Independent review of variable fees and student finance arrangements: report to Minister for Employment and Learning

"The report is structured as follows: Section 1 Introduction and Background to the Review, Section 2 Current Arrangements, Section 3 Impact of the Introduction of Variable Student Fees, Section 4 Future Fee Scenarios for Northern Ireland, Section 5 Future Maintenance Grant Entitlement Options, Section 6 Recommendations" - page 9

Maintenance/repair and production-oriented life cycle cost/earning model for ship structural optimisation during conceptual design stage

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the change in structural weight due to optimisation experiments on life cycle cost and earning elements using the life cycle cost/earning model, which was developed for structure optimisation. The relation between structural variables and relevant cost/earning elements are explored and discussed in detail. The developed model is restricted to the relevant life cycle cost and earning elements, namely production cost, periodic maintenance cost, fuel oil cost, operational earning and dismantling earning. Therefore it is important to emphasise here that the cost/earning figure calculated through the developed methodology will not be a full life cycle cost/earning value for a subject vessel, but will be the relevant life cycle cost/earning value. As one of the main focuses of this paper is the maintenance/repair issue, the data was collected from a number of ship operators and was solely used for the purpose of regression analysis. An illustrative example for a chemical tanker is provided to show the applicability of the proposed approac

Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Occupation, mental illness and medium security: A study of occupational engagement in two forensic regional secure units

Research investigating occupational experience among people with mental illness has highlighted their difficulties in selecting, organising, valuing, enjoying and competently performing occupations. Although occupational therapy literature consistently identifies environmental factors as key in facilitating successful and valued engagement, few authors have studied the implications of detention in secure mental health settings for this population. This study investigated the occupational experiences of five people with schizophrenia in two forensic regional secure units. Quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used, with semi-structured interviews adding depth and subjectivity to Occupational Questionnaire (Smith et al 1986) responses. The quantitative data were analysed using non-parametric analysis, with content analysis applied to the qualitative data. Time-use was characterised predominantly by engagement in passive leisure and rest occupations. This reflects the findings of both inpatient and community-based studies elsewhere and suggests that mental illness is a common factor influencing time-use. The participants chose occupations based on expectations of enjoyment and success, and associations with independence and normality. Significant correlations were found between perceived competence, value and enjoyment (p<0.01), and the participants were more likely to enjoy self-chosen occupations (p<0.05). Forensic occupational therapists must use evidence to optimise resources and deliver interventions that facilitate choice and autonomy and reflect individual needs. Further research with larger samples and longitudinal methodologies will facilitate generalisation and establish temporal perspective

Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) Program and Alternative Fuel Vehicle Projects

The United States has been plagued with air quality problems for decades. Congress began to formally address these problems in 1970 with the passage of the Clean Air Act. The federal government has used a variety of approaches to address air quality problems and among the many strategies has been the use of alternative fuels. The United States also became acutely aware of the need to reduce foreign oil dependence during the oil crises in the 1970s. In response to these crises, Congress passed a number of legislative initiatives including the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1980, the Alternative Motor Fuels Act of 1988, and the Energy Policy Act of 1992. Again, alternative fuels were to play a key role, this time in addressing the need to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil

Green compressive sampling reconstruction in IoT networks

In this paper, we address the problem of green Compressed Sensing (CS) reconstruction within Internet of Things (IoT) networks, both in terms of computing architecture and reconstruction algorithms. The approach is novel since, unlike most of the literature dealing with energy efficient gathering of the CS measurements, we focus on the energy efficiency of the signal reconstruction stage given the CS measurements. As a first novel contribution, we present an analysis of the energy consumption within the IoT network under two computing architectures. In the first one, reconstruction takes place within the IoT network and the reconstructed data are encoded and transmitted out of the IoT network; in the second one, all the CS measurements are forwarded to off-network devices for reconstruction and storage, i.e., reconstruction is off-loaded. Our analysis shows that the two architectures significantly differ in terms of consumed energy, and it outlines a theoretically motivated criterion to select a green CS reconstruction computing architecture. Specifically, we present a suitable decision function to determine which architecture outperforms the other in terms of energy efficiency. The presented decision function depends on a few IoT network features, such as the network size, the sink connectivity, and other systems’ parameters. As a second novel contribution, we show how to overcome classical performance comparison of different CS reconstruction algorithms usually carried out w.r.t. the achieved accuracy. Specifically, we consider the consumed energy and analyze the energy vs. accuracy trade-off. The herein presented approach, jointly considering signal processing and IoT network issues, is a relevant contribution for designing green compressive sampling architectures in IoT networks