Recreation, Tourism, and Rural Well-Being

The promotion of recreation and tourism has been both praised and criticized as a rural development strategy. This study uses regression analysis to assess the effect of recreation and tourism development on socioeconomic conditions in rural recreation counties. The findings imply that recreation and tourism development contributes to rural well-being, increasing local employment, wage levels, and income, reducing poverty, and improving education and health. But recreation and tourism development is not without drawbacks, including higher housing costs. Local effects also vary significantly, depending on the type of recreation area.recreation, tourism, recreation counties, rural development, economic indicators, social indicators, rural development policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Promoting teacher–learner autonomy through and beyond initial language teacher education

With the growing international market for pre-experience MA in ELT/TESOL programmes, a key curriculum design issue is how to help students develop as learners of teaching through and beyond their formal academic studies. We report here on our attempts at the University of Warwick to address this issue, and consider wider implications for research and practice in initial language teacher education. At the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, we run a suite of MA programmes for English language teaching professionals from around the world. Most of these courses are for students with prior teaching experience, but our MA in English Language Studies and Methods (ELSM) programme is designed for students with less than two years’ experience and, in fact, the majority enrol straight after completing their undergraduate studies in their home countries

Vorticity-transport and unstructured RANS investigation of rotor-fuselage interactions

The prediction capabilities of unstructured primitive-variable and vorticity-transport-based Navier-Stokes solvers have been compared for rotorcraft-fuselage interaction. Their accuracies have been assessed using the NASA Langley ROBIN series of experiments. Correlation of steady pressure on the isolated fuselage delineates the differences between the viscous and inviscid solvers. The influence of the individual blade passage, model supports, and viscous effects on the unsteady pressure loading has been studied. Smoke visualization from the ROBIN experiment has been used to determine the ability of the codes to predict the wake geometry. The two computational methods are observed to provide similar results within the context of their physical assumptions and simplifications in the test configuration

A New Approach to Black Hole Microstates

If one encodes the gravitational degrees of freedom in an orthonormal frame field there is a very natural first order action one can write down (which in four dimensions is known as the Goldberg action). In this essay we will show that this action contains a boundary action for certain microscopic degrees of freedom living at the horizon of a black hole, and argue that these degrees of freedom hold great promise for explaining the microstates responsible for black hole entropy, in any number of spacetime dimensions. This approach faces many interesting challenges, both technical and conceptual.Comment: 6 pages, 0 figures, LaTeX; submitted to Mod. Phys. Lett. A.; this essay received "honorable mention" from the Gravity Research Foundation, 199

The application of measurement science to environmental analytical chemistry for air quality studies

