Good stories for great holidays, arranged for story-telling and reading aloud and for the children's own reading,

"Reference lists for story-telling and collateral reading": p. [429]-443.

Seder tefiloth Yisrael = The union prayer-book for Jewish worship /

English and Hebrew on opposite pages.

The kingdom of the Lord Jesus.

Mode of access: Internet.

Friendship's offering and winter's wreath

"A Christmas and New Year's present."

Behind the scenes:a week in the life of a Senior Pro-Vice Chancellor

Helen Higson graduated from Cambridge University in 1982 and followed this up with an MSc with the Open University and a PhD at Birkbeck College London. She started working in HE at Southampton University and has spent the last 25 years at Aston University. Her roles there have been various, starting as PA to the Pro-Vice-Chancellor External Relations and spending 20 years with Aston Business School. Helen was awarded a Personal Chair in Higher Education Learning and Management in 2008 and is currently Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor, with responsibility for International Relations, Employability, Schools Liaison, Registry and Planning. Helen was awarded an AUA Fellowship in 2010 and an OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours list.

Impact in contact lenses and the anterior eye:challenges prevailing in 2015

As we settle into a new year, this second issue of Contact Lens and Anterior Eye allows us to reflect on how new research in this field impacts our understanding, but more importantly, how we use this evidence basis to enhance our day to day practice, to educate the next generation of students and to construct the research studies to deepen our knowledge still further. The end of 2014 saw the publication of the UK governments Research Exercise Framework (REF) which ranks Universities in terms of their outputs (which includes their paper, publications and research income), environment (infrastructure and staff support) and for the first time impact (defined as “any effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” [8]). The REF is a process of expert review, carried out in 36 subject-based units of assessment, of which our field is typically submitted to the Allied Health, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy panel. Universities that offer Optometry did very well with Cardiff, Manchester and Aston in the top 10% out of the 94 Universities that submitted to this panel (Grade point Average ranked order). While the format of the new exercise (probably in 2010) to allocate the more than £2 billion of UK government research funds is yet to be determined, it is already rumoured that impact will contribute an even larger proportion to the weighting. Hence it is even more important to reflect on the impact of our research. In this issue, Elisseef and colleagues [5] examine the intriguing potential of modifying a lens surface to allow it to bind to known wetting agents (in this case hyaluronic acid) to enhance water retention. Such a technique has the capacity to reduced friction between the lens surface and the eyelids/ocular surface, presumably leading to higher comfort and less reason for patients to discontinue with lens wear. Several papers in this issue report on the validity of new high precision, fast scanning imaging and quantification equipment, utilising techniques such as Scheimpflug, partial coherence interferometry, aberrometry and video allowing detailed assessment of anterior chamber biometry, corneal topography, corneal biomechanics, peripheral refraction, ocular aberrations and lens fit. The challenge is how to use this advanced instrumentation which is becoming increasingly available to create real impact. Many challenges in contact lenses and the anterior eye still prevail in 2015 such as: -While contact lens and refractive surgery complications are relatively rare, they are still too often devastating to the individual and their quality of life (such as the impact and prognosis of patients with Acanthmoeba Keratitis reported by Jhanji and colleagues in this issue [7]). How can we detect those patients who are going to be affected and what modifications do we need to make to contact lenses and patient management prevent this occurring? -Drop out from contact lenses still occurs at a rapid rate and symptoms of dry eye seem to be the leading cause driving this discontinuation of wear [1] and [2]. What design, coating, material and lubricant release mechanism will make a step change in end of day comfort in particular? -Presbyopia is a major challenge to hassle free quality vision and is one of the first signs of ageing noticed by many people. As an emmetrope approaching presbyopia, I have a vested interest in new medical devices that will give me high quality vision at all distances when my arms won’t stretch any further. Perhaps a new definition of presbyopia could be when you start to orientate your smartphone in the landscape direction to gain the small increase in print size needed to read! Effective accommodating intraocular lenses that truly mimic the pre-presbyopic crystalline lenses are still a way off [3] and hence simultaneous images achieved through contact lenses, intraocular lenses or refractive surgery still have a secure future. However, splitting light reaching the retina and requiring the brain to supress blurred images will always be a compromise on contrast sensitivity and is liable to cause dysphotopsia; so how will new designs account for differences in a patient's task demands and own optical aberrations to allow focused patient selection, optimising satisfaction? -Drug delivery from contact lenses offers much in terms of compliance and quality of life for patients with chronic ocular conditions such as glaucoma, dry eye and perhaps in the future, dry age-related macular degeneration; but scientific proof-of-concept publications (see EIShaer et al. [6]) have not yet led to commercial products. Part of this is presumably the regulatory complexity of combining a medical device (the contact lens) and a pharmaceutical agent. Will 2015 be the year when this innovation finally becomes a reality for patients, bringing them an enhanced quality of life through their eye care practitioners and allowing researchers to further validate the use of pharmaceutical contact lenses and propose enhancements as the technology matures? -Last, but no means least is the field of myopia control, the topic of the first day of the BCLA's Conference in Liverpool, June 6–9th 2015. The epidemic of myopia is a blight, particularly in Asia, with significant concerns over sight threatening pathology resulting from the elongated eye. This is a field where real impact is already being realised through new soft contact lens optics, orthokeratology and low dose pharmaceuticals [4], but we still need to be able to better predict which technique will work best for an individual and to develop new techniques to retard myopia progression in those who don’t respond to current treatments, without increasing their risk of complications or the treatment impacting their quality of life So what will your New Year's resolution be to make 2015 a year of real impact, whether by advancing science or applying the findings published in journals such as Contact Lens and Anterior Eye to make a real difference to your patients’ lives?

