Internet usage on English for academic purposes courses

This paper begins by documenting general usage of the Internet as a tool for delivery of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. It then goes on to illustrate how a number of specific internet-based classroom activities might be integrated onto EAP courses in order to equip non-native speakers with the main skills that they are likely to need when following an academic course at a British university

Respiratory Syncytial Virus

RSV infection has an estimated global incidence of 33 million cases in children <5 years of age, with 10% requiring hospital admission and up to 199 000 dying of the disease. There is growing evidence that severe infantile RSV bronchiolitis, a condition characterised by an inflammatory reaction to the virus, is associated with later childhood wheeze in some vulnerable children; however, a direct causal relationship with asthma has not yet been established. RSV infection is also increasingly recognised as a cause of morbidity and mortality in those with underlying airway disease, the immunocompromised and frail elderly persons. Novel molecular-based diagnostic tools are becoming established, but treatment remains largely supportive, with palivizumab the only licensed agent currently available for passive prophylaxis of selected pre-term infants. While effective treatments remain elusive, there is optimism about the testing of novel antiviral drugs and the development of vaccines that may induce long-lasting immunity without the risk of disease augmentation

FinTech Innovation: Review and Future Research Directions

This paper aims to survey the most recent theoretical and empirical literature on FinTech innovations in the financial sector. The purpose of this review is to investigate how FinTech Innovations are altering and reshaping the universe of financial service providers, and challenging traditional business models and infrastructures. This study summarizes the opportunities and challenges of FinTech Innovations and the implications to the legacy incumbent financial services companies. FinTech innovation fusions technological capabilities potentially provide innovative financial products and services to foster financial inclusion, streamline processes, and lower costs to clients. FinTech can bring greater competition and diversity in financial services. Further, this research interprets the findings from the lens of institutional theory to advance the theoretical understanding of social changes facilitated by FinTech innovations in revolutionary areas in banking (lending, payment), security trading (real-time settlement, automated investment), and insurance (personalized experience). The investigation points out the regulatory concerns highlighted in the scholarly works, suggesting collaboration is critical to enable multi-stakeholders to anticipate and foster pro-innovative, transparent regulations to deliver meaningful benefits to innovation and financial inclusion. Lastly, this review identifies future research areas to further enrich knowledge to create a future-proof, more efficient, and resilient financial ecosystem to enhance financial stability in the digital era

Data Reduction Procedure for an Experimental Method of Measuring the Velocity-Coupled Response Function of Solid Propellants

A computer program has been developed for calculation of the velocity-coupled response function of solid-propellants from experimentally measured pressure data. The proposed velocity-coupled response function measurement apparatus consists of an end-burner combustor where the propellant sample is oscillated in a direction normal to the flow in the presence of a standing acoustic wave within the combustion chamber. The pressure measurements are made at select points along the length of the chamber. The data reduction program consists of a Runge-Kutta routine driven by a BFGS multivariable search routine. The Runge-Kutta routine determines the pressure distribution within the chamber of the proposed apparatus for a specific velocity-coupled response function (Rv). The BFGS optimization routine searches for the Rv which minimizes the difference between the calculated and measured pressure distributions. The data reduction program has demonstrated convergence to the proper Rv value for pressure data that was generated by sampling from gaussian distributions

Against the \u27tyranny\u27 of single-family dwelling: insights from Christiania at 40

Ownership of a single family dwelling remains the dominant aspiration in market-led economies. In a hyper-privatized landscape it is widely assumed that people will not share housing except in extraordinary circumstances. Yet, there is a long and rich history of counter-cultural groups who imagine and practise alternative forms of shared housekeeping and collaborative dwelling. This paper draws on first hand observations of daily life from the counter-cultural community of Christiania, at a critical moment in a 40 year history of state threatened ‘normalization’. Christiania is a valuable lens through which to re-imagine affordable, adaptable, sustainable homes and neighbourhoods because it disrupts the myth that cultures of home-making and privacy are confined to matters of housing and housing markets alone. The paper argues that sharing practices are shaped by the interdependence of social and material infrastructures of daily life. For example, the cultures of home-making and adapted dwellings in Christiania provide practical as well as social support for fluid family composition, alleviating the upheaval usually associated with household transitions. This paper challenges the assumed superiority of the single family dwelling on grounds that it is unsustainable, socially divisive and represents a barrier to gender democracy

Covariant spinor representation of iosp(d,2/2)iosp(d,2/2) and quantization of the spinning relativistic particle

A covariant spinor representation of $iosp(d,2/2)$ is constructed for the quantization of the spinning relativistic particle. It is found that, with appropriately defined wavefunctions, this representation can be identified with the state space arising from the canonical extended BFV-BRST quantization of the spinning particle with admissible gauge fixing conditions after a contraction procedure. For this model, the cohomological determination of physical states can thus be obtained purely from the representation theory of the $iosp(d,2/2)$ algebra.Comment: Updated version with references included and covariant form of equation 1. 23 pages, no figure

Extended two-level quantum dissipative system from bosonization of the elliptic spin-1/2 Kondo model

We study the elliptic spin-1/2 Kondo model (spin-1/2 fermions in one dimension with fully anisotropic contact interactions with a magnetic impurity) in the light of mappings to bosonic systems using the fermion-boson correspondence and associated unitary transformations. We show that for fixed fermion number, the bosonic system describes a two-level quantum dissipative system with two noninteracting copies of infinitely-degenerate upper and lower levels. In addition to the standard tunnelling transitions, and the transitions driven by the dissipative coupling, there are also bath-mediated transitions between the upper and lower states which simultaneously effect shifts in the horizontal degeneracy label. We speculate that these systems could provide new examples of continuous time quantum random walks, which are exactly solvable.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur