The impact of the formal equality stance on institutional processes and legal compliance in Higher Education

The aim of this paper is to build on a previous paper which explored the politics and perspectives of various social actors regarding anti-discrimination legislation and equality within a higher education setting. This paper will discuss the impact of the politics and perceptions on compliance with legislative requirements as reflected through the equality processes within a case study institution. In considering this, the question which will be borne in mind is: does the tendency towards adopting the formal equality stance also impact on the case study’s equality processes and, in turn, their response to the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED)? Such an analysis could have wider implications on how equality and compliance with the law is dealt with in other Higher Education Institutions (HEI)

Teaching information skills for legal method

I have been involved with teaching information skills as part of the Law Department’s 1st year Legal Method course since 2000. These sessions have developed from a set of half hour sessions offered on a drop-in basis in 2000, to the current format of four seminars of an hour each. The four seminars deal with searching the library catalogue; searching the law databases for cases and statutes; searching for journal articles; and finding and evaluating material for law on the free internet. There are 10 seminar groups for Legal Method so each library seminar is delivered 10 times in the week. The aim of this article is to provide a snapshot of the seminars on journals from January 2009, which I hope will prove interesting to colleagues as an example of services provided by the academic services librarians

Lightning protection of full authority digital electronic systems

Modern electronic systems are vulnerable to transient and they now provide safety critical functions such as full authority digital electronic control (FADEC) units for fly by wire aircraft. Of the traditional suppression technologies available diodes have gained the wider acceptance, however, they lack the current handling capacity to meet existing threat levels. The development of high speed fold back devices where, at a specified voltage, the off state resistance switches to a very low on state one has provided the equivalent to a semiconductor spark gap. The size of the technology enables it to be integrated into connectors of interconnection cables. To illustrate the performance the technology was developed to meet the Lightning Protection requirements for FADEC units within aeroengines. Work was also carried out to study switching behavior with the waveform 5, the 500 us, 10 kA pulse applied to cable assemblies. This test enabled all the switches in a connector to be fired simultaneously

Efficient detection of periodic orbits in high dimensional systems

This paper is concerned with developing a method for detecting unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) by stabilising transformations. Here the strategy is to transform the system of interest in such away that the orbits become stable. However, the number of such transformations becomes overwhelming as we move to higher dimensions [5, 16, 17]. We have recently proposed a set of stabilising transformations which is constructed from a small set of already found UPOs [1]. The real value of the set is that its cardinality depends on the dimension of the unstable manifold at the UPO rather than the dimension of the system. Here we extend this approach to high dimensional systems of ODEs and apply it to the model example of a chaotic spatially extended system - the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation

Heat flux sensor design reduces extraneous source effects

Heat flux sensor isolates the sensor and its transmitting thermocouple from undesirable heat sources by incorporating a radiator section that forms a radiation shield between mounting cup and sensor. Bonding of the thermocouple cable to the underside of the radiator provides a conductive path to dissipate extraneous heat that might otherwise reach the sensor

Hypergraph models of metabolism

In this paper, we employ a directed hypergraph model to investigate the extent to which environmental variability influences the set of available biochemical reactions within a living cell. Such an approach avoids the limitations of the usual complex network formalism by allowing for the multilateral relationships (i.e. connections involving more than two nodes) that naturally occur within many biological processes. More specifically, we extend the concept of network reciprocity to complex hyper-networks, thus enabling us to characterise a network in terms of the existence of mutual hyper-connections, which may be considered a proxy for metabolic network complexity. To demonstrate these ideas, we study 115 metabolic hyper-networks of bacteria, each of which can be classified into one of 6 increasingly varied habitats. In particular, we found that reciprocity increases significantly with increased environmental variability, supporting the view that organism adaptability leads to increased complexities in the resultant biochemical networks

Synagapetus dubitans, a caddisfly new to Britain

The caddisfly species Synagapetus dubitans has been found recently for the first time in the UK in 2010. This study reports on the sampling and discovery of that species in North Yorkshire. A list of sites where S. dubitans (either as larvae or adults) has been found is give

On the use of stabilising transformations for detecting unstable periodic orbits in the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation

In this paper we develop further a method for detecting unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) by stabilising transformations, where the strategy is to transform the system of interest in such a way that the orbits become stable. The main difficulty of using this method is that the number of transformations, which were used in the past, becomes overwhelming as we move to higher dimensions (Davidchack and Lai 1999; Schmelcher et al. 1997, 1998). We have recently proposed a set of stabilising transformations which is constructed from a small set of already found UPOs (Crofts and Davidchack 2006). The main benefit of using the proposed set is that its cardinality depends on the dimension of the unstable manifold at the UPO rather than the dimension of the system. In a typical situation the dimension of the unstable manifold is much smaller than the dimension of the system so the number of transformations is much smaller. Here we extend this approach to high-dimensional systems of ODEs and apply it to the model example of a chaotic spatially extended system -- the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. A comparison is made between the performance of this new method against the competing methods of Newton-Armijo (NA) and Levernberg-Marquardt (LM). In the latter case, we take advantage of the fact that the LM algorithm is able to solve under-determined systems of equations, thus eliminating the need for any additional constraints