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Abstract Optical microscopy has long been the standard method for diagnosis in cytopathology. Whole slide scanners can image and digitize large sample areas automatically, but are slow, expensive and therefore not widely available. Clinical diagnosis of cytology specimens is especially challenging since these samples are both spread over large areas and thick, which requires 3D capture. Here, we introduce a new parallelized microscope for scanning thick specimens across extremely wide fields-of-view (54 × 72 mm2) at 1.2 and 0.6 μm resolutions, accompanied by machine learning software to rapidly assess these 16 gigapixel scans. This Multi-Camera Array Scanner (MCAS) comprises 48 micro-cameras closely arranged to simultaneously image different areas. By capturing 624 megapixels per snapshot, the MCAS is significantly faster than most conventional whole-slide scanners. We used this system to digitize entire cytology samples (scanning three entire slides in 3D in just several minutes) and demonstrate two machine learning techniques to assist pathologists: first, an adenocarcinoma detection model in lung specimens (0.73 recall); second, a slide-level classification model of lung smears (0.969 AUC).

Abstract Much has been written of the implications for government policy on ‘responsible business’ but a comprehensive review of the subject is needed. This literature review will offer an assessment of varied insights to inform academics and practitioners on an important topic in need of scrutiny. The post-war consensus and strength of collective bargaining is waning in the Western world, and an inflection point may be nearing with a new way of working. Governments leveraging responsible business is among the options, but an understanding of the risks inherent in this option available to society is crucial. The world of business is in a new epoch of accepting social responsibility and, at the same time, a crisis of inequality means there is a need for every element of society to put their shoulder to the wheel. Businesses are an extremely powerful element in society, so how should governments harness that productivity for a social purpose? Should governments be encouraging responsible business to improve living standards and rebalance the inequity of incomes, or should political leaders be wary of engaging well-resourced businesses in areas that should be controlled from a democratic mandate? This article examines responsible business by providing comprehensive coverage of the literature in this deceptively mature subject area. Insights from secondary sources are analysed in relation to four key questions to reach an understanding of the risks inherent in crafting policy that expects more from business. The literature review concludes with a focus on the policy area of education, discussing how responsible business has been put into practice to resolve a market failure identified by J. K. Galbraith in the 1940s. Identifying areas such as this will maximise the opportunity of responsible business.

Aim: Patient and public involvement (PPI) in health and social care research is a requirement of nationally peer reviewed funders and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), including research grant applications. The United Kingdom Standards for Public Involvement (UKSPI) in research describes six standards, with associated reflective questions for researchers and organisations to improve PPI throughout the life cycle of their research. This case study aims to critically reflect upon the experience of ‘working together’, the second of the UKSPI, at the design stage of an early career physiotherapy researcher's NIHR research grant application. Methods: The GRIPP2 Checklist guided the reporting of this reflective case study. The researcher and public advisory group (PAG) met on Zoom following the initial consultation to reflect upon the experience of ‘working together’ at the design stage of a grant application. Discussions were audio-recorded. The theoretical model of reflection was informed by Moon (2004) to facilitate the researcher in an iterative learning process utilising the UKSPI reflective questions in order to develop as a novice learner to a contextual learner. Additional prompting was guided by Socratic questions to encourage deeper discussion. Results: The group reflection demonstrated differences between knowledge such as processes and procedures, and experiential knowledge that demonstrated meaning. This enabled the researcher to develop meaning, work with meaningful knowledge throughout the design of an NIHR grant application and therefore produce transformative knowledge. Discussions highlighted the role of f eedback in building reciprocal relationships and establishing ethical processes of working together. Moon's (2004) reflective framework effectively guided the development of meaning utilising the UKSPI questions during the group reflection.Discussion and conclusion Group reflection utilising the UKSPI provides a reflective process including PPI and researcher perspectives for early career researchers to develop and improve on the incorporation of PPI throughout the design of an NIHR grant application. Further research is needed to explore methods of gathering reciprocal feedback to develop a reflective approach to improve the experiences of working together at each stage of the research lifecycle.Public involvement This reflective case study was developed in partnership with a PAG including three previous patients and one relative. The PAG were consulted at the design stage of the research grant application. All members shared the reflective process and production of this reflective case study. All PAG members reviewed the case study. Two PAG members (R.G, M.H) co-produced the plain English summary.

Integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the automotive industry has brought benefits as well as security challenges. Significant benefits include enhanced passenger safety and more comprehensive vehicle performance diagnostics. However, current onboard and remote vehicle diagnostics do not include the ability to detect counterfeit parts. A method is needed to verify authentic parts along the automotive supply chain from manufacture through installation and to coordinate part authentication with a secure database. In this study, we develop an architecture for anti-counterfeiting in automotive supply chains. The core of the architecture consists of a cyber-physical trust anchor and authentication mechanisms connected to blockchain-based tracking processes with cloud storage. The key parameters for linking a cyber-physical trust anchor in embedded IoT include identifiers (i.e., serial numbers, special features, hashes), authentication algorithms, blockchain, and sensors. A use case was provided by a two-year long implementation of simple trust anchors and tracking for a coffee supply chain which suggests a low-cost part authentication strategy could be successfully applied to vehicles. The challenge is authenticating parts not normally connected to main vehicle communication networks. Therefore, we advance the coffee bean model with an acoustical sensor to differentiate between authentic and counterfeit tires onboard the vehicle. The workload of secure supply chain development can be shared with the development of the connected autonomous vehicle networks, as the fleet performance is degraded by vehicles with questionable replacement parts of uncertain reliability.

Abstract Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is an insidious disease characterized by severe remodeling of the pulmonary vasculature caused in part by pathologic changes of endothelial cell functions. Although heterogeneity of endothelial cells across various vascular beds is well known, the diversity among endothelial cells in the healthy pulmonary vascular bed and the pathologic diversity among pulmonary arterial endothelial cells (PAEC) in PAH is unknown and previously unexplored. Here single-cell RNA sequencing technology was used to decipher the cellular heterogeneity among PAEC in the human pulmonary arteries isolated from explanted lungs from three patients with PAH undergoing lung transplantation and three healthy donor lungs not utilized for transplantation. Datasets of 36,368 PAH individual endothelial cells and 36,086 healthy cells were analyzed using the SeqGeq bioinformatics program. Total population differential gene expression analyses identified 629 differentially expressed genes between PAH and controls. Gene Ontology and Canonical Ingenuity analysis revealed pathways that are known to be involved in pathogenesis, as well as unique new pathways. At the individual cell level, dimensionality reduction followed by density based clustering revealed the presence of eight unique PAEC clusters that were typified by proliferative, angiogenic or quiescent phenotypes. While control and PAH harbored many similar subgroups of endothelial cells, PAH had greater proportions of angiogenic and proliferative subsets. These findings identify that only specific subgroups of PAH PAEC have gene expression different than healthy PAEC, and suggest these subpopulations lead to the pathologic functions leading to remodeling.

The year 1960 marked the moment when the number of nominally independent African countries on the continent rose from nine to twenty-six and is a symbolic indicator of when Africa began to emerge from the days of European colonization. However, from the beginning, very few of Africa’s leaders sought to reorganize the continent’s economic structures and did virtually nothing to question its external exchange relations. Preferring to play the role of compradors, most preferred to stay wedded to their former colonial masters. Consequently, sixty years after the Year of Africa, most African countries continue to be entrenched in a set of connections that fit well with Kwame Nkrumah’s description of neocolonialism. This neocolonialism has a highly resilient material base which continues to maintain the continent in its subordinate global status and which perpetuates its underdevelopment. Sustainable growth and development in Africa continues to be blocked by the domination of external economies. African countries remain constrained from accumulating the necessary capital for auto-centric growth since the surplus is transferred overseas. Asymmetrical economic relationships are embodied by the continued supremacy of the core over Africa, something intrinsic to capitalism. Unequal exchange, the transfer of surplus i.e. the continued looting of Africa by its elites and their foreign associates, means that the dreams and aspirations of 1960, for the majority of Africans at least, have been frustrated.

Societal Impact Statement We rely on plants and fungi for most aspects of our lives. Yet plants and fungi are under threat, and we risk losing species before we know their identity, roles, and potential uses. Knowing names, distributions, and threats are first steps toward effective conservation action. Accessible products like field guides and online resources engage society, harnessing collective support for conservation. Here, we review current knowledge of the plants and fungi of the UK and UK Overseas Territories, highlighting gaps to help direct future research efforts toward conserving these vital elements of biodiversity. Summary This review summarizes current knowledge of the status and threats to the plants and fungi of Great Britain and the UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs). Although the body of knowledge is considerable, the distribution of information varies substantially, and we highlight knowledge gaps. The UK vascular flora is the most well studied and we have a relatively clear picture of its 9,001 native and alien taxa. We have seedbanked 72% of the native and archaeophyte angiosperm taxa and 78% of threatened taxa. Knowledge of the UKOTs flora varies across territories and we report a UKOTs flora comprising 4,093 native and alien taxa. We have conserved 27% of the native flora and 51% of the threatened vascular plants in Kew's Millennium Seed Bank, UK. We need a better understanding of the conservation status of plants in the wild, and progress toward completion or updating national red lists varies. Site‐based protection of key plant assemblages is outlined, and progress in identifying Important Plant Areas analyzed. Knowledge of the non‐vascular flora, especially seaweeds remains patchy, particularly in many UKOTs. The biggest gaps overall are in fungi, particularly non‐lichenized fungi. Considerable investment is needed to fill these knowledge gaps and instigate effective conservation strategies.

