British National Research Articles

An anthropological investigation of cruelty and its contrasts

In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most evil of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate cruelty as a concept with torture (Stade) and with love (Rapport). Treating the capability to practise cruelty and the liability to suffer from cruelty as universal aspects of a human condition, Stade and Rapport aim to instantiate the precise enactment of cruelty, firstly, and secondly, to propose a process of its social negation. CIA training manuals and quotidian practice within the British National Health Service are employed as illustrative materials.

Imagined communities: from subjecthood to nationality in the British Atlantic

Drawing on the concept of uneven and combined development this article critically interrogates Benedict Anderson’s theory of the ‘imagined community’ through an historical investigation into the English-realm-cum-British-empire. Placing its rise in the context of the conflicts of Post-Reformation Europe, it identifies vectors of combined development (money, goods, ideas, people) which shaped the formation of new imagined communities. These post-Reformation struggles were not defined by nationality but subjecthood, which saw ‘the realm’ displace the monarch as an object of rights and duties. The 18th century rise of British nationalism was a response to the long crisis of subjecthood (1639–1688). However, this emergence was uneven and non-linear, such that it co-existed as a political imagination with continued belief in – and political support for – subjecthood. Ironically, given its latter-day mythology, the American Revolutionary War was fought to protect subjecthood under the Crown from subordination to the British nation and its parliament.

Cost-utility analysis of adding abiraterone acetate plus prednisone/prednisolone to long-term hormone therapy in newly diagnosed advanced prostate cancer in England: Lifetime decision model based on STAMPEDE trial data.

Adding abiraterone acetate (AA) plus prednisolone (P) to standard of care (SOC) improves survival in newly diagnosed advanced prostate cancer (PC) patients starting hormone therapy. Our objective was to determine the value for money to the English National Health Service (NHS) of adding AAP to SOC. We used a decision analytic model to evaluate cost-effectiveness of providing AAP in the English NHS. Between 2011-2014, the STAMPEDE trial recruited 1917 men with high-risk localised, locally advanced, recurrent or metastatic PC starting first-line androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT), and they were randomised to receive SOC plus AAP, or SOC alone. Lifetime costs and quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) were estimated using STAMPEDE trial data supplemented with literature data where necessary, adjusting for baseline patient and disease characteristics. British National Formulary (BNF) prices (£98/day) were applied for AAP. Costs and outcomes were discounted at 3.5%/year. AAP was not cost-effective. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) was £149,748/QALY gained in the non-metastatic (M0) subgroup, with 2.4% probability of being cost-effective at NICE's £30,000/QALY threshold; and the metastatic (M1) subgroup had an ICER of £47,503/QALY gained, with 12.0% probability of being cost-effective. Scenario analysis suggested AAP could be cost-effective in M1 patients if priced below £62/day, or below £28/day in the M0 subgroup. AAP could dominate SOC in the M0 subgroup with price below £11/day. AAP is effective for non-metastatic and metastatic disease but is not cost-effective when using the BNF price. AAP currently only has UK approval for use in a subset of M1 patients. The actual price currently paid by the English NHS for abiraterone acetate is unknown. Broadening AAP's indication and having a daily cost below the thresholds described above is recommended, given AAP improves survival in both subgroups and its cost-saving potential in M0 subgroup.

British Nationality and Borders Bill and the international protection of refugees in the light of the concept of community interest in international law

The crisis that Europe faced in 2015 has never been resolved and countries have adopted different strategies to deal with the influx of migrants . Some of them raise serious legal doubts for good reason. One of the new national solutions currently in the process of passing is the new migration plan announced by the United Kingdom in the Nationality and Borders Bill last year. The aim of the reform is to improve the British asylum system and to fight effectively illegal immigration and people smuggling.The aim of the article is to present the most important assumptions of the British reform in the field of grant- ing refugee status. The analysis would allow to assess the compliance of the designed solutions with international obligations, the fulfilment of which should form the basis of the asylum policy of each State being a party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. The main aim of the article, however, is to draw attention to the fact that the international protection of refugees should be equated with community interests and referring to the individual interest of the State is an erroneous and dangerous assumption.

