literature on this subject. However, much of this work focuses on describing and extolling the virtues of the ‘Toyota approach’ to design. Therefore, by way of a stock take for the UK, the present authors' research has set out to understand how well lean product design practices have been adopted by leading manufacturers. This has been achieved by carrying out in-depth case studies with three carefully selected manufacturers of complex engineered products. This paper describes these studies, the detailed results and subsequent findings, and concludes that both the awareness and adoption of practices is generally embryonic and far removed from the theory advocated in the literature.

Comparison between femtosecond laser and fusion-arc inscribed long period gratings in photonic crystal fibre

The use of high intensity femtosecond laser sources for inscribing fibre gratings has attained significant interest. The principal advantage of high-energy pulses is their ability for grating inscription in any material type without preprocessing or special core doping. In the field of fibre optical sensing LPGs written in photonic crystal fibre have a distinct advantage of low temperature sensitivity over gratings written in conventional fibre and thus minimal temperature cross-sensitivity. Previous studies have indicated that LPGs written by a point-by-point inscription scheme using a low repetition femtosecond laser exhibit post-fabrication evolution leading to temporal instabilities at room temperatures with respect to spectral location, strength and birefringence of the attenuation bands. These spectral instabilities of LPGs are studied in photonic crystal fibres (endlessly single mode microstructure fibre) to moderately high temperatures 100°C to 200°C and their performance compared to fusion-arc fabricated LPG. Initial results suggest that the fusion-arc fabricated LPG demonstrate less spectral instability for a given constant and moderate temperature, and are similar to the results obtained when inscribed in a standard single mode fibre.

Uncatalysed and potassium-catalysed pyrolysis of the cell-wall constituents of biomass and their model compounds

Cell-wall components (cellulose, hemicellulose (oat spelt xylan), lignin (Organosolv)), and model compounds (levoglucosan (an intermediate product of cellulose decomposition) and chlorogenic acid (structurally similar to lignin polymer units)) have been investigated to probe in detail the influence of potassium on their pyrolysis behaviours as well as their uncatalysed decomposition reaction. Cellulose and lignin were pretreated to remove salts and metals by hydrochloric acid, and this dematerialized sample was impregnated with 1% of potassium as potassium acetate. Levoglucosan, xylan and chlorogenic acid were mixed with CHCOOK to introduce 1% K. Characterisation was performed using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential thermal analysis (DTA). In addition to the TGA pyrolysis, pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (PY-GC-MS) analysis was introduced to examine reaction products. Potassium-catalysed pyrolysis has a huge influence on the char formation stage and increases the char yields considerably (from 7.7% for raw cellulose to 27.7% for potassium impregnated cellulose; from 5.7% for raw levoglucosan to 20.8% for levoglucosan with CHCOOK added). Major changes in the pyrolytic decomposition pathways were observed for cellulose, levoglucosan and chlorogenic acid. The results for cellulose and levoglucosan are consistent with a base catalysed route in the presence of the potassium salt which promotes complete decomposition of glucosidic units by a heterolytic mechanism and favours its direct depolymerization and fragmentation to low molecular weight components (e.g. acetic acid, formic acid, glyoxal, hydroxyacetaldehyde and acetol). Base catalysed polymerization reactions increase the char yield. Potassium-catalysed lignin pyrolysis is very significant: the temperature of maximum conversion in pyrolysis shifts to lower temperature by 70 K and catalysed polymerization reactions increase the char yield from 37% to 51%. A similar trend is observed for the model compound, chlorogenic acid. The addition of potassium does not produce a dramatic change in the tar product distribution, although its addition to chlorogenic acid promoted the generation of cyclohexane and phenol derivatives. Postulated thermal decomposition schemes for chlorogenic acid are presented. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Identifying the ICT challenges of the agri-food sector to define the architectural requirements for a future internet core platform

This paper discussed the specific challenges of the agri-food sector in the light of research carried out in the Smart-AgriFod project. Using questionnaires and focus groups, our research identified as number of business needs and drivers which enable the identification of suitable Future Internet technologies across the three sub-domains of Smart Farming, Smart Agri-logistics, and Smart Food Awareness. The universal need for information access and the importance of standards to enable this lead us to propose an integrated scenario for end to end information access from farm to fork. We conclude by discussing wider implications of such developments especially for climate change and urbanisation.

