Accessing emergency rest centres in the UK - lesson learnt

Emergency rest centres (ERC) are premises that are used for the temporary accommodation of evacuees during an emergency situation. They form an important part of emergency response, by providing a focal point for receiving people and providing food, shelter, information and support. The Disability Discrimination Act 2005 creates a legislative right for ‘reasonable’ access to goods and services for disabled people. This legislation does not differentiate between emergency and non emergency situations which means that those with a responsibility for emergency planning need to consider the accessibility of ERCs. This article examines ERC provision and reviews access for disabled people. It focuses on a study of three ERCs that were established in different local authority areas within the Yorkshire and Humber region in the UK during a flooding event on 25th June 2007. While uncovering many instances of good practise, the results from the research also identified a number of lessons to be learnt, in particular it was noted that the main barriers to access were encountered with: • Facilities and elements that did not comprise part of the buildings normal operation, such as the provision of bedding, medical assistance and effective communication; and • Facilities that would not normally be expected to be used to the extent, or duration, whilst the emergency rest centre was in operation, such as the provision of adequate welfare facilities. The research also noted that Civil Protection Legislation within the UK contains limited instruction or guidance to those with responsibility for Emergency Rest Centre provision. This provides little impetus for Emergency Planners to consider the needs of disabled people. This research has broad implications for local authorities and national government representatives. It identifies a need for those with responsibility for emergency planning and response to strengthen their knowledge of disabled people, and to adopt a more holistic approach to the provision of emergency planning and response

Dissecting the Discourse of Social Licence to Operate

The term “social licence to operate”, or SLO, has increasingly featured in public discussion about commercial operations in the marine environment. As part of the Sustainable Seas National Challenge, we are studying how this term is being used in New Zealand and its implications for industry-community relations

Gamma-based clustering via ordered means with application to gene-expression analysis

Discrete mixture models provide a well-known basis for effective clustering algorithms, although technical challenges have limited their scope. In the context of gene-expression data analysis, a model is presented that mixes over a finite catalog of structures, each one representing equality and inequality constraints among latent expected values. Computations depend on the probability that independent gamma-distributed variables attain each of their possible orderings. Each ordering event is equivalent to an event in independent negative-binomial random variables, and this finding guides a dynamic-programming calculation. The structuring of mixture-model components according to constraints among latent means leads to strict concavity of the mixture log likelihood. In addition to its beneficial numerical properties, the clustering method shows promising results in an empirical study.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOS805 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Spectroscopy of ultrathin epitaxial rutile TiO[sub 2](110) films grown on W(100)

Epitaxial ultrathin titanium dioxide films of 0.3 to similar to 7 nm thickness on a metal single crystal substrate have been investigated by high resolution vibrational and electron spectroscopies. The data complement previous morphological data provided by scanned probe microscopy and low energy electron diffraction to provide very complete characterization of this system. The thicker films display electronic structure consistent with a stoichiometric TiO2 phase. The thinner films appear nonstoichiometric due to band bending and charge transfer from the metal substrate, while work function measurements also show a marked thickness dependence. The vibrational spectroscopy shows three clear phonon bands at 368, 438, and 829 cm(-1) (at 273 K), which confirms a rutile structure. The phonon band intensity scales linearly with film thickness and shift slightly to lower frequencies with increasing temperature, in accord with results for single crystals. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics

Impurity transport and bulk ion flow in a mixed collisionality stellarator plasma

The accumulation of impurities in the core of magnetically confined plasmas, resulting from standard collisional transport mechanisms, is a known threat to their performance as fusion energy sources. Whilst the axisymmetric tokamak systems have been shown to benefit from the effect of temperature screening, that is an outward flux of impurities driven by the temperature gradient, impurity accumulation in stellarators was thought to be inevitable, driven robustly by the inward pointing electric field characteristic of hot fusion plasmas. We have shown in Helander et. al. (2017b) that such screening can in principle also appear in stellarators, in the experimentally relevant mixed collisionality regime, where a highly collisional impurity species is present in a low collisionality bulk plasma. Details of the analytic calculation are presented here, along with the effect of the impurity on the bulk ion flow, which will ultimately affect the bulk contribution to the bootstrap current

Surrogate Assisted Optimisation for Travelling Thief Problems

The travelling thief problem (TTP) is a multi-component optimisation problem involving two interdependent NP-hard components: the travelling salesman problem (TSP) and the knapsack problem (KP). Recent state-of-the-art TTP solvers modify the underlying TSP and KP solutions in an iterative and interleaved fashion. The TSP solution (cyclic tour) is typically changed in a deterministic way, while changes to the KP solution typically involve a random search, effectively resulting in a quasi-meandering exploration of the TTP solution space. Once a plateau is reached, the iterative search of the TTP solution space is restarted by using a new initial TSP tour. We propose to make the search more efficient through an adaptive surrogate model (based on a customised form of Support Vector Regression) that learns the characteristics of initial TSP tours that lead to good TTP solutions. The model is used to filter out non-promising initial TSP tours, in effect reducing the amount of time spent to find a good TTP solution. Experiments on a broad range of benchmark TTP instances indicate that the proposed approach filters out a considerable number of non-promising initial tours, at the cost of omitting only a small number of the best TTP solutions

Scattering of charge carriers by point defects in bilayer graphene

Theory of scattering of massive chiral fermions in bilayer graphene by radial symmetric potential is developed. It is shown that in the case when the electron wavelength is much larger than the radius of the potential the scattering cross-section is proportional to the electron wavelength. This leads to the mobility independent on the electron concentration. In contrast with the case of single-layer, neutral and charged defects are, in general, equally relevant for the resistivity of the bilayer graphene.Comment: final versio

Completeness of the Coulomb scattering wave functions

Completeness of the eigenfunctions of a self-adjoint Hamiltonian, which is the basic ingredient of quantum mechanics, plays an important role in nuclear reaction and nuclear structure theory. However, until now, there was no a formal proof of the completeness of the eigenfunctions of the two-body Hamiltonian with the Coulomb interaction. Here we present the first formal proof of the completeness of the two-body Coulomb scattering wave functions for repulsive unscreened Coulomb potential. To prove the completeness we use the Newton's method [R. Newton, J. Math Phys., 1, 319 (1960)]. The proof allows us to claim that the eigenfunctions of the two-body Hamiltonian with the potential given by the sum of the repulsive Coulomb plus short-range (nuclear) potentials also form a complete set. It also allows one to extend the Berggren's approach of modification of the complete set of the eigenfunctions by including the resonances for charged particles. We also demonstrate that the resonant Gamow functions with the Coulomb tail can be regularized using Zel'dovich's regularization method.Comment: 12 pages and 1 figur