Editorial

Full text: Welcome to issue 1 of 2012 and a belated Happy New Year to all CLAE readers and BCLA members. The hardest job I had for this issue was to decide which papers to include and which papers to hang on to and save for issue 2 of 2012. At the end of December when I was choosing the content for this issue there were additional 5 papers that could have been included. The final choice came down to various factors; such as first come first served – i.e. which papers had been ready and waiting the longest; secondly which papers had been submitted the earliest; are there similar papers so that it may be beneficial to publish them alongside this paper; and also was the content something which needed to be out there quicker than other papers as it was a current hot topic? But it should be noted that once papers are proofed and deemed ready by authors they are published in the epub version and put online for others to see in their final version. An epub version is given a DOI number (digital object identifier) so that it can be cited by other authors. Apart from being on line the only other difference is that an epub version is essentially waiting to be assigned to a particular issue. So those papers that are being held off for issue 2 of this year are actually already available for you to read (and cite) on line. In this issue there is a paper related to the cost of different contact lens replacement schedules – this may be a topic that is debated more in the future since as a society we are thinking more ‘green’ and all trying to help by reducing our carbon footprint, whether that be by recycling or using less in the first place. A timely review paper on the management of allergic eye disease may help us to better manage those patients we see in the spring with pollen allergies. We have two papers looking at different aspects in keratoconus patients, another looking at a modified fluoret strip and its application in measuring tear break up time and a review paper on corneal erosions. Another interesting paper comes from Professor Harminder Dua and his team. Professor Dua is the UK Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ president and has been interested in corneal anatomy and physiology for much of his research career. Finally, an unusual case of an ocular injury related to a snake bite. Overall I would say there is enough to sink your ‘fangs’ into! Finally, it gives me great pleasure in announcing the newest person to join our Editorial Board, Dr Florence Malet. Dr Malet is an Ophthalmologist and since September 2000 she has been at the Bordeaux Hospital in France developing the Contact Lens Unit of in the Ophthalmology University Department. She is ex-president of the French Contact Lens Society and president of the European Contact Lens Society of Ophthalmologists.

