414 research outputs found
Garden cities and the English new towns: foundations for new community planning
The postwar new towns in England were initiated by the New Towns Act of 1946, a keystone in the reconstruction of Britain after the Second World War. Further and mostly smaller new town designations were to follow during the first half of the 1960s. It was the 1965 New Towns Act, however, which brought into existence some of the largest and most famous new towns of the postwar period. Today, over 2.6 million people live in over thirty new towns in the United Kingdom. The majority of the new towns and their citizens are in England, the most populous country in the United Kingdom
The English new towns since 1946: What are the lessons of their history for their future?
During the twentieth century, Britain was a leading pioneer of planned new communities, and at the forefront of the international dissemination of garden city and new town planning. Yet valuable lessons from British town planning are being ignored by current small-scale âgarden villagesâ and eco-towns in the United Kingdom. These are small-scale developments that reflect a lack of national and international vision, and the demise of a dynamic integrated planning culture, that has characterised the British state in recent years
Morphology and hardness ratio exploitation under limited statistics
Gamma-ray astronomy has produced for several years now sky maps for low
photon statistics, non-negligible background and comparatively poor angular
resolution. Quantifying the significance of spatial features remains difficult.
Besides, spectrum extraction requires regions with large statistics while maps
in energy bands allow only qualitative interpretation. The two main competing
mechanisms in the VHE domain are the Inverse-Compton emission from accelerated
electrons radiating through synchrotron in the X-ray domain and the
interactions between accelerated hadrons and the surrounding medium, leading to
the production and subsequent decay of Pi0 mesons. The spectrum of the VHE
emission from leptons is predicted to steepen with increasing distance from the
acceleration zone, owing to synchrotron losses (i.e. cooled population). It
would remain approximately constant for hadrons. Ideally, spectro-imaging
analysis would have the same spatial scale in the TeV and X-ray domains, to
distinguish the local emission mechanisms. More realistically, we investigate
here the possibility of improving upon the currently published HESS results by
using more sophisticated tools.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, Proceeding for a poster at the GAMMA08 Heidelberg
Symposiu
Egc: A Time-Frequency Augmented Template-Based Method For Gravitational Wave Burst Search In Ground-Based Interferometers
The detection of burst-type events in the output of ground gravitational wave detectors is particularly challenging. The potential variety of astrophysical waveforms, as proposed by simulations and analytic studies in general relativity and the discrimination of actual signals from instrumental noise both are critical issues. Robust methods that achieve reasonable detection performances over a wide range of signals are required. We present here a hybrid burst-detection pipeline related to timeâfrequency transforms while based on matched filtering to provide robustness against noise characteristics. Studies on simulated noise show that the algorithm has a detection efficiency similar to other methods over very different waveforms and particularly good timing even for low amplitude signals: no bias for most tested waveforms and an average accuracy of 1.1 ms (down to 0.1 ms in the best case). Timeâfrequency-type parameters, useful for event classification, are also derived for noise spectral densities unfavourable to standard timeâfrequency algorithms
A comparison of methods for gravitational wave burst searches from LIGO and Virgo
The search procedure for burst gravitational waves has been studied using 24
hours of simulated data in a network of three interferometers (Hanford 4-km,
Livingston 4-km and Virgo 3-km are the example interferometers). Several
methods to detect burst events developed in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
(LSC) and Virgo collaboration have been studied and compared. We have performed
coincidence analysis of the triggers obtained in the different interferometers
with and without simulated signals added to the data. The benefits of having
multiple interferometers of similar sensitivity are demonstrated by comparing
the detection performance of the joint coincidence analysis with LSC and Virgo
only burst searches. Adding Virgo to the LIGO detector network can increase by
50% the detection efficiency for this search. Another advantage of a joint
LIGO-Virgo network is the ability to reconstruct the source sky position. The
reconstruction accuracy depends on the timing measurement accuracy of the
events in each interferometer, and is displayed in this paper with a fixed
source position example.Comment: LIGO-Virgo working group submitted to PR
A First Comparison Between LIGO and Virgo Inspiral Search Pipelines
This article reports on a project that is the first step the LIGO Scientific
Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have taken to prepare for the mutual
search for inspiral signals. The project involved comparing the analysis
pipelines of the two collaborations on data sets prepared by both sides,
containing simulated noise and injected events. The ability of the pipelines to
detect the injected events was checked, and a first comparison of how the
parameters of the events were recovered has been completed.Comment: GWDAW-9 proceeding
A first comparison of search methods for gravitational wave bursts using LIGO and Virgo simulated data
We present a comparative study of 6 search methods for gravitational wave
bursts using simulated LIGO and Virgo noise data. The data's spectra were
chosen to follow the design sensitivity of the two 4km LIGO interferometers and
the 3km Virgo interferometer. The searches were applied on replicas of the data
sets to which 8 different signals were injected. Three figures of merit were
employed in this analysis: (a) Receiver Operator Characteristic curves, (b)
necessary signal to noise ratios for the searches to achieve 50 percent and 90
percent efficiencies, and (c) variance and bias for the estimation of the
arrival time of a gravitational wave burst.Comment: GWDAW9 proceeding
Pulsar Wind Nebula candidates recently discovered by H.E.S.S
H.E.S.S. is currently the most sensitive instrument in the very-high-energy
gamma-ray domain and has revealed many new sources along the Galactic Plane, a
significant fraction of which seems to be associated with energetic pulsars.
HESS J1825-137 and Vela X are considered to be the prototypes of such sources
in which the large VHE nebula results from the whole history of the pulsar wind
and the supernova remnant host, both evolving in a complex interstellar medium.
These nebulae are seen to be offset from the pulsar position and, for HESS
J1825-137, a spectral steepening at increasing distance from the pulsar has
been measured. In this context, updated H.E.S.S. results on two previously
published sources, namely HESS J1809-193 and HESS J1912+101, and preliminary
results on the newly discovered HESS J1356-645, are presented. These extended
VHE sources are thought to be associated with the energetic pulsars PSR
J1809-1917, PSR J1913+1011 and PSR J1357-6429, respectively. Properties of each
source in the VHE regime, together with those measured in the radio and X-ray
domains, are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to Proceedings of "4th Heidelberg
International Symposium on High Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy 2008
Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City
Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a ÂŁ16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them
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