Preface: Despite improvements in air quality over recent decades, the air we breathe still contains a variety of pollutants at levels that are harmful to human health and environmental sustainability. In particular, air pollution remains a serious problem in highly industrialised and developing countries. In developed countries pollutants such as particulates with their varying chemical compositions, and mercury vapour have emerged as more recent threats to air quality. As a result of these threats a number of international protocols, national and continental legislations is in place to limit the emissions of pollutants from various processes and their eventual concentration in ambient air. Many countries have therefore established air quality monitoring networks to measure the exposure of their populations to harmful substances in air and to assess compliance with relevant legislation and the effectiveness of abatement policies. Furthermore as the global nature and long range transport of pollutants such as mercury vapour is increasingly recognised, the case for international cooperation becomes even more pressing. In this context the requirement for a robust measurement science infrastructure becomes even more important in order to: Ensure measurement methods are appropriate and properly validated; Ensure measurement results are properly traceable to the SI system of units; Ensure the quality of the very large data sets produced by air quality studies. In particular it is clear that measurement science has a role to play in establishing SI traceability of measurement values in order to ensure that air quality data are: Comparable across measurement locations; Stable with reference to a fixed point, so trends over time may be properly gauged; Coherent, so that results made with different measurement methods are comparable. These requirements are not currently in place universally, and are especially lacking for emerging pollutants and such measurands as the chemical composition of particles and for mercury vapour. Therefore relevant stakeholders, often through government (UK Departments such as BIS and Defra) but also via other NGOs, UK Research Councils and industry, have funded work to address these deficiencies and put in place a measurement research infrastructure to underpin these scientific endeavours. The output of such research undertaken by the candidate forms the basis of this DSc submission. Following the award of BSc and PhD degrees from Imperial College the candidate, Dr Richard J. C. Brown, joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington in 2000 and has since worked on a variety of analytical chemistry problems such as pH metrology, electroanalytical chemistry, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy, low reflectance surfaces (resulting in the much-publicised ‘NPL Super Black’) and complex data analysis techniques – making significant contributions to each. However his most important and substantial contributions over the last decade have focussed on the application of measurement science principles to environmental analytical chemistry for air quality studies. The candidate has published over 110 peer-reviewed papers during this period (not including refereed conference proceedings). He is NPL’s most prolific author of peer-reviewed papers over the last decade. He has also published over 55 non-peer reviewed works (including conference proceedings, NPL reports, and European and International Page 6 of 20 documentary standards) and has been a co-author on 8 European standards for air quality measurement which are now adopted across the European Union. This submission concentrates on the 21 most significant peer-reviewed publications over this period of time relating to the overarching theme of the application of measurement science to environmental analytical chemistry for air quality studies. The candidate’s role in all cases has been to lead the scientific research and the publication of results, lead authoring the majority of the papers. All the papers presented in this portfolio have been led and published by the candidate’s group either exclusively or with minor contributions from collaborators. The experimentally intensive nature of the work means that in most cases this has been delivered by NPL colleagues under the candidate’s direction and supervision. External contributions are highlighted in the relevant text. The candidate’s work in this area has already received substantial recognition via the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 34th SAC Silver Medal and the 2008 CITAC (Cooperation on International Traceability in Analytical Chemistry) award for the “Most Important Paper on Metrology in Chemistry”. Furthermore, the recent International Benchmarking of NPL’s science (similar to the RAE for universities) overseen by the Royal Society / Royal Academy of Engineering Panel which ensures the quality of NPL’s output, rated Dr Brown’s work as “Internationally Leading” (the top category) for both “Science Quality” and “Impact”. The candidate has also won numerous internal NPL awards for the quality of his work – a considerable achievement when this work is being compared across the whole of NPL’s output, most of which is physics-based. The 21 publications forming this submission are grouped according to sub-area, of which three are considered: ‘Mercury vapour measurement in ambient air’, ‘The chemical composition of particulate matter in ambient air’, and ‘Novel measurement and data analysis techniques’. (Publications considered particularly significant are marked: , next to the publication’s title.) All of these publications are peer-reviewed, and none of these papers has been used for the purpose of obtaining any other degree. For completeness the candidate’s full peer-reviewed publications list appears in the Annex to this submission following the reprints of the papers submitted for consideration. This provides access to other publications in the environmental analytical chemistry area not offered for examination here, and additionally gives an overview of the candidate’s simultaneous contributions to other scientific fields

A Study of the Critical Uncertainty Contributions in the Analysis of PCBs in Ambient Air

The measurement of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in ambient air requires a complex, multistep sample preparation procedure prior to analysis by gas chromatography—mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Although routine analytical laboratories regularly carry out these measurements, they are often undertaken with little regard to the accurate calculation of measurement uncertainty, or appreciation of the sensitivity of the accuracy of the measurement to each step of the analysis. A measurement equation is developed for this analysis, and the contributory sources to the overall uncertainty when preparing calibration standards and other solutions by gravimetric and volumetric approaches are discussed and compared. For the example analysis presented, it is found that the uncertainty of the measurement is dominated by the repeatability of the GC-MS analysis and suggested that volumetric (as opposed to gravimetric) preparation of solutions does not adversely affect the overall uncertainty. The methodology presented in this work can also be applied to analogous methods for similar analytes, for example, those used to measure polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pesticides, dioxins, or furans in ambient air

The z < 1.2 optical luminosity function from a sample of ∼410,000 galaxies in Boötes

Using a sample of ~410,000 galaxies to a depth of IAB=24 over 8.26 deg2 in the Boötes field (~10 times larger than the z~1 luminosity function (LF) studies in the prior literature), we have accurately measured the evolving B-band LF of red galaxies at z&lt;1.2 and blue galaxies at z&lt;1.0 In addition to the large sample size, we utilize photometry that accounts for the varying angular sizes of galaxies, photometric redshifts verified with spectroscopy, and absolute magnitudes that should have very small random and systematic errors. Our results are consistent with the migration of galaxies from the blue cloud to the red sequence as they cease to form stars and with downsizing in which more massive and luminous blue galaxies cease star formation earlier than fainter less massive ones. Comparing the observed fading of red galaxies with that expected from passive evolution alone, we find that the stellar mass contained within the red galaxy population has increased by a factor of ~3.6 from z~1.1 to z~0.1 The bright end of the red galaxy LF fades with decreasing redshift, with the rate of fading increasing from ~0.2 mag per unit redshift at z = 1.0 to ~0.8 at z = 0.2. The overall decrease in luminosity implies that the stellar mass in individual highly luminous red galaxies increased by a factor of ~2.2 from z = 1.1 to z = 0.1