Over a period of more than fifty years, promotional films for British popular music have received critical acclaim and numerous awards. Since the launch of MTV in 1981, these films have become known as 'music videos', despite the fact that until the 2000s the overwhelming majority were shot on 35mm and 16mm film, and despite the fact that the form predated MTV. In 1964 a series of short promotional films for British bands were commissioned culminating in seminal short 'promos' for The Kinks, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones through the mid- to late Sixties. Music videos have not only impacted subsequent generations of television viewers but have also inspired creative producers in fashion, design, photography and feature film. Directors Derek Jarman, Julian Temple, Jonathan Glazer, John Maybury and Jamie Thraves are among a number of filmmakers behind some of the most innovative and celebrated music videos. Yet despite its recognition, its innovation and its longevity, the cultural significance of music video within British academic research has been largely unacknowledged. This project seeks to change that. The two-year study is a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth and University of the Arts London in partnership with the British Film Institute and the British Library. It draws together both industry and academic expertise. Permission has been given for the research team to use a new and very rich selection of data, archives, and films from private industry collections. The team will bring together leading academics in popular music, film and television studies and cultural studies to analyse the significance of these collections both for an international audience of academics (thorough our academic outputs) and for the general public (through the nationwide public cinema screenings). In Year 1, using new data donated by British licensing agency, Video Performance Licensing (VPL), and the trade journal Promo News, the CI will create a master database of British music videos 1964-2014, and a separate database of detailed production credits for 1992-2014. These will generate core data necessary to investigate the research questions. In consultation with industry experts and a steering committee of academics, we will select titles of 60 British music videos as case studies for further analysis during a series of six academic focus groups at the BFI. The research questions will be investigated further in a series of industry panels at the BL and supplementary interviews with leading industry figures and archival research. We will also conduct case study analyses of Warp Records and a case study analysis of The Chart Show (using restricted data on single sales held at the British Phonograph Industry Library). The results will be disseminated in a book and a journal special issue. The book will be a monograph which presents a history of the structure, creative practices, models of authorship, stylistic innovations and influences of the industry. The journal special issue will present the results of the focus groups in a series of specially commissioned articles about the cultural significance of British videos written by academics from popular music, film and television studies and cultural studies. The project will also generate two permanent digital collections of music videos at the BFI and BL for the general public and academics. In order to make them more accessible nationwide they will also be exhibited to the public in a series of cinema screenings in London, Belfast, Edinburgh and Manchester, and distributed on a BluRay/DVD by Soda Pictures. There will also be public talk by the CI, Dr Emily Caston, at the British Library to launch these new collections.

After four months of low magnitude seismic activity and continuous deformation, the Island of El Hierro in the Canarian Achipelago erupted on 10 October 2011. Since that date, seismic activity has been slowly increasing in magnitude, with more than 34 Ml>3 earthquakes (four of which have Ml> 4) occurring since 1 November. The largest, a Ml 4.6, intensity (EMS) IV-V earthquake occurred on the 11/11/11 and was felt across El Hierro as well as in the neighbouring Tenerife and La Palma Islands. The current eruption has also extended, with activity now taking place from several vents describing an approximate north-south alignment a short distance offshore. Most ominously this alignment parallels a prominent band of young cinder cones and possible rifting that extends northwards across the island and this area has now been placed on red alert status. Moreover, this alignment parallels the pattern of present seismicity that bisects the island, as well as apparently structurally controlled segments of the cliffed coastline. El Hierro, although the smallest island in the Canary group, represents just the uppermost 1500 metres of a very large volcano that extends more than three kilometres below sea level. Its distinctive scalloped coastline is the result of at least four large-scale flank collapses, occurring as recently as 15 thousand years ago, and the current deformation and seismic activity could trigger a new flank collapse or reactivate one of the older collapses. The official Spanish agency (IGN) responsible for monitoring the seismicity also installed 4 GPS stations in mid July 2011 to record variations in distance between these points, while thekey local group for volcanological research (INVOLCAN) focuses mainly on geochemical monitoring (CO2 and radon emissions) but has a further 6 GPS stations, some pre-dating the crisis, which measure absolute movement of the stations, with data processed by personnel from Nagoya University inJapan. These datasets, although valuable, only provide information from scattered points, and do not represent the integrated structural documentation and analysis of recent and potential future overall deformation presently proposed. This structural analysis needs to be carried out urgently, to seize the scientific opportunity to capture baseline data and to provide a volcano-tectonic framework in which to place the monitoring data outlined above. In this way the progression of potential flank instability can be documented and modelled, work that is crucial to understanding this widespread and potentially catastrophic phenomenon, yet presently does not exist. On 27 October 2011, a meeting took place of the members of the scientific committee set up as a result of the present crisis. This meeting, attended by the PI, confirmed that no group is investigating active fractures and other structures in the field, emphasising the urgency of, 1) establishing this baseline structural framework and, 2) enacting monitoring networks and procedures to record the pattern and rate at which this framework deforms. We therefore propose in this project a field campaign to map and analyse active volcano-seismo-gravitational structures on the island and to set up a control system that will monitor the evolution of these structures. The work will contribute principally to modelling and understanding the overall deformation of volcanic edifices during eruptions and the generation and evolution of areas of instability. Additionally, the work has the potential to make predictions and warnings useful in the current crisis. Once the initial field campaign is finished, repeat measurements will be performed by personnel from the relevant Spanish agencies, INVOLCAN and ITER. The ultimate aim is to further collaborate with these colleagues in a follow-up multi-disciplinary project proposal.

