Overlaps in dimensions of poverty

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed. We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another. The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty –the results obtained are just not reliable enough. Surveys, such as the Family Resources Survey or the European Community Household Panel, which are used to monitor the prevalence of poverty, need to be adapted to enable results to be triangulated – to incorporate a wider range of poverty measures

Are Chromospheric Nanoflares a Primary Source of Coronal Plasma?

It has been suggested that the hot plasma of the solar corona comes primarily from impulsive heating events, or nanoflares, that occur in the lower atmosphere, either in the upper part of the ordinary chromosphere or at the tips of type II spicules. We test this idea with a series of hydrodynamic simulations. We find that synthetic Fe XII (195) and Fe XIV (274) line profiles generated from the simulations disagree dramatically with actual observations. The integrated line intensities are much too faint; the blue shifts are much too fast; the blue-red asymmetries are much too large; and the emission is confined to low altitudes. We conclude that chromospheric nanoflares are not a primary source of hot coronal plasma. Such events may play an important role in producing the chromosphere and powering its intense radiation, but they do not, in general, raise the temperature of the plasma to coronal values. Those cases where coronal temperatures are reached must be relatively uncommon. The observed profiles of Fe XII and Fe XIV come primarily from plasma that is heated in the corona itself, either by coronal nanoflares or a quasi-steady coronal heating process. Chromospheric nanoflares might play a role in generating waves that provide this coronal heating.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, accepted by Astrophysical Journa

The Cooling of Coronal Plasmas. iv: Catastrophic Cooling of Loops

We examine the radiative cooling of coronal loops and demonstrate that the recently identified catastrophic cooling (Reale and Landi, 2012) is due to the inability of a loop to sustain radiative / enthalpy cooling below a critical temperature, which can be > 1 MK in flares, 0.5 - 1 MK in active regions and 0.1 MK in long tenuous loops. Catastrophic cooling is characterised by a rapid fall in coronal temperature while the coronal density changes by a small amount. Analytic expressions for the critical temperature are derived and show good agreement with numerical results. This effect limits very considerably the lifetime of coronal plasmas below the critical temperature

Combination of molecular similarity measures using data fusion

Many different measures of structural similarity have been suggested for matching chemical structures, each such measure focusing upon some particular type of molecular characteristic. The multi-faceted nature of biological activity suggests that an appropriate similarity measure should encompass many different types of characteristic, and this article discusses the use of data fusion methods to combine the results of searches based on multiple similarity measures. Experiments with several different types of dataset and activity suggest that data fusion provides a simple, but effective, approach to the combination of individual similarity measures. The best results were generally obtained with a fusion rule that sums the rank positions achieved by each molecule in searches using individual measures

Can Big Media do "Big Society"?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News

The UK Government is committed to helping ‘nurture a new generation of local media companies’. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This paper provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Media’s network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the ‘community publishers’ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally-elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Government’s preferred convergent, commercial model