UKC Orbix Survival Guide

Orbix is a faithfull implementation of the CORBA standard developed by Iona of Ireland. This documents is a tutorial to using Orbix to produce distibuted applications. An example program is developed one step at a time and each of the stages is explained. The appendix contains a checklist to help when developing your own applications

Student Employability – Integrating term-time working into graduate employability

This was a final report of research based on interviews with students and employers with regard to student employability in the local north east labour market

Finding a Zipf distribution and cascading propagation metric in utility line outage data

Observed transmission line outage data is grouped into successive generations of events. The empirical distribution of the number of generations in the cascades follows a Zipf distribution that implies the increasing propagation as cascades progress. The slope of the Zipf distribution gives a System Event Propagation Slope Index (SEPSI). This new metric quantifies the cascade propagation, varies as expected, and determines the probabilities of small, medium, and large cascades

Integrating term-time working into graduate employability development strategies

Government at the time of this project was seeking to improve graduate employability. With work placements for undergraduates struggling to keep up with the expansion in student numbers, term-time working can potentially provide a significant source of employability skills. In recent years, reflecting changes such as the imposition of student fees and ending of maintenance grants, an increasing proportion of students are working. At Northumbria University, for example, research shows that around 60% undergraduates take a job during term-time. Our project builds on previous research into Students in the Labour Market, undertaken by the Northern Economic Research Unit (NERU), and based on interviews with students and employers. For this project, a sample of employers were interviewed with regard to student employability issues. The views of employers were also sought regarding developing more formalised links (i.e. with particular degree course programmes) in relation to student termtime working, as a means of pursuing employability (and other) outcomes. The paper reports on a survey of activity related to employability in other English universities, and incorporates these findings in its discussion of the way forward on this issue

Recording single-channel activity of inositol trisphosphate receptors in intact cells with a microscope, not a patch clamp.

Optical single-channel recording is a novel tool for the study of individual Ca2+-permeable channels within intact cells under minimally perturbed physiological conditions. As applied to the functioning and spatial organization of IP3Rs, this approach complements our existing knowledge, which derives largely from reduced systems - such as reconstitution into lipid bilayers and patch clamping of IP3Rs on the membrane of excised nuclei - where the spatial arrangement and interactions among IP3Rs via CICR are disrupted. The ability to image the activity of single IP3R channels with millisecond resolution together with localization of their positions with a precision of a few tens of nanometers both raises several intriguing questions and holds promise of answers. In particular, what mechanism underlies the anchoring of puffs and blips to static locations; why do these Ca2+ release events appear to involve only a very small fraction of the IP3Rs within a cell; and how can we reconcile the relative immotility of functional IP3Rs with numerous studies reporting free diffusion of IP3R protein in the ER membrane

North Tyneside Printing Sector Training Needs Analysis

The printing sector in this region has a proportionately low level of employment compared to the UK as a whole. North Tyneside provides the location for some 36 print-based firms, which account for only 11% of Tyne & Wear’s total print employment. However, this survey indicates that the official data significantly under-estimates the employment size of the sector in North Tyneside

Detailed Abundances of 15 Stars in the Metal-Poor Globular Cluster NGC 4833

We have observed 15 red giant stars in the relatively massive, metal-poor globular cluster NGC 4833 using the Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle spectrograph at Magellan. We calculate stellar parameters for each star and perform a standard abundance analysis to derive abundances of 43 species of 39 elements, including 20 elements heavier than the iron group. We derive = -2.25 +/- 0.02 from Fe I lines and = -2.19 +/- 0.013 from Fe II lines. We confirm earlier results that found no internal metallicity spread in NGC 4833, and there are no significant star-to-star abundance dispersions among any elements in the iron group (19 <= Z <= 30). We recover the usual abundance variations among the light elements C, N, O, Na, Mg, Al, and possibly Si. The heavy-element distribution reflects enrichment by r-process nucleosynthesis ([Eu/Fe] = +0.36 +/- 0.03), as found in many other metal-poor globular clusters. We investigate small star-to-star variations found among the neutron-capture elements, and we conclude that these are probably not real variations. Upper limits on the Th abundance, log epsilon (Th/Eu) < -0.47 +/- 0.09, indicate that NGC 4833, like other globular clusters where Th has been studied, did not experience a so-called "actinide boost."Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Version 2 adds final publication referenc