King Arthur’s “Lurking Carcass” and the English Nation: Embodying the State on Stage and Page in The Misfortunes of Arthur and A Mirror for Magistrates

ABSTRACT In Thomas Hughes’s 1588 drama The Misfortunes of Arthur, King Arthur desires his “carcasse” to “lurke” in obscurity after his death, so that his missing body may inspire future generations with promises of his glorious return. In a comparable passage in Richard Niccols’s 1610 edition of the Mirror for Magistrates, Arthur tells the reader that he hopes his fame will continue to inspire when his limbs lie “rapt in mould.” The two texts’ emphasis on the importance of the sovereign’s physical body to his legacy reinforces Claire McEachern’s suggestion in The Poetics of English Nationhood that “embodied, the state becomes familiar” and facilitates subjects’ desire for inclusion in the nation. In this article I demonstrate how the state became familiar via the Arthurian body—in performance and especially in print—as that body spoke directly to the concerns of all subjects and readers who constituted the English nation.

John Keats’s Geographical Writing and Construction of British National Identity

British romantic poets generally illustrate distinctive geographical writing characteristics. Among them, John Keats is a representative in composing geographical space from a multi-dimensional perspective, either real or imaginary, thus illustrating the natural aesthetic characteristics of his poetry and the poet’s own humanistic thoughts and political concerns. In his poems, Keats not only wrote about the landscape of English natural geographical appearance, including forests, grasslands, etc., which highlighted his love for Britain and pride in folk customs, but also focused on the human landscape represented by castles and churches, which highlighted the central position of England within Great Britain and the anticipation of integrating Scotland under English control. Keats is not confined to a particular moment or a scene, but detached from reality and creating fantasy to incorporate elements of magical mythology in order to fictionalize the natural geographic environment including nature, river, mountains and human geography like castles, thus highlighting his Hellenized Britain and publicizing the civilized image of the Great Britain. On the other hand, he also highlighted the rationality and order of Britain through the mapping of the East, and provided a rational explanation for its Eastern colonization.

The Updated NICE Guidance Exposed the Serious Flaws in CBT and Graded Exercise Therapy Trials for ME/CFS.

The British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recently published its updated guidelines for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). NICE concluded, after an extensive review of the literature, that graded exercise therapy (GET) is harmful and should not be used, and that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is only an adjunctive and not a curative treatment. Leading proponents of the cognitive behavioural model (CBmodel) find it difficult to accept this paradigm shift. In, for example, an article in The Lancet, they try to argue that the new NICE guideline is based on ideology instead of science. In this article we reviewed the evidence they used to support their claims. Our analysis shows that the trials they used in support suffered from serious flaws which included badly designed control groups, relying on subjective primary outcomes in non-blinded studies, including patients in their trials who didn’t have the disease under investigation or had a self-limiting disease, selective reporting, outcome switching and making extensive endpoint changes, which created an overlap in entry and recovery criteria, using a post-hoc definition of recovery which included the severely ill, not publishing results that contradict their own conclusion, ignoring their own (objective) null effect, etc. The flaws in these trials all created a bias in favour of the interventions. Despite all these flaws, treatments that are said to lead to recovery in reality do not lead to objective improvement. Therefore, these studies do not support the claim that CBT and GET are effective treatments. Moreover, the arguments that are used to claim that NICE was wrong, in reality, highlight the absence of evidence for the safety and efficacy of CBT and GET and strengthen the decision by NICE to drop CBT and GET as curative treatments for ME/CFS.

