Towards a UK local government reform Act of 2015: improving public sector performance for 2025

This paper proposes a three tiered governance structure to rebalance local government within the United Kingdom. The introduction of a North of England assembly is proposed to rebalance the North / South divide. An international comparison of U.K. Australian and Canadian public sectors suggests that the U.K lags behind in competitiveness and wellbeing. Calling for equality for all citizens, the paper concludes that a shift in central government policy formulation is needed to enable equitable localisation of political power and improved global competitiveness of the U.K

HEER: Hybrid Energy Efficient Reactive Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of numerous sensors which send sensed data to base station. Energy conservation is an important issue for sensor nodes as they have limited power.Many routing protocols have been proposed earlier for energy efficiency of both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. We can prolong our stability and network lifetime by reducing our energy consumption. In this research paper, we propose a protocol designed for the characteristics of a reactive homogeneous WSNs, HEER (Hybrid Energy Efficient Reactive) protocol. In HEER, Cluster Head(CH) selection is based on the ratio of residual energy of node and average energy of network. Moreover, to conserve more energy, we introduce Hard Threshold (HT) and Soft Threshold (ST). Finally, simulations show that our protocol has not only prolonged the network lifetime but also significantly increased stability period.Comment: 2nd IEEE Saudi International Electronics, Communications and Photonics Conference (SIECPC 13), 2013, Riyadh, Saudi Arabi

Accuracy of urinary human papillomavirus testing for presence of cervical HPV: systematic review and meta-analysis

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.Funding: This study did not receive any fundin

URINARY TESTING FOR HPV Authors' reply to Vorsters and colleagues

This is the peer reviewed published version of the following article: URINARY TESTING FOR HPV Authors' reply to Vorsters and colleagues, which has been published in final form at 10.1136/bmj.g6253. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with BMJ's Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

On Energy Efficiency and Delay Minimization in Reactive Protocols in Wireless Multi-hop Networks

In Wireless Multi-hop Networks (WMhNs), routing protocols with energy efficient and delay reduction techniques are needed to fulfill users demands. In this paper, we present Linear Programming models (LP_models) to assess and enhance reactive routing protocols. To practically examine constraints of respective LP_models over reactive protocols, we select AODV, DSR and DYMO. It is deduced from analytical simulations of LP_models in MATLAB that quick route repair reduces routing latency and optimizations of retransmission attempts results efficient energy utilization. To provide quick repair, we enhance AODV and DSR. To practically examine the efficiency of enhanced protocols in different scenarios of WMhNs, we conduct simulations using NS- 2. From simulation results, enhanced DSR and AODV achieve efficient output by optimizing routing latencies and routing load in terms of retransmission attempts

Effects of the tensor force on the ground and first 2+2^{+} states of the magic 54^{54}Ca nucleus

The magic nature of the $^{54}$Ca nucleus is investigated in the light of the recent experimental results. We employ both HFB and HF+BCS methods using Skyrme-type SLy5, SLy5+T and T44 interactions. The evolution of the single-particle spectra is studied for the N=34 isotones: $^{60}$Fe, $^{58}$Cr, $^{56}$Ti and $^{54}$Ca. An increase is obtained in the neutron spin-orbit splittings of $p$ and $f$ states due to the effect of the tensor force which also makes $^{54}$Ca a magic nucleus candidate. QRPA calculations on top of HF+BCS are performed to investigate the first $J^{\pi}$=$2^{+}$ states of the calcium isotopic chain. A good agreement for excitation energies is obtained when we include the tensor force in the mean-field part of the calculations. The first $2^{+}$ states indicate a subshell closure for both $^{52}$Ca and $^{54}$Ca nuclei. We confirm that the tensor part of the interaction is quite essential in explaining the neutron subshell closure in $^{52}$Ca and $^{54}$Ca nuclei.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

On using Multiple Quality Link Metrics with Destination Sequenced Distance Vector Protocol for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

In this paper, we compare and analyze performance of five quality link metrics forWireless Multi-hop Networks (WMhNs). The metrics are based on loss probability measurements; ETX, ETT, InvETX, ML and MD, in a distance vector routing protocol; DSDV. Among these selected metrics, we have implemented ML, MD, InvETX and ETT in DSDV which are previously implemented with different protocols; ML, MD, InvETX are implemented with OLSR, while ETT is implemented in MR-LQSR. For our comparison, we have selected Throughput, Normalized Routing Load (NRL) and End-to-End Delay (E2ED) as performance parameters. Finally, we deduce that InvETX due to low computational burden and link asymmetry measurement outperforms among all metrics

Performance Analysis of Hierarchical Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

This work focusses on analyzing the optimization strategies of routing protocols with respect to energy utilization of sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs). Different routing mechanisms have been proposed to address energy optimization problem in sensor nodes. Clustering mechanism is one of the popular WSNs routing mechanisms. In this paper, we first address energy limitation constraints with respect to maximizing network life time using linear programming formulation technique. To check the efficiency of different clustering scheme against modeled constraints, we select four cluster based routing protocols; Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Threshold Sensitive Energy Efficient sensor Network (TEEN), Stable Election Protocol (SEP), and Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (DEEC). To validate our mathematical framework, we perform analytical simulations in MATLAB by choosing number of alive nodes, number of dead nodes, number of packets and number of CHs, as performance metrics.Comment: NGWMN with 7th IEEE International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA 2012), Victoria, Canada, 201