Gambling in Great Britain:a response to Rogers

A recent issue of Practice: Social Work in Action featured a paper by Rogers that examined whether the issue of problem gambling was a suitable case for social work. Rogers’ overview was (in various places) out of date, highly selective, contradictory, presented unsupported claims and somewhat misleading. Rogers’ paper is to be commended for putting the issue of problem gambling on the social work agenda. However, social workers need up-to-date information and contextually situated information if they are to make informed decisions in helping problem gamblers

Effective polar potential in the central force Schrodinger equation

The angular part of the Schrodinger equation for a central potential is brought to the one-dimensional 'Schrodinger form' where one has a kinetic energy plus potential energy terms. The resulting polar potential is seen to be a family of potentials characterized by the square of the magnetic quantum number m. It is demonstrated that this potential can be viewed as a confining potential that attempts to confine the particle to the xy-plane, with a strength that increases with increasing m. Linking the solutions of the equation to the conventional solutions of the angular equation, i.e. the associated Legendre functions, we show that the variation in the spatial distribution of the latter for different values of the orbital angular quantum number l can be viewed as being a result of 'squeezing' with different strengths by the introduced 'polar potential'.Comment: This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in European Journal of Physic

Visualising London's Suburbs

2 - 4 April 200

Microfluidic immunomagnetic multi-target sorting – a model for controlling deflection of paramagnetic beads

We describe a microfluidic system that uses a magnetic field to sort paramagnetic beads by deflecting them in the direction normal to the flow. Our experiments systematically study the dependence of the beads’ deflection on: bead size and susceptibility, magnet strength, fluid speed and viscosity, and device geometry. We also develop a design parameter that can aid in the design of microfluidic devices for immunomagnetic multi-target sorting

Do the suburbs exist? Discovering complexity and specificity in suburban built form

In human geography cities are routinely acknowledged as complex and dynamic built environments. This description is rarely extended to the suburbs, which are generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs and therefore of little intrinsic theoretical interest in themselves. This article presents a detailed critique of this widely held assumption by showing how the idea of 'the suburban' as an essentially non-problematic domain has been perpetuated from a range of contrasting disciplinary perspectives, including those that directly address suburban subject matter. The result has been that attempts to articulate the complex social possibilities of suburban space are easily caught between theories of urbanisation that are insensitive to suburban specificity and competing representations of the suburb that rarely move beyond the culturally specific to consider their generic significance. This article proposes that the development of a distinctively suburban theory would help to undermine one-dimensional approaches to the built environment by focusing on the relationship between social organisation and the dynamics of emergent built form

A multi-disciplinary perspective on the built environment: Space Syntax and cartography – the communication challenge

8-11 June 2009

Phase Structure of 2-Flavor Quark Matter: Heterogeneous Superconductors

We analyze the free energy of charge and color neutral 2-flavor quark matter within the BCS approximation. We consider both the homogeneous gapless superconducting phase and the heterogeneous mixed phase where normal and BCS superconducting phases coexist. We calculate the surface tension between normal and superconducting phases and use it to compare the free energies of the gapless and mixed phases. Our calculation, which retains only the leading order gradient contribution to the free energy, indicates that the mixed phase is energetically favored over an interesting range of densities of relevance to 2 flavor quark matter in neutron stars.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Major Revisions. Includes a detailed discussion of the kinetic terms of the effective theory, instabilities of the gapless phase and the charge neutral phase diagra