Reduction of turbomachinery noise

In the invention, propagating broad band and tonal acoustic components of noise characteristic of interaction of a turbomachine blade wake, produced by a turbomachine blade as the blade rotates, with a turbomachine component downstream of the rotating blade, are reduced. This is accomplished by injection of fluid into the blade wake through a port in the rotor blade. The mass flow rate of the fluid injected into the blade wake is selected to reduce the momentum deficit of the wake to correspondingly increase the time-mean velocity of the wake and decrease the turbulent velocity fluctuations of the wake. With this fluid injection, reduction of both propagating broad band and tonal acoustic components of noise produced by interaction of the blade wake with a turbomachine component downstream of the rotating blade is achieved. In a further noise reduction technique, boundary layer fluid is suctioned into the turbomachine blade through a suction port on the side of the blade that is characterized as the relatively low-pressure blade side. As with the fluid injection technique, the mass flow rate of the fluid suctioned into the blade is here selected to reduce the momentum deficit of the wake to correspondingly increase the time-mean velocity of the wake and decrease the turbulent velocity fluctuations of the wake; reduction of both propagating broad band and tonal acoustic components of noise produced by interaction of the blade wake with a turbomachine component downstream of the rotating blade is achieved with this suction technique. Blowing and suction techniques are also provided in the invention for reducing noise associated with the wake produced by fluid flow around a stationary blade upstream of a rotating turbomachine

Precision Cosmology from X-ray AGN clustering

We place tight constraints on the main cosmological parameters of spatially flat cosmological models by using the recent angular clustering results of XMM-{\it Newton} soft (0.5-2 keV) X-ray sources (Ebrero et al. 2009a), which have a redshift distribution with a median of $z\sim 1$. Performing a standard likelihood procedure, assuming a constant in comoving coordinates AGN clustering evolution, the AGN bias evolution model of Basilakos et al. (2008) and the WMAP5 value of $\sigma_8$, we find stringent simultaneous constraints in the ($\Omega_{m},$w) plane, with $\Omega_{m}= 0.26\pm 0.05$, w$=-0.93^{+0.11}_{-0.19}$.Comment: Accepted for publication, MNRAS Lett. in press, 5 pages, 2 figure

Re-Focusing - Building a Future for Entrepreneurial Education & Learning

The field of entrepreneurship has struggled with fundamental questions concerning the subject’s nature and purpose. To whom and to what means are educational and training agendas ultimately directed? Such questions have become of central importance to policy makers, practitioners and academics alike. There are suggestions that university business schools should engage more critically with the lived experiences of practising entrepreneurs through alternative pedagogical approaches and methods, seeking to account for and highlighting the social, political and moral aspects of entrepreneurial practice. In the UK, where funding in higher education has become increasingly dependent on student fees, there are renewed pressures to educate students for entrepreneurial practice as opposed to educating them about the nature and effects of entrepreneurship. Government and EU policies are calling on business schools to develop and enhance entrepreneurial growth and skill sets, to make their education and training programmes more proactive in providing innovative educational practices which help and facilitate life experiences and experiential learning. This paper makes the case for critical frameworks to be applied so that complex social processes become a source of learning for educators and entrepreneurs and so that innovative pedagogical approaches can be developed in terms both of context (curriculum design) and process (delivery methods)

Equilibrium and stability of neutrino lumps as TOV solutions

We report about stability conditions for static, spherically symmetric objects that share the essential features of mass varying neutrinos in cosmological scenarios. Compact structures of particles with variable mass are held together preponderantly by an attractive force mediated by a background scalar field. Their corresponding conditions for equilibrium and stability are given in terms of the ratio between the total mass-energy and the spherical lump radius, $M/R$. We show that the mass varying mechanism leading to lump formation can modify the cosmological predictions for the cosmological neutrino mass limits. Our study comprises Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff solutions of relativistic objects with non-uniform energy densities. The results leave open some questions concerning stable regular solutions that, to an external observer, very closely reproduce the preliminary conditions to form Schwarzschild black holes.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Supervision and Scholarly Writing: Writing to Learn - Learning to Write

