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Building capacity in climate change policy analysis and negotiation: methods and technologies
Capacity building is often cited as the reason “we cannot just pour money into developing countries” and why so many development projects fail because their design does not address local conditions. It is therefore a key technical and political concept in international development.
Some of the poorest countries in the world are also some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their vulnerability is in part due to a lack of capacity to plan and anticipate the effects of climate change on crops, water resources, urban electricity demand etc. What capacities do these countries lack to deal with climate change? How will they cope? What steps can they take to reduce their vulnerability?
This innovative and high-profile research project was part of a larger project (called C3D) and conducted with non-governmental organisations in Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The research involved several participatory workshops and a questionnaire to all three research centres
Neutrino-electron processes in a strongly magnetized thermal plasma
We present a new method of calculating the rate of neutrino-electron
interactions in a strong magnetic field based on finite temperature field
theory. Using this method, in which the effect of the magnetic field on the
electron states is taken into account exactly, we calculate the rates of all of
the lowest order neutrino-electron interactions in a plasma. As an example of
the use of this technique, we explicitly calculate the rate at which neutrinos
and antineutrinos annihilate in a highly magnetized plasma, and compare that to
the rate in an unmagnetized plasma. The most important channel for energy
deposition is the gyromagnetic absorption of a neutrino-antineutrino pair on an
electron or positron in the plasma ().
Our results show that the rate of annihilation increases with the magnetic
field strength once it reaches a certain critical value, which is dependent on
the incident neutrino energies and the ambient temperature of the plasma. It is
also shown that the annihilation rates are strongly dependent on the angle
between the incident particles and the direction of the magnetic field. If
sufficiently strong fields exist in the regions surrounding the core of a type
II supernovae or in the central engines of gamma ray bursts, these processes
will lead to more efficient plasma heating mechanism than in an unmagnetized
medium, and moreover, one which is intrinsically anisotropic.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, minor corrections, references added, to be
published in Phys. Rev.
Rise of the 'Gig Worker' Economy or Just Mending the Legislative Leak?
This article assesses the extent to which the UK's Supreme Court (UKSC) rulings in Uber and Pimlico Plumbers have resolved the long-standing conundrum facing employers of the label 'worker'. This analysis raises critical issues relating to the effectiveness or otherwise of regulation of the gig economy. Furthermore, it seeks to question how the gig economy is reframing employment law
The death of William Golding: authorship and creativity in darkness visible and the paper men
In the seventies and eighties William Golding was deeply responsive to the critical, anti-authorial ethos that followed the publication of Roland Barthes's "La mort de I'auteur" (1968). In Darkness Visible (1979) and The Paper Men (1984) he investigates means by which to reaffirm authorial presence. Working through paradox, he performs the authorial death in these novels, and establishes language’s inadequacy as a means of conveying absolute meaning, authorial "vision," truth or revelation. Having done so he nonetheless gestures towards the divine, towards the possibility of a vatic communication. In this manner the novels work upon principles of contradiction and collapse. What remains is a discourse of hope, promise, desire, without means of substantiating such optimism. Thus Golding might be said to have practiced a form of negative theology, and to have anticipated in this respect some recent trends in literary theory
Big Bang Synthesis of Nuclear Dark Matter
We investigate the physics of dark matter models featuring composite bound
states carrying a large conserved dark "nucleon" number. The properties of
sufficiently large dark nuclei may obey simple scaling laws, and we find that
this scaling can determine the number distribution of nuclei resulting from Big
Bang Dark Nucleosynthesis. For plausible models of asymmetric dark matter, dark
nuclei of large nucleon number, e.g. > 10^8, may be synthesised, with the
number distribution taking one of two characteristic forms. If
small-nucleon-number fusions are sufficiently fast, the distribution of dark
nuclei takes on a logarithmically-peaked, universal form, independent of many
details of the initial conditions and small-number interactions. In the case of
a substantial bottleneck to nucleosynthesis for small dark nuclei, we find the
surprising result that even larger nuclei, with size >> 10^8, are often finally
synthesised, again with a simple number distribution. We briefly discuss the
constraints arising from the novel dark sector energetics, and the extended set
of (often parametrically light) dark sector states that can occur in complete
models of nuclear dark matter. The physics of the coherent enhancement of
direct detection signals, the nature of the accompanying dark-sector form
factors, and the possible modifications to astrophysical processes are
discussed in detail in a companion paper.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, v3; minor additional comments - matches
published versio
Place and its relations in late twentieth century cultural theory and British fiction
The dissertation presents a descriptive analysis of aspects of British fictional
writing prefaced by a comparative analysis of cultural theory concerned with
questions of place and socio-spatial relations-The general aim is to show how
both the theory and the fiction negotiate elements of a relational poetics and
politics of place in the context of negatively homogenizing tendencies in socioeconomic
developments during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. In
the first part, the writers of cultural theory are divided into three preliminary
areas, covering primarily Marxist, post-structuralist and environmentalist
approaches to questions of place and its relations. The second and third
parts then provide more detailed consideration of novels by Raymond Williams
and lain Sinclair which have so far not been accorded substantial critical
attention. The aim is to show how their approaches in the novels considered
converge with aspects of the theory discussed in the opening part of the
dissertation. In all cases, the writers are presented as producing 'partial
mappings'. These are seen as offering perspectives of sufficient scope to
provide effective criticism of, and possible alternatives to, negative and
disorientating aspects of social relations affected by tendencies in capital
accumulation which might be seen as endangering elements of social justice and
equality, cultural heterogeneity, and ecological viability. The first part includes
consideration of the poet Charles Olson and a related aim is to suggest how
novels such as those by Williams and Sinclair might provide a significant
complement to both theory and modem epic poetry in relation to questions of
place
Characterising the physicality of everyday buttons
A significant milestone in the development of physically-dynamic surfaces is the ability for buttons to protrude outwards from any location on a touch-screen. As a first step toward developing interaction requirements for this technology we conducted a survey of 1515 electronic push buttons in everyday home environments. We report a characterisation that describes the features of the data set and discusses important button properties that we expect will inform the design of future physically-dynamic devices and surfaces
The efficacy of occlusal splints in the treatment of bruxism : A systematic review
Funding This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Peer reviewedPostprin
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