Protect our pubs!

Protect Our Pubs! is a project examining the notion of the nationalisation of pubs by the state. It involved a protest, audio tours of the pub, posters protesting at the notion, a contest for the smartest barperson, peg drinking contest, a flighting contest and various documentation. The protest and subsequent events took place at the Hare & Hounds Pub in the Midlands

Fuchs' problem for indecomposable abelian groups

More than 50 years ago, Laszlo Fuchs asked which abelian groups can be the group of units of a commutative ring. Though progress has been made, the question remains open. We provide an answer to this question in the case of indecomposable abelian groups by classifying the indecomposable abelian groups that are realizable as the group of units of a ring of any given characteristic.Comment: 10 pages, accepted for publication in Journal of Algebr

Spectrophotometry for cerebrospinal fluid pigment analysis

The use of spectrophotometry for the analysis of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is reviewed. The clinically relevant CSF pigments--oxyhemoglobin and bilirubin--are introduced and discussed with regard to clinical differential diagnosis and potentially confounding variables (the four T's: traumatic tap, timing, total protein, and total bilirubin). The practical laboratory aspects of spectrophotometry and automated techniques are presented in the context of analytical and clinical specificity and sensitivity. The perceptual limitations of human color vision are highlighted and the use of visual assessment of the CSF is discouraged in light of recent evidence from a national audit in the United Kingdom. Finally, future perspectives including the need for longitudinal CSF profiling and routine spectrophotometric calibration are outlined

Array languages and the N-body problem

This paper is a description of the contributions to the SICSA multicore challenge on many body planetary simulation made by a compiler group at the University of Glasgow. Our group is part of the Computer Vision and Graphics research group and we have for some years been developing array compilers because we think these are a good tool both for expressing graphics algorithms and for exploiting the parallelism that computer vision applications require. We shall describe experiments using two languages on two different platforms and we shall compare the performance of these with reference C implementations running on the same platforms. Finally we shall draw conclusions both about the viability of the array language approach as compared to other approaches used in the challenge and also about the strengths and weaknesses of the two, very different, processor architectures we used

What are Australia’s national security interests in the South China Sea?

Abstract This paper examines Australia’s national security interests in the South China Sea. It notes that a number of states lay claim to various islands in the region, and that territorial disputes over those claims have occasionally erupted into armed conflict in the past. The paper contends that China’s more recent behaviour in asserting its claim is unsettling the region and heightening strategic competition between China and the US, particularly regarding freedom of navigation through the South China Sea. The paper explores two key interests: first, the maintenance of a rules-based international order, especial ly in a contested and strategically-located area so close to Australia’s diplomatic, economic and military interests; and second, in ensuring continued and free access to the ‘global commons’. It concludes that Australia has real and tangible national security interests in the South China Sea that will become increasingly significant across the next decade, not least because Australia’s interests are closely aligned with those of the US, which potentially could involve aiding the US in the event of conflict