This paper describes an action research project on postgraduate students’ scholarly writing in which I employed reflective approaches to examine and enhance my postgraduate supervisory practice. My reflections on three distinct cycles of supervision illustrate a shift in thinking about scholarly writing and an evolving understanding of how to support postgraduate students’ writing. These understandings provide the foundation for a future-oriented fourth cycle of supervisory practice, which is characterised by three principles, namely the empowerment of students as writers, the technological context of contemporary writing, and ethical issues in writing

A kapwa-infused paradigm in teaching Catholic theology/catechesis in a multireligious classroom in the Philippines

The increasing religious diversity in educational space has raised a legitimate question on how Catholic theology/ catechesis must be taught in Philippine Catholic universities given the institutional mandate to educate students “into the faith of the Church through teaching of Christian doctrine in an organic and systematic way” (Wuerl, 2013, 1). On this note, the paper makes reference to “centered plural- ism” (CP), a positional posture espoused by Georgetown University in dealing with this predicament. In an attempt to (re) appropriate CP into local context, there is a need to explore the Filipino conception of self/others as enveloped within the indigenous concept of kapwa. Hereon, the paper finds that CP is not just feasibly suitable in local context but with kapwa's more inclusive description of the relationship of self and others, a CP‐based teaching paradigm in theology/ catechesis is a promising project in the educational scene of the Philippines

Primordial Neutrinos, Cosmological Perturbations in Interacting Dark-Energy Model: CMB and LSS

We present cosmological perturbation theory in neutrinos probe interacting dark-energy models, and calculate cosmic microwave background anisotropies and matter power spectrum. In these models, the evolution of the mass of neutrinos is determined by the quintessence scalar field, which is responsible for the cosmic acceleration today. We consider several types of scalar field potentials and put constraints on the coupling parameter between neutrinos and dark energy. Assuming the flatness of the universe, the constraint we can derive from the current observation is $\sum m_{\nu} < 0.87 eV$ at the 95 % confidence level for the sum over three species of neutrinos. We also discuss on the stability issue of the our model and on the impact of the scattering term in Boltzmann equation from the mass-varying neutrinos.Comment: 26 pages Revtex, 11 figures, Add new contents and reference

Learning is Like a Lava Lamp: The Student Journey to Critical Thinking

This paper explores the ways in which a university Foundation Degree programme supports undergraduate early years students to develop critical thinking, mindfulness and self-actualisation through their lived personal and professional experiences. It considers the impact of this on graduates employed within the Early Years sector. Findings inform future design of a University Foundation Degree programme situated within Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). As undergraduates, students engage in higher-level learning aligned to their practice within the workplace. An interpretive Participatory Qualitative Research methodology is used to gather the views of 6 alumni who completed their studies in 2014. They participated in the research freely within ethical parameters approved by a university ethics committee. Findings revealed that the development of critical thinking is empowered by having a personal or professional impetus, which in the case of Early Years is the child as being at the heart of values based practice. This, with the inclusion of mindfulness, drives students to a sustainable deeper layer of thinking to achieve self-actualisation. Through the acquisition of critical thinking students have been subsequently able to take up positions of authority within the early years workforce

Investigation of the Origin and Spread of a Mammalian Transposable Element Based on Current Sequence Diversity

Almost half the human genome consists of mobile DNA elements, and their analysis is a vital part of understanding the human genome as a whole. Many of these elements are ancient and have persisted in the genome for tens or hundreds of millions of years, providing a window into the evolution of modern mammals. The Golem family have been used as model transposons to highlight computational analyses which can be used to investigate these elements, particularly the use of molecular dating with large transposon families. Whole-genome searches found Golem sequences in 20 mammalian species. Golem A and B subsequences were only found in primates and squirrel. Interestingly, the full-length Golem, found as a few copies in many mammalian genomes, was found abundantly in horse. A phylogenetic profile suggested that Golem originated after the eutherian–metatherian divergence and that the A and B subfamilies originated at a much later date. Molecular dating based on sequence diversity suggests an early age, of 175 Mya, for the origin of the family and that the A and B lineages originated much earlier than expected from their current taxonomic distribution and have subsequently been lost in some lineages. Using publically available data, it is possible to investigate the evolutionary history of transposon families. Determining in which organisms a transposon can be found is often used to date the origin and expansion of the families. However, in this analysis, molecular dating, commonly used for determining the age of gene sequences, has been used, reducing the likelihood of errors from deleted lineages