Effect of cancer cachexia on the activity of tripeptidyl-peptidase II in skeletal muscle

The ubiquitin-proteasome proteolytic pathway plays a major role in degradation of myofibrillar proteins in skeletal muscle during cancer cachexia. The end-product of this pathway is oligopeptides and these are degraded by the extralysomal peptidase tripeptidyl-peptidase II (TPPII) together with various aminopeptidases to form tripeptides and amino acids. To investigate if a relationship exists between the activity of the proteasome and TPPII, functional activities have been measured in gastrocnemius muscle of mice bearing the MAC16 tumour, and with varying extents of weight loss. TPPII activity was quantitated using the specific substrate Ala-Ala-Phe-7-amido-4-methylcoumarin, while proteasome activity was determined as the 'chymotrypsin-like' enzyme activity. Both proteasome proteolytic activity and TPPII activity increased in parallel with increasing weight loss, reaching a maximum at 16% weight loss, after which there was a progressive decrease in activity for both proteases with increasing weight loss. In murine myotubes, proteolysis-inducing factor, which is a sulphated glycoprotein produced by cachexia-inducing tumours, induced an increase in activity of both proteasome and TPPII, with an identical dose-response curve, and both activities were inhibited by eicosapentaenoic acid. These results suggest that the activities of both the proteasome and TPPII are regulated in a parallel manner in cancer cachexia, and that both are induced by the same factor and probably have the same intracellular signalling pathways and transcription factors. © 2004 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Challenges and emerging solutions in the development of compressed orally disintegrating tablets

Areas covered: The review discusses the main challenges of ODT manufacturing process and the emerging solutions featured at early drug development stages. The research specifically describes the methods reported for taste masking/assessment and solubilisation of unpalatable and poorly soluble drugs, respectively. Furthermore, this review highlights the techniques used for developing modified-release ODTs, an emerging area in the field. In addition, it also discusses the poor flowability and segregation problems of directly compressed powders. Moreover, the review describes the tests reported in the literature for ODT disintegration time assessment since a universal technique is still non-existent. Expert opinion: The approaches used to overcome the manufacturing challenges often have a bearing on the price of the end product. However, despite the technical and regulatory challenges, ODTs can offer many advantages over the conventional dosage forms if accompanied by suitable adjuvant technologies and in vitro analytical tools. © 2014 Informa UK, Ltd. Introduction: Orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs) provide several advantages over conventional tablets such as suitability for patients with swallowing difficulties and faster onset of action. The manufacture of ODTs by compression/tableting offers a practical and cost-effective strategy over the freeze drying (lyophilisation) method. Nonetheless, the FDA recommends a disintegration time of 30 s and a maximum weight of 500 mg for a tablet to be labelled as an ODT. These requirements, alongside other desirable product properties, have created a number of challenges for the formulator to overcome while developing compressed ODTs.

Reactor design and its impact on performance and products

This chapter discusses engineering design and performance of various types of biomass transformation reactors. These reactors vary in their operating principle depending on the processing capacity and the nature of the desired end product, that is, gas, chemicals or liquid bio-oil. Mass balance around a thermal conversion reactor is usually carried out to identify the degree of conversion and obtain the amount of the various components in the product. The energy balance around the reactors is essential for determining the optimum reactor temperature and the amount of heat required to complete the overall reactions. Experimental and pilot-plant testing is essential for proper reactor design. However, it is common practice to use correlation and valid parameter values in determining the realistic reactor dimensions and configurations. Despite the recent progress in thermochemical conversion technology, reactor performance and scale up potential are the subjects of continuing research.

