Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers

Green's Dyadic Approach of the Self-Stress on a Dielectric-Diamagnetic Cylinder with Non-Uniform Speed of Light

We present a Green's dyadic formulation to calculate the Casimir energy for a dielectric-diamagnetic cylinder with the speed of light differing on the inside and outside. Although the result is in general divergent, special cases are meaningful. It is pointed out how the self-stress on a purely dielectric cylinder vanishes through second order in the deviation of the permittivity from its vacuum value, in agreement with the result calculated from the sum of van der Waals forces.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to proceedings of QFEXT0

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Society has become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on employing an inquiry-based approach to using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills

Surface Divergences and Boundary Energies in the Casimir Effect

Although Casimir, or quantum vacuum, forces between distinct bodies, or self-stresses of individual bodies, have been calculated by a variety of different methods since 1948, they have always been plagued by divergences. Some of these divergences are associated with the volume, and so may be more or less unambiguously removed, while other divergences are associated with the surface. The interpretation of these has been quite controversial. Particularly mysterious is the contradiction between finite total self-energies and surface divergences in the local energy density. In this paper we clarify the role of surface divergences.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, submitted to proceedings of QFEXT0

Casimir self-energy of a \delta-\delta' sphere

We extend previous work on the vacuum energy of a massless scalar field in the presence of singular potentials. We consider a single sphere denoted by the so-called "delta-delta prime" interaction. Contrary to the Dirac delta potential, we find a nontrivial one-parameter family of potentials such that the regularization procedure gives an unambiguous result for the Casimir self-energy. The procedure employed is based on the zeta function regularization and the cancellation of the heat kernel coefficient a_2. The results obtained are in agreement with particular cases, such as the Dirac delta or Robin and Dirichlet boundary conditions

Multiple Scattering: Dispersion, Temperature Dependence, and Annular Pistons

We review various applications of the multiple scattering approach to the calculation of Casimir forces between separate bodies, including dispersion, wedge geometries, annular pistons, and temperature dependence. Exact results are obtained in many cases.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, contributed to the Festschrift for Emilio Elizald

Evaluation of swirl effect on the Global Energy Balance of a HSDI Diesel engine

[EN] In the last years, a growing interest about increasing engine efficiency has led to the development of new engine technologies. Since air motion in the chamber is a key issue in internal combustion engines to improve the air-fuel mixing process and achieve faster burning rates, modern Diesel engines are designed to generate gas vorticity (swirl) that lead to enhanced turbulence in the combustion chamber. However, the use of swirl has a direct effect on fuel consumption due to the changes in the in-cylinder processes, affecting indicated efficiency, and also on the air management. An analysis, based on the engine Global Energy Balance (GEB), is presented to thoroughly assess the behavior of a high speed direct injection Diesel engine under variable swirl levels at different operating points. The tests have been performed keeping constant both the conditions at intake valve closing and combustion phasing, thus minimizing the variability due to in-cylinder conditions and the combustion process. The analysis includes a combination of theoretical (0D models) and experimental tools (heat rejection and wall temperature measurement) used to ensure control of in-cylinder conditions and to provide detailed explanation of the different phenomena affecting engine efficiency when swirl ratio is modified. Based on these tools, impact of swirl on the engine GEB is analyzed in detail paying special attention to engine efficiency and heat transfer in the chamber. Results show that increasing swirl has two main effects regarding the gross indicated efficiency (eta(i)): on one hand chamber heat rejection increases and therefore eta(i) diminishes about -0.5% at low load and 0.4% at high load; on the other hand combustion development is affected and thus a eta(i) improvement higher to 1.5% is achieved at low load and speed. The combination of these effects leads to a gross indicated efficiency increase higher to 1% at an optimum swirl ratio that diminishes when engine speed increases. In addition, pumping losses effect dominates brake efficiency behavior, which always diminishes (from 0.9% to 1.4%) when swirl increases. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The support of GM Global R&D and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (TRA2013-41348-R) is greatly acknowledged.Benajes, J.; Olmeda, P.; Martín, J.; Blanco-Cavero, D.; Warey, A. (2017). Evaluation of swirl effect on the Global Energy Balance of a HSDI Diesel engine. Energy. 122:168-181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2017.01.082S16818112

Proposal of Real-Time Echocardiogram Transmission Based on Visualization Modes with WiMAX Access

This study presents a new approach to improve the echocardiogram transmissions over WiMAX networks. Using a compression method based on visualization modes and a reliable method that adapts to the channel conditions, overall performance results are improved compared to classical approaches. The echocardiogram transmission using a compression method based on visualization modes requires lower bandwidth than without considering visualization modes. Furthermore, if the proposed reliability method is also used, the echocardiogram is more often visualized with adequate clinical quality than compressing the echocardiogram without distinguishing the visualization modes and without using a reliability method for the available dataset. The reduction in the bandwidth ranges from 29 kbps to 166 kbps for the simulated scenarios. 1