British Research Research Articles

Collaborations in Space: Memories of British Space Science, 1960–1980

After being awarded a degree in Special Physics by the University of Leicester in 1960, the Head of Department, Professor E.A. Stewardson, offered me a research position to assist in a recently-established programme to study the X-radiation from the sun – at that time the only known source of cosmic X-rays. This paper contains some of my recollections and impressions of my subsequent participation in the British collaborative programme of international space research, first at University of Leicester and, subsequently, from 1965 onwards, at University College London (UCL). Until 1980 I was involved in trans-Atlantic collaboration, which took me to the United States of America on a regular basis, and I also found myself collaborating with space scientists from other European countries. By the late 1950s, the University of Leicester had built up a notable space science group in its Physics department, however, it was not the only British university building such research groups. UCL was another pioneer

Control of sedimentation by active tectonics, glaciation and contourite-depositing currents in Endurance Basin, South Georgia

Endurance Basin is an elongate broadly WNW–ESE trending basin located on the northern margin of the Scotia Sea, adjacent to the southern margin of the South Georgia micro-continent. Bathymetric and TOPAS sub-bottom profile data acquired in 2010 by the British research ship RRS James Clark Ross map this basin and its sedimentology for the first time. Endurance Basin contains a number of sub-basins and a substantial glaciogenic fan. The northern margin of Endurance Basin is formed by a series of steep slopes and intervening troughs. These are interpreted as a left-stepping en echelon array of oblique, strike–slip faults whilst the sub-basins are separated by compressional dip–slip faults. It appears that South Georgia is moving NW with respect to the basin. We interpret five seismic facies from TOPAS data, which are associated with distinct sedimentologies. The most striking units in the basin fill are: substantial contourite drifts located in the NW of the basin and on its southern margin; and two distinct mass transport deposits that pond in the centre of the basin. Combined with the known regional oceanographic setting, the contourites provide evidence of broadly eastward flowing bottom currents, entering the basin from at least two locations. Although landslide scars are present on the steep northern basin margin, the imaged mass transport deposits are interpreted to have been sourced from the glaciogenic fan, located in the SE of the basin, and from a contourite unit located on the basin's southern margin. Sediments from these events are transported at least 40km. The contourite drift sequence is at least 100m thick in the west of the basin and may contain a palaeoenvironmental archive of Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) flow and the climate of South Georgia extending to the Pliocene. Such an archive would allow the reconstruction of ACC flow through the Pleistocene glaciations and provide a means of linking ocean circulation and climate records in the sub-Antarctic Polar Front region.

Interview with Tony James.

Tony D. James (born October 7th 1964) is a Professor at the University of Bath and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He completed his first degree in Chemistry in 1986 at the University of East Anglia. He then moved to the University of Victoria in 1986 to do his PhD under the supervision of Thomas M. Fyles. After finishing his PhD in 1991 he moved to Japan as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow where he worked at the Chemirecognics Project with Seiji Shinkai. In 1995 he returned to the UK as a Royal Society Research Fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, moving to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath in September 2000. He has been a visiting professor at Tsukuba, Osaka and Kyushu Universities and is a guest Professor at East China University of Science and Technology, Xiamen University, Shandong Normal University, Nanjing University and is a Hai-Tian (Sea-Sky) Scholar at Dalian University of Technology. In 2013 he was awarded a Daiwa Adrian Prize, which are awarded in recognition of significant scientific collaboration between British and Japanese research teams. His research interests include many aspects of supramolecular chemistry, including molecular recognition, molecular self-assembly and sensor design. Within the area of molecular recognition his research has a particular focus on boronic acid based receptors for the fluorescence sensing of saccharides. He has developed a broad interdisciplinary approach to research, with an underpinning focus on the development of modular sensors where he has pioneered a range of reporting regimes.

