The legal protection of refugees with disabilities: Forgotten and invisible?

© Mary Crock, Laura Smith-Khan, Ron McCallum and Ben Saul 2017. This ground-breaking book focuses on the 'forgotten refugees', detailing people with disabilities who have crossed borders in search of protection from disaster or human conflict. The authors explore the intersection between one of the oldest international human rights treaties, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, with one of the newest: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Drawing on fieldwork in six countries hosting refugees in a variety of contexts - Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uganda, Jordan and Turkey - the book examines how the CRPD is (or should) be changing the way that governments and aid agencies engage with and accommodate persons with disabilities in situations of displacement. The timeliness of the book is underscored by the adoption in mid-2016 of the UN Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action adopted at the World Humanitarian Summit

A cross-border deforestation index to understand underlying drivers of deforestation

This paper considers a preliminary investigation involving the development of a Cross-Border Deforestation Index (CBDI), which is an attempt to quantify the differences in deforestation between two countries or potentially any two administrative units. In this study, the focus was on countries. For each pair of bordering countries, a 50km buffer zone was drawn and the average value of the Vegetation Continuous Field (VCF) was calculated for each country in the pair. The ratio of these two averages is the CBDI. Values of 1 indicate similar levels of forest cover but values greater than 1 point towards dissimilar land use policies within countries and/or sub-national administrative levels. This index was calculated for all pairs of bordering tropical countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa. In addition, a visual analysis of the spatial variation of the VCF was undertaken to show how this can complement the CBDI. The results showed that countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Laos, Thailand and DR Congo, in combination with different neighbouring countries, all have CBDI values differing from 1. These areas are worth examining in greater detail in order to understand what types of drivers are behind these outlying CBDI values. These drivers could include land use policy, population pressure, accessibility, etc. Future work will i nclude the addition of environmental factors. By computing the CBDI for so called Homogeneous Response Units (HRU: areas of similar or identical environmental conditions in terms of soil, altitude and slope), we will be able to examine the changing effect on the CBDI. This work is still ongoing and will be expanded to consider HRU for all country pairs. In addition, regression of the CBDI with different drivers of deforestation will be attempted in order to help identify these underlying causes

SemEval 2017 Task 10: ScienceIE - Extracting Keyphrases and Relations from Scientific Publications

We describe the SemEval task of extracting keyphrases and relations between them from scientific documents, which is crucial for understanding which publications describe which processes, tasks and materials. Although this was a new task, we had a total of 26 submissions across 3 evaluation scenarios. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on understanding scientific content, as well as the broader knowledge base population and information extraction communities

Spatial mapping of band bending in semiconductor devices using in-situ quantum sensors

Band bending is a central concept in solid-state physics that arises from local variations in charge distribution especially near semiconductor interfaces and surfaces. Its precision measurement is vital in a variety of contexts from the optimisation of field effect transistors to the engineering of qubit devices with enhanced stability and coherence. Existing methods are surface sensitive and are unable to probe band bending at depth from surface or bulk charges related to crystal defects. Here we propose an in-situ method for probing band bending in a semiconductor device by imaging an array of atomic-sized quantum sensing defects to report on the local electric field. We implement the concept using the nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond, and map the electric field at different depths under various surface terminations. We then fabricate a two-terminal device based on the conductive two-dimensional hole gas formed at a hydrogen-terminated diamond surface, and observe an unexpected spatial modulation of the electric field attributed to a complex interplay between charge injection and photo-ionisation effects. Our method opens the way to three-dimensional mapping of band bending in diamond and other semiconductors hosting suitable quantum sensors, combined with simultaneous imaging of charge transport in complex operating devices.Comment: This is a pre-print of an article published in Nature Electronics. The final authenticated version is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-018-0130-

Discovery of a binary icosahedral quasicrystal in Sc12_12Zn88_88

We report the discovery of a new binary icosahedral phase in a Sc-Zn alloy obtained through solution-growth, producing millimeter-sized, facetted, single grain, quasicrystals that exhibit different growth morphologies, pentagonal dodecahedra and rhombic triacontahedra, under only marginally different growth conditions. These two morphologies manifest different degrees of quasicrystalline order, or phason strain. The discovery of i-Sc$_12$Zn$_88$ suggests that a reexamination of binary phase diagrams at compositions close to crystalline approximant structures may reveal other, new binary quasicrystalline phases.Comment: Incorrect spelling in author list resolve

S1×S2S^1 \times S^2 wormholes and topological charge

I investigate solutions to the Euclidean Einstein-matter field equations with topology $S^1 \times S^2 \times R$ in a theory with a massless periodic scalar field and electromagnetism. These solutions carry winding number of the periodic scalar as well as magnetic flux. They induce violations of a quasi-topological conservation law which conserves the product of magnetic flux and winding number on the background spacetime. I extend these solutions to a model with stable loops of superconducting cosmic string, and interpret them as contributing to the decay of such loops.Comment: 18 pages (includes 6 figs.), harvmac and epsf, CU-TP-62

The static quark-antiquark potential in QCD to three loops

The static potential between an infinitely heavy quark and antiquark is derived in the framework of perturbative QCD to three loops by performing a full calculation of the two-loop diagrams and using the renormalization group. The contribution of massless fermions is included.Comment: Latex, 11 pages, 3 figures included. The complete paper, including figures, is also available via anonymous ftp at ftp://ttpux2.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/ , or via www at http://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/preprints/ . Revised version, essentially identical to the version published in Physical Review Letter