Narrative Policy Analysis

This review explores the book All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagons View on Climate Change, written by Micheal Klare, highlighting how the US national security offices are viewing and responding to the ominous looming threats posed by climate change

Robust particle outline extraction and its application to digital on-line holography

Peer reviewedPostprin

Algae Living in Salamanders, Friend or Foe?

Roughly speaking, our bodies use energy from the sun, but we can\u27t use sunlight directly. Instead, plants and algae collect sunlight and store it as chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis. We can access that fuel directly when we eat plants, or indirectly when we eat other animals that eat plants. However, in some invertebrate animals (those without a backbone) the relationships to algae are more intimate. Tiny single-celled algal symbionts can actually live inside the cells of living corals and small animals like hydra that live in water. The algae live in a safe environment inside animal cells and are provided with building block materials to function. They use sunlight to convert the building block materials into larger molecules to store energy and build cellular structures. At the same time some of that stored solar energy is directly transferred to the host animal, allowing it to live in otherwise nutrient poor environments. Thus the algae and their hosts depend on one another to live and thrive. These mutually beneficial relationships are called photosymbioses. [excerpt

A control problem for Burgers' equation with bounded input/output

A stabilization problem for Burgers' equation is considered. Using linearization, various controllers are constructed which minimize certain weighted energy functionals. These controllers produce the desired degree of stability for the closed-loop nonlinear system. A numerical scheme for computing the feedback gain functional is developed and several numerical experiments are performed to show the theoretical results

On non-convergence of adjoint semigroups for control systems with delays

It is shown that the adjoints of a spline based approximation scheme for delay equations do not converge strongly

Effect of rotation rate on the forces of a rotating cylinder: Simulation and control

In this paper we present numerical solutions to several optimal control problems for an unsteady viscous flow. The main thrust of this work is devoted to simulation and control of an unsteady flow generated by a circular cylinder undergoing rotary motion. By treating the rotation rate as a control variable, we can formulate two optimal control problems and use a central difference/pseudospectral transform method to numerically compute the optimal control rates. Several types of rotations are considered as potential controls, and we show that a proper synchronization of forcing frequency with the natural vortex shedding frequency can greatly influence the flow. The results here indicate that using moving boundary controls for such systems may provide a feasible mechanism for flow control

Accelerated Neural Networks on OpenCL Devices Using SYCL-DNN

Over the past few years machine learning has seen a renewed explosion of interest, following a number of studies showing the effectiveness of neural networks in a range of tasks which had previously been considered incredibly hard. Neural networks' effectiveness in the fields of image recognition and natural language processing stems primarily from the vast amounts of data available to companies and researchers, coupled with the huge amounts of compute power available in modern accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. There are a number of approaches available to developers for utilizing GPGPU technologies such as SYCL, OpenCL and CUDA, however many applications require the same low level mathematical routines. Libraries dedicated to accelerating these common routines allow developers to easily make full use of the available hardware without requiring low level knowledge of the hardware themselves, however such libraries are often provided by hardware manufacturers for specific hardware such as cuDNN for Nvidia hardware or MIOpen for AMD hardware. SYCL-DNN is a new open-source library dedicated to providing accelerated routines for neural network operations which are hardware and vendor agnostic. Built on top of the SYCL open standard and written entirely in standard C++, SYCL-DNN allows a user to easily accelerate neural network code for a wide range of hardware using a modern C++ interface. The library is tested on AMD's OpenCL for GPU, Intel's OpenCL for CPU and GPU, ARM's OpenCL for Mali GPUs as well as ComputeAorta's OpenCL for R-Car CV engine and host CPU. In this talk we will present performance figures for SYCL-DNN on this range of hardware, and discuss how high performance was achieved on such a varied set of accelerators with such different hardware features.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. In International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL '19), May 13-15, 2019, Bosto

Qualitative management accounting research in QRAM: some reflections

"This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited."Purpose: This paper offers a brief personal reflection upon, and celebrates, the 10th anniversary of Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management (QRAM). More specifically, I highlight the journal’s contributions towards advancing qualitative management accounting research over the last decade, and I suggest possible future avenues. Design/Methodology/Approach: This is a relatively short paper, and mainly constitutes a review of qualitative management accounting articles published in the first ten years of QRAM’s publishing life, plus some personal reflection and suggestions for future directions. Findings: I celebrate the impressive achievements of QRAM’s founding editors, and I am encouraged to offer my personal views on how the journal might excel further in years to come. Research Implications: Although the piece is primarily personal reflection, there is hopefully some food for thought with regards to fruitful directions in tomorrow’s qualitative management accounting research. In particular, arguments are made for more undertaking of processual qualitative research and also for more targeted focus on the connections between management accounting and other relevant disciplines such as management and organisation studies. Practical Implications: The paper offers no practical implications as such, but does discuss, and in fact heeds some caution against, the apparent trend of (possibly too uncritically) seeking to tease out practical implications from qualitative management accounting research. Social Implications: Again, while this paper offers no specific discussion on its social implications, I would add that any qualitative management accounting research paper inherently carries at least some implications for society; management accounting and the wider society are continually intertwined through time. Originality/Value: I would not claim that there is much that is original in this short piece – most of what is offered simply gathers others’ past contributions. But hopefully there will be some value in the ideas offered with regards to the exciting future ahead for qualitative management accounting research in QRAM

Precision placement of fertiliser for optimising the early nutrition of vegetable crops : a review of the implications for the yield and quality of crops, and their nutrient use efficiency

The research outlined in this paper highlights the importance of the early nutrition of vegetable crops, and its long-term effects on their subsequent growth and development. Results are also presented to demonstrate how the nutrient supply during the establishment stages of young seedlings and transplants can be enhanced by targeting fertiliser to a zone close to their developing roots. Three different precision fertiliser placement techniques are compared for this purpose: starter, band or side-injected fertiliser. The use of each of these methods consistently produced the same (or greater) yields at lower application rates than those from conventional broadcast applications, increasing the apparent recovery of N, P and K, and the overall efficiency of nutrient use, while reducing the levels of residual nutrients in the soil. Starter fertilisers also advanced the maturity of some crops, and enhanced produce quality by increasing the proportions of the larger and/or more desirable marketable grades. The benefits of the different placement techniques are illustrated with selected examples from research at Warwick HRI using different vegetable crops, including lettuce, onion and carrot