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In recent years sexualised drug use, usually referred to as chemsex, has become the object of intense media health‐related panic and increasing academic scrutiny. Critical social scientists have challenged pathologising perspectives, analysing the socio‐cultural and political economy dimensions of chemsex. Against the silence of geographers in this emerging field, the paper develops a geographical relational analysis of chemsex, focusing on the experiences of gay men living with HIV in two Italian cities (Bologna; Milan) and Italian gay men living with HIV in three English cities (Leicester; London; Manchester). Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, that is, as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. To emphasise the central role of place and geographical knowledge to understand chemsex, the paper builds on 'weak theory', as it conceives things as open, entangled, connected and in flux, while focusing on ordinary practices and heterogeneity in more‐than‐human worlds. Showing how chemsex represents an embodied, relational geographical encounter among different human and non‐human actors, places (both physical and digital), imaginations and desires, the paper highlights the role of sexual practices in the relational construction of place‐making, therefore calling for an increased engagement with sex itself within the field of geographies of sexualities. The paper introduces a relational geographical perspective to the analysis of chemsex. Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, i.e. as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. The paper calls for an increased engagement with the materiality of sex within the field of geographies of sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary school homework is a common practice internationally, historically viewed as an independent child activity, but more recently recognised as a family accomplishment. Parental involvement in homework has been principally discussed in relation to general and fixed typologies, with parent behaviours categorised into pre‐defined ‘types’. This paper challenges that framing by theorising homework as an interactional event. It illustrates that parental involvement is not simply determined by parents’ involvement ‘type’; rather, as an interactional exercise, homework is negotiated in‐the‐moment by parent and child, in linguistic, embodied and material ways. Based on a corpus of 74 video‐recorded homework sessions collected in England and Italy, and adopting discourse analysis, the article reveals that parents display their understanding of what counts as ‘appropriate involvement’ and, at the same time, locally negotiate this with their children, often adapting their involvement practices to meet children's explicit or implicit requests. We present this phenomenon as a ‘flexible line of involvement’ which can shift during each interaction, according to local negotiations embedded within the homework encounter. This shapes the unfolding event, as the parent's moment‐by‐moment responses to their child may result in them ‘crossing the line’. By demonstrating the locally negotiated fluidity of parental involvement, this article highlights the complexity of parent–child primary homework, moving beyond common assumptions that homework is either a lone child's activity, a task solely shaped by schools, or the result of fixed types of parental involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the link between young people's well‐being and the creative arts is strengthening, there is a lack of research which focuses on the roles that artists play to help teachers and parents engage young people in the creative arts. This paper explores the benefits of and barriers to artists working in education in six European countries (England, Iceland, Germany, Greece, Italy and Austria). Using the '5A's model of creativity' and a view of professional development taking place within 'landscapes of practice', the data were analysed in order to explain how creativity is operationalised in the different contexts. Our study highlights the need for policy at a national and transnational level to value the creative arts in order to help teachers cross boundaries and utilise the full potential of the creative arts in schools. Our study also highlights that further research is needed into how artists shape teaching and curriculum and how schools engage parents in the creative arts in order to build an evidence‐base relating to young people's positive mental health that can affect policy at these levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Start of the main construction phase of the Brenner Base Tunnel / Startschuss für die Hauptbauphase des Brenner Basistunnels Construction and finance contract for the new trunk line in Munich / Bau- und Finanzierungsvertrag für die neue Stammstrecke in München Crossrail awards remaining tunnelling contracts / Crossrail vergibt ausstehende Tunnelbau-Lose Aker Wirth to build two telescopic shield machines for the Koralm Tunnel / Aker Wirth baut zwei Teleskopschildmaschinen für den Koralmtunnel Contract for the operational ventilation of the Gotthard Base Tunnel awarded / Werkvertrag für Betriebslüftung des Gotthard-Basistunnels vergeben Investigation tunnel for the Garmisch-Partenkirchen bypass / Erkundungsstollen für die Umgehung von Garmisch-Partenkirchen Call for papers - Themes for the next issues of Geomechanics and Tunnelling / Themen für die nächsten Ausgaben der 'Geomechanics and Tunnelling' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic significance of variation in the number and size of towns across Europe during the early 14th century by comparing the towns of England and of northern Italy. The paper starts by examining the towns of the two countries more closely, distinguishing between those that were very large, large, middle-sized and small. In comparison with rural communities, all towns had more people employed outside agriculture, but this was proportionally more marked in a metropolis like London or Florence than in a small town. The larger the town, the higher the proportion of non-agricultural occupations, the stronger the commitment to producing goods in restricted demand, and the greater the weight of commercial and professional activities. The fact that the contrast between northern Italy and England is so sharp at the top end of the urban scale implies that there was more employment in manufacturing and services in Italy. It also suggests that northern Italy had a wider range of specialized occupations. Studies of urbanization and urban hierarchy characteristically go beyond the statistical classification of towns to establish and explain rank-size relationships between them in different economic regions.

This article presents information on several congresses and conventions related to software testing to be held. The Second Conference on the Mathematics of Dependable Systems will be held at the University of York, England during September 4-6, 1995. The 16th IEEE Real-time Systems Symposium will be held in Pisa, Italy during December 4-5. The purpose of this symposium is to bring together researchers and developers from academia, industry and government to advance the science and technology of real-time computing.

