Fashion and passion: marketing sex to women

Against a backdrop of a ‘pornographication’ of mainstream media and the emergence of a more heavily sexualized culture, women are increasingly targeted as sexual consumers. In the UK, the success of TV shows like Sex and the City and the ‘fashion ‘n’ passion’ of sex emporia like Ann Summers suggests that late twentieth century discourses which foregrounded female pleasure have crystallised in a new form of sexual address to women. This article examines how sex products are being marketed for female consumers, focussing on the websites of sex businesses such as Myla, Babes n Horny, Beecourse, tabooboo and Ann Summers. It asks how a variety of existing discourses – of fashion, consumerism, bodily pleasure and sexuality - are drawn on in the construction of this new market, how they negotiate the dangers and pleasures of sexuality for women, and what they show about the construction of ‘new’ female sexualities.</p

A field-based comparison of ammonia emissions from six Irish soil types following urea fertiliser application

peer-reviewedAmmonia (NH3) emissions from a range of soil types have been found to differ under laboratory conditions. However, there is lack of studies comparing NH3 emissions from different soil types under field conditions. The objective was to compare NH3 emissions from six different soil types under similar environmental conditions in the field following urea fertiliser application. The study was conducted on a lysimeter unit and NH3 emissions were measured, using wind tunnels, from six different soil types with varying soil characteristics following urea fertiliser application (80 kg N/ha). On average, 17.6% (% total N applied) was volatilised, and there was no significant difference in NH3 emissions across all soil types. Soil variables, including pH, cation exchange capacity and volumetric moisture, were not able to account for the variation in emissions. Further field studies are required to improve the urea-NH3 emission factor used for Ireland’s NH3 inventory

Editorial: RAMIRAN 2017: Sustainable Utilisation of Manures and Residue Resources in Agriculture

peer-reviewedThe recycling of organic residues deriving from on-farm (e.g., livestock manure) or off-farm (e.g., sewage sludge, industrial by-products) is a central part of the circular economy toward developing more sustainable food production systems (e.g., EC, 2014). However, the safe, effective, and efficient use of organic “waste” streams as resources for nutrient provision and soil improvement in agricultural systems require several challenges to be addressed, summarized by Bernal (2017) as (i) to improve nutrient availability and soil cycling; (ii) to develop technologies for nutrient re-use; (iii) to reduce contaminants and improve food safety; (iv) to mitigate environmental emissions; and (v) to enhance soil health and function. Addressing these challenges needs multidisciplinary research within a whole systems context

The ALFAM2 database on ammonia emission from field-applied manure: Description and illustrative analysis

peer-reviewedAmmonia (NH3) emission from animal manure contributes to air pollution and ecosystem degradation, and the loss of reactive nitrogen (N) from agricultural systems. Estimates of NH3 emission are necessary for national inventories and nutrient management, and NH3 emission from field-applied manure has been measured in many studies over the past few decades. In this work, we facilitate the use of these data by collecting and organizing them in the ALFAM2 database. In this paper we describe the development of the database and summarise its contents, quantify effects of application methods and other variables on emission using a data subset, and discuss challenges for data analysis and model development. The database contains measurements of emission, manure and soil properties, weather, application technique, and other variables for 1895 plots from 22 research institutes in 12 countries. Data on five manure types (cattle, pig, mink, poultry, mixed, as well as sludge and “other”) applied to three types of crops (grass, small grains, maize, as well as stubble and bare soil) are included. Application methods represented in the database include broadcast, trailing hose, trailing shoe (narrow band application), and open slot injection. Cattle manure application to grassland was the most common combination, and analysis of this subset (with dry matter (DM) limited to <15%) was carried out using mixed- and fixed-effects models in order to quantify effects of management and environment on ammonia emission, and to highlight challenges for use of the database. Measured emission in this subset ranged from <1% to 130% of applied ammonia after 48 h. Results showed clear, albeit variable, reductions in NH3 emission due to trailing hose, trailing shoe, and open slot injection of slurry compared to broadcast application. There was evidence of positive effects of air temperature and wind speed on NH3 emission, and limited evidence of effects of slurry DM. However, random-effects coefficients for differences among research institutes were among the largest model coefficients, and showed a deviation from the mean response by more than 100% in some cases. The source of these institute differences could not be determined with certainty, but there is some evidence that they are related to differences in soils, or differences in application or measurement methods. The ALFAM2 database should be useful for development and evaluation of both emission factors and emission models, but users need to recognize the limitations caused by confounding variables, imbalance in the dataset, and dependence among observations from the same institute. Variation among measurements and in reported variables highlights the importance of international agreement on how NH3 emission should be measured, along with necessary types of supporting data and standard protocols for their measurement. Both are needed in order to produce more accurate and useful ammonia emission measurements. Expansion of the ALFAM2 database will continue, and readers are invited to contact the corresponding author for information on data submission. The latest version of the database is available at http://www.alfam.dk