Plotting the Contours of an Emerging Field: An Essay and Research Note Concerning British Academic Social and Environmental Accountants

The broad field we might think of as ‘social accounting’ has attracted a fair amount of criticism over the years, increasingly it seems, from within its own ranks. It is no surprise that social accounting is a field given to self-evaluation but as (for example) Correa and Laine (2013. “Struggling Against Like-Minded Conformity in Order to Enliven SEAR: A Call for Passion.” Social and Environmental Accountability Journal 33 (3): 134–144) demonstrate, there is a growing trend of articulated disquiet amongst members of the social accounting community. Prompted by these concerns, this paper was initially envisaged as an attempt to provide some empirical content to these concerns and, in particular, to try and describe the members of the community in rather more detail than simply an overview of selected published work. Obtaining any reliable global data proved beyond me, but there is exceptionally good data concerning the UK and Ireland accounting community: The British Accounting Review Research Register. Consequently, at the risk of parochialism, this short piece plots the contours of the British social and environmental accounting community over 28 years from 1984 to 2011 (the last date for which data are currently available). The data are frequently arresting and suggest that some of the critiques of social accounting may have a point of some substance. The paper concludes with a broad reflection on whether the experience from the UK and Ireland may be repeated elsewhere and whether these data have any lessons for our community more widely.

Increased serum levels of lipocalin-1 and -2 in patients with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Despite a number of studies on biomarkers in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), only a few disease-related markers have been identified, yet we still have no satisfactory markers specific to innate immune system and neutrophil activation, which is essential in airway inflammation in COPD. Recent biological studies indicated that lipocalins (LCNs) might be involved in airway inflammation and innate immunity; however, results from available studies on the association of LCNs with COPD are not consistent. We carried out a multicenter prospective observational cohort study to investigate the differences in serum levels of LCN1 and LCN2 between subjects with COPD (n=58) and healthy controls (n=29). Several validated inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein, tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-6, and interleukin-8, were measured. The correlation of LCN1 and LCN2 with clinical features such as smoking habits, lung function, symptoms, and disease category was also analyzed. When comparing with healthy controls, serum levels of LCN1 (66.35±20.26 ng/mL versus 41.16±24.19 ng/mL, P<0.001) and LCN2 (11.29±3.92 ng/mL versus 6.09±5.13 ng/mL, P<0.001) were both elevated in subjects with COPD after adjusting for age, sex, smoking habits, and inflammatory biomarkers. Smoking history and tobacco exposure, as quantified by pack-year, had no impact on systemic expressions of LCN1 and LCN2 in our study. Blood levels of LCN1 and LCN2, respectively, were negatively correlated to COPD Assessment Test and Modified Medical British Research Council score (P<0.001). Disease category by Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease grade 1–4 or group A–D was not associated with levels of LCNs. Patient-reported exacerbations and body mass index were also tested, but no relationship with LCNs was found. In summary, serum concentrations of LCN1 and LCN2 were both elevated in patients with COPD, with their levels correlating to COPD Assessment Test and Modified Medical British Research Council score. These findings warrant large-scale and longitudinal studies to validate LCNs as circulating biomarkers for COPD.

Causes of aging are likely to be many: robin holliday and changing molecular approaches to cell aging, 1963-1988.

Causal complexities involved in biological phenomena often generate ambiguous experimental results that may create epistemic niches for new approaches and interpretations. The exploration for new approaches may foment momentum of larger epistemological shifts, and thereby introduce the possibilities of adopting new technologies. This paper describes British molecular biologist Robin Holliday's cell aging research from 1963 to the 1980s that transformed from simple hypothesis testing to working on various alternative and integrative approaches designed to deal with complex data. In the 1960s, hoping to use biochemical investigations of cells to settle a debate about whether DNA mutations or protein errors caused aging, Holliday carried out a series of experiments with fruit flies, fungi, and human fibroblast cells. The results seemed to demonstrate that cytoplasmic protein errors caused cell aging. However, other scientists obtained contradictory results and raised issues about potential flaws in Holliday's experiments. In the 1970s, working as the director of the Genetics Division of the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, United Kingdom, Holliday relied on available talents of his associates, including computational expertise, to explore alternative hypotheses and approaches. By the early 1980s, they had worked out an epigenetic explanation and had established integrative, evolutionary models of cell aging that incorporated both DNA mutations and protein errors as critical factors. By delineating Holliday's research path from simply testing hypotheses to integrating multiple factors involved in aging, this paper offers an account of the difficulties in targeting molecular cause in cell aging around the 1970s, whose failures nevertheless opened up an epistemic niche for integration.

