Questionnaire surveys to discover academic staff and library staff perceptions of a National Union catalogue

During the feasibility study into a National Union catalogue for the UK (UKNUC), a questionnaire survey was undertaken of the needs of both academic staff in higher education and library staff. A response rate of 40-50 per cent was achieved, 846 questionnaires being returned for academics and 724 for librarians. The analysis suggests that a UKNUC would be highly valued and heavily used by all categories. Academics felt it would have a positive effect on their information searching, and wished to include the holdings of the British Library, and libraries of both the major research universities and the ``traditional’’ universities. They wanted it to be comprehensive and easy to use, to include locations of both books and journals, and to facilitate subject collection searching. Library staff have similar priorities to academics, although there are more variations by sector and a recognition of a UKNUC’s value as a potential source of bibliographic records

Projections of the future path of the gender wage gap in Great Britain

Purpose &ndash; The paper attempts to project the future trend of the gender wage gap in Great Britain up to 2031.Design/methodology/approach &ndash; The empirical analysis utilises the British Household Panel Study Wave F together with Office for National Statistics (ONS) demographic projections. The methodology combines the ONS projections with assumptions relating to the evolution of educational attainment in order to project the future distribution of human capital skills and consequently the future size of the gender wage gap.Findings &ndash; The analysis suggests that gender wage convergence will be slow, with little female progress by 2031 unless there is a large rise in returns to female experience.Originality/value &ndash; The paper has projected the pattern of male and female skill acquisition together with the associated trend in wages up to 2031.<br /

Wait no more : the use of private dental services by welfare recipients in Australia

Dental services in Australia are available both privately and publicly. However, access to public dental services, like access to public hospital services for non-urgent treatment, is subject to a considerable waiting period. Moreover, access to public dental services is restricted to certain categories of welfare beneficiaries who qualify for a health care card. Because of the waiting time for public treatment, there is a frequent call for more public dental resources. This paper addresses the issue of what the waiting time for public dental services represents. One view largely confirmed by our research is that state governments are using the waiting time as a way of trying to push more and more people into the private sector. We find that more and more health care card holders are using theprivate sector for dental services.<br /

Gender crime convergence over twenty years

Men have typically been responsible for the majority of criminal activity and dominate prison populations around the globe. The twentieth century witnessed significant male-female convergence in a myriad of positive dimensions including human capital acquisition, labour force participation and wages. This has prompted the question, to what extent are women ‘looking more like men’? In this paper we examine whether similar forces are at play in the context of criminality. We study the pattern of gender convergence in crime using rich administrative data on the population of young people in Queensland, Australia. We present evidence of significant narrowing of the gender gap in criminal activity over the course of the last twenty years. Crime convergence occurs for broad aggregates of both property and violent crime, as well as for almost all sub-component categories. Convergence occurs largely because crime has fallen significantly for men, combined with much less of a downward trend for women. Results are supported by aggregate analysis of rates of offending in police force districts matched to census data by gender between 2001 and 2016

Gender crime convergence over twenty years: evidence from Australia

Historically men have been responsible for the majority of criminal activity and dominate prison populations around the globe. The twentieth century witnessed significant male–female convergence in a myriad of positive dimensions including human capital acquisition, labour force participation and wages. This has prompted the question, to what extent are women ‘looking more like men’? In this paper we examine whether similar forces are at play in the context of criminality. We study the pattern of gender convergence in crime using rich administrative data on the population of young people in Queensland, Australia. The evidence points to a significant narrowing of the gender gap in criminal activity over the course of the last twenty years. Crime convergence occurs for broad aggregates of both property and violent crime, as well as for almost all sub-component categories. Convergence occurs largely because crime has fallen significantly for men, combined with no downward trend for women. This is confirmed by aggregate analysis of rates of offending in police force districts matched to Census data by gender between 2001 and 201

School indiscipline and crime

This paper studies the impact of compulsory schooling on violent behaviour and victimization in school using individual-level administrative data matching education and criminal records from Queensland (Australia). Exploiting a legislative increase in the minimum dropout age in 2006, this study defines a series of regression-discontinuity specifications to show that compulsory schooling reduces crime but increases violent behaviour in school. While police records show that property and drugs offences decrease, education records indicate that violence and victimization in school increase. Thus, prior studies that fail to consider in-school behaviour may over-estimate the short-run crime-reducing impact of compulsory education

High-energy kink in high-temperature superconductors

In conventional metals, electron-phonon coupling, or the phonon-mediated interaction between electrons, has long been known to be the pairing interaction responsible for the superconductivity. The strength of this interaction essentially determines the superconducting transition temperature TC. One manifestation of electron-phonon coupling is a mass renormalization of the electronic dispersion at the energy scale associated with the phonons. This renormalization is directly observable in photoemission experiments. In contrast, there remains little consensus on the pairing mechanism in cuprate high temperature superconductors. The recent observation of similar renormalization effects in cuprates has raised the hope that the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity may finally be resolved. The focus has been on the low energy renormalization and associated "kink" in the dispersion at around 50 meV. However at that energy scale, there are multiple candidates including phonon branches, structure in the spin-fluctuation spectrum, and the superconducting gap itself, making the unique identification of the excitation responsible for the kink difficult. Here we show that the low-energy renormalization at ~50 meV is only a small component of the total renormalization, the majority of which occurs at an order of magnitude higher energy (~350 meV). This high energy kink poses a new challenge for the physics of the cuprates. Its role in superconductivity and relation to the low-energy kink remains to be determined.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

User Configuration of Activity Awareness

This paper describes an approach to user configuration of activity awareness. This approach offers users increased flexibility by allowing the use of multiple methods of configuration to be used within a unified framework; these configuration methods can include context, policy rules and automatic techniques of configuring behaviour. In this paper we describe the benefits of this flexibility and discuss a model of configuration that can be used to support these features

Efficient Charging System for Hyperloop Application

Conventional transportation methods are a major contributor to the climate crisis and Hyperloop systems are a proposed form of novel transportation that can provide a fast and energyefficient alternative. However, current research in Hyperloop technology has neglected the development of the charging infrastructure to facilitate repeated and high-speed charging cycles that minimize battery degradation. To address this, an efficient charging system for Hyperloop application is presented in this paper. Starting with a pre-existing electric vehicle (EV) charging model in MATLAB Simulink, the design was validated and scaled for the Hyperloop application to support a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery pack with parameters of 800V and 185Ah. This model was used to test the performance of the proposed charger and observe battery degradation in a variety of scenarios. Upon testing, the system parameters were tuned to successfully charge the specified battery pack in 42 minutes with the potential to decrease the charge duration by up to four times by using a higher charging current. The design was then scaled down to supply a LiFePO4 battery pack with 6.6V and 2.3Ah, which could be built in hardware to safely test and validate the design. The results of the small-scale prototype model were then compared with the full-scale model results. This yielded the same charge curve characteristics with only a 6% difference in the voltage magnitude, thus validating the scalability of the charging system. Finally, to minimize the effects of battery degradation, a temperature control system was designed to keep the battery pack at its ideal temperature (25°C) and was simulated at extreme temperatures of -30°C and 45°C. The results of the temperature control system showed a 7.2% reduction in battery degradation when compared to a system without a temperature control system