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Assembling cultures takes a fine-grained look at workplace activism in car manufacturing between 1945 and 1982, using it as a key case for unpicking narratives around affluence, declinism and class. It traces the development of the militant car worker stereotype, looking at the social relations which lay behind the industry's reputation for conflict. This book reveals a changing, complex world of social practices, cultural norms, shared values and expectations. From the 1950s, car workers developed shop-floor organisations of considerable authority, enabling some new demands of their working lives, but constraining other more radical political aims. This is a story of workers and their place in the power relations of post-war Britain. 0This book is invaluable to academics and students studying the history, sociology and politics of modern Britain, particularly those with an interest in power, rationality, class, labour, gender and race. -- .

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) remains a leading cause of economic loss in pig farming worldwide. Existing commercial vaccines, all based on modified live or inactivated PRRSV, fail to provide effective immunity against the highly diverse circulating strains of both PRRSV-1 and PRRSV-2. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop more effective and broadly active PRRSV vaccines. In the absence of neutralizing antibodies, T cells are thought to play a central role in controlling PRRSV infection. Herpesvirus-based vectors are novel vaccine platforms capable of inducing high levels of T cells against encoded heterologous antigens. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the immunogenicity and efficacy of an attenuated herpesvirus-based vector (bovine herpesvirus-4; BoHV-4) expressing a fusion protein comprising two well-characterized PRRSV-1 T-cell antigens (M and NSP5). Prime-boost immunization of pigs with BoHV-4 expressing the M and NSP5 fusion protein (vector designated BoHV-4-M-NSP5) induced strong IFN-γ responses, as assessed by ELISpot assays of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) stimulated with a pool of peptides representing PRRSV-1 M and NSP5. The responses were closely mirrored by spontaneous IFN-γ release from unstimulated cells, albeit at lower levels. A lower frequency of M and NSP5 specific IFN-γ responding cells was induced following a single dose of BoHV-4-M-NSP5 vector. Restimulation using M and NSP5 peptides from PRRSV-2 demonstrated a high level of cross-reactivity. Vaccination with BoHV-4-M-NSP5 did not affect viral loads in either the blood or lungs following challenge with the two heterologous PRRSV-1 strains. However, the BoHV-4-M-NSP5 prime-boost vaccination showed a marked trend toward reduced lung pathology following PRRSV-1 challenge. The limited effect of T cells on PRRSV-1 viral load was further examined by analyzing local and circulating T-cell responses using intracellular cytokine staining and proliferation assays. The results from this study suggest that vaccine-primed T-cell responses may have helped in the control of PRRSV-1 associated tissue damage, but had a minimal, if any, effect on controlling PRRSV-1 viral loads. Together, these results indicate that future efforts to develop effective PRRSV vaccines should focus on achieving a balanced T-cell and antibody response.

Outbreaks that occur as a result of zoonotic spillover from an animal reservoir continue to highlight the importance of studying the disease interface between species. One Health approaches recognise the interdependence of human and animal health and the environmental interplay. Improving the understanding and prevention of zoonotic diseases may be achieved through greater consideration of these relationships, potentially leading to better health outcomes across species. In this review, special emphasis is given on the emerging and outbreak pathogen Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever virus (CCHFV) that can cause severe disease in humans. We discuss the efforts undertaken to better understand CCHF and the importance of integrating veterinary and human research for this pathogen. Furthermore, we consider the use of closely related nairoviruses to model human disease caused by CCHFV. We discuss intervention approaches with potential application for managing CCHFV spread, and how this concept may benefit both animal and human health.

During the 1970s, Britain’s trade unions expanded into new areas of the economy, making considerable progress among the low-paid workers of the expanding welfare state. The Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) both made huge strides recruiting women and particularly women of colour in the National Health Service, as the laundry, cleaning, catering and portering services of Britain’s hospitals became union strongholds. This article questions why the increased weight of feminized service work is so marginal in our idea of 1970s workplace activism and why it features so rarely in histories of British trade unionism, despite being one of the movement’s most significant growth areas. Drawing on NUPE’s photographic archive, I argue that by looking at the changing character of worker-activist visual culture in this period we can reinsert women and women of colour back into those histories. This is followed by a close reading of trade-union branch minutes which explores how women re-ordered the gendered hierarchy of both their male-dominated union and their hospital between 1970 and 1979, exercising new-found agency within the highly paternalist setting of the NHS.

Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a priority emerging disease. CCHF, caused by the CCHF virus (CCHFV), can lead to hemorrhagic fever in humans with severe cases often having fatal outcomes. CCHFV is maintained within a tick-vertebrate-tick cycle, which includes domestic animals. Domestic animals infected with CCHFV do not show clinical signs of the disease and the presence of antibodies in the serum can provide evidence of their exposure to the virus. Current serological tests are specific to either one CCHFV antigen or the whole virus antigen. Here, we present the development of two in-house ELISAs for the detection of serum IgG that is specific for two different CCHFV antigens: glycoprotein Gc (CCHFV Gc) and nucleoprotein (CCHFV NP). We demonstrate that these two assays were able to detect anti-CCHFV Gc-specific and anti-CCHFV NP-specific IgG in sheep from endemic CCHFV areas with high specificity, providing new insight into the heterogeneity of the immune response induced by natural infection with CCHFV in domestic animals.