The role of context in image annotation and recommendation

With the rise of smart phones, lifelogging devices (e.g. Google Glass) and popularity of image sharing websites (e.g. Flickr), users are capturing and sharing every aspect of their life online producing a wealth of visual content. Of these uploaded images, the majority are poorly annotated or exist in complete semantic isolation making the process of building retrieval systems difficult as one must firstly understand the meaning of an image in order to retrieve it. To alleviate this problem, many image sharing websites offer manual annotation tools which allow the user to “tag” their photos, however, these techniques are laborious and as a result have been poorly adopted; Sigurbjörnsson and van Zwol (2008) showed that 64% of images uploaded to Flickr are annotated with < 4 tags. Due to this, an entire body of research has focused on the automatic annotation of images (Hanbury, 2008; Smeulders et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2012a) where one attempts to bridge the semantic gap between an image’s appearance and meaning e.g. the objects present. Despite two decades of research the semantic gap still largely exists and as a result automatic annotation models often offer unsatisfactory performance for industrial implementation. Further, these techniques can only annotate what they see, thus ignoring the “bigger picture” surrounding an image (e.g. its location, the event, the people present etc). Much work has therefore focused on building photo tag recommendation (PTR) methods which aid the user in the annotation process by suggesting tags related to those already present. These works have mainly focused on computing relationships between tags based on historical images e.g. that NY and timessquare co-exist in many images and are therefore highly correlated. However, tags are inherently noisy, sparse and ill-defined often resulting in poor PTR accuracy e.g. does NY refer to New York or New Year? This thesis proposes the exploitation of an image’s context which, unlike textual evidences, is always present, in order to alleviate this ambiguity in the tag recommendation process. Specifically we exploit the “what, who, where, when and how” of the image capture process in order to complement textual evidences in various photo tag recommendation and retrieval scenarios. In part II, we combine text, content-based (e.g. # of faces present) and contextual (e.g. day-of-the-week taken) signals for tag recommendation purposes, achieving up to a 75% improvement to precision@5 in comparison to a text-only TF-IDF baseline. We then consider external knowledge sources (i.e. Wikipedia & Twitter) as an alternative to (slower moving) Flickr in order to build recommendation models on, showing that similar accuracy could be achieved on these faster moving, yet entirely textual, datasets. In part II, we also highlight the merits of diversifying tag recommendation lists before discussing at length various problems with existing automatic image annotation and photo tag recommendation evaluation collections. In part III, we propose three new image retrieval scenarios, namely “visual event summarisation”, “image popularity prediction” and “lifelog summarisation”. In the first scenario, we attempt to produce a rank of relevant and diverse images for various news events by (i) removing irrelevant images such memes and visual duplicates (ii) before semantically clustering images based on the tweets in which they were originally posted. Using this approach, we were able to achieve over 50% precision for images in the top 5 ranks. In the second retrieval scenario, we show that by combining contextual and content-based features from images, we are able to predict if it will become “popular” (or not) with 74% accuracy, using an SVM classifier. Finally, in chapter 9 we employ blur detection and perceptual-hash clustering in order to remove noisy images from lifelogs, before combining visual and geo-temporal signals in order to capture a user’s “key moments” within their day. We believe that the results of this thesis show an important step towards building effective image retrieval models when there lacks sufficient textual content (i.e. a cold start).

Breast cancer five-year survival in New South Wales women, 1972 to 1991

This study of breast cancer survival is based on analysis of five-year relative survival of 38 362 cases of invasive breast cancer in New South Wales (NSW) women, incident between 1972 and 1991, with follow-up to 1992, using data from the population-based NSW Central Cancer Registry. Survival was ascertained by matching the registry file of breast cancers against NSW death certificates from 1972 to 1992, mainly by automated probabilistic linkage. Absolute survival of cases was compared with expected survival of age- and period-matched NSW women. Proportional hazard regression analysis was used for examination of the effects on excess mortality of age, period of diagnosis and degree of spread at diagnosis. Relative survival at five years increased from 70 per cent in 1972-1976 to 77 per cent in 1987-1991. Survival improved during the 1970s and in the late 1980s. Regression analysis suggested that part of the improved survival in the late 1980s was due to lesser degree of spread at diagnosis, whereas the improved survival during the 1970s may have been due to treatment. Survival was better for those aged 40-49 years (RR = 0.86) and worse for those aged greater than or equal to 70 years (RR = 1.22) compared with the referent group (60-69 years). Excess mortality was much less for those with invasive localised disease than those with regional spread (RR = 3.1) or metastatic cancer (RR = 15.5) at diagnosis. For the most recent period (1987-1991), relative five-year survival was 90, 70 and 18 per cent, respectively, for the three degree-of-spread categories.

