The Winner's Choice: Sustainable Economic Strategies for Successful 21st Century Regions

Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, urbanization, new technologies, rapid labor-saving productivity growth in primary industries, and improved highways combined to create large-scale rural-urban functionally integrated regions. These forces have raised the stakes for regions in their pursuit of economic development and growth, making successful regional policy even more important. Changes to the governance structures consistent with the increased interdependence within broad rural-urban regions will improve the region's competitiveness; adopting fad-based approaches and policies aimed at “picking winners” will be less fruitful. Going forward, continuing globalization and environmental sustainability have the potential to fundamentally reshape relative regional attractiveness.Regional Policy, Rural Development

Fatigue delamination behaviour of unidirectional carbon fibre/epoxy laminates reinforced by Z-Fiber® pinnin

-Pin reinforced carbon-fibre epoxy laminates were tested under Mode I and Mode II conditions, both quasi-statically and in fatigue. Test procedures were adapted from existing standard or pre-standard tests. Samples containing 2% and 4% areal densities of carbon-fibre Z-pins (0.28mm diameter) were compared with unpinned laminates. Quasi-static tests under displacement control yielded a dramatic increase of the apparent delamination resistance. Specimens with 2% pin density failed in Mode I at loads 170N, equivalent to an apparent GIC of 2kJ/m2. Fatigue testing under load control showed that the presence of the through- thickness reinforcement slowed down fatigue delamination propagation

Bose-Einstein Condensation and Spin Mixtures of Optically Trapped Metastable Helium

We report the realization of a BEC of metastable helium-4 atoms (4He*) in an all optical potential. Up to 10^5 spin polarized 4He* atoms are condensed in an optical dipole trap formed from a single, focused, vertically propagating far off-resonance laser beam. The vertical trap geometry is chosen to best match the resolution characteristics of a delay-line anode micro-channel plate detector capable of registering single He* atoms. We also confirm the instability of certain spin state combinations of 4He* to two-body inelastic processes, which necessarily affects the scope of future experiments using optically trapped spin mixtures. In order to better quantify this constraint, we measure spin state resolved two-body inelastic loss rate coefficients in the optical trap

The Evolution of L and T Dwarfs in Color-Magnitude Diagrams

We present new evolution sequences for very low mass stars, brown dwarfs and giant planets and use them to explore a variety of influences on the evolution of these objects. We compare our results with previous work and discuss the causes of the differences and argue for the importance of the surface boundary condition provided by atmosphere models including clouds. The L- to T-type ultracool dwarf transition can be accommodated within the Ackerman & Marley (2001) cloud model by varying the cloud sedimentation parameter. We develop a simple model for the evolution across the L/T transition. By combining the evolution calculation and our atmosphere models, we generate colors and magnitudes of synthetic populations of ultracool dwarfs in the field and in galactic clusters. We focus on near infrared color- magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and on the nature of the ``second parameter'' that is responsible for the scatter of colors along the Teff sequence. Variations in metallicity and cloud parameters, unresolved binaries and possibly a relatively young population all play a role in defining the spread of brown dwarfs along the cooling sequence. We find that the transition from cloudy L dwarfs to cloudless T dwarfs slows down the evolution and causes a pile up of substellar objects in the transition region, in contradiction with previous studies. We apply the same model to the Pleiades brown dwarf sequence. Taken at face value, the Pleiades data suggest that the L/T transition occurs at lower Teff for lower gravity objects. The simulated populations of brown dwarfs also reveal that the phase of deuterium burning produces a distinctive feature in CMDs that should be detectable in ~50-100 Myr old clusters.Comment: Accepted for publication in the ApJ. 52 pages including 20 figure

Production of TGF-alpha and TGF-beta by cultured keratinocytes, skin and oral squamous cell carcinomas--potential autocrine regulation of normal and malignant epithelial cell proliferation.

Transforming growth factors have a wide range of biological activities related to cell proliferation and differentiation. In general TGF-alpha promotes cell proliferation while TGF-beta may stimulate or inhibit proliferation depending on the cell type and growth factor environment. Cultured human keratinocytes, skin and oral squamous cell carcinomas were analysed for the presence of transcripts and protein for the transforming growth factors alpha & beta. Both growth factors were detected in cultured keratinocytes (which have receptors for and respond to both ligands), and in medium conditioned by these cells. Additionally transcripts for TGF-alpha were found preferentially in the basal, proliferative compartment of cultured keratinocytes. Similarly both growth factors were detected in oral squamous cell carcinomas and a highly significant inverse correlation was found between the levels of TGF-alpha and the epidermal growth factor receptor in these tumours. The data for TGF-alpha are consistent with the existence of an autocrine growth control loop influencing cell proliferation in both a normal cell type and malignant epithelial tissues, a process that in keratinocytes and responsive squamous cell carcinomas could be modulated by TGF-beta

Ultraviolet detection from energetically deposited titania films

Thin films of unintentionally doped n-type titania have been energetically deposited from a filtered cathodic vacuum arc. All films were dense, smooth, and transparent with crystallinity depending on the deposition/annealing temperature. At a growth temperature of 600 C, the preferred phase could be changed from rutile to anatase by increasing the oxygen process pressure thereby reducing dynamic annealing. Pt/TiOx/Pt ultraviolet detectors exhibiting rectifying current-voltage characteristics and ultraviolet-visible rejection ratios exceeding 104 :1 were formed on selected films

The Bayesian Decision Tree Technique with a Sweeping Strategy

The uncertainty of classification outcomes is of crucial importance for many safety critical applications including, for example, medical diagnostics. In such applications the uncertainty of classification can be reliably estimated within a Bayesian model averaging technique that allows the use of prior information. Decision Tree (DT) classification models used within such a technique gives experts additional information by making this classification scheme observable. The use of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methodology of stochastic sampling makes the Bayesian DT technique feasible to perform. However, in practice, the MCMC technique may become stuck in a particular DT which is far away from a region with a maximal posterior. Sampling such DTs causes bias in the posterior estimates, and as a result the evaluation of classification uncertainty may be incorrect. In a particular case, the negative effect of such sampling may be reduced by giving additional prior information on the shape of DTs. In this paper we describe a new approach based on sweeping the DTs without additional priors on the favorite shape of DTs. The performances of Bayesian DT techniques with the standard and sweeping strategies are compared on a synthetic data as well as on real datasets. Quantitatively evaluating the uncertainty in terms of entropy of class posterior probabilities, we found that the sweeping strategy is superior to the standard strategy