386 research outputs found
Sustainable care: theorising the wellbeing of caregivers to older persons
The term âcare crisisâ is invoked to denote chronic system failures and bad outcomes for the people involved. We present a comprehensive wellbeing framework and illustrate its practicality with evidence of negative outcomes for those who provide care. We find evidence of substantial material and relational wellbeing failures for family carers and for care workers, while there has been little interest in carersâ views of their ability to live the life that they most value. Understanding and improving wellbeing outcomes for carers is an essential component of sustainable care, which requires the wellbeing of the different actors in care arrangements
Buyback Problem - Approximate matroid intersection with cancellation costs
In the buyback problem, an algorithm observes a sequence of bids and must
decide whether to accept each bid at the moment it arrives, subject to some
constraints on the set of accepted bids. Decisions to reject bids are
irrevocable, whereas decisions to accept bids may be canceled at a cost that is
a fixed fraction of the bid value. Previous to our work, deterministic and
randomized algorithms were known when the constraint is a matroid constraint.
We extend this and give a deterministic algorithm for the case when the
constraint is an intersection of matroid constraints. We further prove a
matching lower bound on the competitive ratio for this problem and extend our
results to arbitrary downward closed set systems. This problem has applications
to banner advertisement, semi-streaming, routing, load balancing and other
problems where preemption or cancellation of previous allocations is allowed
Semi-Streaming Set Cover
This paper studies the set cover problem under the semi-streaming model. The
underlying set system is formalized in terms of a hypergraph whose
edges arrive one-by-one and the goal is to construct an edge cover with the objective of minimizing the cardinality (or cost in the weighted
case) of . We consider a parameterized relaxation of this problem, where
given some , the goal is to construct an edge -cover, namely, a subset of edges incident to all but an
-fraction of the vertices (or their benefit in the weighted case).
The key limitation imposed on the algorithm is that its space is limited to
(poly)logarithmically many bits per vertex.
Our main result is an asymptotically tight trade-off between and
the approximation ratio: We design a semi-streaming algorithm that on input
graph , constructs a succinct data structure such that for
every , an edge -cover that approximates
the optimal edge \mbox{(-)cover} within a factor of can be
extracted from (efficiently and with no additional space
requirements), where In particular for the traditional
set cover problem we obtain an -approximation. This algorithm is
proved to be best possible by establishing a family (parameterized by
) of matching lower bounds.Comment: Full version of the extended abstract that will appear in Proceedings
of ICALP 2014 track
Inclusive growth: the challenges of multidimensionality and multilateralism
The two decades either side of the global financial crisis have seen a remarkable surge and an equally remarkable reaction to global inequalities. This has played some part in fuelling the recent populist backlash against globalisation. In response, many global institutions and some national governments have embraced the concept of inclusive growth â proposing a policy agenda designed to share the benefits of economic growth and development more equitably. This paper argues that the current debate about inclusivity suffers from two major misspecifications that weaken the concept and undermine the prospect of the economic and political goals it stands for being achieved. For inclusivity to be meaningful and sustainable it must be understood in multidimensional terms, but attaching it to orthodox thinking on growth continually draws the debate back to narrow economic considerations. The concept has also been hampered by âmethodological nationalismâ, whereby policies for inclusivity are considered predominantly at the national level without adequate attention being given to the multilateral dimensions of inclusivity in a world of global interdependence. To be coherent and applicable, inclusive growth must be (re)conceived multilaterally and embrace a more multidimensional notion of inclusive development that hinges around a meaningful conception of human wellbeing
Blue urea : fertilizer with reduced environmental impact
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers such as urea are a necessity for food production, making them invaluable toward achieving global food security. Conventional manufacture of urea is conducted in centralized production plants at an enormous scale, with the subsequent prilled urea product distributed to the point-of-use. Despite consuming carbon dioxide in the synthesis, the overall process is carbon positive due to the use of fossil feedstocks, resulting in significant net emissions. Blue Urea could be produced using attenuated reaction conditions and hydrogen derived from renewable-powered electrolysis to produce a reduced-carbon alternative. This paper demonstrates the intensified production of urea and ammonium nitrate fertilizers from sustainable feedstocks, namely water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Critically, the process can be scaled-down such that equipment can be housed in a standardized ISO container deployed at the point-of-use, delocalizing production and eliminating costs, and emissions associated