Breast cancer five-year survival, by New South Wales regions, 1980 to 1991

Breast cancer five-year relative survival was calculated for 16 urban and rural regions in New South Wales (NSW) for cases incident in 1980-1991. Survival analysis employed cancer registry data linked with the death register, and age- and period-matched regional mortality of NSW women, Proportional hazard regression analysis was used to compare excess mortality in breast cancer cases in each region. The effect of region was significant (P < 0.05) in the analysis, after age and the follow-up variable (and their intel action) were adjusted for, although no region was significantly different from the referent group (chosen because of average relative five-year survival). When degree of spread and its interactions were entered into che model, the effect of region became nonsignificant. A significant linear trend (P < 0.05) in the adjusted relative risk for excess mortality in breast cancer cases was noted when regions were divided into quartiles based on socioeconomic status, with higher relative risk in low-socioeconomic-status groups; this effect also disappeared with adjustment for degree of spread at diagnosis. There was no general effect of rurality versus capital city or other metropolitan centres. This study demonstrates a small effect of region of residence and implied socioeconomic status on breast cancer survival in NSW women, but this becomes nonsignificant when the data are adjusted for degree of spread at diagnosis, This suggests that earlier diagnosis would he of benefit in reducing minor inequalities in breast cancer survival in NSW women.

Paul Auster and the music of change: building new stories

In the work of Paul Auster (Newark, 1947 - ), we find two main themes: the sense of loss and existential drift and the loneliness of the individual fully committed to the work of writing, as if he had been confined to the book that commands his life. However, this second theme is clearly the dominant one because the character's space of solitude may include its own wandering, because this wandering is also often performed inside the four walls of a room, just like it is narrated inside the space of the page and the book. Both in his poetry, essays and fiction, Auster seems to face the work of writing as an actual physical effort of effective construction, as if the words that are aligned in the poem-text were stones to place in a row when building a wall or some other structure in stone.

Reversible behavioural autistic-like regression: A manifestation of a special (new?) epileptic syndrome in a 28-month-old child. A 2-year longitudinal study .

A 28-month-old boy was referred for acute onset of abnormal head movements. History revealed an insidious progressive regression in behaviour and communication over several months. Head and shoulder 'spasms' with alteration of consciousness and on one occasion ictal laughter were seen. The electroencephalograph (EEG) showed repeated bursts of brief generalized polyspikes and spike-wave during the 'spasms', followed by flattening, a special pattern which never recurred after treatment. Review of family videos showed a single 'minor' identical seizure 6 months previously. Magnetic resonance imaging was normal. Clonazepam brought immediate cessation of seizures, normalization of the EEG and a parallel spectacular improvement in communication, mood and language. Follow-up over the next 10 months showed a new regression unaccompained by recognized seizures, although numerous seizures were discovered during the videotaped neuropsychological examination, when stereotyped subtle brief paroxysmal changes in posture and behaviour could be studied in slow motion and compared with the 'prototypical' initial ones. The EEG showed predominant rare left-sided fronto-temporal discharges. Clonazepam was changed to carbamazepin with marked improvement in behaviour, language and cognition which has been sustained up to the last control at 51 months. Videotaped home observations allowed the documentation of striking qualitative and quantitative variations in social interaction and play of autistic type in relation to the epileptic activity. We conclude that this child has a special characteristic epileptic syndrome with subtle motor and vegetative symptomatology associated with an insidious catastrophic 'autistic-like' regression which could be overlooked. The methods used to document such fluctuating epileptic behavioural manifestations are discussed.