Decision-making in product quality based on failure knowledge

Decision-making in product quality is an indispensable stage in product development, in order to reduce product development risk. Based on the identification of the deficiencies of quality function deployment (QFD) and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), a novel decision-making method is presented that draws upon a knowledge network of failure scenarios. An ontological expression of failure scenarios is presented together with a framework of failure knowledge network (FKN). According to the roles of quality characteristics (QCs) in failure processing, QCs are set into three categories namely perceptible QCs, restrictive QCs, and controllable QCs, which present the monitor targets, control targets and improvement targets respectively for quality management. A mathematical model and algorithms based on the analytic network process (ANP) is introduced for calculating the priority of QCs with respect to different development scenarios. A case study is provided according to the proposed decision-making procedure based on FKN. This methodology is applied in the propeller design process to solve the problem of prioritising QCs. This paper provides a practical approach for decision-making in product quality. Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Exploring demographic information in social media for product recommendation

In many e-commerce Web sites, product recommendation is essential to improve user experience and boost sales. Most existing product recommender systems rely on historical transaction records or Web-site-browsing history of consumers in order to accurately predict online users’ preferences for product recommendation. As such, they are constrained by limited information available on specific e-commerce Web sites. With the prolific use of social media platforms, it now becomes possible to extract product demographics from online product reviews and social networks built from microblogs. Moreover, users’ public profiles available on social media often reveal their demographic attributes such as age, gender, and education. In this paper, we propose to leverage the demographic information of both products and users extracted from social media for product recommendation. In specific, we frame recommendation as a learning to rank problem which takes as input the features derived from both product and user demographics. An ensemble method based on the gradient-boosting regression trees is extended to make it suitable for our recommendation task. We have conducted extensive experiments to obtain both quantitative and qualitative evaluation results. Moreover, we have also conducted a user study to gauge the performance of our proposed recommender system in a real-world deployment. All the results show that our system is more effective in generating recommendation results better matching users’ preferences than the competitive baselines.

Revealing 4-hydroxynonenal-histidine adducts as qualitative and quantitative biomarker of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation and oxidative homeostasis

Findings on growth regulating activities of the end-product of lipid peroxidation 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal (HNE), which acts as a “second messenger of free radicals”, overlapped with the development of antibodies specific for the aldehyde-protein adducts. These led to qualitative immunochemical determinations of the HNE presence in various pathophysiological processes and to the change of consideration of the aldehyde’s bioactivities from toxicity into cell signalling. Moreover, findings of the HNE-protein adduct in various organs under physiological circumstances support the concept of “oxidative homeostasis”, which implies that oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation are not only pathological but also physiological processes. Reactive aldehydes, at least HNE, could play important role in oxidative homeostasis, while complementary research approaches might reveal the relevance of the aldehydic-protein adducts as major biomarkers of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation and oxidative homeostasis. Aiming to join efforts in such research activities researchers interacting through the International 4-Hydroxynonenal Club acting within the SFRR-International and through networking projects of the system of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) carried validation of the methods for lipid peroxidation and further developed the genuine 4-HNE-His ELISA founding quantitative and qualitative methods for detection of 4-HNE-His adducts as valuable tool to study oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation in cell cultures, various organs and tissues and eventually for human plasma and serum analyses [1]. Reference: 1. Weber, Daniela. Lidija, Milkovic. Measurement of HNE-protein adducts in human plasma and serum by ELISA—Comparison of two primary antibodies. Redox Biol. 2013. 226-233.

Motivations for servitization:the impact of product complexity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the commonalities and differences in manufacturers’ motivations to servitise. Design/methodology/approach – UK study based on interviews with 40 managers in 25 companies in 12 sectors. Using the concept of product complexity, sectors were grouped using the Complex Products and Systems (CoPS) typology: non-complex products, complex products and systems. Findings – Motivations to servitise were categorised as competitive, demand based (i.e. derived from the customer) or economic. Motivations to servitise vary according to product complexity, although cost savings and improved service quality appear important demand-based motivations for all manufacturers. Non-complex product manufacturers also focus on services to help product differentiation. For CoPS manufacturers, both risk reduction and developing a new revenue stream were important motivations. For uniquely complex product manufacturers, stabilising revenue and increased profitability were strong motivations. For uniquely systems manufacturers, customers sought business transformation, whilst new service business models were also identified. Research limitations/implications – Using the CoPS typology, this study delineates motivations to servitise by sector. The findings show varying motivations to servitise as product complexity increases, although some motivational commonality existed across all groups. Manufacturers may have products of differing complexity within their portfolio. To overcome this limitation the unit of analysis was the strategic business unit. Practical implications – Managers can reflect on and benchmark their motivation for, and opportunities from, servitisation, by considering product complexity. Originality/value – The first study to categorise servitisation motivations by product complexity. Identifying that some customers of systems manufacturers seek business transformation through outsourcing.