with transportation. The urea and ammonium nitrate were synthesized in a semi-continuous process under considerably milder conditions to produce aqueous fertilizers suitable for direct soil application, eliminating the financial and energetic costs associated with drying and prilling. The composition of the fertilizers from this process were found to be free from contaminants, making them ideal for application. In growth studies, the synthesized urea and ammonium nitrate were applied under controlled conditions and found to perform comparably to a commercial fertilizer (Nitram). Crucially, both the synthesized fertilizers enhanced biomass growth, nitrogen uptake and leaf chlorophylls (even in depleted soils), strongly suggesting they would be effective toward improving crop yields and agricultural output. The Blue Urea concept is proposed for installation in ISO containers and deployment on farms, offering a turnkey solution for point-of-need production of nitrogen fertilizers
Manageable creativity
This article notes a perception in mainstream management theory and practice that creativity has shifted from being disruptive or destructive to 'manageable'. This concept of manageable creativity in business is reflected in a similar rhetoric in cultural policy, especially towards the creative industries. The article argues that the idea of 'manageable creativity' can be traced back to a 'heroic' and a 'structural' model of creativity. It is argued that the 'heroic' model of creativity is being subsumed within a 'structural' model which emphasises the systems and infrastructure around individual creativity rather than focusing on raw talent and pure content. Yet this structured approach carries problems of its own, in particular a tendency to overlook the unpredictability of creative processes, people and products. Ironically, it may be that some confusion in our policies towards creativity is inevitable, reflecting the paradoxes and transitions which characterise the creative process
Accounting for the impact of conservation on human well-being
Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well-being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well-being and are starting to converge on a common understanding of how best to do this. In conservation, the term human well-being is in widespread use, but there is a need for guidance on operationalizing it to measure the impacts of conservation interventions on people. We present a framework for understanding human well-being, which could be particularly useful in conservation. The framework includes 3 conditions; meeting needs, pursuing goals, and experiencing a satisfactory quality of life. We outline some of the complexities involved in evaluating the well-being effects of conservation interventions, with the understanding that well-being varies between people and over time and with the priorities of the evaluator. Key challenges for research into the well-being impacts of conservation interventions include the need to build up a collection of case studies so as to draw out generalizable lessons; harness the potential of modern technology to support well-being research; and contextualize evaluations of conservation impacts on well-being spatially and temporally within the wider landscape of social change. Pathways through the smog of confusion around the term well-being exist, and existing frameworks such as the Well-being in Developing Countries approach can help conservationists negotiate the challenges of operationalizing the concept. Conservationists have the opportunity to benefit from the recent flurry of research in the development field so as to carry out more nuanced and locally relevant evaluations of the effects of their interventions on human well-being
First Observation of Coherent Production in Neutrino Nucleus Interactions with 2 GeV
The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab has amassed the largest sample to date
of s produced in neutral current (NC) neutrino-nucleus interactions at
low energy. This paper reports a measurement of the momentum distribution of
s produced in mineral oil (CH) and the first observation of coherent
production below 2 GeV. In the forward direction, the yield of events
observed above the expectation for resonant production is attributed primarily
to coherent production off carbon, but may also include a small contribution
from diffractive production on hydrogen. Integrated over the MiniBooNE neutrino
flux, the sum of the NC coherent and diffractive modes is found to be (19.5
1.1 (stat) 2.5 (sys))% of all exclusive NC production at
MiniBooNE. These measurements are of immediate utility because they quantify an
important background to MiniBooNE's search for
oscillations.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Lett.
Dark Energy and Neutrino CPT Violation
In this paper we study the dynamical CPT violation in the neutrino sector
induced by the dark energy of the Universe. Specifically we consider a dark
energy model where the dark energy scalar derivatively interacts with the
right-handed neutrinos. This type of derivative coupling leads to a
cosmological CPT violation during the evolution of the background field of the
dark energy. We calculate the induced CPT violation of left-handed neutrinos
and find the CPT violation produced in this way is consistent with the present
experimental limit and sensitive to the future neutrino oscillation
experiments, such as the neutrino factory.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Typos corrected and references added. To be
published in EPJ
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