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As the clamour within the drug treatment field in the UK – and throughout much of Europe – increases, leading agencies are arguing for a review of the current legislation and a change in focus away from criminal justice and towards a more public health understanding of addiction. Therapeutic communities have found themselves united with many drug users-led campaigns to argue for a wholesale restructuring of the legislative, policy and funding arrangements which recognises the role of recovery-oriented interventions within the mix. Given these on-going debates, it is perhaps useful to understand how the current arrangements were established [1].

In 1850s, the sale of opium – like alcohol – was largely unregulated. It was widely used, in a variety of preparations, by all classes for medical and non-medical purposes. A pennyworth of opium was as likely (perhaps more likely) as a pound of potatoes to find its way into the weekly shopping basket.

By the 1920s, the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer – with their tales of innocent English virgins being seduced into crime and sexual perversion by an evil Chinese genius who lurked within the opium dens of Edwardian Britain – had redefined opium as a drug of the outside, the deadly, an agent in the enslavement of innocence.

This dramatic change was largely brought about by the introduction of an array of new medications and a move away from traditional “herbal” remedies. This change was accelerated by the experiences of the First World War and underpinned by the print media and laid the foundations of the legislation and policy of the present day.

This article draws on the experience of conducting an effectiveness review of community responses to drug concerns and supplementary interviews with key informants. Despite accessing nearly 300 publications relating to initiatives, there is a paucity of published evaluative evidence. The literature does provide a greater amount of information about initiatives that are delivered into the community as opposed to initiated by the community. Community‐led responses have taken a number of approaches. To assess the current evidence on ‘what works?’ we have defined community responses to drug problems under five banners: self‐help groups; parents' groups, residents' groups, community development groups and diversionary activity groups for ease of discussion. There are a number of commonly identified elements that exist in successful and sustainable initiatives which are discussed.

The growing availability of naturalistic driving datasets (NDDs) presents a valuable opportunity to develop various models for autonomous driving. However, while current NDDs include data on vehicles with and without intended driving behavior changes, they do not explicitly demonstrate a type of data on vehicles that intend to change their driving behavior but do not execute the behaviors because of safety, efficiency, or other factors. This missing data is essential for autonomous driving decisions. This study aims to extract the driving data with implicit intentions to support the development of decision-making models.

According to Bayesian inference, drivers who have the same intended changes likely share similar influencing factors and states. Building on this principle, this study proposes an approach to extract data on vehicles that intended to execute specific behaviors but failed to do so. This is achieved by computing driving similarities between the candidate vehicles and benchmark vehicles with incorporation of the standard similarity metrics, which takes into account information on the surrounding vehicles' location topology and individual vehicle motion states. By doing so, the method enables a more comprehensive analysis of driving behavior and intention.

The proposed method is verified on the Next Generation SIMulation dataset (NGSim), which confirms its ability to reveal similarities between vehicles executing similar behaviors during the decision-making process in nature. The approach is also validated using simulated data, achieving an accuracy of 96.3 per cent in recognizing vehicles with specific driving behavior intentions that are not executed.

This study provides an innovative approach to extract driving data with implicit intentions and offers strong support to develop data-driven decision-making models for autonomous driving. With the support of this approach, the development of autonomous vehicles can capture more real driving experience from human drivers moving towards a safer and more efficient future.

Therapeutic communities (and many other residential services) have been effectively marginalised in recent years with the increasing popularity of community-based outpatient responses to a variety of social issues including addiction, learning difficulties, mental health issues, etc. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This has inevitably led to a low profile and has resulted in a lack of knowledge about therapeutic communities and how the methodology differs significantly from other approaches.

This situation is beginning to change in a number of fields and it is important that the therapeutic community movement adapts its methodology to the needs of their respective client groups and clarifies its approach (and the efficacy of that approach) to funders and service commissioners.

This paper is a personal contribution.

Automatic categorisation can be understood as a learning process during which a program recognises the characteristics that distinguish each category or class from others, i.e. those characteristics which the documents should have in order to belong to that category. As yet few experiments have been carried out with documents in Spanish. Here we show the possibilities of elaborating pattern vectors that include the characteristics of different classes or categories of documents, using techniques based on those applied to the expansion of queries by relevance; likewise, the results of applying these techniques to a collection of documents in Spanish are given. The same collection of documents was categorised manually and the results of both procedures were compared.

Many new micromachined angular rate sensors (gyroscopes) are now commercially available. Their rapid development has been mainly due to the automotive industry. A wide range of different devices exists and their performance is significantly improving every year while costs are falling. Much effort is now under way for large volume production. This article provides a general overview of gyroscopic sensors and also describes a novel micromachined rotating device.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to reflect upon what the global therapeutic community (TC) movement has learnt from coronavirus and to consider how TCs will continue to adapt and evolve in a post-pandemic climate.

This is a viewpoint paper based on the authors’ participation in an international learning event whereby speakers from TCs from around the world spoke about how they adapted their services to overcome adversity.

The findings are usefully thought out as shelter, creativity, reintegration and employment, technology and roots. Based on the material discussed in the learning event, it would seem that the global TC movement has engaged in a process of looking to the past to move forward by drawing upon founding principles and prescriptions of the TC tradition, rooted in humanistic and indeed humanitarian responses to staff, client and sociocultural needs.

According to the author, this paper is one of the first attempts to capture how TCs from across the globe have responded to the threat of coronavirus.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the main findings and conclusions of four separate studies on treatment in therapeutic communities (TCs) for addictions.

The first two studies address the core characteristics of the TC approach: a study on the workable and destructive elements of the Synanon model; and a comparative study on the essential elements of TCs for addictions in Europe and in the USA. The final two studies highlight clients’ perceptions of the TC treatment process in relation to retention: a study on clients’ first month perceptions of the TC treatment process and the influence of fixed and dynamic client factors; and a longitudinal study on changes in clients’ perception of the TC treatment process and the impact of motivation, psychological distress and cluster B personality traits.

The first study showed that Synanon’s therapeutic and pedagogical methods are still highly valued despite its negative reputation. The results of the second study suggest that while traditional TCs operate as concept-based TCs in Europe, modified TCs might differ in the extent to which they apply the core principles and elements of the TC approach. The third study provides evidence that suitability for treatment is a very important predictor for clients’ first month perceptions of the community environment. The fourth study shows that with time in treatment clients develop more profound perceptions regarding the essence of TC treatment.

Finally, implications for clinical practice, general limitations and some concrete recommendations for future research are presented in this paper.

The PhD summary study contributes to the existing literature on TC treatment.