Declaration of interest None. It is recognised that women patients in mixed-sex psychiatric settings are vulnerable to threats, harassment and abuse by male patients (Barlow & Wolfson, 1987; Department of Health & Home Office, 1992; Department of Health, 1994; Thomas et al, 1995). This has led to UK governmental policy initiatives to increase the provision of single-sex units and wards for psyc...

A distance estimator is a code together with a randomized algorithm. The algorithm approximates the distance of any word from the code by making a small number of queries to the word. One such example is the Reed-Muller code equipped with an appropriate algorithm. It has polynomial length, polylogarithmic alphabet size, and polylogarithmic number of queries. In our work we present two results. ...

Designing and implementing security-critical systems correctly is very difficult. In practice, most vulnerabilities arise from bugs in implementations. We present work towards systematic specification-based testing of securitycritical systems using the CASE tool AutoFocus. Cryptographic systems are formally specified with state transition diagrams, a notation for state machines in the AutoFocus...

The solution of trust-region and regularisation subproblems which arise in unconstrained optimization is considered. Building on the pioneering work of Gay, Moré and Sorensen, methods which obtain the solution of a sequence of parametrized linear systems by factorization are used. Enhancements using high-order polynomial approximation and inverse iteration ensure that the resulting method is bo...

IN this continuation of the special issue of papers invited from the Fifth International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI ’05), we present three papers which are summarized below. An alternative to the classical Hannenhali-Pevzner theory for sorting by reversal is described by Séverine Bérard, Anne Bergeron, Cedric Chauve, and Christophe Paul in their paper “Perfect Sorting by Rev...

Nutrition is an important component of public health and health care, including in education and research, and in the areas of policy and practice. This statement was the overarching message during the third annual International Summit on Medical Nutrition Education and Research, held at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, in August 2017. This summit encouraged attendees t...

gasoline filling station workers Ansari-Lari et al reported that the sex ratio (proportion male) of offspring of men exposed to petroleum fuel is significantly low as contrasted with controls. If confirmed, this is an important result. It is in contrast with reports of significantly high offspring sex ratios in communities exposed to active seepages of natural gas and oil and to petrochemical a...

Literature on the body-weight cycles of nonmigratory birds is meager (Nice 1937, 1938, 1946; Baldwin and Kendeigh 1938), and consequently the factors that regulate these cycles are only incompletely understood (Farner 1955). The mean body weight of a bird that has free access to food, it has been suggested, may change because of alteration in the level of the activity of the hypophysis (Wolfson...

The action potential (AP) of a cardiac cell is made up of a complex balance of ionic currents which flow across the cell membrane in response to electrical excitation of the cell. Mathematical models of the action potential have grown increasingly complex and include many subcellular phenomena such as calcium handling and complex Markov formulations of the gating dynamics of the ion channels. T...

Several proteins secreted by enteric bacteria are thought to contribute to virulence by disturbing the signal transduction of infected cells. Here, we report that SopB, a protein secreted by Salmonella dublin, has sequence homology to mammalian inositol polyphosphate 4-phosphatases and that recombinant SopB has inositol phosphate phosphatase activity in vitro. SopB hydrolyzes phosphatidylinosit...