Who guards the guardians of monetary stability and financial stability? That is the key question behind the debate about the accountability of the Bank of England

Rosa Lastra unpicks the debate surrounding the accountability of the increasingly powerful Bank of England. She argues that the Bank of England should be made accountable to Parliament, and calls for a better understanding of how we should assess the Bank’s role in creating financial stability

Entanglement properties in the Inhomogeneous Tavis-Cummings model

In this work we study the properties of the atomic entanglement in the eigenstates spectrum of the inhomogeneous Tavis-Cummings Model. The inhomogeneity is present in the coupling among the atoms with quantum electromagnetic field. We calculate analytical expressions for the concurrence and we found that this exhibits a strong dependence on the inhomogeneity.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Evidence of Variable Zn/Fe in Zinc-Ferrites Produced From Roasting of Zinc Sulphide Concentrate

Zn-Fe-O phases formed during roasting of concentrates from zinc sulfide ores produce soluble zinc oxide, oxy-sulfates and insoluble ferrite compounds. The ferrites have a general formula ZnOFe2O3. However, these ferrites have a range of magnetic properties, suggesting variable stoichiometry. Scanning electron microscopy has been used to obtain the general relationship between the Zn/Fe ratio of the ferrites and their magnetic susceptibility

Phonon-induced entanglement dynamics of two donor-based charge quantum bits

The entanglement dynamics of a pair of donor-based charge qubits is obtained in analytical form. The disentanglement is induced by off resonant scattering of acoustical phonons in the semiconductor host. According to our results a rather unusual recovery of entanglement occurs that depends on the geometrical configuration of the qubits. In addition, for large times a non-vanishing stationary entanglement is predicted. For the cases of one and two initial excitations a simple kinetic interpretation allows for an adequate analysis of the observed dynamics. Our results also reveal a direct relation between the disentanglement rate and the inter-donor decoherence rates

Accelerated anaerobic hydrolysis rates under a combination of intermittent aeration and anaerobic conditions

Anaerobic hydrolysis in activated return sludge was investigated in laboratory scale experiments to find if intermittent aeration would accelerate anaerobic hydrolysis rates compared to anaerobic hydrolysis rates under strict anaerobic conditions. The intermittent reactors were set up in a 240 h experiment with intermittent aeration (3 h:3 h) in a period of 24 h followed by a subsequent anaerobic period of 24 h in a cycle of 48 h which was repeated five times during the experiment. The anaerobic reactors were kept under strict anaerobic conditions in the same period (240 h). Two methods for calculating hydrolysis rates based on soluble chemical oxygen demand were compared. Two-way analysis of variance with the Bonferroni post-test was performed in order to register any significant difference between reactors with intermittent aeration and strictly anaerobic conditions respectively. The experiment demonstrated a statistically significant difference in favor of the reactors with intermittent aeration showing a tendency towards accelerated anaerobic hydrolysis rates due to application of intermittent aeration. The conclusion of the work is thus that intermittent aeration applied in the activated return sludge process can improve the treatment capacity further in full scale applications.</jats:p

Filogenia de aislamientos entomopatógenos de Isaria spp. (Ascomycota: Hypocreales) provenientes de Argentina y Brasil.

Los hongos entomopatógenos del genero Isaria (Ascomycota: Hypocreales) son agentes de control natural de insectos plaga. La clasificación de sus especies generalmente se realiza por descripción de las características morfológicas, sin embargo, debido al carácter pleomórfico de algunas especies, su identificación se torna difícil. Actualmente, existen técnicas moleculares que permiten estudiar la variabilidad genética y establecer relaciones filogenéticas entre aislamientos fúngicos, como por ejemplo el secuenciamiento de las regiones espaciadoras intergénicas (ITS1-5,8S-ITS2) y el factor de elongación 1 alfa (EF1-?). En este trabajo investigamos las relaciones filogenéticas de 20 aislamientos de Isaria provenientes de Argentina y Brasil, con 51 especies fúngicas de la familia Clavicipitaceae, Cordycipitaceae y Ophiocordycipitaceae. La metodología consistió en la amplificación y el secuenciamiento de un fragmento de 1100pb correspondiendo a EF1-? y de un fragmento de 600pb correspondiente a ITS1-5,8S-ITS2. Las secuencias nucleotídicas de EF1-? fueron alineadas con el programa Clustal X y las secuencias de ITS1-5,8S-ITS2 con el programa Mafft. Los análisis de máxima parsimonia fueron realizados con el programa TNT y los árboles filogenéticos editados con el programa Dendroscope. Los resultados indicaron que el genero Isaria es polifilético y que se encuentra ubicado taxonómicamente dentro de la Familia Cordycipitaceae. Los aislamientos de I. fumosorosea, I. farinosa e I. tenuipes formaron tres clados fuertemente soportados y cercanamente emparentados con las especies de Beauveria, Lecanicillium y Simplicillium. Asimismo, se establecieron relaciones filogenéticas entre los estados anamórficos Isaria, Beauveria y Lecanicillium con los estados teleomórficos Cordyceps y Torrubiella. Por lo tanto, se puede concluir que los genes nucleares (EF1-? y ITS1-5,8S-ITS2) son una excelente herramienta para confirmar la identificación de los aislamientos fúngicos y establecer relaciones filogenéticas entre especies de hongos entomopatógenos

Web based system architecture for long pulse remote experimentation

Remote experimentation (RE) methods will be essential in next generation fusion devices. Requirements for long pulse RE will be: on-line data visualization, on-line data acquisition processes monitoring and on-line data acquisition systems interactions (start, stop or set-up modifications). Note that these methods are not oriented to real-time control of fusion plant devices. INDRA Sistemas S.A., CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medioambientales y Tecnológicas) and UPM (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) have designed a specific software architecture for these purposes. The architecture can be supported on the BeansNet platform, whose integration with an application server provides an adequate solution to the requirements. BeansNet is a JINI based framework developed by INDRA, which makes easy the implementation of a remote experimentation model based on a Service Oriented Architecture. The new software architecture has been designed on the basis of the experience acquired in the development of an upgrade of the TJ-II remote experimentation system

A first step to accelerating fingerprint matching based on deformable minutiae clustering

Fingerprint recognition is one of the most used biometric methods for authentication. The identification of a query fingerprint requires matching its minutiae against every minutiae of all the fingerprints of the database. The state-of-the-art matching algorithms are costly, from a computational point of view, and inefficient on large datasets. In this work, we include faster methods to accelerating DMC (the most accurate fingerprint matching algorithm based only on minutiae). In particular, we translate into C++ the functions of the algorithm which represent the most costly tasks of the code; we create a library with the new code and we link the library to the original C# code using a CLR Class Library project by means of a C++/CLI Wrapper. Our solution re-implements critical functions, e.g., the bit population count including a fast C++ PopCount library and the use of the squared Euclidean distance for calculating the minutiae neighborhood. The experimental results show a significant reduction of the execution time in the optimized functions of the matching algorithm. Finally, a novel approach to improve the matching algorithm, considering cache memory blocking and parallel data processing, is presented as future work.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech