Getting diverse students and staff to talk about integration on campus, and what they say when they do: A UK-India collaborative case study.

This paper reports the early stages of a UKIERI-funded project, ‘Widening Participation: Diversity, isolation or integration in Higher Education?’.The project is concerned with greater equity, social justice, community and social cohesion within the current globalised, market oriented context of higher education (HE), and with enabling students to be better prepared for, and thrive in social networks and work-related arenas which are increasingly diverse, multicultural, interdependent and global. The main aim of this 3 year project is to explore the nature of social cohesion, integration and separation, diversity, equality and discrimination experienced by diverse, minority, disadvantaged and under-represented students attending HE in UK and India. Group stereotypes are often subconsciously held, emerging into consciousness only when they appear confirmed or confounded by personal experience or public events. Where there is little knowledge or personal experience then reliance upon group stereotypes is more likely (Kunda & Thagard, 1996). This can impact upon student and staff expectations of, responses to, and interactions with each other. Individual students’ experiences and perceptions lie at the core of this project, but the ultimate purpose is to illuminate our understanding as to how these are mediated, shaped and formed, in relation to and in interaction with the structures and contextual features of the educational environments in which they, as students, are located. It is thus framed by socio-cultural rather than psychological or therapeutic theories and is located within a social-constructivist perspective (Moore, 2000). Social constructivism facilitates the development of improved understandings of educational and social environments that shape rather than determine individual dispositions towards social diversity encountered on campus. It is highly suited to the understanding of perceptions, and exploring resonances with actions, reactions and interactions. The initial stage of this project involved inviting students and staff (academic and support staff) from five HE colleges and universities in England and India to keep a record (written and photographic) of what for them seemed to be important and relevant events relating to what they saw, heard, did and experienced on campus for a period of 1 month, in teaching, learning and social situations; namely interactions in classes and social settings; what seem to be good experiences and what seem to be negative ones; how and if their particular knowledge and experiences were used, valued and incorporated into their HE experience and learning or how they were negated. A sample size of 90 record keepers was sought across the participating institutions. Getting that sample presented significant difficulties to all but one of the participating institutions, and raised questions about • the methods initially adopted, • the general willingness of students and staff to address and share issues relating to diversity, equality, social cohesion and integration on HE campuses with researchers • cultural differences in accessing respondents to take part in the research Additional data collection methods were adopted and by January 2009 the intended sample size almost met. This paper will address the problems encountered in undertaking the first stage of this research and present initial findings from the data that were eventually obtained

Tracing very high energy neutrinos from cosmological distances in ice

Astrophysical sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos yield tau neutrino fluxes due to neutrino oscillations. We study in detail the contribution of tau neutrinos with energies above PeV relative to the contribution of the other flavors. We consider several different initial neutrino fluxes and include tau neutrino regeneration in transit through the Earth and energy loss of charged leptons. We discuss signals of tau neutrinos in detectors such as IceCube, RICE and ANITA.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figure

On the Noether charge form of the first law of black hole mechanics

The first law of black hole mechanics was derived by Wald in a general covariant theory of gravity for stationary variations around a stationary black hole. It is formulated in terms of Noether charges, and has many advantages. In this paper several issues are discussed to strengthen the validity of the Noether charge form of the first law. In particular, a gauge condition used in the derivation is justified. After that, we justify the generalization to non-stationary variations done by Iyer-Wald.Comment: Latex, 16 pages, arguments on gauge conditions and near-stationary entropy are added, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Hadamard regularization of the third post-Newtonian gravitational wave generation of two point masses

Continuing previous work on the 3PN-accurate gravitational wave generation from point particle binaries, we obtain the binary's 3PN mass-type quadrupole and dipole moments for general (not necessarily circular) orbits in harmonic coordinates. The final expressions are given in terms of their ``core'' parts, resulting from the application of the pure Hadamard-Schwartz (pHS) self-field regularization scheme, and augmented by an ``ambiguous'' part. In the case of the 3PN quadrupole we find three ambiguity parameters, xi, kappa and zeta, but only one for the 3PN dipole, in the form of the particular combination xi+kappa. Requiring that the dipole moment agree with the center-of-mass position deduced from the 3PN equations of motion in harmonic coordinates yields the relation xi+kappa=-9871/9240. Our results will form the basis of the complete calculation of the 3PN radiation field of compact binaries by means of dimensional regularization.Comment: 33 pages, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Fluid resuscitation in adults with severe burns at risk of secondary abdominal compartment syndrome—An evidence based systematic review

Background: Secondary abdominal compartment syndrome (sACS) in adults with severe burns is commonly unsuspected, can be rapidly fatal and seriously compromises the reliability of urine output as an indicator of perfusion and resuscitation status. Current literature lacks an exhaustive, evidence-based review critically appraising all retrieved literature on which clinical decisions may be based. Methods: The evidence on three inter-related concepts was evaluated: fluid-volume management and its contribution to sACS; the role of urinary bladder pressure monitoring; and awareness of the burns community to sACS. Literature published over the last ten years across the major databases was retrieved, and the search strategy was fully reported to reduce the retrieval bias ubiquitous in previous literature. Each article was individually appraised and classified into a framework of evidence, enabling the formulation of specific, graded recommendations. Results: Current best evidence supports recommendations to reduce fluid-volume administered through use of colloids or hypertonic saline especially if the projected resuscitation volume surpasses a ‘volume ceiling’. Continuous intra-vesical monitoring is recommended: to guide fluid resuscitation for early diagnosis of sACS; and as a guide to reliability of urine output as indicator of organ perfusion. A priming volume of 75 cm3 or less is recommended. Conclusion: Fluid resuscitation volume is causative to sACS, especially once a predetermined maxima is reached. Continuous intra-vesical pressure monitoring is a cheap, reliable, userfriendly monitoringmethod recommended in high-risk patients. Poor awareness among the burns community requires urgent dissemination of evidence based information

Perturbative stability of the QCD analysis of DIS data

We perform pQCD analysis of the existing DIS data for charged leptons with account of corrections up to the NNLO. The parton distributions, value of strong coupling constant, and high-twist terms are extracted and their stability with respect to account of the NNLO corrections is analyzed. All the quantities are generally stable within their experimental errors. Obtained value of the strong coupling constant is $\alpha_s^{\rm NNLO}(M_{\rm Z})=0.1143\pm 0.0014 ({\rm exp})$ with a guess $\alpha_s^{\rm NNNLO}(M_{\rm Z})\sim 0.113$.Comment: 4 pages, LATEX, 3 figures (EPS). Talk presented at the 37th Rencontres de Moriond, QCD and Hadronic Interactions, Les Arcs 1800 (France), March 16-23 200

Boundary Terms, Spinors and Kerr/CFT

Similarly as in AdS/CFT, the requirement that the action for spinors be stationary for solutions to the Dirac equation with fixed boundary conditions determines the form of the boundary term that needs to be added to the standard Dirac action in Kerr/CFT. We determine this boundary term and make use of it to calculate the two-point function for spinor fields in Kerr/CFT. This two-point function agrees with the correlator of a two dimensional relativistic conformal field theory.Comment: 15 page