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Behaviour change at work: Empowering energy efficiency in the workplace through user-centred design
Copyright @ 2011 University of California eScholarship RepositoryCO2 emissions from non-domestic buildings - primarily workplaces - make up 18 percent of the UK's carbon footprint. A combination of technology advances and behavioural changes have the potential to make significant impact, but interventions have often been planned in ways which do not take into account the needs, levels of understanding and everyday behavioural contexts of building users - and hence do not achieve the hoped-for success.This paper provides a brief introduction to the Empower project, a current industrial-academic collaboration in the UK which is applying methods from user-centred design practice to understand diverse users' needs, priorities, mental models of energy and decision-making heuristics - as well as the affordances available to them - in a number of office buildings. We are developing and trialling a set of low-cost, simple software interventions tailored to multiple user groups with different degrees of agency over their energy use, which seek to influence more energy efficient behaviour at work in areas such as HVAC, lighting and equipment use. The project comprises an ethnographic research phase, a participatory design programme involving building users in the design of interventions, and iterative trials in a large office building in central London
Semi-transparent brane-worlds
We study the evolution of a closed Friedmann brane perturbed by the Hawking
radiation escaping a bulk black hole. The semi-transparent brane absorbes some
of the infalling radiation, the rest being transmitted across the brane to the
other bulk region. We characterize the cosmological evolution in terms of the
transmission rate . For small values of a critical-like
behaviour could be observed, when the acceleration due to radiation pressure
and the deceleration induced by the increasing self-gravity of the brane
roughly compensate each other, and cosmological evolution is approximately the
same as without radiation. Lighter (heavier) branes than those with the
critical energy density will recollapse slower (faster). This feature is
obstructed at high values of , where the overall effect of the
radiation is to speed-up the recollapse. We determine the maximal value of the
transmission rate for which the critical-like behaviour is observed. We also
study the effect of transmission on the evolution of different source terms of
the Friedmann equation. We conclude that among all semi-transparent branes the
slowest recollapse occurs for light branes with total absorption.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
A MOOC for Adult Learners of Mathematics and Statistics: Tensions and Compromises in Design
There are many adults with low mathematical/statistical knowledge who would like to enhance that understanding. There are insufficient teachers to respond to the level of need and so innovative solutions must be found. In the UK, the Ufi Charitable Trust has funded a project to develop a free open online course to offer motivated adults access to powerful ideas. We reflect on the tensions and compromises that emerged during its design. More specifically, referring to data collected from users, we consider the challenge of developing resources that will support heterogeneous students from unknown backgrounds, who may have already been failed by the conventional educational system and who will have no interactive tutor support within this course
The ART of IAM: The Winning Strategy for the 2006 Competition
In many dynamic open systems, agents have to interact with one another to achieve their goals. Here, agents may be self-interested, and when trusted to perform an action for others, may betray that trust by not performing the actions as required. In addition, due to the size of such systems, agents will often interact with other agents with which they have little or no past experience. This situation has led to the development of a number of trust and reputation models, which aim to facilitate an agent's decision making in the face of uncertainty regarding the behaviour of its peers. However, these multifarious models employ a variety of different representations of trust between agents, and measure performance in many different ways. This has made it hard to adequately evaluate the relative properties of different models, raising the need for a common platform on which to compare competing mechanisms. To this end, the ART Testbed Competition has been proposed, in which agents using different trust models compete against each other to provide services in an open marketplace. In this paper, we present the winning strategy for this competition in 2006, provide an analysis of the factors that led to this success, and discuss lessons learnt from the competition about issues of trust in multiagent systems in general. Our strategy, IAM, is Intelligent (using statistical models for opponent modelling), Abstemious (spending its money parsimoniously based on its trust model) and Moral (providing fair and honest feedback to those that request it)
PREDICTION OF AN OPTIMUM TECHNIQUE FOR THE WOMEN’S YURCHENKO LAYOUT VAULT
The purpose of this study was to identify an optimum technique for the women’s Yurchenko layout vault through an application of optimal control theory on a five-segment model consisting of the hand, whole arm, upper trunk, lower trunk and whole leg. An optimum technique for the vault was determined which, compared to the data, had greater post-flight amplitude and a better layout posture throughout post-flight. However, it involved a larger angular velocity of the segments and greater shoulder extension by about 9º, than the data. The impact phase of the optimum technique was shorter than the data by 0.003 s, and served to increase both the angular momentum of the model as well as the vertical horse takeoff velocity. There is thus, evidence of a ‘blocking technique’ during impact
Friedmann branes with variable tension
We introduce brane-worlds with non-constant tension, strenghtening the
analogy with fluid membranes, which exhibit a temperature-dependence according
to the empirical law established by E\"otv\"os. This new degree of freedom
allows for evolving gravitational and cosmological constants, the latter being
a natural candidate for dark energy. We establish the covariant dynamics on a
brane with variable tension in full generality, by considering asymmetrically
embedded branes and allowing for non-standard model fields in the 5-dimensional
space-time. Then we apply the formalism for a perfect fluid on a Friedmann
brane, which is embedded in a 5-dimensional charged Vaidya-Anti de Sitter
space-time.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in Phys. Rev.
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