Hunting gruffalo: ‘gangs’, unreason and the big bad coalition

But who is this creature with terrible claws/And terrible teeth in its terrible jaws?/He has knobbly knees and turned out toes/And a poisonous wart on the end of his nose/His eyes are orange, his tongue is black/He has purple prickles all over his back/Oh help! Oh no! It's a Gruffalo!(Donaldson, 1999)Youth violence, like most other forms of violence has been falling steadily in recent years. Despite – or perhaps because of this – recent policy responses have begun to rely increasingly on the spectre of ‘the gang’ as a trope for representing serious youth crime, invoking moral panic, and justifying greater police powers in socially marginalised communities (Hallsworth, 2013). The cynical disconnect between this and the growing weight of critical, empirical British youth gang research strains belief, and exposes the unreason at the heart of coalition policy. In this article, we analyse the release of several reports relating to the 2011 policy paper Ending Gang and Youth Violence (HM Government, 2011). Amid...

Suicídio e internet: análise de resultados em ferramentas de busca

Embora seja ainda um assunto incipiente no Brasil, a mídia pode exercer influência sobre diferentes atitudes dos sujeitos e, especificamente, sobre suicídio. Este estudo buscou replicar, com adaptações, uma pesquisa inglesa sobre conteúdos relacionados ao suicídio acessados na internet. Foram utilizadas, em três sites de busca, doze expressões-chave, como por exemplo, suicídio; métodos de suicídio; suicídio indolor; suicídio rápido entre outras. Foram analisadas as dez primeiras indicações de cada pesquisa; retirando-se os resultados repetidos, a amostra foi composta por 209 sites. A análise do conteúdo das páginas eletr™nicas se pautou em 19 critérios de classificação, sendo os de maior frequência os sites acadêmicos; os de conteúdo religioso; o que retratam o suicídio em termos elegantes; e os sites mantidos por psicólogos ou profissionais de saúde. Como conclusão, observou-se que, diferente do descrito no artigo original, no Brasil não foram encontradas páginas com conteúdo pró-suicídio, promovendo, encorajando ou facilitando atos suicidas.

Creating and Re-Shaping Egypt in Kush: Responses at Amara West

An ongoing British Museum research project at Amara West, Ramesside administrative center of Upper Nubia (Kush), is producing a range of evidence that allows different experiences of the colonial environment to be investigated. This paper considers the formal built environment (walled town, temple and associated decorative programs), household space, domestic cult, material culture and the role of writing to explore individual and household responses when residing in a context (cultural, environmental) distinct from Egypt itself. Alongside consideration of the limitations of the available data, the evidence for an increasing heterogeneity of the town (and its inhabitants) is also covered.

Wie kommt die Landschaft zurück in die Humangeographie? Plädoyer für eine ‚konstruktivistische Landschaftsgeographie‘

For nearly half a century now, the concept of landscape has been banned from the treatment context of the German human geography. The connotations associated with the concept of landscape within the traditional landscape geography with its essentialist and in few cases, naive positivist content did not appear to be compatible to a modern human geography anymore. However, in the past decade the German-speaking landscape research has developed - also under the impression of British landscape research - constructivist perspectives, too, which can be linked to the research programs of a constructivist-oriented cultural geography. In recent years, the German-speaking constructivist landscape research has reached a high degree of sophistication. Today it is essentially characterized by three approaches: First, the moderate social constructivist, secondly, the social constructivist, thirdly the discourse-theoretical landscape research.

What is armchair anthropology? Observational practices in 19th-century British human sciences

The study of human diversity in the first half of the 19th century has traditionally been categorized as a type of armchair-based natural history. If we are to take seriously this characterization of the discipline it requires further unpacking. Armchair anthropology was not a passive pursuit, with minimal analytical reflection that simply synthesized the materials of other writers. Nor was it detached from the activities of informants who were collecting and recording data in the field. Practitioners in the 19th century were highly attuned to the problems associated with their research techniques and continually sought to transform their methodologies. The history of British anthropological research is one of gradual change and the adoption of new observational techniques into its methodologies. This article looks at the history of 19th-century British anthropology and examines in detail the observational practices of its researchers. In doing so it aims to answer the question: What is armchair anthropology?

