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Utilising Abbott’s work on professions and disciplines we trace the broad development of Social Policy in UK universities over the past 50 years. As with all subjects, Social Policy is enmeshed in continuous boundary protection, and at the same time may seek to extend jurisdiction by laying claim to areas and activities undertaken by others. We draw on a range of sources to inform our analysis including: overviews of contributions to Journal of Social Policy; reviews of selected available UK Social Policy Association documents such as newsletters; reviews of research quality (Research Assessment Exercise/Research Excellence Framework) submissions; and student numbers data. In conclusion we consider whether reassessment of some of the jurisdictional battles of the past 50 years might provide routes forward for the subject to flourish in the current environment.

Since 2000, robotic-assisted surgery has rapidly expanded into almost every surgical sub-specialty. Despite the popularity of robotic surgery across the United States, a national consensus for standardized training and education of robotic surgeons or surgical teams remains absent. In this quality improvement initiative, a novel, stepwise iterative Robotic Assistant Surgical Training (RAST) curriculum was developed to broaden and standardize robotic bedside assistant training. Thirteen voluntary participants, capable of fulfilling the bedside assistant role, were evaluated to determine if RAST enhanced the learner’s self-perceived level of confidence and comfort in their role as bedside assistant. A pre- and post-RAST training survey and a between-stages repeated-measures survey were conducted. All learner participants reported statistically significant increases in confidence and comfort after RAST training, (p =

We analyse people’s attitudes to autonomous vehicles (AVs), i.e. driverless cars and trucks, using Eurobarometer data relating to November/December 2014 on approximately 1000 people in each EU country. People tend to be lukewarm to AVs, particularly driverless cars. However, a simple average hides the fact that many people, young and old, are totally hostile to the concept and a smaller number totally in favour. AVs are part of a technological development linked in general to robots, and regression analysis finds attitudes tend to be linked to both general attitudes to robots and individual self-interest relating specifically to AVs. Consistent with the literature, we find the young to be more in favour than the elderly. There are other differences, with males, those in cities and the more educated being more in favour, as well as differences between countries. There is also some evidence that support for AVs is greater in countries with high accident rates.

Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law builds upon the legal historian F.W. Maitland's famous observation that history involves comparison, and that those who ignore every system but their own 'hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history'. The extensive introduction addresses the intellectual challenges posed by comparative approaches to legal history. This is followed by twelve essays derived from papers delivered at the 24th British Legal History Conference. These essays explore patterns in legal norms, processes, and practice across an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range. Carefully selected to provide a network of inter-connections, they contribute to our better understanding of legal history by combining depth of analysis with historical contextualization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Le droit prend une place toujours plus importante dans notre société, et il pose à l’Europe entière un problème difficile qu’il est pourtant urgent de résoudre : comment construire un droit, un système judiciaire - ou du moins un ensemble cohérent de systèmes judiciaires - alors que la plupart des droits européens ont une longue histoire, qui n’est pas seulement une histoire de doctrines ou de normes, mais aussi celle de la symbiose dans laquelle ces droits ont vécu avec les sociétés qui les ont créés, appliqués ou subis. Le Groupe de recherche France-Îles Britanniques a choisi de consacrer son premier colloque à une confrontation entre la France et l’Angleterre sur le thème « Droit et société », car on peut dans ce domaine comparer terme à terme la situation anglaise (puis britannique) avec celle de la France sur un millénaire : des questions diverses y sont abordées, de la production des lois et de l’idéologie qui l’inspire, à la représentation que se fait la société du droit, de la justice et des juges, en passant par la fonction et le statut sociaux des hommes de loi. La vision et la perception des pauvres et des marginaux n’ont pas été oubliées dans un ouvrage qui se veut un tremplin vers de futures recherches.

Introduction In this paper, I compare certain aspects of the ideals and practices of royal approaches to crime in England in the tenth and the later twelfth centuries. In the latter, the Angevin period, the birth of the English Common Law is traditionally found ; in the former Patrick Wormaid has recently located what he calls the Making of English Law. My central concern is to make comparisons regarding the conceptualization and treatment of offences and offenders. I aim to set the issues in...

Approximately 40% of unconventional wells in the United States with artificial lift are using gas lift. One of the blessings of gas lift is that it is very forgiving and rarely fails. This has led some operators to the conclusion that gas lift doesn’t require a proper control and optimization scheme. The objective of this study is to use field data and show the importance and benefit of a controlled and optimized gas lift compressor to aid production. The intelligent gas lift compressor utilizes a heavy computational process of taking a composite Vogel reservoir inflow model coupled with a Hagedorn & Brown outflow model that informs the Guo model to solve for a minimum critical rate to lift liquid droplets out of the wellbore. First, an empirical range of injection rates is used to find the rate with maximum unloading as indicated by a drop in casing injection pressure. Once this rate is found, reservoir inflow performance relationship (IPR) parameters are estimated to meet that condition. These parameters are held constant for a time period and injection rate needed is calculated based on production rate and pressure coming into the programmable logic controller (PLC) via digital connections. This approach is tested on a well and the production is monitored over a 3-month period. The collected data are used to analyze the benefits of an intelligent gas lift compressor control. The data from a well with this intelligent gas lift system is monitored over a 3-month period. This includes a 20-day period of the compressor searching for an injection rate that shows to be the most efficient. Then the compressor control is set up with a critical rate control mode. This calculation is performed with an edge server that runs the intense calculations every minute to instruct the compressor what volume of injection it needs to achieve manipulation of an automated suction control valve and speed control of the engine driver. The surface casing pressure data shows a very stable unloading behavior profile, which is confirmed with very stable oil and gas production data over the observation period. An estimate of gained production during the periods of high line pressure along with stable unloading is given as the justification for outfitting the well site with the intelligent compressor controls. Despite gas lift’s importance as a lift technique, its control and optimization are still not properly addressed within the industry. This work’s proposed intelligent gas lift scheme can be a potentially valuable solution to unstable unloading of liquids, and benefit the operators significantly in production and revenues.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have revolutionized blood cancer immunotherapy; however, their efficacy against solid tumors has been limited. A common mechanism of tumor escape from single target therapies is downregulation or mutational loss of the nominal epitope. Targeting multiple antigens may thus improve the effectiveness of CAR immunotherapies. We generated dual CAR-T cells targeting two tumor antigens: TAG-72 (tumor-associated glycoprotein 72) and CD47. TAG-72 is a pan-adenocarcinoma oncofetal antigen, highly expressed in ovarian cancers, with increased expression linked to disease progression. CD47 is ubiquitously overexpressed in multiple tumor types, including ovarian cancer; it is a macrophage “don’t eat me” signal. However, CD47 is also expressed on many normal cells. To avoid this component of the dual CAR-T cells killing healthy tissue, we designed a truncated CD47 CAR devoid of intracellular signaling domains. The CD47 CAR facilitates binding to CD47+ cells, increasing the prospect of TAG-72+ cell elimination via the TAG-72 CAR. Furthermore, we could reduce the damage to normal tissue by monomerizing the CD47 CAR. Our results indicate that the co-expression of the TAG-72 CAR and the CD47-truncated monomer CAR on T cells could be an effective, dual CAR-T cell strategy for ovarian cancer, also applicable to other adenocarcinomas., Graphical Abstract, Tumors often escape immunotherapy by mutational downregulation of the nominal target antigen. Use of CAR-T cells with dual antigen specificity can mitigate this problem. Adenocarcinomas expressing low levels of TAG-72 are not killed by single specificity TAG-72 CAR-T cells, but they are killed by dual CAR-T cells targeting TAG-72 and CD47.