Bromide-containing impurities were found to decrease the thermal stability of quaternary alkyl ammonium-modified layered silicates. Improved purification procedures completely removed bromide and led to a 20°C to >100°C increase in organic modified layered silicate thermal stability. Using mass spectrometry and thermal and electrochemical analysis, N,N-dimethyl-N,N-dioctadecyl quaternary ammonium-modified montmorillonite and fluorinated synthetic mica were found to degrade primarily through elimination and nucleophilic attack by these anions. The nature of residual bromides was identified and quantified, and the efficiency of removing these anions was found to be solvent dependent; sequential extraction, first ethanol then tetrahydrofuran, gave the best results. This exhaustive extraction method represents a viable alternative to the use of expensive, more thermally stable oniumion treatments for layered silicates.

Using recently released papers, we analyze an attempted neoliberal policy revolution in 1980s Britain—the attempt to restrict the state pension to a minimal flat-rate benefit and supplement it with personal pensions. In the process, the government would abolish both the state earnings-related pension and collective employer-provided occupational pension schemes that then covered about half the workforce and owned about a quarter of all shares listed on the London Stock Exchange. Unusually, our focus is not primarily on ministers, as we unpick an attempted revolution that would have refashioned every worker in Britain as an investor-capitalist. Rather we focus on a sub-ministerial center of political power, the No. 10 Policy Unit, and the influence on it of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. In doing so, we confirm the latter's importance as source of neoliberal ideas for the architects of policy change in the 1980s and reveal the centrality of the Policy Unit as a source of motive power for Britain's neoliberal revolution. We also, however, highlight the relative pragmatism of ministers as they backed away from the Policy Unit's attempted revolution, choosing instead to implement a more evolutionary set of reforms.

Home care for older people in England is commissioned through local authorities working predominantly with independent providers of care. Commissioners operate in a market model, planning and procuring home care services for local populations. Their role involves ‘managing’ and ‘shaping’ the market to ensure an adequate supply of care providers. Another imperative, emerging from the principles of personalisation, is the drive to achieve user outcomes rather than ‘time and task’ objectives. Little formal research has investigated the way commissioners reconcile these different requirements and organise commissioning. This study investigated commissioning approaches using qualitative telephone interviews with ten commissioners from different local authorities in England. The characteristics of commissioning were analysed thematically. Findings indicated (a) commissioning involved complex systems and processes, uniquely shaped for the local context, but frequently changed, suggesting a constant need for reframing commissioning arrangements; (b) partnerships with providers were mainly transactional, with occasional examples of collaborative models, that were considered to facilitate flexible services more appropriate for commissioning for personalised outcomes; and (c) only a small number of commissioners had attempted to reconcile the competing and incompatible goals of tightly prescribed contracting and working collaboratively with providers. A better understanding of flexible contracting arrangements and the hallmarks of a trusting collaboration is required to move beyond the procedural elements of contracting and commissioning.

Genetic information is relevant not only to the patient, but also to their family. Where a patient refuses to share that information with family members, then their legal rights may conflict. This paper focuses on that conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of third parties. We first examine the nature of the duty of confidence as it applies in these circumstances, and the extent to which it can appropriately accommodate the familial nature of genetic information. We then consider the situations in which a healthcare practitioner might owe a third-party family member a tortious duty of care. We conclude that in most cases, there will be no duty owed to third parties, but that in certain limited circumstances, a duty of care should arise.

It is widely recognized that ‘the individual’ was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized ‘the individual’. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of ‘personal pensions’. This approach allows us to understand the position of ‘the individual’ on the functional level of Thatcherite policy-making. In doing so, we argue that there was no coherent or fixed Thatcherite concept of the individual. Instead, we identify three fundamental tensions: (i) should individuals be capitalists or consumers; (ii) were they rational or irrational; and (iii) should they be risk-taking entrepreneurs or prudent savers? This reflected, in part, conflicts within the diverse tapestry of post-war neoliberal thought. We demonstrate in this article that these tensions undermined the Thatcher governments’ original attempt to create a society of entrepreneurial investor-capitalists, which in turn cemented their preference for simply maximizing individual freedom of choice within a competitive – yet tightly regulated – market environment.

Two broad aims drive weed science research: improved management and improvedunderstanding of weed biology and ecology. In recent years, agriculturalweed research addressing these two aims has effectively split into separatesubdisciplines despite repeated calls for greater integration. Although someexcellent work is being done, agricultural weed research has developed avery high level of repetitiveness, a preponderance of purely descriptivestudies, and has failed to clearly articulate novel hypotheses linked toestablished bodies of ecological and evolutionary theory. In contrast,invasive plant research attracts a diverse cadre of nonweed scientists usinginvasions to explore broader and more integrated biological questionsgrounded in theory. We propose that although studies focused on weedmanagement remain vitally important, agricultural weed research wouldbenefit from deeper theoretical justification, a broader vision, andincreased collaboration across diverse disciplines. To initiate change inthis direction, we call for more emphasis on interdisciplinary training forweed scientists, and for focused workshops and working groups to developspecific areas of research and promote interactions among weed scientistsand with the wider scientific community.

The concept of a mixing efficiency is widely used to relate the amount of irreversible diabatic mixing in a stratified flow to the amount of energy available to support mixing. This common measure of mixing in a flow is based on the change in the background potential energy, which is the minimum gravitational potential energy of the fluid that can be achieved by an adiabatic rearrangement of the instantaneous density field. However, this paper highlights examples of mixing that is primarily ‘buoyancy-driven’ (i.e. energy is released to the flow predominantly from a source of available potential energy) to demonstrate that the mixing efficiency depends not only on the specific characteristics of the turbulence in the region of the flow that is mixing, but also on the density profile in regions remote from where mixing physically occurs. We show that this behaviour is due to the irreversible and direct conversion of available potential energy into background potential energy in those remote regions (a mechanism not previously described). This process (here termed ‘relabelling’) occurs without requiring either a local flow or local mixing, or any other process that affects the internal energy of that fluid. Relabelling is caused by initially available potential energy, associated with identifiable parcels of fluid, becoming dynamically inaccessible to the flow due to mixing elsewhere. These results have wider relevance to characterising mixing in stratified turbulent flows, including those involving an external supply of kinetic energy.

Nimmagadda SR, Agrawal N, Worrall-Davies A, Markova I, Rickards H. Determinants of irritability in Huntington's disease.

Objectives: Irritability is a common and disabling problem associated with Huntington's disease (HD). However, the underlying causes of such irritability remain unclear. This study investigates the association of irritability in HD with possible aetiological factors including dysexecutive syndrome, depression, anxiety (state and trait) and movement disorder.

Methods: Thirty patients with genetically confirmed HD and their carers were recruited from a regional HD neuropsychiatry service. Patients completed two self-reported questionnaires (Irritability, Anxiety and Depression Scale and State Trait Anxiety Inventory). Their carers filled in the Burns Irritability Scale. Patients were also administered the Behavioural Assessment of Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS), Montgomery and Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and the Motor component of the Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS).

Results: Both self-rated and carer-rated irritability scales showed significant positive correlation with trait anxiety. The self-rated irritability scales also showed significant positive correlation with state anxiety and depression. No association was observed between irritability and dysexecutive syndrome or motor impairment.

Conclusions: Trait anxiety might serve as a predictor for irritability in HD. Irritability is unrelated to motor or cognitive features of HD indicating that it is an independent neuropsychiatric manifestation of HD.