Objectives: We aimed to investigate the occurrence rates of clinical events and their associations with comfort in dying nursing home residents with and without dementia.Methods: Epidemiological after-death survey was performed in nationwide representative samples of 322 nursing homes in Belgium, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and England. Nursing staff reported clinical events and assessed comfort. The nursing staff or physician assessed the presence of dementia; severity was determined using two highly discriminatory staff-reported instruments.Results: The sample comprised 401 residents with advanced dementia, 377 with other stages of dementia, and 419 without dementia (N = 1197). Across the three groups, pneumonia occurred in 24 to 27% of residents. Febrile episodes (unrelated to pneumonia) occurred in 39% of residents with advanced dementia, 34% in residents with other stages of dementia and 28% in residents without dementia (P = .03). Intake problems occurred in 74% of residents with advanced dementia, 55% in residents with other stages of dementia, and 48% in residents without dementia (P < .001). Overall, these three clinical events were inversely associated with comfort. Less comfort was observed in all resident groups who had pneumonia (advanced dementia, P = .04; other stages of dementia, P = .04; without dementia, P < .001). Among residents with intake problems, less comfort was observed only in those with other stages of dementia (P < .001) and without dementia (P = .003), while the presence and severity of dementia moderated this association (P = .03). Developing "other clinical events" was not associated with comfort.Conclusions: Discomfort was observed in dying residents who developed major clinical events, especially pneumonia, which was not specific to advanced dementia. It is crucial to identify and address the clinical events potentially associated with discomfort in dying residents with and without dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social identification and team performance literatures typically focus on the relationship between individual differences in identification and individual‐level performance. By using a longitudinal multilevel approach, involving 369 members of 45 sports teams across England and Italy, we compared how team‐level and individual‐level variance in social identification together predicted team and individual performance outcomes. As hypothesized, team‐level variance in identification significantly predicted subsequent levels of both perceived and actual team performance in cross‐lagged analyses. Conversely, individual‐level variance in identification did not significantly predict subsequent levels of perceived individual performance. These findings support recent calls for social identity to be considered a multilevel construct and highlight the influence of group‐level social identification on group‐level processes and outcomes, over and above its individual‐level effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent economic and fiscal crisis provides an opportunity for learning lessons of general and practical relevance about how governments face shocks affecting their financial conditions. This article draws on the resilience concept to investigate the organizational capacities that are deployed and/or built by local governments (LGs) to respond to such shocks, looking at their combinations and interactions with environmental conditions. The article presents the results of a multiple-case analysis of 12 European LGs across Austria, Italy and England. The analysis allows us to highlight and operationalize different patterns of financial resilience, that is, self-regulation, constrained or reactive adaptation, contented or powerless fatalism, that are the result of the interaction and development over time of different internal and external dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe how academics in England, Denmark and Portugal understand the Bologna Process, their attitudes towards the initiative, and how understandings and attitudes determine action. It shows how contextually and culturally determined academic understandings, expectations, preferences, priorities and constraints are key influences in the process of educational change envisaged by the Bologna Process. Second, inspired by the implementation staircase metaphor which illustrates different actors' perceptions conditioned by their location on the path of the policy, the article presents three different examples of interplay between national authorities responsible for policy-making in the wake of the Bologna Process and the institutional field responsible for policy implementation. It reveals variations from country to country with regard to bottom-up and top-down initiatives, both at the level of actors' expectations and of actual measures to implement Bologna policy. This article comes in response to the frailty of an empirical base for the understanding of Bologna from an institutional and academic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy-making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several topics discussed at the meeting of European Nutrition Foundations in Madrid on April 2010 is presented. Topics of the meeting include the nutrition in the school curriculum and regulations on foods and drinks provided in schools. The meeting features various executives including Juan Ballasteros.

Cross-cultural research on theory of mind is relatively recent and largely restricted to comparisons of children from Western versus non-Western samples; much less is known about variation within Western cultures. This study compared 5- to 6-year-olds from Britain and Italy (matched for age, verbal age, gender, and maternal education; N = 140), on tests tapping children's understanding of I stand 2nd order false belief and mixed emotions. Overall, British children outperformed Italian children; group differences were clearest for tests of false-belief understanding. These results are discussed in relation to contrasts in family talk about mental states, schooling, language comprehension, and cultural factors in Britain and Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the history of the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect on several infectious diseases. This discovery gained a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 for Sir Alexander Fleming, Dr. Ernst B. Chain and Sir Howard Florey. It has often been pointed out that the discovery of penicillin was a chance finding because he was working on a different bacteriological problem. However, the discovery came to his prepared mind. The discovery started when he noticed a circle around the mold Penicillium notatum in a culture plate of staphylococci. Then in 1940, German-Jewish chemist Ernst Chain and Australian pathologist Howard Florey succeeded in obtaining pure penicillin.

This article contains information regarding various forthcoming events related to quality and reliability engineering. This article contains information regarding various forthcoming events related to quality and reliability engineering. The event Improving Reliability of Mechanical Systems in Design is being organized on May 25, 1989 in London, England. The event Communicating with the Public about Major Hazards: A European Conference is being organized from May 30-June 1, 1989 in Varese, Italy.

Presents a speech by S. T. Holgate, a professor of immunopharmacology in Southampton, England, delivered at the University of Ferrara in Italy, October 31, 1997. Benefits of conducting multidisciplinary research in allergy and asthma; Efforts to study human mast-cell mechanisms as the allergic basis of asthma; Discoveries made regarding the role of viruses in asthma.

Presents brief reports on geologic topics, compiled as of July 2001. Possible collapse of the Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; Collapse of chalk tower, the Devil's Chimney in Sussex, England on April 3; Occurrence of a 7.5 earthquake in the Kutch region of Gujarat, India; Collapse of a chunk of the ceiling of the underground complex forming the remains of Nero's Golden House in Rome, Italy.