Biological N? fixation and N loss as N?O and N? in a white clover-based system of dairy production

THESIS 10524Pasture-based livestock production systems have a relatively large requirement for nitrogen (N) input compared to other food production systems. These inputs may consist of organic N, mineral N or biologically-fixed N. Of all N that enters these systems, only a small proportion (15-40%) is converted to saleable agricultural products. The remaining N (surplus N) is largely unaccounted for and can be either lost from the system through a range of pathways including gaseous N losses to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N2O), ammonia (NH3), and dinitrogen (N2), N losses to groundwater or N may be immobilised in soil organic matter, all of which have differing environmental consequences

Performance and receiver structures for OFDM on Rayleigh fading channels

This thesis is a study of performance and receiver structures for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) on land mobile radio channels characterized by flat or frequency-selective Rayleigh fading. The type of OFDM considered is a parallel modulation scheme in which 'N data symbols are assembled and used to simultaneously modulate N frequency-orthogonal tones, forming the OFDM symbol or block. Relative to a conventional serial modulation scheme of comparable bandwidth, OFDM has an extended signaling interval which allows for channel averaging in fading conditions. However, the channel variation over the duration of an OFDM block impairs the orthogonality of the modulated tones, causing intersymbol interference. A new matched filter bound is derived which does not require that the channel remain constant over the signaling interval, and has Doppler frequency as a parameter. Pulse shape, diversity order, and interray correlation may also be varied. The matched filter bound is used to establish analytic performance limits on the probability of bit error for any receiver of uncoded OFDM on flat or frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. In contrast to the AWGN channel, the optimal pulse shape used in the receive correlator is time-varying and the transmitter pulse shape affects the probability of error. Using the Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation (MLSE) criterion, an optimal receiver for OFDM on flat fading channels is derived. This turns out to require a constraint length L = N — 1, which is generally infeasible due to complexity constraints. However for BPSK OFDM a suboptimal truncated version of the MLSE receiver is able to approach the MFB to within 1 dB for a wide range of Doppler rates. For QPSK OFDM simple truncated MLSE is found to be impractical due to the required constraint length, which is greater than for BPSK OFDM. The Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) criterion is used to derive optimal linear and nonlinear decision feedback equalizing receivers for OFDM on flat fading channels. A continuous-time analysis is used to show that the optimal linear MMSE receiver requires a sampling rate in excess of N samples per OFDM block, and that the optimal weighting function applied to the received signal to mitigate channel fading is tone-dependent. Approximations are considered to remove the tone-dependency, yielding a result consistent with previous work. An MMSE-based criterion is proposed and used to derive a method for modifying the channel impulse response to an optimal desired impulse response having a specified constraint length. This limits error propagation with decision feedback and reduces the complexity of sequence estimation, making the latter feasible for QPSK OFDM as well as BPSK OFDM. The resulting nonlinear receiver structures have probability of error performances which improve on previously published results for the same modulation and channel. Finally optimal and suboptimal receivers for OFDM on frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels based on MLSE and MMSE criteria are derived. The additional complexities of receiver design arising from the presence of delay spread are studied analytically and evaluated by simulation. It is shown that for the MLSE receiver, long blocklength OFDM is relatively insensitive to the distribution of signal strengths between the rays of the two-ray frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel model.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat

Statistical Properties of Velocity and Temperature in Isothermal and Nonisothermal Turbulent Pipe Flow

322 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1970.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

The Theoretical Development of a New High Speed

Advancements in parallel and cluster computing have made many complex Monte Carlo simulations possible in the past several years. Unfortunately, cluster computers are large, expensive, and still not fast enough to make the Monte Carlo technique useful for calculations requiring a near real-time evaluation period. For Monte Carlo simulations, a small computational unit called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is capable of bringing the power of a large cluster computer into any personal computer (PC). Because an FPGA is capable of executing Monte Carlo simulations with a high degree of parallelism, a simulation run on a large FPGA can be executed at a much higher rate than an equivalent simulation on a modern single-processor desktop PC. In this thesis, a simple radiation transport problem involving moderate energy photons incident on a three-dimensional target is discussed. By comparing the theoretical evaluation speed of this transport problem on a large FPGA to the evaluation speed of the same transport problem using standard computing techniques, it is shown that it is possible to accelerate Monte Carlo computations significantly using FPGAs. In fact, we have found that our simple photon transport test case can be evaluated in exces