Management system requirements for wireless systems beyond 3G

This paper presents a comprehensive description of various management system requirements for systems beyond 3G, which have been identified as a result of the Software Based Systems activities within the Mobile VCE Core 2 program. Specific requirements for systems beyond 3G are discussed and potential technologies to address them proposed. The analysis has been carried out from network, service and security viewpoints

Reducing Energy Use and Carbon Emissions: A Critical Assessment of Small-Group Interventions

Motivating individuals to decrease the environmental impact of their lifestyles could play an important role in reducing energy use and meeting carbon reduction commitments in developed countries. Few approaches which encourage voluntary changes in behaviour result in substantial reductions in energy use, however, particularly over the longer term. An exception to this general trend is small-group interventions which use group participation and which target collections of behaviours including energy use. Through a critical examination of published data this paper considers the energy and carbon emission reductions achieved by such initiatives, the durability of those reductions, and the common elements which may contribute to their success. Participants in small-group interventions reduced their energy use and carbon emissions by approximately 20% within a year. There is also some evidence that these reductions were lasting and that participants continued to make changes to their lifestyles after the end of the intervention. The reasonable person model (RPM) is proposed as a useful framework for understanding the success of these small-group interventions. Examination of small-group interventions suggests that they provide settings which are supportive of informational needs, and that this may be important to their success in promoting substantial and durable decreases in energy use

Highly active iridium(I) complexes for the selective hydrogenation of carbon-carbon multiple bonds

New iridium(I) complexes, bearing a bulky NHC/phosphine ligand combination, have been established as extremely efficient hydrogenation catalysts that can be used at low catalyst loadings, and are compatible with functional groups which are often sensitive to more routinely employed hydrogenation methods

A national scale inventory of resource provision for biodiversity within domestic gardens

The human population is increasingly disconnected from nature due to urbanisation. To counteract this phenomenon, the UK government has been actively promoting wildlife gardening. However, the extent to which such activities are conducted and the level of resource provision for biodiversity (e.g., food and nesting sites) within domestic gardens remains poorly documented. Here we generate estimates for a selection of key resources provided within gardens at a national scale, using 12 survey datasets gathered across the UK. We estimate that 22.7 million households (87% of homes) have access to a garden. Average garden SiZe is 190 m(2), extrapolating to a total area of 432,924 ha. Although substantial, this coverage is still an order of magnitude less than that of statutory protected areas. Approximately 12.6 million (48%) households provide supplementary food for birds, 7.4 million of which specifically use bird feeders. Similarly, there are a minimum of 4.7 million nest boxes within gardens. These figures equate to one bird feeder for every nine potentially feeder-using birds in the UK, and at least one nest box for every six breeding pairs of cavity nesting birds. Gardens also contain 2.5-3.5 million ponds and 28.7 million trees, which is just under a quarter of all trees occurring outside woodlands. Ongoing urbanisation, characterised by increased housing densities, is inevitable throughout the UK and elsewhere. The important contribution domestic gardens make to the green space infrastructure in residential areas must be acknowledged, as their reduction will impact biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and the well-being of the human population

Understanding energy behaviours and transitions through the lens of a smart grid Agent Based Model

Available from: .Investigating the dynamics of consumption is crucial for understanding the wider socio-technical transitions needed to achieve carbon reduction goals in the energy sector. Such insight is particularly necessary when considering Smart Grids and current debates about potential transition pathways (and contingent benefits) for the electricity system and coupled gas and transport systems. The electricity grid is a complex adaptive system comprising physical networks, economic markets and multiple, heterogeneous, interacting agents. Fundamental to innovation studies is that social practices and technological artefacts shape and are shaped by one another. Different trajectories of socio-technical systems’ transition are intrinsically linked to the behavioural and cognitive norms of individuals, businesses, communities, sectors, and governance institutions. Therefore the transition to smart(er) grids inevitably requires a knowledge transition and behaviour change among such actor groups. To date, these effects have not been modelled. We present a prototype Agent Based Model (ABM) as a means to examine the effect of individual behaviour and social learning on energy use patterns, from the perspectives of adoption of energy saving behaviours, energy saving technologies and individual or community based energy use practices. We draw on the Energy Cultures framework to understand real-world observations and incorporate representative energy use behaviours into the model and discuss the model’s relation to case studies, e.g. energy use in island communities. Such models enable examination of how far we can learn and scale up lessons from case studies to similar Socio-Technical Systems with bigger scale and greater interconnectivity such as the UK national grid.EPSRC - grant EP/G059969/

Contaminant signature at Los Alamos firing sites

During a dynamic weapons test, a weapons component is either explosively detonated or impacted against a target in the open air environment. This results in both the production of a wide size range of depleted uranium particles as well as particle scattering over a considerable distance away from the firing pad. The explosive detonation process which creates aerial distribution over a watershed distinguishes this contaminant transport problem from others where the source term is spatially discrete. Investigations of this contamination began in 1983 with collection of onsite soils, sediments, and rock samples to establish uranium concentrations. The samples were analyzed for total uranium to evaluate the magnitude of transport of uranium away from firing sites by airborne and surface water runoff mechanisms. This data was then used to define a firing site

Mass Dependence of M3Y-Type Interactions and the Effects of Tensor Correlations

The mass dependence of the M3Y-type effective interactions and the effects of tensor correlations are examined. Two-body nuclear matrix elements are obtained by the lowest order constrained variational (LOCV) technique with and without tensor correlations. We have found that the tensor correlations are important especially in the triplet-even (TE) and tensor-even (TNE) channels in order to reproduce the G-matrix elements obtained previously. Then M3Y-type potentials for inelastic scattering are obtained by fitting our two-body matrix elements to those of a sum of Yukawa functions for the mass numbers A=24, A=40 and A=90.Comment: 13 pages, 6 table

Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder

Behavioral researchers are increasingly conducting their studies online, to gain access to large and diverse samples that would be difficult to get in a laboratory environment. However, there are technical access barriers to building experiments online, and web browsers can present problems for consistent timing—an important issue with reaction-time-sensitive measures. For example, to ensure accuracy and test–retest reliability in presentation and response recording, experimenters need a working knowledge of programming languages such as JavaScript. We review some of the previous and current tools for online behavioral research, as well as how well they address the issues of usability and timing. We then present the Gorilla Experiment Builder (gorilla.sc), a fully tooled experiment authoring and deployment platform, designed to resolve many timing issues and make reliable online experimentation open and accessible to a wider range of technical abilities. To demonstrate the platform’s aptitude for accessible, reliable, and scalable research, we administered a task with a range of participant groups (primary school children and adults), settings (without supervision, at home, and under supervision, in both schools and public engagement events), equipment (participant’s own computer, computer supplied by the researcher), and connection types (personal internet connection, mobile phone 3G/4G). We used a simplified flanker task taken from the attentional network task (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004). We replicated the Bconflict network^ effect in all these populations, demonstrating the platform’s capability to run reaction-time-sensitive experiments. Unresolved limitations of running experiments online are then discussed, along with potential solutions and some future features of the platform

Perfectionism, anxiety, and depressive distress: Evidence for the mediating role of negative automatic thoughts and anxiety sensitivity

This study assessed a mediational model in which negative automatic thoughts and anxiety sensitivity were hypothesized to mediate the relationship between perfectionism cognitions and depressive and anxiety symptoms.Participants: Participants were undergraduate students from an urban Canadian university. The data were collected from July 2009 to August 2010.Methods: In a cross-sectional evaluation, 992 undergraduate participants completed questionnaires that assessed perfectionism cognitions, negative automatic thinking, anxiety sensitivity, and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Mediational analysis confirmed the role of anxiety sensitivity and negative automatic thoughts in mediating the association between perfectionistic cognitions, anxiety symptoms, and depressive distress. Furthermore, in line with previous studies, nearly a third of students displayed an elevated prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms. This study further clarified the associations and mediating relationships among mood states associated with perfectionism.Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC

Ovarian cancer--the need for change in service delivery in Northern Ireland.

This paper provides local data on the provision of services for patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1996 prior to the reorganisation of cancer services. It documents a service for 140 patients provided by 80 consultant teams and illustrates the need for reorganisation to meet the evidence base already in existence for improvement in survival and will serve as a baseline for future audits in this area