The Professional Status of Educational Research: Professionalism and Developmentalism in Twenty-First-Century Working Life

‘How helpful and how necessary is it for at least some of us to see ourselves as professional educational researchers?’ asked Donald McIntyre in his 1996 presidential address to the British Educational Research Association. Still pertinent to consideration of the direction in which the British educational research community ought to focus its development, this question is revisited through examination of whether or not educational research is a profession. Located within a sociological framework, the paper first examines some of the earliest work that established the sociology of professions as a field of study. It then compares this with recent work in the field, before considering whether or not – against the various criteria for professional status that these studies identify – educational research(ing) may be categorised as a profession. Using Noordegraaf’s three categories, the case is examined for considering educational research(ing) as a ‘pure’, a ‘hybrid’ or a ‘situated’ profession. The conclusion is that it represents none of these, but that, within the context of twenty-first-century working life, this is less important than the need for educational research to embrace a culture of developmentalism.

Re-examining a false dichotomy: on the contemporary methods in educational research

In educational research, the ‘paradigm wars’—vehement debates between proponents of qualitative approaches and proponents of quantitative approaches—are far from over (Bryman 2006). The development of British educational research demonstrates this nicely. Influenced by policy makers’ demands for prediction and control, the current research climate is characterised by a mistrust of qualitative methods, particularly in regard to their potential value-ladenness and lack of rigour (Hodkinson 2008). British education sociologist and methodologist Martyn Hammersley, one of the authors of Challenging the Qualitative–Quantitative Divide: Explorations in CaseFocused Causal Analysis, objects to the dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative methods that the paradigm wars are based on. He argues that the division is artificial and may even be damaging: for instance, it could discourage researchers of one approach from taking into account arguments produced by researchers of a different style (Hammersley 2005). Challenging the Qualitative–Quantitative Divide should be read in this context. Its authors argue that it is unproductive to accept the qualitative–quantitative divide. They therefore lay bare the hidden assumptions, advantages and disadvantages of different methods in contemporary educational research. To illustrate, they apply each method to extensive examples drawn from their area of expertise: educational inequalities and social mobility in Britain. The authors argue that their arguments are generalisable to social science as a whole, and the methods they discuss are in fact commonly used in other social science areas, such as political science. As such, the book promises three things: to contribute to the topical debate between proponents of qualitative and quantitative methods; to give examples from an interesting area of social science, i.e. educational research; and to introduce the

Should We Start Treating Chronic Low Back Pain with Antibiotics Rather than with Pain Medications?

For those of us who have read the 2 recently published articles by a Danish - British research group, it might appear that we are observing an impending paradigm shift on the origins of chronic low back pain. The results of this research indicate, that chronic low back pain associated with bone marrow edema in vertebral endplates that are adjacent to herniated intervertebral discs may be caused by infections with anaerobic bacteria of low virulence. According to these articles, treatment with certain antibiotics is significantly more effective than placebo against this low back pain. If these findings are to hold true in repeat studies by other researchers, they stand to fundamentally change our concepts of low back pain, degenerative disc disease and in consequence the suitable therapies for these entities. It may in fact require pain specialists to become familiarized with the details of antibiotic treatments and their specific risks in order to be able to properly counsel their patients. While this seems hard to believe at first glance, bacteria have been implicated in the pathogenesis of other conditions that do not primarily impose as infectious diseases such as gastric ulcers. While the authors refer to a few previous studies pointing into the same direction, the relevant research is really only from one group of collaborating scientists. Therefore, before we start prescribing antibiotics for chronic low back pain, it is imperative that other researchers in different institutions confirm these results.

Defining an epidemic: the body mass index in British and US obesity research 1960–2000

Between the 1970s and the mid-1990s the body mass index (BMI) became the standard means of assessing obesity both in populations and in individuals, replacing previously diverse and contested definitions of excess body weight. This article draws on theoretical approaches from the sociology of standards and science and technology studies to describe the development of this important new standard and the ways in which its adoption facilitated the development of obesity science, that is, knowledge about the causes, health effects and treatments of excess body weight. Using an analysis of policy and healthcare literatures, I argue that the adoption of the BMI, along with associated standard cut-off points defining overweight and obesity, was crucial in the framing of obesity as an epidemic. This is because, I suggest, these measures enabled, firstly, the creation of large data sets tracking population-level changes in average body weight, and, secondly, the construction of visual representations of these changes. The production of these two new techniques of representation made it possible for researchers in this field, and others such as policymakers, to argue credibly that obesity should be described as an epidemic.