After observing a crime, eyewitnesses can provide law enforcement personnel with important information about the criminal's identity. This is often achieved by pointing out the criminal from an identity parade. The basic procedure for an identity parade is to have the witness inspect a group of people and judge whether one of them is the criminal, but the procedures used to administer identity parades vary substantially across jurisdictions. In countries like Australia and South Africa, parade members appear in person - similar to how identification procedures tend to be depicted in popular films. Live parades are also used in the USA and Canada, but identification from photographs (or "mugshots") is far more common. In the UK, recent legislation has led to the widespread use of video technology to present identity parades. Such disparity in procedures begs the question: Which one is best? When considering the pragmatics of the different techniques, photo and video identifications are the clear favourites. Finding suitable people to appear in a live parade is not always easy, whereas the availability of large databases of photo and video images make these alternative forms of identity parades substantially more manageable to construct. Video and photo parades are also less expensive than live parades because the parade members do not need to be paid each time they appear. Although the practical benefits of photo and video parades are clear, eyewitness scientists have yet to reach a consensus on which procedure is most likely to facilitate a correct identification decision. This is a huge societal problem because if a witness is unable to identify the criminal, investigators may not have the evidence required to secure a conviction and hold the criminal responsible. There is also a very real possibility that an eyewitness will mistakenly identify an innocent person. When this happens, the innocent person is at an increased risk of wrongful conviction. Wrongful convictions happen quite frequently and in a review of convictions that were proven to be wrongful in light of DNA evidence, mistaken identifications were present in over 70% of the cases and was the leading contributing factor (www.innocenceproject.org). Sometimes false identifications are beyond the justice system's control, but decades of scientific research have demonstrated that eyewitness identification policies and procedures can have a significant impact on the reliability of eyewitness identifications. This is why it is crucial to know how identifications are affected by presenting the identity parade members in person, on video, or with photographs. One thing to consider is that live procedures give witnesses the opportunity to see the parade members in their entirety, whereas photo and video procedures typically only provide a head-and-shoulders view. All else equal, the ability to see the parade members from top to bottom should improve eyewitness identification performance. In practice, however, the logistical constraints of live identifications might wipe out any of these theoretical benefits. The proposed research will provide a rigorous comparison of live, video, and photo parades, and it will also introduce a novel procedure that shows videos of the entire person. The novel procedure has been designed to retain the practical advantages of video parades, but also provide witnesses with the additional memory cues that are available for live parades. The people who are investigating crimes and setting eyewitness identification policy are currently facing a paradox: the most practical identification procedure may not produce the best identification outcomes. When the proposed research has been completed, the data will inform investigators and policy-makers on which identity parade modality produces the best identification outcomes.

Our Universe contains two mysterious substances: dark energy and dark matter. Dark matter is needed to explain the orbital speeds of stars within galaxies, and dark energy explains the surprising observation that the Universe's expansion is speeding up. In this project we will combine Hubble Space Telescope observations of strong gravitational lensing and Very Large Telescope observations of the orbital properties of stars to constrain the properties of both dark matter and dark energy. Gravitational lensing occurs due to the warping of space time around massive galaxies. As light from a background galaxy pass by a foreground galaxy its path is deflected, and in some cases the deflection is large enough that multiple images of the background source is observed. These rare alignments are called strong lenses and the separation between the images is sensitive to dark matter in the lensing galaxy and the dark energy between us and the source. However these properties are degenerate, and only by combining with external data can we disentangle the effects of dark matter, dark energy and gravity. We will use the orbital properties of stars within the lens galaxy to break this degeneracy: as the mass of the galaxy increases, the stars orbit faster.

Covid Extension