Investigation into Lean-Burn Combustor Thermo-acoustic Instabilities: Modelling of Entropy Convection for Low Frequency Rumble Prediction

New combustion methods, aimed to reduce emissions, are shown to be susceptible to instability. To reduce nitrogen oxides, the traditional diffusion flame is replaced by lean combustion, where fuel-air are partially premixed, and combustion conditions are set to keep the flame temperature cooler, producing the minimum amount of NOx. However they are more sensitive to unsteady combustion that generates acoustic waves which alter the mixture fraction; at a certain conditions the self-excited oscillations may grow showing the rumble phenomena. This work has been carried on in Rolls-Royce plc, in Combustion & Casings department, while a six month internship by Aerothermal Methods team. The task is aimed to improve the acoustic in-house program, coming to a new entropy convection model for rumble prediction

For the Tempus-fugitives: Christopher Norris on the Philosophy (and Poetry) of Colour

Born in 1947, Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He worked first on literary criticism, then on the question of realism and antirealism in philosophy (as a strong adversary of antirealism), on Derrida and deconstructionism and, more recently, on the philosophy of science. In the past few years he has also authored several philosophical poems. In this issue we present two poems he wrote that are dedicated to color. Color is a recurrent theme in Norris’ poetry. Why? And why does Norris choose, for nearly ten years past, to mainly use poems for his philosophical investigations? Is there a link between his interest on color and this choice he has made? Moreover: Norris was always a strong adversary of antirealism and the extreme consequences of the “linguistic turn”. Isn’t there a contradiction between this philosophical position and the importance he gives to poetry? Perhaps color can give us a key

Maritime Spatial Planning: a New Frontier for Remote Sensing of Coastal and Marine Regions

The proliferation of economic and recreational activities in the European seas is leading to increasing competition between sectorial interests. Moreover, the effects of climate change – rising sea level, temperatures and acidification – are likely to induce unknown instabilities into ecosystems and in socio-economic systems alike. A new set of measures, known as Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP), can help tackle these effects, by promoting a sustainable use of sea space and an efficient adaptation to its changes. Managing maritime areas requires integrating differing sectorial approaches in a coherent set of policies. In this respect, MSP has been overtaking the concept of Integrated Coastal Management (ICM). The European Commission (EC) drafted its MSP recommendations around the “ecosystem approach”, requiring that all elements of an ecosystem, and their mutual interactions, be taken into due account. The selection of suitable geographical units for this approach requires the assessment of ecological provinces with homogeneous environmental traits. Coastal zones, - where no evident geographic markers, except the coastline itself, bind the interaction between atmosphere, land and sea – represent a critical factor in this assessment. A coastal province can be defined by physical setting, but also by its bio-geo-chemical features, ideally on the basis of Remote Sensing (RS) data, collected at space/time scales not accessible by other means. Classifications based on indicators such as pigments concentration, surface temperature, and roughness-derived parameters like waves and winds, or the direct assessment of sea level change, demonstrate the potential of ecological provinces to develop the MSP process.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen

Colour for Philosophers: Introduction

«The ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him, but the philosopher, who speaks of colour only in a general way, begins to rave». This is still true now: the philosophical discussion on colour is very lively. There is a debate within Anglo-American philosophy that has been going on for the past fifty years, and is still going on today, as is demonstrated by the imminent publication of the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, which we are happy to announce in this issue. Colour is something very familiar but, nevertheless, it is also a subject on which philosophers never cease to raise questions. Why

Reappropriation and self-labeling: the influence of sexist language on women's feeling of personal power

This research investigates how the use of sexist terms affects women's perception of individual power and the valence they attribute to these stigmatizing labels. One hundred and seventy-five participants were randomly assigned to three conditions: in one condition participants were asked to remember a situation in which they self-labeled using a sexist term, in another condition participants were asked to remember a situation in which another woman used a sexist term to refer to them and in the last condition participants were asked about a situation in which they used non-sexist negative terms to self-label. Participants' feelings of power in the remembered situations were recorded, as well as the valence of the specific sexist labels. Results show that women’s sense of individual power does not vary when they used the terms to describe themselves compared to the situations in which another woman used them, while the value attributed to the labels appears to be less negative when the participants used the terms to describe themselves than when another woman did it.Este estudo aborda o modo como o uso de termos sexistas afeta a perceção das mulheres acerca do seu poder individual e o valor que as mesmas atribuem a estas etiquetas estigmatizantes. Cento e setenta e cinco participantes mulheres foram aleatoriamente distribuídas por três condições: numa condição as participantes foram convidadas a lembrar uma situação em que se auto-descreveram usando um termo sexista, noutra condição foi pedido às participantes que lembrassem uma situação em que outra mulher usou um termo sexista para as definir e, por fim, na última condição, as participantes foram questionadas sobre uma situação na qual elas usaram termos negativos não sexistas para se autodescrever. Os sentimentos de poder dos participantes nas situações lembradas foram registados, bem como a valência das etiquetas sexistas especificadas. Os resultados mostram que a perceção de poder individual das mulheres não varia quando elas mesmas usam as etiquetas em comparação com as situações em que outra mulher as usou. De realçar ainda, que o valor atribuído às etiquetas resultou ser menos negativo quando as participantes usaram os termos para se autodescrever do que quando outra mulher os utilizou

Empowering Refugee Claimants and their Lawyers: Using Machine Learning to Examine Decision-Making in Refugee Law

Our project aims at helping and supporting stakeholders in refugee status adjudications, such as lawyers, judges, governing bodies, and claimants, in order to make better decisions through data-driven intelligence and increase the understanding and transparency of the refugee application process for all involved parties. This PhD project has two primary objectives: (1) to retrieve past cases, and (2) to analyze legal decision-making processes on a dataset of Canadian cases. In this paper, we present the current state of our work, which includes a completed experiment on part (1) and ongoing efforts related to part (2). We believe that NLP-based solutions are well-suited to address these challenges, and we investigate the feasibility of automating all steps involved. In addition, we introduce a novel benchmark for future NLP research in refugee law. Our methodology aims to be inclusive to all end-users and stakeholders, with expected benefits including reduced time-to-decision, fairer and more transparent outcomes, and improved decision quality.Comment: 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law - ICAIL 2023, Doctoral Consortium. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2305.1553