Engineering - what's that?

Engineering the Future (EtF) aims to develop a sustainable model of activities and interactions among researchers, policy makers and practitioners that develops pupils’ understanding of the nature of engineering, embeds experiences of engineering within the school classroom and curriculum and promotes engineering as a career.One barrier to young people entering engineering is inadequate awareness of the nature ofengineering and its diverse career paths. Many pupils in the participating schools had no awareness of engineering or very limited awareness. 65% had never considered engineering as a career choice.1st year electronic and electrial engineering students at the universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow identified family links as a key factor in encouraging them to study engineering. They also traced interest in engineering to particular school classroom experiences. Discussions with careers guidance staff revealed that careers guidance is almost entirely responsive to pupil requests: only occasionally will pupils who are good at science and mathematics be directed towards engineering.The current situation leaves almost all school pupils uninformed about the nature of engineering.The paper describes how the EtF project seeks to redress the situation by developing classroom engineering experiences, working to embed engineering formally in the curriculum and providing resources for active careers advice

'Oh no, no, no, we haven't got time to be doing that': Challenges encountered introducing a breast-feeding support intervention on a postnatal ward

Objective: to identify elements in the environment of a postnatal ward which impacted on the introduction of a breast-feeding support intervention. Design: a concurrent, realist evaluation including practice observations and semi-structured interviews. Setting: a typical British maternity ward. Participants: five midwives and two maternity support workers were observed. Seven midwives and three maternity support workers were interviewed. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. Ethical approval was granted by the relevant authorities. Findings: a high level of non-compliance with the intervention was driven by a lack of time and staff, and the ward staffs' lack of control of the organisation of their time and space. This was compounded by a propensity towards task orientation, workload reduction and resistance to change - all of which supported the existing medical approach to care. Limited support for the intervention was underpinned by staff willingness to reconsider their views and a widespread frustration with current ways of working. Key conclusions: this small, local study suggests that the environment and working conditions on a typical British postnatal ward present significant barriers to the introduction of breast-feeding support interventions requiring a relational approach to care. Implications for practice: midwives and maternity support workers need to be able to control their time and space, and feel able to provide the relational care they perceive that women need, before breast-feeding support interventions can be successfully implemented in practice. Frustration with current ways of working, and a willingness to consider other approaches, could be harnessed to initiate change that would benefit health professionals and the women and families in their care. However, without appropriate leadership or facilitation for change, this could alternatively encourage learned helplessness and passive resistance

Snowmass 2001: Jet Energy Flow Project

Conventional cone jet algorithms arose from heuristic considerations of LO hard scattering coupled to independent showering. These algorithms implicitly assume that the final states of individual events can be mapped onto a unique set of jets that are in turn associated with a unique set of underlying hard scattering partons. Thus each final state hadron is assigned to a unique underlying parton. The Jet Energy Flow (JEF) analysis described here does not make such assumptions. The final states of individual events are instead described in terms of flow distributions of hadronic energy. Quantities of physical interest are constructed from the energy flow distribution summed over all events. The resulting analysis is less sensitive to higher order perturbative corrections and the impact of showering and hadronization than the standard cone algorithms.Comment: REVTeX4, 13 pages, 6 figures; Contribution to the P5 Working Group on QCD and Strong Interactions at Snowmass 200

On-stack replacement, distilled

On-stack replacement (OSR) is essential technology for adaptive optimization, allowing changes to code actively executing in a managed runtime. The engineering aspects of OSR are well-known among VM architects, with several implementations available to date. However, OSR is yet to be explored as a general means to transfer execution between related program versions, which can pave the road to unprecedented applications that stretch beyond VMs. We aim at filling this gap with a constructive and provably correct OSR framework, allowing a class of general-purpose transformation functions to yield a special-purpose replacement. We describe and evaluate an implementation of our technique in LLVM. As a novel application of OSR, we present a feasibility study on debugging of optimized code, showing how our techniques can be used to fix variables holding incorrect values at breakpoints due to optimizations

SOME ABSTRACT PROPERTIES OF SEMIGROUPS APPEARING IN SUPERCONFORMAL THEORIES

A new type of semigroups which appears while dealing with $N=1$ superconformal symmetry in superstring theories is considered. The ideal series having unusual abstract properties is constructed. Various idealisers are introduced and studied. The ideal quasicharacter is defined. Green's relations are found and their connection with the ideal quasicharacter is established.Comment: 11 page

Massive stars exploding in a He-rich circumstellar medium. IV. Transitional Type Ibn Supernovae

We present ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared data of the Type Ibn supernovae (SNe) 2010al and 2011hw. SN 2010al reaches an absolute magnitude at peak of M(R) = -18.86 +- 0.21. Its early light curve shows similarities with normal SNe Ib, with a rise to maximum slower than most SNe Ibn. The spectra are dominated by a blue continuum at early stages, with narrow P-Cygni He I lines indicating the presence of a slow-moving, He-rich circumstellar medium. At later epochs the spectra well match those of the prototypical SN Ibn 2006jc, although the broader lines suggest that a significant amount of He was still present in the stellar envelope at the time of the explosion. SN 2011hw is somewhat different. It was discovered after the first maximum, but the light curve shows a double-peak. The absolute magnitude at discovery is similar to that of the second peak (M(R) = -18.59 +- 0.25), and slightly fainter than the average of SNe Ibn. Though the spectra of SN 2011hw are similar to those of SN 2006jc, coronal lines and narrow Balmer lines are cleary detected. This indicates substantial interaction of the SN ejecta with He-rich, but not H-free, circumstellar material. The spectra of SN 2011hw suggest that it is a transitional SN Ibn/IIn event similar to SN 2005la. While for SN 2010al the spectro-photometric evolution favours a H-deprived Wolf-Rayet progenitor (of WN-type), we agree with the conclusion of Smith et al. (2012) that the precursor of SN 2011hw was likely in transition from a luminous blue variable to an early Wolf-Rayet (Ofpe/WN9) stage.Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures, 6 tables. Accepted by MNRA

Belief heterogeneity and survival in incomplete markets

In complete markets economies (Sandroni [16]), or in economies with Pareto optimal outcomes (Blume and Easley [10]), the market selection hypothesis holds, as long as traders have identical discount factors. Traders who survive must have beliefs that merge with the truth. We show that in incomplete markets, regardless of traders’ discount factors, the market selects for a range of beliefs, at least some of which do not merge with the truth. We also show that impatient traders with incorrect beliefs can survive and that these incorrect beliefs impact prices. These beliefs may be chosen so that they are far from the truth