Positive-Unlabelled (PU) learning is a field of machine learning that involves learning classifiers from data consisting of positive class and unlabelled instances. That is, instances that may be either positive or negative, but the label is unknown. PU learning differs from standard binary classification due to the absence of negative instances. This difference is non-trivial and requires differing classification frameworks and evaluation metrics. This thesis looks to address gaps in the PU learning literature and make PU learning more accessible to non-experts by introducing Automated Machine Learning (Auto-ML) systems specific to PU learning. Three such systems have been developed, GA-Auto-PU, a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based Auto-ML system, BO-Auto-PU, a Bayesian Optimisation (BO)-based Auto-ML system, and EBO-Auto-PU, an Evolutionary/Bayesian Optimisation (EBO) hybrid-based Auto-ML system.These three Auto-ML systems are three primary contributions of this work. EBO, the optimiser component of EBO-Auto-PU, is by itself a novel optimisation method developed in this work that has proved effective for the task of Auto-ML and represents another contribution. EBO was developed with the aim of acting as a trade-off between GA, which achieved high predictive performance but at high computational expense, and BO, which, when utilised by the Auto-PU system, did not perform as well as the GA-based system but did execute much faster. EBO achieved this aim, providing high predictive performance with a computational runtime much faster than the GA-based system, and not substantially slower than the BO-based system.The proposed Auto-ML systems for PU learning were evaluated on three versions of 40 datasets, thus evaluated on 120 learning tasks in total. The 40 datasets consist of 20 real-world biomedical datasets and 20 synthetic datasets. The main evaluation measure was the F-measure, a popular measure in PU learning. Based on the F-measure results, the three proposed systems outperformed in general two baseline PU learning methods, usually with statistically significant results. Among the three proposed systems, there was no statistically significance difference between their results in general, whilst a version of the EBO-Auto-PU system performed overall slightly better than the other systems, in terms of F-measure.The two other main contributions of this work relate specifically to the field of PU learning. Firstly, in this work we present and utilise a robust evaluation approach. Evaluating PU learning classifiers is non-trivial and little guidance has been provided in the literature on how to do so. In this work, we present a clear framework for evaluation and use this framework to evaluate the proposed systems. Secondly, when evaluating the proposed systems, an analysis of the most frequently selected components of the optimised PU learning algorithm is presented. That is, the components that constitute the PU learning algorithms produced by the optimisers (for example, the choice of classifiers used in the algorithm, the number of iterations, etc.). This analysis is used to provide guidance on the construction of PU learning algorithms for specific dataset characteristics.

Between 1968 and 1975 Britain saw an upsurge in workplace activism,² a phenomenon amply reflected in the motor industry, where workers in all four mass-production car firms – Ford, Vauxhall, Rootes-Chrysler and British Leyland – experienced increasing levels of industrial conflict.³ Although politically the Communist Party (CP) remained the dominant far-left force, holding the convenor position at several major assembly plants, the three main currents of Trotskyism – the Socialist Labour League (SLL), Militant and the International Socialists (IS) – all also benefited. The SLL built a forty-strong factory branch at British Leyland’s Cowley plant in Oxford, led by Alan

In this thesis, we investigate certain aspects of PSL₂(q). We begin by looking at the generating graph of PSL₂(q), a structure which may be used to encode certain information about the group, which was first introduced by Liebeck and Shalev and further investigated by many others. We provide a classification of maximal cocliques (independent sets) in the generating graph of PSL₂(q) when q is a prime and provide a family of examples to show that this result does not directly extend to the prime-power case. After this, we instead investigate the cohomology of finite groups and prove a general result relating the first cohomology of any module to the structure of some fixed module and a generalisation of this result to higher cohomology. We then completely determine the cohomology Hⁿ (G, V ) and its generalisation, ExtⁿG(V, W), for irreducible modules V, W for G = PSL₂(q) for all q in all non-defining characteristics before doing the same for the Suzuki groups.

We compute the dimensions of \\(\\operatorname{Ext}_G^n(V, W)\\) for all irreducible \\(V\\), \\(W\\) lying in \\(r\\)-blocks of cyclic defect in the simple groups \\(\\operatorname{Sz}(q)\\), \\(\\operatorname{PSU}_3(q)\\) and \\(\\operatorname{{}^2G}_2(q)\\) in cross characteristic, obtaining in particular the dimensions of all cohomology groups for such modules. Along the way, we also obtain an analogous result for any \\(r\\)-block of cyclic defect whose Brauer tree is either a star or line (open polygon).