The Struggle of Becoming Established in a Deprived Inner-City Neighbourhood

The theory of established-outsider figurations developed by Norbert Elias is a use-ful tool for examining deprived neighbourhoods. The case of this paper is Dort-mund Nordstadt in Germany, an old inner-city neighbourhood which from its early days has housed the newly arrived immigrants. Elias claims that the social cohesion of the established together with the stigmatisation of the outsiders lead to status and power differentials that exclude the outsiders. In Nordstadt, three lev-els of established-outsider relations overlap and affect each other. On the first, the societal level, the Germans stand opposite to the immigrants. On the second, the city level, Nordstadt is put into the outsider position. Furthermore, the spatial hierarchy is linked with the first level of established-outsider relations as Nord-stadt is a traditional immigrant neighbourhood. On the third, the neighbourhood level, the other established-outsider relations are in part reproduced and in part changed by recent developments.Deprived neighbourhoods, Immigration, Integration, Established, Outsider, Elias

A Benes Based NoC Switching Architecture for Mixed Criticality Embedded Systems

Multi-core, Mixed Criticality Embedded (MCE) real-time systems require high timing precision and predictability to guarantee there will be no interference between tasks. These guarantees are necessary in application areas such as avionics and automotive, where task interference or missed deadlines could be catastrophic, and safety requirements are strict. In modern multi-core systems, the interconnect becomes a potential point of uncertainty, introducing major challenges in proving behaviour is always within specified constraints, limiting the means of growing system performance to add more tasks, or provide more computational resources to existing tasks. We present MCENoC, a Network-on-Chip (NoC) switching architecture that provides innovations to overcome this with predictable, formally verifiable timing behaviour that is consistent across the whole NoC. We show how the fundamental properties of Benes networks benefit MCE applications and meet our architecture requirements. Using SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA), formal properties are defined that aid the refinement of the specification of the design as well as enabling the implementation to be exhaustively formally verified. We demonstrate the performance of the design in terms of size, throughput and predictability, and discuss the application level considerations needed to exploit this architecture

Data science of stroke imaging and enlightenment of the penumbra.

Imaging protocols of acute ischemic stroke continue to hold significant uncertainties regarding patient selection for reperfusion therapy with thrombolysis and mechanical thrombectomy. Given that patient inclusion criteria can easily introduce biases that may be unaccounted for, the reproducibility and reliability of the patient screening method is of utmost importance in clinical trial design. The optimal imaging screening protocol for selection in targeted populations remains uncertain. Acute neuroimaging provides a snapshot in time of the brain parenchyma and vasculature. By identifying the at-risk but still viable penumbral tissue, imaging can help estimate the potential benefit of a reperfusion therapy in these patients. This paper provides a perspective about the assessment of the penumbral tissue in the context of acute stroke and reviews several neuroimaging models that have recently been developed to assess the penumbra in a more reliable fashion. The complexity and variability of imaging features and techniques used in stroke will ultimately require advanced data driven software tools to provide quantitative measures of risk/benefit of recanalization therapy and help aid in making the most favorable clinical decisions

Social and Cultural Contexts of Alcohol Use: Influences in a Social-Ecological Framework.

Alcohol use and misuse account for 3.3 million deaths every year, or 6 percent of all deaths worldwide. The harmful effects of alcohol misuse are far reaching and range from individual health risks, morbidity, and mortality to consequences for family, friends, and the larger society. This article reviews a few of the cultural and social influences on alcohol use and places individual alcohol use within the contexts and environments where people live and interact. It includes a discussion of macrolevel factors, such as advertising and marketing, immigration and discrimination factors, and how neighborhoods, families, and peers influence alcohol use. Specifically, the article describes how social and cultural contexts influence alcohol use/misuse and then explores future directions for alcohol research

Scalable data abstractions for distributed parallel computations

The ability to express a program as a hierarchical composition of parts is an essential tool in managing the complexity of software and a key abstraction this provides is to separate the representation of data from the computation. Many current parallel programming models use a shared memory model to provide data abstraction but this doesn't scale well with large numbers of cores due to non-determinism and access latency. This paper proposes a simple programming model that allows scalable parallel programs to be expressed with distributed representations of data and it provides the programmer with the flexibility to employ shared or distributed styles of data-parallelism where applicable. It is capable of an efficient implementation, and with the provision of a small set of primitive capabilities in the hardware, it can be compiled to operate directly on the hardware, in the same way stack-based allocation operates for subroutines in sequential machines

The Link Between Intimate Partner Violence, Substance Abuse and Mental Health in California

Presents findings about how Californians who have been victims of intimate partner violence as adults are more likely to report serious psychological distress, violence-related substance abuse, and need for mental health and/or substance abuse services

The TLC Method for Modeling Creep Deformation and Rupture

This thesis describes a novel new method, termed the Tangent-Line-Chord (TLC) method, that can be used to more efficiently model creep deformation dominated by the tertiary regime. Creep deformation is a widespread mechanical mode of failure found in high-stress and temperature mechanical systems. To accurately simulate creep and its effect on structures, researchers utilize finite element analysis (FEA). General purpose FEA packages require extensive amounts of time and computer resources to simulate creep softening in components because of the large deformation rates that continuously evolve. The goal of this research is to employ multi-regime creep models, such as the Kachanov-Rabotnov model, to determine a set of equations that will allow creep to be simulated using as few iterations as possible. The key outcome is the freeing up of computational resources and the saving of time. Because both the number of equations and the value of material constants within the model change depending on the approach used, programming software will be utilized to automate this analytical process. The materials being considered in this research are mainly generic Ni-based superalloys, as they exhibit creep responses that are dominated by secondary and tertiary creep