Seaplanes at Green Island

A study for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authorit

MISASSESSED RISK IN CONSUMER VALUATION OF FOOD SAFETY: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH

This study estimates Canadian consumers' willingness to pay for food safety improvements and identifies systematic misassessments of food-borne risks. Non-hypothetical experimental auctions were used to elicit consumer valuations of food safety improvement. Consistent with behavioural research, results suggest that subjects generally overestimate the likelihood of becoming ill due to food-borne disease relative to scientifically-estimated odds. Subjects were willing to pay a positive amount to reduce food-safety risk. Risk reductions' valuations increased with higher initial risk, supporting arguments of diminishing marginal value for risk reductions.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

The AdS/CFT/Unparticle Correspondence

We examine the correspondence between the anti-de Sitter (AdS) description of conformal field theories (CFTs) and the unparticle description of CFTs. We show how unparticle actions are equivalent to holographic boundary actions for fields in AdS, and how massive unparticles provide a new type of infrared cutoff that can be simply implemented in AdS by a soft breaking of conformal symmetry. We also show that processes involving scalar unparticles with dimensions d_s<2 or fermion unparticles with dimensions d_f<5/2 are insensitive to ultraviolet cutoff effects. Finally we show that gauge interactions for unparticles can be described by bulk gauge interactions in AdS and that they correspond to minimal gauging of the non-local effective action, and we compute the fermion unparticle production cross-section.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figur

Learning about Galactic structure with Gaia astrometry

The Gaia mission is reviewed together with the expected contents of the final catalogue. It is then argued that the ultimate goal of Galactic structure studies with Gaia astrometry should be to build a dynamical model of our galaxy which is capable of explaining the contents of the Gaia catalogue. This will be possible only by comparing predicted catalogue data to Gaia's actual measurements. To complement this approach the Gaia catalogue should be used to recalibrate photometric distance and abundance indicators across the HR-diagram in order to overcome the lack of precise parallax data at the faint end of the astrometric survey. Using complementary photometric and spectroscopic data from other surveys will be essential in this respect.Comment: Presented at the "Classification and Discovery in Large Astronomical Surveys" meeting, Ringberg Castle, 14-17 October, 200

The response to high magnetic fields of the vacuum phototriodes for the compact muon solenoid endcap electromagnetic calorimeter

The endcap electromagnetic calorimeter of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detects particles with the dense fast scintillator lead tungstate (PbWO4). Due to the low light yield of this scintillator photodetectors with internal gain are required. Silicon avalanche photodiodes cannot be used in the endcap region due to the intense neutron flux. Following an extensive R&D programme 26 mm diameter single-stage photomultipliers (vacuum phototriodes) have been chosen as the photodetector in the endcap region. The first 1400 production devices are currently being evaluated following recent tests of a pre-production batch of 500 tubes. Tubes passing our acceptance tests have responses, averaged over the angular acceptance of the endcap calorimeter, corresponding to the range 20 to 55 electrons per MeV deposited in PbWO4. These phototriodes operate, with a typical gain of 10, in magnetic fields up to 4T.PPARC, EC(INTAS-CERN scheme 99-424

Using sub-daily precipitation for grid-based hydrological modelling across Great Britain: assessing model performance and comparing flood impacts under climate change

•Study region: Great Britain. •Study focus: National-scale grid-based hydrological models are usually run at fine spatial and temporal resolutions, but driving data are often not available at the required resolutions. Here, a recent observation-based hourly 1 km gridded precipitation dataset is applied with a 1 km hydrological model to simulate daily mean river flows. Performance is compared to use of equally-disaggregated and profile-disaggregated daily data, for a large number of catchments. Hourly and daily precipitation from a high-resolution convection-permitting climate model (CPM) are then used to drive the hydrological model for baseline (1980–2000) and future (2060–2080) periods, to investigate differences in potential peak flow changes. •New hydrological insights: On average, use of observation-based hourly data provides a clear improvement over equally-disaggregated daily data for high flows and peak flow bias, a small improvement for average flows and mean flow bias, but little difference for low flows. Performance in faster-responding catchments typically improves more; performance in some catchments degrades. Use of profile-disaggregated daily data provides the small mean flow bias improvement and some peak flow bias improvement, but other factors degrade. On average, future changes in peak flows from hourly CPM precipitation are only slightly larger than from equally-disaggregated daily data. Future work will look at simulation of hourly mean flows

Advances in precision medicine: tailoring individualised therapies

The traditional bench-to-bedside pipeline involves using model systems and patient samples to provide insights into pathways deregulated in cancer. This discovery reveals new biomarkers and therapeutic targets, ultimately stratifying patients and informing cohort-based treatment options. Precision medicine (molecular profiling of individual tumors combined with established clinical-pathological parameters) reveals, in real-time, individual patient's diagnostic and prognostic risk profile, informing tailored and tumor-specific treatment plans. Here we discuss advances in precision medicine presented at the Irish Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting, highlighting examples where personalized medicine approaches have led to precision discovery in individual tumors, informing customized treatment programs

Monte-Carlo generator for e+e- annihilation into lepton and hadron pairs with precise radiative corrections

Recently, various cross sections of e+e- annihilation into hadrons were accurately measured in the energy range from 0.37 to 1.39 GeV with the CMD-2 detector at the VEPP-2M collider. In the pi+pi- channel a systematic uncertainty of 0.6% has been achieved. A Monte-Carlo Generator Photon Jets (MCGPJ) was developed to simulate events of the Bhabha scattering as well as production of two charged pions, kaons and muons. Based on the formalism of Structure Functions, the leading logarithmic contributions related to the emission of photon jets in the collinear region are incorporated into the MC generator. Radiative corrections (RC) in the first order of alpha are accounted for exactly. The theoretical precision of the cross sections with RC is estimated to be better than 0.2%. Numerous tests of the program as well as comparison with other MC generators and CMD-2 experimental data are presented.Comment: LaTeX, 23 pages with 18 figure

High frequency magnetic permeability of nanocomposite film

The high frequency magnetic permeability of nanocomposite film consisting of the single-domain spherical ferromagnetic particles in the dielectric matrix is studied. The permeability is assumed to be determined by rotation of the ferromagnetic inclusion magnetic moments around equilibrium direction in AC magnetic field. The composite is modeled by a cubic array of ferromagnetic particles. The magnetic permeability tensor is calculated by solving the Landau-Lifshits-Gilbert equation accounting for the dipole interaction of magnetic particles. The permeability tensor components are found as functions of the frequency, temperature, ferromagnetic inclusions density and magnetic anisotropy. The obtained results show that nanocomposite films could have rather high value of magnetic permeability in the microwave range