On Keep and Keep on: A Corpora-based Analysis

The main goal of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of keep and keep on in the TV Corpus and the British National Corpus. With respect to the TV Corpus, it is interesting to note that keep was favored over keep on from the 1950s to the 2010s. A further point to note is that keep and keep on reached a peak (28,586 tokens vs. 1,303 tokens) in the 2010s. In addition, it is worth pointing out that keep was always preferable to keep on from the 1950s to the 2010s. With respect to the BNC, it is probably worthwhile pointing out that keep is 71.42% the same as keep on in the seven genres of the BNC. When it comes to the Euclidean distance between keep and keep on, the former is the nearest from the latter in the fiction genre, whereas the former is the furthest from the latter in the spoken genre. Quite interestingly, the BNC clearly shows that keep going and keep on going are the most preferred (430 tokens vs. 24 tokens) by the British. Finally, it is significant to note that 43.58% of thirty nine gerunds are the collocations of both keep and keep on.

Environmental Occurrence and Predicted Pharmacological Risk to Freshwater Fish of over 200 Neuroactive Pharmaceuticals in Widespread Use.

There is a growing concern that neuroactive chemicals released into the environment can perturb wildlife behaviour. Among these chemicals, pharmaceuticals such as antidepressants and anxiolytics have been receiving increasing attention, as they are specifically prescribed to modify behavioural responses. Many laboratory studies have demonstrated that some of these compounds can affect various aspects of the behaviour of a range of aquatic organisms; however, these investigations are focused on a very small set of neuroactive pharmaceuticals, and they often consider one compound at a time. In this study, to better understand the environmental and toxicological dimension of the problem, we considered all pharmaceuticals explicitly intended to modulate the central nervous system (CNS), and we hypothesised that these compounds have higher probability of perturbing animal behaviour. Based on this hypothesis, we used the classification of pharmaceuticals provided by the British National Formulary (based on their clinical applications) and identified 210 different CNS-acting pharmaceuticals prescribed in the UK to treat a variety of CNS-related conditions, including mental health and sleep disorders, dementia, epilepsy, nausea, and pain. The analysis of existing databases revealed that 84 of these compounds were already detected in surface waters worldwide. Using a biological read-across approach based on the extrapolation of clinical data, we predicted that the concentration of 32 of these neuroactive pharmaceuticals in surface waters in England may be high enough to elicit pharmacological effects in wild fish. The ecotoxicological effects of the vast majority of these compounds are currently uncharacterised. Overall, these results highlight the importance of addressing this environmental challenge from a mixture toxicology and systems perspective. The knowledge platform developed in the present study can guide future region-specific prioritisation efforts, inform the design of mixture studies, and foster interdisciplinary efforts aimed at identifying novel approaches to predict and interpret the ecological implications of chemical-induced behaviour disruption.

‘The moral rearmament of imperialism’: the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Northern Ireland conflict, and the new world order, 1981-1994

ABSTRACT Through four thematic sections, this article explains why, from its inception in 1981, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) espoused ‘unconditional support’ for ‘Irish freedom’, and why this position changed in the 1990s. Illuminating a particularly functional mode of radical solidarity, it argues that British leftists engaged with the Northern Ireland conflict to articulate their revolutionary praxis. Advocating ‘unconditional support’ enabled the RCP to challenge reformism on the British left and nationalism in the labour movement. As the article’s second section demonstrates, such specific left-wing anti-imperialism irked Provisional republican leaders, who demanded a more substantial, inclusive solidarity movement in Britain. The article’s third section elucidates how the Cold War’s denouement from the late 1980s deepened strategic and ideological differences among radicals. Seeking to replicate peace processes in Israel-Palestine and South Africa, Provisional republicans envisaged a negotiated transfer of power in the ‘new world order’. By contrast, lambasting western intervention in the Gulf and the Balkans, RCP theoreticians lamented the ‘moral rearmament of imperialism’. The nascent republican peace strategy of the 1990s conclusively exposed deep-rooted tensions within the RCP’s peculiar solidarity. For disillusioned cadres who had endorsed republicanism only insofar as it threatened the British state, republicanism’s new constitutionalism represented capitulation.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on community medication dispensing: a national cohort analysis in Wales, UK.

