'Education, education, education' : legal, moral and clinical

This article brings together Professor Donald Nicolson's intellectual interest in professional legal ethics and his long-standing involvement with law clinics both as an advisor at the University of Cape Town and Director of the University of Bristol Law Clinic and the University of Strathclyde Law Clinic. In this article he looks at how legal education may help start this process of character development, arguing that the best means is through student involvement in voluntary law clinics. And here he builds upon his recent article which argues for voluntary, community service oriented law clinics over those which emphasise the education of students

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Relationship of edge localized mode burst times with divertor flux loop signal phase in JET

A phase relationship is identified between sequential edge localized modes (ELMs) occurrence times in a set of H-mode tokamak plasmas to the voltage measured in full flux azimuthal loops in the divertor region. We focus on plasmas in the Joint European Torus where a steady H-mode is sustained over several seconds, during which ELMs are observed in the Be II emission at the divertor. The ELMs analysed arise from intrinsic ELMing, in that there is no deliberate intent to control the ELMing process by external means. We use ELM timings derived from the Be II signal to perform direct time domain analysis of the full flux loop VLD2 and VLD3 signals, which provide a high cadence global measurement proportional to the voltage induced by changes in poloidal magnetic flux. Specifically, we examine how the time interval between pairs of successive ELMs is linked to the time-evolving phase of the full flux loop signals. Each ELM produces a clear early pulse in the full flux loop signals, whose peak time is used to condition our analysis. The arrival time of the following ELM, relative to this pulse, is found to fall into one of two categories: (i) prompt ELMs, which are directly paced by the initial response seen in the flux loop signals; and (ii) all other ELMs, which occur after the initial response of the full flux loop signals has decayed in amplitude. The times at which ELMs in category (ii) occur, relative to the first ELM of the pair, are clustered at times when the instantaneous phase of the full flux loop signal is close to its value at the time of the first ELM

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

The value of quantitative environmental DNA analyses for the management of invasive and endangered native fish

1. Environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring is a useful tool for species detection but its use in addressing management questions remains scarce. One factor limiting the use of eDNA as a routine monitoring tool is uncertainty around the potential of eDNA data to estimate species abundance. While several confounding factors limit the ability of eDNA data to estimate absolute abundances at large spatial and temporal scales, eDNA data have the potential to estimate relative species abun- dances patterns at smaller scales, and this information can assist management. 2. Environmental DNA and conventional monitoring surveys were conducted in the Abercrombie River catchment (Australia) where an incursion of the invasive red- fin perch (Perca fluviatulis) threatens the survival of a population of endangered Macquarie perch (Macquaria australasica). Species-specific assays were used to quantify eDNA concentrations from water samples and estimate the relative abundance of both species. Electrofishing and fyke netting surveys were used to validate key observations from the eDNA survey. 3. Environmental DNA of both species was detected at all sites except one, where redfin perch DNA was not detected. Between species comparisons of eDNA con- centrations revealed a clear negative relationship between the eDNA concen- trations of both species, consistent with other evidence of redfin perch having a negative impact on Macquarie perch populations. Between site comparisons of redfin perch eDNA concentrations showed evidence of a novel incursion of the species in the upper reaches of the Abercrombie River and conventional monitor- ing in the following year confirmed the pattern of increased redfin perch abun- dances from downstream to upstream sites. 4. Relative comparisons of eDNA concentrations of aquatic species can be used to assess species interactions and reveal unexpected species abundance patterns (e.g. allowing inferences of novel incursions of invasive species). This informa- tion is critical to evaluate current, and design future, management strategies. Consequently, while deriving absolute species abundances from quantitative eDNA data may remain challenging, the use of quantitative eDNA surveys can provide relative abundance patterns valuable to the conservation and manage- ment of invasive and endangered species. 5. The quantitative nature of eDNA survey data has been debated extensively in the current literature because of potential confounding influences. Current study results show that these confounding influences may be less problematic at small spatial scales and quantitative eDNA data can be effective to monitor relative spe- cies abundances patterns