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Coming of age
Copyright at Demos 2011. This work is made available under the terms of the Demos licence.Britain’s ageing population is often described as a demographic time-bomb. As a society we often view ageing as a ‘problem’ which must be ‘managed’ – how to cope with the pressure on national health services of growing numbers of older people, the cost of sustaining them with pensions and social care, and the effect on families and housing needs. But ageing is not a policy problem to be solved. Instead it is a normal part of life, which varies according to personal characteristics, experience and outlook, and for many people growing older can be a very positive experience. Drawing on the Mass Observation project, one of the longest-running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world, Coming of Age grounds public policy in people’s real, lived experiences of ageing. It finds that the experience of ageing is changing, so that most people who are now reaching retirement do not identify themselves as old. One-size-fits-all policy approaches that treat older people as if they are all alike are alienating and inappropriate. Instead, older people need inclusive policy approaches that enable them to live their lives on their own terms. To ensure that older people are actively engaged, policy makers should stop emphasising the costs posed by an ageing population and start building on the many positive contributions that older people already make to our society.The Research Support and Development Office
(RSDO) at Brunel University and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC
Image selection system
An image selection (ISS) was developed for the NASA-Ames Research Center Earth Resources Aircraft Project. The ISS is an interactive, graphics oriented, computer retrieval system for aerial imagery. An analysis of user coverage requests and retrieval strategies is presented, followed by a complete system description. Data base structure, retrieval processors, command language, interactive display options, file structures, and the system's capability to manage sets of selected imagery are described. A detailed example of an area coverage request is graphically presented
Coordinate Confusion in Conformal Cosmology
A straight-forward interpretation of standard
Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmologies is that objects move
apart due to the expansion of space, and that sufficiently distant galaxies
must be receding at velocities exceeding the speed of light. Recently, however,
it has been suggested that a simple transformation into conformal coordinates
can remove superluminal recession velocities, and hence the concept of the
expansion of space should be abandoned. This work demonstrates that such
conformal transformations do not eliminate superluminal recession velocities
for open or flat matter-only FRLW cosmologies, and all possess superluminal
expansion. Hence, the attack on the concept of the expansion of space based on
this is poorly founded. This work concludes by emphasizing that the expansion
of space is perfectly valid in the general relativistic framework, however,
asking the question of whether space really expands is a futile exercise.Comment: 5 pages, accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter
The Lyman-alpha Forest at z~4: Keck HIRES Observations of Q 0000-26
This paper describes a study of the Lyman-alpha forest absorption clouds
along the quasar sightline Q0000-26 (zem=4.1). The spectrum was obtained with
the High Resolution Spectrometer on the 10m Keck telescope. We derive accurate
H I column density and Doppler width distributions for the clouds from Voigt
profile fitting. We also analyze simulated Lyman-alpha forest spectra of
matching characteristics in order to gauge the effects of line
blending/blanketing and noise in the data. The results are compared with
similar studies at lower redshifts in order to study any possible evolution in
the clouds' properties. We also estimate the mean intensity of the UV
background at z=4 from an analysis of the proximity effect.Comment: plain TeX containing 23 PS pages, 3 PS tables, and 9 PS figures, ApJ,
Dec 1, 1996 issue replacing an earlier version which contains an corrupted
table
Submarine landslides on the upper southeast Australian passive continental margin – preliminary findings
The southeast Australian passive continental margin is narrow, steep and sediment-deficient, and characterized by relatively low rates of modern sedimentation. Upper slope (\u3c1200m) sediments comprise mixtures of calcareous and terrigenous sand and mud. Three of twelve sediment cores recovered from geologically-recent, submarine landslides located offshore New South Wales/Queensland (NSW/QLD) are interpreted to have sampled failure surfaces at depths of between 85 cm and 220 cm below the present-day seabed. Differences in sediment physical properties are recorded above and below the three slide-plane boundaries. Sediment taken directly above the inferred submarine landslide failure surfaces and presumed to be post-landslide, returned radiocarbon ages of 15.8 ka, 20.7 ka and 20.1 ka. The last two ages correspond to adjacent slide features, which are inferred to be consistent with their being triggered by a single event such as an earthquake. Slope stability models based on classical soil mechanics and measured sediment shearstrengths indicate that the upper slope sediments should be stable. However, multibeam sonar data reveal that many upper slope landslides occur across the margin and that submarine landsliding is a common process. We infer from these results that: a) an unidentified mechanism regularly acts to reduce the shear resistance of these sediments to the very low values required to enable slope failure, and/or b) the margin experiences seismic events that act to destabilise the slope sediments
Variable stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822: the photometric catalogue
Deep B,V time-series photometry obtained with the ESO Very Large Telescope
has been used to identify variable stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC
6822. We surveyed a 6.8x6.8 arcmin area of the galaxy and detected a total
number of 390 candidate variables with the optimal image subtraction technique
(Alard 2000). Light curves on a magnitude scale were obtained for 262 of these
variables. Differential flux light curves are available for the remaining
sample. In this paper we present the photometric catalogue of calibrated light
curves and time-series data, along with coordinates and classification of the
candidate variables. A detailed description is provided of the procedures used
to identify the variable stars and calibrate their differential flux light
curves on a magnitude scale.Comment: 22 pages, 19 figures only as JPEG. Revised version with corrected eq.
5. Full text with better resolution .ps figures available upon request from
the authors. Uses aa.cls (included), in press on A&A. Table 2 will only be
published at the CDS, Appendix A, Tables 4,5,6 will only be available in the
electronic edition of the Journa
P6: Predictors of compliance with COVID-19 related non- pharmaceutical interventions amongst university students
College campuses have been an area where the novel coronavirus has spread rapidly, thus this study is focused on compliance with COVID-19 related non-pharmaceutical interventions among college students.We surveyed over 600 college students from across the United States and modeled predictors of compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions. To determine how applicable nationwide modeling might be to individual local campuses we also administered this same survey to nearly 600 students at two large universities in Utah County (Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University). We then ran structural equation modeling (SEM) to determine what factors are related to student compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions
Light Echoes of Transients and Variables in the Local Universe
Astronomical light echoes, the time-dependent light scattered by dust in the
vicinity of varying objects, have been recognized for over a century.
Initially, their utility was thought to be confined to mapping out the
three-dimensional distribution of interstellar dust. Recently, the discovery of
spectroscopically-useful light echoes around centuries-old supernovae in the
Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud has opened up new scientific
opportunities to exploit light echoes.
In this review, we describe the history of light echoes in the local Universe
and cover the many new developments in both the observation of light echoes and
the interpretation of the light scattered from them. Among other benefits, we
highlight our new ability to spectroscopically classify outbursting objects, to
view them from multiple perspectives, to obtain a spectroscopic time series of
the outburst, and to establish accurate distances to the source event. We also
describe the broader range of variable objects whose properties may be better
understood from light echo observations. Finally, we discuss the prospects of
new light echo techniques not yet realized in practice.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in PAS
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