BackgroundPopulation-level information on dispensed medication provides insight on the distribution of treated morbidities, particularly if linked to other population-scale data at an individual-level.ObjectiveTo evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on dispensing patterns of medications.MethodsRetrospective observational study using population-scale, individual-level dispensing records in Wales, UK. Total dispensed drug items for the population between 1st January 2016 and 31st December 2019 (3-years, pre-COVID-19) were compared to 2020 with follow up until 27th July 2021 (COVID-19 period). We compared trends across all years and British National Formulary (BNF) chapters and highlighted the trends in three major chapters for 2019-21: 1-Cardiovascular system (CVD); 2-Central Nervous System (CNS); 3-Immunological & Vaccine. We developed an interactive dashboard to enable monitoring of changes as the pandemic evolves.ResultAmongst all BNF chapters, 73,410,543 items were dispensed in 2020 compared to 74,121,180 items in 2019 demonstrating -0.96% relative decrease in 2020. Comparison of monthly patterns showed average difference (D) of -59,220 and average Relative Change (RC) of –0.74% between the number of dispensed items in 2020 and 2019. Maximum RC was observed in March 2020 (D = +1,224,909 and RC = +20.62), followed by second peak in June 2020 (D = +257,920, RC = +4.50%). A third peak was observed in September 2020 (D = +264,138, RC = +4.35%). Large increases in March 2020 were observed for CVD and CNS medications across all age groups. The Immunological and Vaccine products dropped to very low levels across all age groups and all months (including the March dispensing peak).ConclusionsReconfiguration of routine clinical services during COVID-19 led to substantial changes in community pharmacy drug dispensing. This change may contribute to a long-term burden of COVID-19, raising the importance of a comprehensive and timely monitoring of changes for evaluation of the potential impact on clinical care and outcomes.

National identity in historical video games: An analysis of howCivilization Vrepresents the past

AbstractAlthough the last two decades have seen a vast increase in studies that analyse banal nationalism in media, there is one medium that has largely been ignored in these discussions: video games. This article fills part of this gap by analysing the way in which the historical strategy gameCivilization Vrepresents the Past and what role it gives nations within historical processes. This video game was marketed globally by an American company, but it evokes Spanish, Japanese, and English nationalist narratives and imagery. Although globalization and nationalism are often framed as opposing forces, this is hardly the case here. This paper will combine insights of Game Studies and Nationalism Studies to illustrate how the elements that conformCivilization Vincentivise and enable players to re‐enact a narrative that portrays essentialised nation‐states as the only relevant actors in the past, present, and future of humankind. Although a product of globalization,Civilization Vstrengthens rather than erodes national boundaries.

Exploring British Accents: Modelling the Trap–Bath Split with Functional Data Analysis

AbstractThe sound of our speech is influenced by the places we come from. Great Britain contains a wide variety of distinctive accents which are of interest to linguistics. In particular, the ‘a’ vowel in words like ‘class’ is pronounced differently in the North and the South. Speech recordings of this vowel can be represented as formant curves or as mel-frequency cepstral coefficient curves. Functional data analysis and generalised additive models offer techniques to model the variation in these curves. Our first aim was to model the difference between typical Northern and Southern vowels /æ/ and /ɑ/, by training two classifiers on the North-South Class Vowels dataset collected for this paper. Our second aim is to visualise geographical variation of accents in Great Britain. For this we use speech recordings from a second dataset, the British National Corpus (BNC) audio edition. The trained models are used to predict the accent of speakers in the BNC, and then we model the geographical patterns in these predictions using a soap film smoother. This work demonstrates a flexible and interpretable approach to modelling phonetic accent variation in speech recordings.

Communicative efficiency and the Principle of No Synonymy: predictability effects and the variation ofwant toandwanna

AbstractThere is ample psycholinguistic evidence that speakers behave efficiently, using shorter and less effortful constructions when the meaning is more predictable, and longer and more effortful ones when it is less predictable. However, the Principle of No Synonymy requires that all formally distinct variants should also be functionally different. The question is how much two related constructions should overlap semantically and pragmatically in order to be used for the purposes of efficient communication. The case study focuses onwant to + Infinitive and its reduced variant withwanna, which have different stylistic and sociolinguistic connotations. Bayesian mixed-effects regression modelling based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus reveals a very limited effect of efficiency: predictability increases the chances of the reduced variant only in fast speech. We conclude that efficient use of more and less effortful variants is restricted when two variants are associated with different registers or styles. This paper also pursues a methodological goal regarding missing values in speech corpora. We impute missing data based on the existing values. A comparison of regression models with and without imputed values reveals similar tendencies. This means that imputation is useful for dealing with missing values in corpora.