China's relationship with Angola – which is both the region's top oil exporter to China and recipient of the highest amount of Chinese loans – represents a critical case when it comes to studying Sino–African relations. The Sino–Angolan relationship, forged for purely pragmatic reasons at an opportune moment of mutual need in the early 2000s, has been labelled a ‘marriage of convenience’. A variety of factors have, however, altered the environment in which China first made inroads into Angola; most notably a decline in oil prices, and the 2017 political transition. These have provided fresh impetus to the Angolan political economy and relations with China. Based on interviews we show that although oil remains a central ingredient, China's role has substantially evolved. The marriage of convenience is experiencing a period of rocky introspection, one in which the notion of China having sway in Angola can finally be laid to rest.

Blockchains have been around for more than ten years, and since 2015, a plethora of systems have been launched to target more flexible use cases. More recently, several enterprise blockchain systems, such as Consensys Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, have been launched to make blockchain simpler to apply in complex organizational configurations. In this paper, we identify a specific Department of Defense use case, extrapolate requirements, and perform a thorough assessment of the different layers of the blockchain stack to identify the existing state of the art and undertake a gap analysis of the technology for this context. We describe a platform that meets many of these challenges and show how we architected, designed, and implemented a solution for this use case for deployment at NAVAIR. This solution connects transactions from two separate blockchain systems, Consensys Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, by using a graph-based approach that preserves privacy while enabling full transparency across the military and supplier networks.

Reproducibility can be considered as one of the basic requirements to ensure that a given research finding is accurate and acceptable. This paper presents a new layered approach that allows scientific researchers to provide a) data to fellow researchers to validate research and b) proofs of research quality to funding agencies, without revealing sensitive details associated with the same. We conclude that by integrating smart contracts, blockchain technology, and self-sovereign identity into an automated system, it is possible to assert the quality of scientific materials and validate the peer review process without the need of a central authority.

Birth registration is a critical element of newborn care. Increasing the coverage of birth registration is an essential part of the strategy to improve newborn survival globally, and is central to achieving greater health, social, and economic equity as defined under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Parts of Eastern and Southern Africa have some of the lowest birth registration rates in the world. Mobile technologies have been used successfully with mothers and health workers in Africa to increase coverage of essential newborn care, including birth registration. However, mounting concerns about data ownership and data protection in the digital age are driving the search for scalable, user-centered, privacy protecting identity solutions. There is increasing interest in understanding if a self-sovereign identity (SSI) approach can help lower the barriers to birth registration by empowering families with a smartphone based process while providing high levels of data privacy and security in populations where birth registration rates are low. The process of birth registration and the barriers experienced by stakeholders are highly contextual. There is currently a gap in the literature with regard to modeling birth registration using SSI technology. This paper describes the development of a smartphone-based prototype system that allows interaction between families and health workers to carry out the initial steps of birth registration and linkage of mothers-baby pairs in an urban Kenyan setting using verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers, and the emerging standards for their implementation in identity systems. The goal of the project was to develop a high fidelity prototype that could be used to obtain end-user feedback related to the feasibility and acceptability of an SSI approach in a particular Kenyan healthcare context. This paper will focus on how this technology was adapted for the specific context and implications for future research.

Chl1 is a member of the XPD family of 5'-3' DNA helicases, which perform a variety of roles in genome maintenance and transmission. They possess a variety of unique structural features, including the presence of a highly variable, partially-ordered insertion in the helicase domain 1. Chl1 has been shown to be required for chromosome segregation in yeast due to its role in the formation of persistent chromosome cohesion during S-phase. Here we present structural and biochemical data to show that Chl1 has the same overall domain organisation as other members of the XPD family, but with some conformational alterations. We also present data suggesting the insert domain in Chl1 regulates its DNA binding.

Since the early 1980s, a philosophical approach to economics and development, one that is broadly in alignment with the neoliberal mantra of liberalisation, privatisation and the "free market" has become hegemonic. Despite the evident intellectual bankruptcy of relying on "the market" for development and even after the post-2008 crisis, which exposed neoliberalism’s failures, we have not witnessed any fundamental changes in most international institutions approaches to the most pressing issue of our time: sustainable development. This article seeks to demonstrate that a new organisation specifically aimed at promoting global development and free of the reformist discourses that pervade existing bodies (such as UNCTAD) is needed. Otherwise, debates will continue to be restricted to problem-solving issues, nothing will fundamentally change and global inequality (itself brought about by imperialism and neo-colonialism) will continue to characterise the global political economy.

