A cost-benefit analysis of pathways to work for new and repeat incapacity benefits claimants

This latest research forms part of a comprehensive independent evaluation of Pathways to Work. The report is based on a cost-benefit analysis conducted by a consortium of researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Policy Studies Institute. It examines whether the financial benefits from Pathways are larger or smaller than its costs and the generalisability of some of the quantitative findings. The estimates of costs and benefits relate to new and repeat incapacity benefits claimants in the seven original Jobcentre Plus districts. The overall findings provide a favourable impression of the financial benefits of the Pathways to Work for new and repeat incapacity benefits claimants, for the Exchequer and hence, for society as a whole

A search for evidence of large body Earth impacts associated with biological crisis zones in the fossil record

The natural history of the Earth, how the present plant and animal species developed, how others completely died out, etc., was studied. The rock strata sampled and studied were at the time of deposition at sea bottom. It was found that, exactly at the stratigraphic level corresponding to the extinction, a thin clay layer was greatly enriched in the the rare element iridium. It was hypothesized that the excess irridium at the boundary came from a large steroid like object that hit the earth, and that the impact of this object threw up a dust cloud dense enough and long lasting enough to bring about the extinction of a wide variety of plants and animals, producing the unique break in in the fossil record, the cretaceous-tertiary boundary. The same iridium and platinum metals enrichement are found in a thin clay layer that corresponds with the boundary as difined by sudden radical changes in plant populations. The irridium enrichement is confirmed at other fresh water origin rites in the Raton Basin

Investigation of sputtering effects on the moon's surface Eleventh quarterly status report, 25 Oct. 1965 - 24 Jan. 1966

Implications of Lunar 9 moon probe, sputtering yield reduction due to surface roughness, water formation by solar wind bombardment, photometric function of moon, and chemical sputterin

Single-qubit rotations in two-dimensional optical lattices with multiqubit addressing

Published versio

Comparative study of design: application to Engineering Design

A recent exploratory study examines design processes across domains and compares them. This is achieved through a series of interdisciplinary, participative workshops. A systematic framework is used to collect data from expert witnesses who are practising designers across domains from engineering through architecture to product design and fashion, including film production, pharmaceutical drugs, food, packaging, graphics and multimedia and software. Similarities and differences across domains are described which indicate the types of comparative analysis we have been able to do from our data. The paper goes further and speculates on possible lessons for selected areas of engineering design which can be drawn from comparison with processes in other domains. As such this comparative design study offers the potential for improving engineering design processes. More generally it is a first step in creating a discipline of comparative design which aims to provide a new rich picture of design processes

Randomised field trial to evaluate serological response after foot-and-mouth disease vaccination in Turkey

AbstractDespite years of biannual mass vaccination of cattle, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) remains uncontrolled in Anatolian Turkey. To evaluate protection after mass vaccination we measured post-vaccination antibodies in a cohort of cattle (serotypes O, A and Asia-1). To obtain results reflecting typical field protection, participants were randomly sampled from across Central and Western Turkey after routine vaccination. Giving two-doses one month apart is recommended when cattle are first vaccinated against FMD. However, due to cost and logistics, this is not routinely performed in Turkey, and elsewhere. Nested within the cohort, we conducted a randomised trial comparing post-vaccination antibodies after a single-dose versus a two-dose primary vaccination course.Four to five months after vaccination, only a third of single-vaccinated cattle had antibody levels above a threshold associated with protection. A third never reached this threshold, even at peak response one month after vaccination. It was not until animals had received three vaccine doses in their lifetime, vaccinating every six months, that most (64% to 86% depending on serotype) maintained antibody levels above this threshold. By this time cattle would be >20 months old with almost half the population below this age. Consequently, many vaccinated animals will be unprotected for much of the year. Compared to a single-dose, a primary vaccination course of two-doses greatly improved the level and duration of immunity. We concluded that the FMD vaccination programme in Anatolian Turkey did not produce the high levels of immunity required. Higher potency vaccines are now used throughout Turkey, with a two-dose primary course in certain areas.Monitoring post-vaccination serology is an important component of evaluation for FMD vaccination programmes. However, consideration must be given to which antigens are present in the test, the vaccine and the field virus. Differences between these antigens affect the relationship between antibody titre and protection

