Researching the support needs of Pakistani families with disabled children in the UK

Copyright @ 2007 Social Services Research Group.Pakistani families living in the UK form one of the most disadvantaged sections of the society. Key issues faced relate to poverty, high unemployment, ill health, low levels of English proficiency, rising ‘Islamophobia’, men feeling misunderstood and misrepresented, and a lack of faith/culture appropriate facilities. When a disabled child is born, additional issues are added to this already challenging situation. These include a significantly higher incidence of disability, high costs of raising a disabled child, being less likely to receive benefits, poor access to health and social care, negative attitudes towards disability within the community and a high incidence of depression and anxiety among primary carers. Although a considerable body of research-based evidence has been available for well over a decade, no significant improvement in service provision to these families has been seen. The paper suggests that a critical paradigm of research, with emancipatory goals, is needed and that participatory action research be used to help Pakistani families gain better understanding of their own support needs and to provide better skills to be able to ensure that these needs will be met more effectively within the family, in the community and through mainstream services

A class of homogeneous scalar-tensor cosmologies with a radiation fluid

We present a new class of exact homogeneous cosmological solutions with a radiation fluid for all scalar-tensor theories. The solutions belong to Bianchi type $VI_{h}$ cosmologies. Explicit examples of nonsingular homogeneous scalar-tensor cosmologies are also given.Comment: 7 pages, LaTex; v2 type mistakes corrected, comments adde

The effect of FPU architecture on a dynamic precision algorithm for the solution of differential equations

Solution of lnitial Value Problems (IVPs) is an important application in scientific computing. Methods for solving these problems use techniques for reducing the error and increasing the speed of the computation. This paper introduces a class of algorithms which dynamically reconfigure their operating parameters to reduce the computation time. By dynamically varying the precision of the arithmetic being performed, it is possible to obtain dramatic speedups on certain architectures when solving IVPs. This paper illustrates how various architectures impact on a dynamic precision version of the Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg algorithm. It is shown that a speedup of over 30 percent is possible for both massively parallel processors and vector supercomputers

Spherical Orbifolds for Cosmic Topology

Harmonic analysis is a tool to infer cosmic topology from the measured astrophysical cosmic microwave background CMB radiation. For overall positive curvature, Platonic spherical manifolds are candidates for this analysis. We combine the specific point symmetry of the Platonic manifolds with their deck transformations. This analysis in topology leads from manifolds to orbifolds. We discuss the deck transformations of the orbifolds and give eigenmodes for the harmonic analysis as linear combinations of Wigner polynomials on the 3-sphere. These provide new tools for detecting cosmic topology from the CMB radiation.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.427

A correction to the enhanced bottom drag parameterisation of tidal turbines

Hydrodynamic modelling is an important tool for the development of tidal stream energy projects. Many hydrodynamic models incorporate the effect of tidal turbines through an enhanced bottom drag. In this paper we show that although for coarse grid resolutions (kilometre scale) the resulting force exerted on the flow agrees well with the theoretical value, the force starts decreasing with decreasing grid sizes when these become smaller than the length scale of the wake recovery. This is because the assumption that the upstream velocity can be approximated by the local model velocity, is no longer valid. Using linear momentum actuator disc theory however, we derive a relationship between these two velocities and formulate a correction to the enhanced bottom drag formulation that consistently applies a force that remains closed to the theoretical value, for all grid sizes down to the turbine scale. In addition, a better understanding of the relation between the model, upstream, and actual turbine velocity, as predicted by actuator disc theory, leads to an improved estimate of the usefully extractable energy. We show how the corrections can be applied (demonstrated here for the models MIKE 21 and Fluidity) by a simple modification of the drag coefficient

Wave packet approach to transport in mesoscopic systems

Wave packets provide a well established and versatile tool for studying time-dependent effects in molecular physics. Here, we demonstrate the application of wave packets to mesoscopic nanodevices at low temperatures. The electronic transport in the devices is expressed in terms of scattering and transmission coefficients, which are efficiently obtained by solving an initial value problem (IVP) using the time-dependent Schroedinger equation. The formulation as an IVP makes non-trivial device topologies accessible and by tuning the wave packet parameters one can extract the scattering properties for a large range of energies.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Fluorescence Analysis for Multi-Site Aluminum Binding to Natural Organic Matter

Natural organic matter (NOM) samples isolated from different water sources in Norway were compared using their fluorescence properties. Fluorescence surfaces were observed at pH 4.36 and deconvoluted using SIMPLISMA (Windig and Guilment 1991). There were a total of seven different fluorophores observed for these samples and each sampling site had between four and six ofthe fluorescent components. These components were observed to bind Al during titrations at the same pH. Multiresponse titration curves were fit using the method of Smith and Kramer (1998) and most of the binding strengths are similar to values for Suwannee River fulvic acid (1ogK’ between 4.8 and 5.5), but there are strong sites (IogK’ = 7) and weak sites (1ogK’ between 3 and 4) also observed. Results depended on the isolation method used; reverse osmosis and low pressure evaporation yielded different values but with no consistent trends