Additional Meanings of Human Body-related Idioms: Context, Semantics

The paper addresses a vital issue of forming idioms with nominations of human body. Human body-related words nominating body parts, physiological and mental processes are used to form numerous English idioms. In given paper these idioms are referred to as human body-related. The paper aims at revealing the specifics of lexical and semantic constituents of the idioms with reference to their contexts. We collected 200 human body-related English idioms from academic books and dictionaries. The research comprised four stages. The thematic classification based on the lexical structure of the idioms revealed prevalence of the idioms comprising words head, eyes, heart, back, foot, and hand. The similarities found in the meanings of all the idioms under study provided semantic classification into five groups, namely, characteristics, action, state, causation, and ability. Next we focused on contextual and semantic specifics of the idioms. In particular, the idioms, containing the word head were studied in the texts of the British National Corpus. The contexts provided the following additional meanings of the idioms: higher position, achievements, location, expenses, and inability to do something. The revealed collocations follow AV+K type. The obtained results and developed algorithm may be applied to lexical and contextual studies of idioms and lexical groups.

Similarity and consistency assessment of three major online drug-drug interaction resources.

AimsThe aim of this study was to explore the level of agreement on drug–drug interaction (DDI) information listed in three major online drug information resources (DIRs) in terms of: (1) interacting drug pairs; (2) severity rating; (3) evidence rating; and (4) clinical management recommendations.MethodsWe extracted information from the British National Formulary (BNF), Thesaurus and Micromedex. Following drug name normalisation, we estimated the overlap of the DIRs in terms of DDI. We annotated clinical management recommendations either manually, where possible, or through application of a machine learning algorithm.ResultsThe DIRs contained 51 481 (BNF), 38 037 (Thesaurus) and 65 446 (Micromedex) drug pairs involved in DDIs. The number of common DDIs across the three DIRs was 6970 (13.54% of BNF, 18.32% of Thesaurus and 10.65% of Micromedex). Micromedex and Thesaurus overall showed higher levels of similarity in their severity ratings, while the BNF agreed more with Micromedex on the critical severity ratings and with Thesaurus on the least significant ones. Evidence rating agreement between BNF and Micromedex was generally poor. Variation in clinical management recommendations was also identified, with some categories (i.e., Monitor and Adjust dose) showing higher levels of agreement compared to others (i.e., Use with caution, Wash‐out, Modify administration).ConclusionsThere is considerable variation in the DDIs included in the examined DIRs, together with variability in categorisation of severity and clinical advice given. DDIs labelled as critical were more likely to appear in multiple DIRs. Such variability in information could have deleterious consequences for patient safety, and there is a need for harmonisation and standardisation.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to church: The use of the Present Perfect after the conjunction since

ABSTRACT Previous research on the Present Perfect suggests that the latter is acceptable in since-clauses only if the situation expressed by the subordinate clause extends in time up until the present, as in Tony has been happy since he has been taking Prozac, i.e. if the Present Perfect in the since-clause is a Universal Perfect whose predication is true at all subintervals in the time-interval delimited by since and not an Existential Perfect whose predication is true only at a certain moment therein, as in *Tony has been happy since he has visited Cape Cod. The present study puts the implications of this claim and others found in the literature to the empirical test through an examination of all of the 2,621 occurrences of the Present Perfect in since-clauses with pronominal subjects in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. A significant proportion of the data is shown to contradict the generalizations proposed in previous studies. An explanation capable of accounting for all of the uses of the Present Perfect in since-clauses is put forward based on the complex meaning of this verbal structure which involves the notion of present stative after-phase of a past situation. The Present Perfect is possible in a since-clause whenever the beginning of the after-phase serves to mark the beginning-point in the past from which the main-clause situation unfolds towards the present. The beginning of the after-phase is argued to be interpretable in two ways: either as the first moment after the end of the prior situation or as the first moment in the process of accruing the after-phase itself.