Crowdsourcing Formulaic Phrases: towards a new type of spoken corpus

Corpora have revolutionised the way we describe and analyse language in use. The sheer scale of collections of texts, along with the appropriate software for structuring and analysing this data, has led to a fuller understanding of the characteristics of language use in context. However, the development of corpora has been unbalanced. The assembly of collections of written texts is relatively straightforward, and as a result, the field has a number of very large corpora which focus on mainly written texts, although often with some spoken elements included, e.g. the COCA (520m words), GloWbE (1.9b), and the enTenTen (19b). In addition, a number of corpora now include samples of language used in social media and other web contexts alongside more traditional written and (transcribed) spoken language samples, e.g. the Open American National Corpus (planned corpus size 100m words, mirroring the British National Corpus). Conversely, the development of spoken corpora has lagged behind, mainly due to the time-consuming nature of recording and transcribing spoken content. Most of the spoken corpora that exist consist of material that is easily gathered by automated collection software, such as radio talk show and television news transcripts and other entertainment programming (e.g. the spoken elements of COCA). The nature of this spoken discourse is described as unscripted, however, it is certainly constrained, e.g. talk show radio has certain expectations about how the host will moderate the discussion. While the scripted/constrained oral content in these spoken corpora has proved informative in terns of the nature of spoken discourse (see Adolphs and Carter, 2013; Raso and Mello, 2014; Aijmer, 2002 and Carter and McCarthy, 1999 for notable studies), it is no substitute for spontaneous, unscripted oral discourse. Furthermore, even the automated collection of scripted/constrained spoken discourse has not yet enabled the development of large spoken corpora of a size comparable to the largest written corpora (e.g. the spoken component of the 100m British National Corpus is only 10m words with a further 10m words added in the new spoken BNC2014). The 10m word subcorpus of the BNC contains 4m words of spontaneous speech, and is controlled for a number of sociolinguistic and contextual variables. There are a number of smaller spoken corpora available, e.g. the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) which at just under 2m words is both modest in size and quite specialised in content. This trend is reflected in other corpora of spoken discourse. Spontaneous spoken discourse forms a large part of everyday language use, and the development of larger and more representative corpora of spontaneous oral language is therefore desirable to inform linguistic description. The main constraint to this ambition has always been the time-consuming nature and financial cost related to the compilation of such corpora. Spoken corpora provide a unique resource for the exploration of how people interact in real-life communicative contexts. Depending on how spoken corpora are annotated (as discussed below), they present opportunities for examining patterns in, for example, spoken lexis and grammar, pragmatics, dialect and language variation. Spoken corpora are now used in a variety of different fields from translation to reference and grammar works, to studies of language change. The need for spontaneous unscripted corpora seems uncontroversial, however, compiling such corpora in the traditional way remains a formidable task. Advances have been made in other areas utilizing the power of people volunteering information about what they think and do. This approach is often referred to as crowdsourcing, and it holds the promise to both overcome some of the difficulties outlined above, and to add useful aspects to corpus compilation which traditional methods cannot offer.This paper thus explores a new approach to collecting samples of naturally occurring spoken language samples, which may allow researchers to take advantage of the burgeoning area of information crowdsourcing. Instead of relying on the typical recording and transcribing of spoken discourse, crowdsourcing may allow the collection of real-time data ‘in the wild’ by having participants report the language they hear around them. Specifically, we aim to investigate the level of precision and recall of the ‘crowd’ when it comes to reporting language they have heard in real certain contexts, alongside the use of a crowdsourcing toolkit to facilitate this task. This method of ‘reporting’ usage does come with its own issues of course, many of which have been highlighted in the literature on Discourse Completion Tasks (Schauer and Adolphs, 2006), and can merely be regarded as a proxy for usage. Investigating user memory in this context can therefore only be regarded as a first step in assessing the overall viability of the proposed approach to collecting language samples. As a focusing device for selection of reported language samples, we draw on the use of formulaic phrases, an area that have received considerable attention from different areas in applied linguistics

The adsorption structure of furan on Pd(1 1 1)

The structure of molecular furan, C4H4O, on Pd(1 1 1) has been investigated by O K-edge near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) and C 1s scanned-energy mode photoelectron diffraction (PhD). NEXAFS shows the molecule to be adsorbed with the molecular plane close to parallel to the surface, a conclusion confirmed by the PhD analysis. Chemical-state specific C 1s PhD data were obtained for the two inequivalent C atoms in the furan, the α-C atoms adjacent to the O atom, and the β-C atoms bonded only to C atoms, but only the PhD modulations for the α-C emitters were of sufficiently large amplitude for detailed evaluation using multiple scattering calculations. This analysis shows the α-C atoms to be located approximately 0.6 Å off-atop surface Pd atoms with an associated C–Pd bondlength of 2.13 ± 0.03 Å. Two alternative local geometries consistent with the data place the O atom in off-atop or near-hollow locations, and for each of these local structures there are two equally-possible registries relative to the fcc and hcp hollow sites. The results are in good agreement with earlier density functional theory calculations which indicate that the fcc and hcp registries are equally probable, but the PhD results fail to distinguish the two distinct local bonding geometries

Flexible delivery of Er:YAG radiation at 2.94 µm with negative curvature silica glass fibers:a new solution for minimally invasive surgical procedures

We present the delivery of high energy microsecond pulses through a hollow-core negative-curvature fiber at 2.94 µm. The energy densities delivered far exceed those required for biological tissue manipulation and are of the order of 2300 J/cm(2). Tissue ablation was demonstrated on hard and soft tissue in dry and aqueous conditions with no detrimental effects to the fiber or catastrophic damage to the end facets. The energy is guided in a well confined single mode allowing for a small and controllable focused spot delivered flexibly to the point of operation. Hence, a mechanically and chemically robust alternative to the existing Er:YAG delivery systems is proposed which paves the way for new routes for minimally invasive surgical laser procedures