442 research outputs found
Frit valg eller frit fald: nÄr velfÊrd er et tilbud [Free choice or free fall when welfare is a choice]
Denne rapport er blevet til pÄ et initiativ fra Fagligt FÊlles Forbund. Hovedsigtet med rapporten at belyse udviklingen i det britiske velfÊrdssystem siden Margaret Thatchers konservative regering i 1979 pÄbegyndte den liberalt inspirerede reformproces, som har fÞrt til det system, der eksisterer i dag og at drage sammenligninger med udviklingen i Storbritannien og Danmark. Storbritannien har oplevet en dramatisk forvÊrring af levevilkÄrene for de fattigste og dÄrligst uddannede dele af befolkningen i lÞbet af den samme periode, som Thatchers konservative regering gennemfÞrte en rÊkke reformer af den offentlige sektor og af arbejdsmarkedet.
Der er mange forskelle mellem Danmark og Storbritannien, ikke mindst efter Thatchers reformer, men en del af det, Thatcher gennemfÞrte, og som kun i begrÊnset omfang er blevet Êndret af Tony Blairs New Labour regering, er under gennemfÞrelse eller planlagt her i Danmark af vores nuvÊrende borgerlige regering. Det er derfor af stor interesse for beslutningstagere i Danmark og den danske offentlighed mere bredt at fÄ kendskab til indholdet i og virkningerne af de reformer, der er blevet gennemfÞrt i Storbritannien. Dette er formÄlet med denne rapport
Distance-redshift from an optical metric that includes absorption
We show that it is possible to equate the intensity reduction of a light wave
caused by weak absorption with a geometrical reduction in intensity caused by a
"transverse" conformal transformation of the spacetime metric in which the wave
travels. We are consequently able to modify Gordon's optical metric to account
for electromagnetic properties of ponderable material whose properties include
both refraction and absorption. Unlike refraction alone however, including
absorption requires a modification of the optical metric that depends on the
eikonal of the wave itself. We derive the distance-redshift relation from the
modified optical metric for Friedman-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker spacetimes
whose cosmic fluid has associated refraction and absorption coefficients. We
then fit the current supernovae data and provide an alternate explanation
(other than dark energy) of the apparent acceleration of the universe.Comment: 2 figure
An Assessment of Reduced Crew and Single Pilot Operations in Commercial Transport Aircraft Operations
Future reduced crew operations or even single pilot operations for commercial airline and on-demand mobility applications are an active area of research. These changes would reduce the human element and thus, threaten the precept that "a well-trained and well-qualified pilot is the critical center point of aircraft systems safety and an integral safety component of the entire commercial aviation system." NASA recently completed a pilot-in-the-loop high fidelity motion simulation study in partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) attempting to quantify the pilot's contribution to flight safety during normal flight and in response to aircraft system failures. Crew complement was used as the experiment independent variable in a between-subjects design. These data show significant increases in workload for single pilot operations, compared to two-crew, with subjective assessments of safety and performance being significantly degraded as well. Nonetheless, in all cases, the pilots were able to overcome the failure mode effects in all crew configurations. These data reflect current-day flight deck equipage and help identify the technologies that may improve two-crew operations and/or possibly enable future reduced crew and/or single pilot operations
Including Absorption in Gordon's Optical Metric
We show that Gordon's optical metric on a curved spacetime can be generalized
to include absorption by allowing the metric to become complex. We demonstrate
its use in the realm of geometrical optics by giving three simple examples. We
use one of these examples to compute corrected distance-redshift relations for
Friedman-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker models in which the cosmic fluid has an
associated complex index of refraction that represents grey extinction. We then
fit this corrected Hubble curve to the type Ia supernovae data and provide a
possible explanation (other than dark energy) of the deviation of these
observations from dark matter predictions.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figur
Disruption of the N-alpha-Acetyltransferase NatB Causes Sensitivity to Reductive Stress in Arabidopsis thaliana
In Arabidopsis thaliana, the evolutionary conserved N-terminal acetyltransferase (Nat) complexes NatA and NatB co-translationally acetylate 60% of the proteome. Both have recently been implicated in the regulation of plant stress responses. While NatA mediates drought tolerance, NatB is required for pathogen resistance and the adaptation to high salinity and high osmolarity. Salt and osmotic stress impair protein folding and result in the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The ER-membrane resident E3 ubiquitin ligase DOA10 targets misfolded proteins for degradation during ER stress and is conserved among eukaryotes. In yeast, DOA10 recognizes conditional degradation signals (Ac/N-degrons) created by NatA and NatB. Assuming that this mechanism is preserved in plants, the lack of Ac/N-degrons required for efficient removal of misfolded proteins might explain the sensitivity of NatB mutants to protein harming conditions. In this study, we investigate the response of NatB mutants to dithiothreitol (DTT) and tunicamycin (TM)-induced ER stress. We report that NatB mutants are hypersensitive to DTT but not TM, suggesting that the DTT hypersensitivity is caused by an over-reduction of the cytosol rather than an accumulation of unfolded proteins in the ER. In line with this hypothesis, the cytosol of NatB depleted plants is constitutively over-reduced and a global transcriptome analysis reveals that their reductive stress response is permanently activated. Moreover, we demonstrate that doa10 mutants are susceptible to neither DTT nor TM, ruling out a substantial role of DOA10 in ER-associated protein degradation (ERAD) in plants. Contrary to previous findings in yeast, our data indicate that N-terminal acetylation (NTA) does not inhibit ER targeting of a substantial amount of proteins in plants. In summary, we provide further evidence that NatB-mediated imprinting of the proteome is vital for the response to protein harming stress and rule out DOA10 as the sole recognin for substrates in the plant ERAD pathway, leaving the role of DOA10 in plants ambiguous
An inhomogeneous universe with thick shells and without cosmological constant
We build an exact inhomogeneous universe composed of a central flat Friedmann
zone up to a small redshift , a thick shell made of anisotropic matter, an
hyperbolic Friedmann metric up to the scale where dimming galaxies are observed
() that can be matched to a hyperbolic Lema\^{i}tre-Tolman-Bondi
spacetime to best fit the WMAP data at early epochs. We construct a general
framework which permits us to consider a non-uniform clock rate for the
universe. As a result, both for a uniform time and a uniform Hubble flow, the
deceleration parameter extrapolated by the central observer is always positive.
Nevertheless, by taking a non-uniform Hubble flow, it is possible to obtain a
negative central deceleration parameter, that, with certain parameter choices,
can be made the one observed currently. Finally, it is conjectured a possible
physical mechanism to justify a non-uniform time flow.Comment: Version published in Class. Quantum gra
An introduction to Elinor Glyn : her life and legacy
This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review re-evaluates an author who was once a household name, beloved by readers of romance, and whose films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. Elinor Glyn (1864â1943) was a British author of romantic fiction who went to Hollywood and became famous for her movies. She was a celebrity figure of the 1920s, and wrote constantly in Hearst's press. She wrote racy stories which were turned into filmsâmost famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). These were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by othersâHollywood and the Spanish Catholic Churchâas acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred âflapper eraâ. Decades on, the idea of the âIt Girlâ continues to have great pertinence in the post-feminist discourses of the twenty-first century. The 1910s and 1920s saw the development of intermodal networks between print, sound and screen cultures. This introduction to Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research
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