The European Union (EU) is increasingly aspiring to be a global peace and security actor. Using the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as a test case to analyse such ambitions, this article reveals that the EU’s attempts to build peace and security are severely compromised by its bureaucratic and organizational complexity as well as by its ineffective policies. In fact, the EU’s state-centred approach in the DRC has resulted in the EU’s inability to deal with 1) the realities of governance in the DRC and 2) the strong transborder dimensions of the conflict. As a result, the EU continues to lack a coherent strategy for the DRC, despite a large budget. The analysis concludes that the EU is more concerned with establishing a symbolic presence and a form of representation than with achieving specific goals.Die Europäische Union (EU) bemüht sich zunehmend um eine anerkannte Rolle in der globalen Friedenssicherung. Die Autoren des vorliegenden Beitrags nehmen die Aktivitäten der EU in der Demokratischen Republik Kongo (DRC) als Testfall und zeigen auf, dass die Umsetzung ihrer Versuche, dort Frieden und Sicherheit zu schaffen, von einer bürokratischen Herangehensweise, den komplexen EU-Strukturen und einer ineffizienten politischen Zielsetzung stark behindert wird. Tatsächlich hat der staatszentrierte Ansatz der EU dazu geführt, dass sie weder mit den Realitäten des Regierens in der DRC, noch mit den entscheidenden grenzüberschreitenden Dimensionen des Konflikts umzugehen wusste. Im Ergebnis fehlt der EU weiterhin eine kohärente Strategie für die DRC – trotz eines beträchtlichen Budgets. Die Autoren kommen zu dem Schluss, dass es der EU mehr darum geht, eine symbolische Präsenz zu etablieren, als spezifische Ziele zu erreichen.

The development of brief, reliable and valid self-report measures of cognitive abilities would facilitate research in areas including cognitive ageing. This is due to both practical and economic limitations of formal cognitive testing procedures. This study examined the reliability and validity of the newly developed Self-Report Measure of Cognitive Abilities (SRMCA; Jacobs & Roodenburg, 2014); a multi-item self-report tool designed to assess cognitive function in the ability areas of fluid reasoning (Gf), comprehension-knowledge (Gc) and visual processing (Gv). Participants were (n = 93) cognitively healthy older adults aged between 52 and 82 years who completed the SRMCA, the Big Five Inventory and a battery of cognitive tasks. Results revealed adequate reliability for the SRMCA and convergent validity for the Gc domain but not for Gf or Gv. Moreover, significant personality bias was evident with Extraversion (positively), Openness to Experience (positively) and Neuroticism (negatively) predicting SRMCA responses independently of actual cognitive performance. Thus, although the SRMCA appears to be reliable in older adults, personality was a stronger predictor of self-estimated cognitive abilities than actual cognitive performance, questioning the utility of this tool as a subjective measure of cognitive ability.

Within the current world order, despite the ongoing economic crisis, neo-liberalism continues to inform the global financial architecture and forms the foundation for the global trading system. It is a normative paradigm which has been accepted by elites in the Global South but which is also being interrogated as the process of neoliberal globalization seems to engender division and inequity across and—crucially—within national territories. Such questions are based on the partial nature of global liberalization, seen to benefit the developed world at the expense of the developing and also the continuation of what South Africa’s previous president, Thabo Mbeki, referred to as “global apartheid”. Within this context, since the 1994 elections, but particularly under the presidency of Mbeki and continuing under Zuma, South African foreign policy has more and more adopted a reformist stance towards the global system. Activism has been particularly focussed on multilateral initiatives and alliance-building amongst like-minded states in order to further an agenda that seeks to ameliorate the perceived negative outcomes of globalisation, whilst also seeking to open up the markets of the developed world. Whilst Pretoria’s diplomacy is, perhaps as expected, implicitly statist, such bargaining coalitions are of increasing interest and importance in pushing positions in the emerging global trade regime. This article seeks to analyse how South Africa fits within this emerging network of coalitions and meeting points, as exemplified by the G-20, India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA) and the BRICS.

Review of the edited volume:Devan Pillay, Gilbert M. Khadiagala, Prishani Naidoo and Roger Southall (eds), New South African Review 4: A Fragile Democracy – Twenty Years On, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014, ISBN 9781868147632, 380 pp.