Student compliance with ethical guidelines: the Glasgow ethics code

While disciplines like medicine and psychology have for several years followed strict procedures for ethical approval of experiments involving humans, only recently has the use of human participants within Computing Science been subject to the same scrutiny. Although we may wish to put a case forward for Computing Science to be exempt from such formal ethics procedures, funding bodies and universities typically insist that we seek the same approval as other disciplines for our experiments, including any use of human participants by our students during the course of their studies. We have introduced a simple, scalable ethics procedure for student assessment, that identifies ethical concerns, yet does not overwhelm the limited staff resources available for supporting this initiative. The process is based around a form of triage that filters the approximately 8000 assessments that are submitted annually. This paper summarises this procedure, discusses the underlying assumptions, and outlines the problems encountered

Towards a Practical Criticism of Caesar's Prose Style

published or submitted for publicatio

Cicero vs. Ciceronianism in the Ciceronianus

published or submitted for publicatio

Solitons in the noisy Burgers equation

We investigate numerically the coupled diffusion-advective type field equations originating from the canonical phase space approach to the noisy Burgers equation or the equivalent Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation in one spatial dimension. The equations support stable right hand and left hand solitons and in the low viscosity limit a long-lived soliton pair excitation. We find that two identical pair excitations scatter transparently subject to a size dependent phase shift and that identical solitons scatter on a static soliton transparently without a phase shift. The soliton pair excitation and the scattering configurations are interpreted in terms of growing step and nucleation events in the interface growth profile. In the asymmetrical case the soliton scattering modes are unstable presumably toward multi soliton production and extended diffusive modes, signalling the general non-integrability of the coupled field equations. Finally, we have shown that growing steps perform anomalous random walk with dynamic exponent z=3/2 and that the nucleation of a tip is stochastically suppressed with respect to plateau formation.Comment: 11 pages Revtex file, including 15 postscript-figure

Aspects of the Noisy Burgers Equation

The noisy Burgers equation describing for example the growth of an interface subject to noise is one of the simplest model governing an intrinsically nonequilibrium problem. In one dimension this equation is analyzed by means of the Martin-Siggia-Rose technique. In a canonical formulation the morphology and scaling behavior are accessed by a principle of least action in the weak noise limit. The growth morphology is characterized by a dilute gas of nonlinear soliton modes with gapless dispersion law with exponent z=3/2 and a superposed gas of diffusive modes with a gap. The scaling exponents and a heuristic expression for the scaling function follow from a spectral representation.Comment: 23 pages,LAMUPHYS LaTeX-file (Springer), 13 figures, and 1 table, to appear in the Proceedings of the XI Max Born Symposium on "Anomalous Diffusion: From Basics to Applications", May 20-24, 1998, Ladek Zdroj, Polan

Thai Food in Taiwan: Tracing the Contours of Transnational Taste

This essay examines the recent proliferation of Thai restaurants in Taiwan, relating their development to different streams of transnational migration from Thailand, Myanmar and mainland China. Thai restaurants in Taiwan take many forms from low-cost 'ethnic' restaurants around the Taoyuan train station and in more peripheral areas, catering mainly to migrant workers from Thailand, to upmarket restaurants in city centre locations, catering to a 'cosmopolitan' clientele with high levels of economic and cultural capital. The paper traces the contours of transnational taste in Taiwan where Thai food has been adapted to suit local demand. In this context, as elsewhere, notions of culinary authenticity are contested, revolving around specific ingredients, recipes and dishes as well as notions of provenance, décor and other aspects of material culture. The paper examines the process of authentication, focusing on the culinary claims made by differently-located stakeholders. It also considers the material as well as the symbolic construction of 'taste', a term whose multiple meanings provide a valuable way of rethinking transnationality. As well as providing a case study of the evolution of culinary culture in a non-Western context, the paper sheds light on the role of food in defining Taiwan's contemporary political culture through notions of cosmopolitanism and modernity

Least restrictive alternative - advance statements and the new mental health legislation

No abstract availabl

A constitutive model for the superplastic material ALNOVI-1 including leak risk information

For some applications, it is important that a formed sheet of material is completely gas tight, therefore it is beneficial to be able to predict whether a formed sheet will be leak tight for gases or not. Superplastic materials show the ability to attain very high plastic strains before failure. These strains can only be reached within a small range of tempera-ture and strain rate. In thecase of the alu-minium alloy ALNOVI-1 by Furukawa Sky Aluminium, the optimum superplastic be-haviour is found at 520 °C and at strain rates roughly between 10-4 to 10-2 s-1. Under these conditions, the mechanical behaviour of the material is highly strain rate depend-ent. This article describes a proposal for the constitutive model of ALNOVI-1, as can be incorporated into an FE code (like a user-defined material UMAT in ABAQUS), in which the leak risk can be implemented, as function of the cavity volume fraction. This will be done in a phenomenological way, using the results of uniaxial tensile and biaxial bulge experiments