Results of monitoring at the British library excavation

The main phase of excavation for the basements of the British Library at St Pancras, London, was completed in 1987. The project included basements extending up to 25 m deep, through the London Clay and into the Lambeth Group. The excavations were formed using both the top-down method and open excavation with ground anchors. Existing major buildings lie within 25 m of the site and London Underground tunnels lie below and adjacent to the site. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of displacement monitoring; they are summarised in the paper and presented in more detail in online supplementary data files. The retaining walls advanced towards the site by up to about 32 mm and the clays expanded rapidly on unloading beneath the excavations, causing the Victoria Line tunnels to heave by up to 22 mm. The slow progress of the project provided an unusual opportunity to monitor ground and structure movements in the surroundings before site activity began. Ironically, it was found that the largest settlements of adjacent buildings were caused by the installation of equipment intended to measure the settlements. Extensive condition surveys were carried out, but no damage to adjacent structures or tunnels has been recorded. </jats:p

Structure and entrainment in the plane of symmetry of a turbulent spot

Laser-Doppler velocity measurements in water are reported for the flow in the plane of symmetry of a turbulent spot. The unsteady mean flow, defined as an ensemble average, is fitted to a conical growth law by using data at three streamwise stations to determine the virtual origin in x and t. The two-dimensional unsteady stream function is expressed as ψ=U^2_∞tg(ξ,η) in conical similarity co-ordinates ζ = x/U_∞t and η = y/U_∞t. In these co-ordinates, the equations for the unsteady particle displacements reduce to an autonomous system. This system is integrated graphically to obtain particle trajectories in invariant form. Strong entrainment is found to occur along the outer part of the rear interface and also in front of the spot near the wall. The outer part of the forward interface is passive. In terms of particle trajectories in conical co-ordinates, the main vortex in the spot appears as a stable focus with celerity 0·77U_∞. A second stable focus with celerity 0·64U_∞ also appears near the wall at the rear of the spot. Some results obtained by flow visualization with a dense, nearly opaque suspension of aluminium flakes are also reported. Photographs of the sublayer flow viewed through a glass wall show the expected longitudinal streaks. These are tentatively interpreted as longitudinal vortices caused by an instability of Taylor-Görtler type in the sublayer

Health, hygiene and biosecurity: tribal knowledge claims in the UK poultry industry

Since 1997 the world has been facing the threat of a human influenza pandemic that may be caused by an avian virus and the poultry industry around the globe has been grappling with the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1, or in more informal terms bird flu. The UK poultry industry has lived with and through this threat and its consequences since 2005. This study investigates knowledge claims about health, hygiene and biosecurity as tools to ward off the threat from this virus. It takes a semi-ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to analyse a small corpus of semi-structured interviews carried out in the wake of one of the most publicised outbreaks of H5N1 in Suffolk in 2007. It reveals that claims about what best to do to protect flocks against the risk of disease are divided along lines imposed on the one hand by the structure of the industry and on the other by more 'tribal' lines drawn by knowledge and belief systems about purity and dirt, health and hygiene

The Uses and Abuses of the Euro in the Canadian Currency Debate. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series, Vol. 3 No. 3, August 2003

(From the introduction). In the late 1990s, some prominent Canadian economists – notably Thomas Courchene, Herbert Grubel, Richard Harris, and Robert Mundell – began arguing that a North American common currency would solve the problems underlying the growing gap between U.S. and Canadian real GDP per capita.1 They succeeded in provoking a lively economic policy debate that occurred in parallel with the launch of the euro. The purpose of this paper is to examine the uses – and abuses – of European parallels by both sides in the economic policy debate that peaked in the 1999-2001 period. The body of the paper begins by providing an understanding of the European case. Hence, the second section outlines our interpretation of the major developments in the birth of the euro. The third section, the core of the paper, examines in detail the use of European parallels in the Canadian currency debate. We start by providing a brief overview of the protagonists in the debate. We then continue by arguing that the euro provided a “temporal spur” for the Canadian discussion but that it was only one among several important factors. We argue further that the proponents of a North American common currency relied very little on the European experience to support their case for the need for a common currency. Where they did use the European experience, however, was in their analysis of the institutional form that a common currency in North America might take. We argue that the opponents of a North American common currency were correct in viewing this as an abuse of the European parallel. In the concluding fourth section, we summarize our findings and argue that the most important parallel between the European and North American forces for a common currency is that both were driven primarily by politics

Economic associations among causes of species endangerment in the United States.

Associations among causes of species endangerment in the United States reflect the integration of economic sectors, supporting the theory and evidence that economic growth proceeds at the competitive exclusion of nonhuman species in the aggregate

The changing effects of social protection on poverty

This paper fits within a broader research programme concerned with the processes that link labour market precarity and social exclusion. Labour market insecurity manifests itself most directly in the form of unemployment, and other elements in the programme seek to measure the impact of precarity, and unemployment in particular, on poverty and social exclusion in the eight countries covered. One of the principal concerns of the programme is however the extent to which institutional differences across countries with respect to the labour market and social protection are a significant factor mediating the relationship between labour market precarity and social exclusion. This paper focuses on the effectiveness of cash transfers, the central element of social protection systems, in alleviating the effects of unemployment on income poverty. The structures of social protection systems vary greatly across European Union member states, and in many cases have altered significantly in recent years in response to high unemployment (see Hauser et al, 1998). Using data from the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s for six member countries, the paper compares the effectiveness of different systems in lifting or keeping the unemployed out of poverty, and how this has been affected by the way systems have responded to the challenges produced by developments in the labour market in the past decade. The specific role of social insurance-based unemployment-linked transfers versus other cash transfers is also considered, to assess the extent to which social insurance has been able to cope with changes in the labour market over the period. The data come from a variety of national large-scale household surveys. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the data and methods to be employed in measuring the impact of cash transfers on poverty risks for the unemployed. Section 3 looks at the overall risks of poverty for the unemployed before and after cash transfers, and how these changed between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. Section 4 looks at the role of social insurance-based unemployment payments versus other cash transfers. Section 5 examines the extent to which the impact of transfers varies by gender and by duration of unemployment. Section 6 highlights the key patterns identified and what these tell us about the relationship between the type of welfare regime a country operates and effectiveness in alleviating poverty among the unemployed

Continuous Performance Benchmarking Framework for ROOT

Foundational software libraries such as ROOT are under intense pressure to avoid software regression, including performance regressions. Continuous performance benchmarking, as a part of continuous integration and other code quality testing, is an industry best-practice to understand how the performance of a software product evolves over time. We present a framework, built from industry best practices and tools, to help to understand ROOT code performance and monitor the efficiency of the code for a several processor architectures. It additionally allows historical performance measurements for ROOT I/O, vectorization and parallelization sub-systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, CHEP 2018 - 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physic