The Bias Toward Single-Unit Turns in Conversation

ABSTRACT Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson argued that the rules for turn taking for conversation involve a confluence of pressures that bias turn size toward single turn constructional units (TCUs), which leads to an empirical prediction that turns are more likely to be composed of single (vs. multiple) TCUs. We directly test and confirm this “single-TCU bias” by using conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and Bayesian statistics to assess the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC-C), which contains 475,509 turns of talk. Our results confirm this bias, showing that 67% of turns are composed of single TCUs; we discuss why this estimate is conservative. The mean word length for single-TCU turns was 4.5 (SD = 3.4), compared to 19.9 (SD = 22.6) for multi-TCU turns. Our findings reinforce the ideas that the natural habitat for an accountable social action is the single TCU (vs. the turn), and that interaction is fundamentally organized (i.e., both produced and understood) on an action-by-action basis, which is a TCU-by-TCU basis. Data are in British English.

A Review of Modern Slavery in Britain: Understanding the Unique Experience of British Victims and Why it Matters

This article offers an original contribution to the field of victimization studies by investigating the current context of, and responses to, British nationals who are victims of modern slavery in the UK (BVs). Through the examination of National Referral Mechanism and Duty to Notify statistics, a current picture of specific experiences of BVs in the UK is illustrated with reference to identification and access to support. An exploration of the reasons for non-engagement of BVs with services and the detrimental impact this may have on their recovery highlights pertinent issues of mistrust, stigma and shame. Compounded by the current criminal justice approach towards modern slavery, the effects on the well-being of victims and survivors document the barriers to accessing services. A lack of engagement with the complexity of modern slavery; a lack of knowledge, training and expertise; and a lack of comprehensive guidance result in poor outcomes for BVs. Overall, the findings of this article are important in recognizing that the needs of BVs are currently not adequately met. A comprehensive investigation is required to examine the specific needs and experiences of BVs so that responses can be improved to effectively and appropriately support them into long-term and meaningful recovery.

A global view on digital legal deposit: what could be learned?

Aim Procedures for legal deposit of the print material are well established and widely practiced. Such procedures, however, are not necessarily applicable to the digital environment, mainly because bibliographic specifications of print material do not match those of digital objects and digital environment. The history of legal deposit of publications in Iran goes back to 1906. Since then, the press, publishers, public and private institutions are required to deposit one or more copies of their published material to the National Library of Iran (NLIR). However, reports have always indicated incomplete deposit or lack of coherent and comprehensive policies, especially with regard to digital resources. The present study aims to propose a framework for NLIR by comparing several national libraries. Methodology This research examined the policies and practices of 10 large national libraries that according to the World atlas (2018) have been ranked the highest in terms of the number and variety of resources. They were the Library of Congress, the British Library, National Library and Archives of Canada (LAC), and national libraries of France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Australia, Japan, and China. The data related to digital legal deposit implementation was collected from various sources including directories; official publications of international organizations, national legal deposit laws and regulations. Findings A global trend towards legal deposit to cover digital publications and preservation of comprehensive national archives is developing. In Iran, there was no mechanisms for identification, selection and deposit of digital materials either do not exist or are inappropriate for some types of publications. Conclusion National libraries and other libraries are at the forefront of research and development in the field of legal deposit. In this research, an effort was made to design and propose a framework for depositing digital material at NLIR drawing on the policies and practices of the top 10 national libraries. The proposed framework has two parts. The first includes elements such as introduction, general principles, resources comprehensiveness, legal deposit method, the origin of publications, collaboration and partnership, and legal considerations. In the second part -the plan-areas addressed in the first part are discussed in detail.