Detecting structural change in university research systems: A case study of British research policy

The university research environment has been undergoing profound change in recent decades. Aiming at international competitiveness and excellence, a variety of polices have been designed and implemented in many countries. However, evidence-based analysis of policy effects is scarce. This paper develops methods for evaluating the effect of university research policy on university system research input-output dynamics. We assume stable dynamics between inputs and outputs, and that effective policy change introduces external interventions and therefore structural changes into the system. Our proposed method involves three steps: modeling system dynamics, detecting structural change, and mapping policy change. Examining the case of the United Kingdom, we identified three structural changes in 1990, 1994, and 2001 respectively. The first change corresponds to the second round of the Research Selectivity Exercise (RSE), and the latter two changes may be caused by the database effect. The British case is a provocative demonstration of this method, which could be further developed to provide evidence-based analysis for policy learning and a foundation for cross-case comparison.

Translating the Transnational: American ‘Science’ and the British Regional Problem, 1962–1965

From the mid-1950s, social scientists in the USA began trying to understand the geography of economic problems using quantitative methods and theoretical models. Subnational regions had the ideal proportions for performing this research, which led to the creation of a new subject area, ‘regional science’. When regional economic imbalances shot up the political agenda in Britain in the 1960s, advocates of regional science saw an opportunity to expand the reach of their subject. This article examines the migration of American regional science to Britain and explores why its ideas and organisational model met with opposition. It argues that the transnational transfer of academic networks is more complex than has been acknowledged and that British regional research and policy was more influenced by American ideas than is commonly recognised.

The Research Council System and the Politics of Medical and Agricultural Research for the British Colonial Empire, 1940–52

AbstractHistorical accounts of colonial science and medicine have failed to engage with the Colonial Office’s shift in focus towards the support of research after 1940. A large new fund was created in 1940 to expand activities in the colonies described as fundamental research. With this new funding came a qualitative shift in the type of personnel and activity sought for colonial development and, as a result, a diverse group of medical and technical officers existed in Britain’s colonies by the 1950s. The fact that such variety existed amongst British officers in terms of their qualifications, institutional locations and also their relationships with colonial and metropolitan governments makes the use of the term ‘expert’ in much existing historical scholarship on scientific and medical aspects of empire problematic. This article will consider how the Colonial Office achieved this expansion of research activities and personnel after 1940. Specifically, it will focus on the reasons officials sought to engage individuals drawn from the British research councils to administer this work and the consequences of their involvement for the new apparatus established for colonial research after 1940. An understanding of the implications of the application of the research council system to the Colonial Empire requires engagement with the ideology promoted by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) which placed emphasis on the distinct and higher status of fundamental research and which privileged freedom for researchers.

EMERGING FORMS OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

ABSTRACT This paper takes stock of recent research on patterns of cultural engagement in various European nations, with specific reference to British and Danish research. It argues that Bourdieu's original theorisation of cultural capital in ‘Distinction’ needs to be significantly updated to register the decline of ‘highbrow’ culture which these studies reveal. However, we argue that this shift does not entail the erosion of cultural capital itself, or the rise of the ‘cultural omnivore’, so much as the emergence of a form of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We argue that this emerging cultural capital can be associated with the partial creation of a European field and testifies to the continued stakes of cultural engagement today

Globalization, Immigration, and Transformation: Thoughts from a European Perspective

Historical archaeology as an archaeology of the modern world is greatly dominated in Europe by British research. Nevertheless, the discipline is gradually gaining a foothold in other European countries as well. This paper looks at the contribution that historical archaeology can make to the subjects of globalization, immigration, and transformation from a European perspective and how it relates to them. Three issues are dealt with: Is Europe, as the “missing link,” conducive to the formation of a global historical archaeology? What are the topics of research that can contribute to its creation from a European perspective? What role does the interplay between globalization and nationalism play in all of this?