Higher education academic salaries in the UK

It is widely believed that higher education academic salaries are too low, and that this may lead to a ‘brain drain’ and also lower quality in higher education, as universities fail to attract the ‘brightest and the best’. We compare the salaries of Higher Education teaching professionals in the UK with those of other comparable professionals. We compare academic salaries to a range of occupational groupings that one might view as similar, in terms of unobserved characteristics, to academics. We conclude that HE teaching professionals earn lower earnings than most public sector graduates and do particularly poorly compared to most other comparable professionals. In particular, academic earnings compare poorly to those in the legal professions, consultant physicians and dental practitioners (across both the public and private sectors). On the other hand, some public sector workers do worse than HE academics, e.g. FE teachers

Kaon electromagnetic production: constraints set by new data

The CLAS data on the photo-production of K+ off the proton are utilised to study reaction mechanism of the process in frame of the isobaric approach. The missing D13 resonance is shown to be important for successful description of the data in the whole kinematical region. Constructed models provide satisfactory predictions for the process.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, contribution to the VIII International Conference on Hypernuclear & Strange Particle Physics, Jefferson Lab, Virginia, U.S.A., October 14-18, 200

Plant Secondary Compounds; Their Impact on Forage Nutritive Value and upon Animal Production

Both the anti-nutritional and beneficial effects of secondary compounds in a range of temperate and tropical forages have been reviewed. Major secondary compounds in temperate and tropical forage plants occur in the phenolic fraction and include condensed and hydrolysable tannins, phenolic monomers and lignin. Condensed tannins (CT) bind to plant protein by pH-reversible hydrogen bonding. In temperate legume forages this reduces rumen protein degradation and can increase the absorption of essential amino acids (EAA) from the small intestine, with reactivity depending on CT concentration, molecular weight and chemical structure. Low concentrations of CT in Lotus corniculatus (20-40g/kg DM) increased EAA absorption by 62% and increased wool growth (15%) and ovulation rate (25%) in grazing sheep and increased milk production in ewes and dairy cows, all without changing voluntary feed intake (VFI). High concentrations of CT in Lotus pedunculatus (80- 100 g/kg DM) depressed VFI and depressed rates of body and wool growth in grazing sheep. Sulla, containing 80-120 g CT/kg DM, was particularly effective for counteracting the effects of parasitism and for promoting high rates of body growth in parasitised lambs. CT is present in tropical species such as Leucaena and Acacia at higher concentrations (60-200 g/kg DM) than in temperate species. Action of CT reduced rumen protein degradation in sheep fed tropical forages, but as yet there is no convincing evidence that this leads to increases in EAA absorption from the small intestine or that CT increases animal production. Further research is needed in these areas with tropical forages, particularly on the relationship between CT structure and its reactivity with proteins. Increasing CT concentration did not depress rumen microbial protein synthesis in sheep fed either temperate or tropical forages, until CT concentration exceeded 130 g/kg DM. Effect of CT upon undegraded, dietary protein release in the small intestine and upon endogenous protein secretion is defined as a future research area. Flavonoids have been detected in tropical legume forages in the same concentrations as CT. They have anti-nutritional effects in terms of causing amino acid loss during their excretion as conjugates in the urine and by disturbing blood acid/base balance, leading to reduced VFI. Research currently in progress with other secondary compounds in both temperate and tropical forages is reviewed. This includes sesquiterpene lactones in chicory, acubin in plantain, isoflavones in red clover and coumarin and dihydro-coumarin in glyricidia. The nutritional and anti-nutritional effects of these compounds for both ruminants and non-ruminants is discussed

Comparison of Techniques to Reduce Bremsstrahlung Background Radiation from Monoenergetic Photon Beams

An important applied technology is a tunable mono-energetic photon source [1]. These sources are made of relativistic electron accelerators coupled to low-energy lasers, which produce high-energy, mono-energetic-rays. One challenge associated with systems such as this is a continuum of bremsstrahlung background created when an electron beam passes through an aperture of some sort and the electron bunch or its halo impinges on the aperture pictured in figure 1. For instance, in the current T-REX [1] design for the interaction point between the laser- and electron-beam, the electron-beam passes through the center of a mirror used to reflect the laser. There is a potential with this design that bremsstrahlung radiation may be produced at the edges of the mirror openings and contaminate the mono-energetic photon beam. Certain applications [2] may be sensitive to this contamination. To reduce the bremsstrahlung contaminate a collimator (thickness {approx}24in. (calculated from XCOM database [3]) to attenuate by a factor of 10{sup -3} the 112MeV photons expected in the T-REX demonstration [1]) is situated between the aperture and target. To maximize the brightness of the photon-beam, the collimator opening must be no less than the size of the photon-beam spot size expected to be about 1mm. This fixes the collimator opening. a priori the aperture size must be greater than the collimator opening and is a function distance between the aperture and collimator. In this paper we focus on two approaches to estimate the aperture size, given a collimator and a target whose sizes and distances from the aperture are given. In the next section we will discuss these approaches

Geometry-induced asymmetric diffusion

Past work has shown that ions can pass through a membrane more readily in one direction than the other. We demonstrate here in a model and an experiment that for a mixture of small and large particles such asymmetric diffusion can arise solely from an asymmetry in the geometry of the pores of the membrane. Our deterministic simulation considers a two-dimensional gas of elastic disks of two sizes diffusing through a membrane, and our laboratory experiment examines the diffusion of glass beads of two sizes through a metal membrane. In both experiment and simulation, the membrane is permeable only to the smaller particles, and the asymmetric pores lead to an asymmetry in the diffusion rates of these particles. The presence of even a small percentage of large particles can clog a membrane, preventing passage of the small particles in one direction while permitting free flow of the small particles in the other direction. The purely geometric kinetic constraints may play a role in common biological contexts such as membrane ion channels.Comment: published with minuscule change

Overview of the BlockNormal Event Trigger Generator

In the search for unmodeled gravitational wave bursts, there are a variety of methods that have been proposed to generate candidate events from time series data. Block Normal is a method of identifying candidate events by searching for places in the data stream where the characteristic statistics of the data change. These change-points divide the data into blocks in which the characteristics of the block are stationary. Blocks in which these characteristics are inconsistent with the long term characteristic statistics are marked as Event-Triggers which can then be investigated by a more computationally demanding multi-detector analysis.Comment: GWDAW-8 proceedings, 6 pages, 2 figure

Effect of Three Legumes Containing Different Condensed Tannin Concentrations on the in Vitro Formation of the Pastoral Flavour Compound; Skatole

Feeding legumes, such as white clover (Trifolium repens), results in higher intakes and increased animal production compared to grasses (Ulyatt, 1981). Skatole is produced in the rumen from plant protein fermentation and is associated with undesirable pastoral flavours in meat (Young et al. 2002). Feeding white clover causes a greater skatole concentration in the rumen compared to perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne) or Lotus corniculatus, as the protein in white clover is highly soluble and rapidly degraded (Schreurs et al., 2004). The condensed tannins (CT) in Lotus species slow protein degradation in the rumen (Aerts et al., 1999). The aim of this study was to determine the effect of legumes with different concentrations of CT on skatole formation

Ninja data analysis with a detection pipeline based on the Hilbert-Huang Transform

The Ninja data analysis challenge allowed the study of the sensitivity of data analysis pipelines to binary black hole numerical relativity waveforms in simulated Gaussian noise at the design level of the LIGO observatory and the VIRGO observatory. We analyzed NINJA data with a pipeline based on the Hilbert Huang Transform, utilizing a detection stage and a characterization stage: detection is performed by triggering on excess instantaneous power, characterization is performed by displaying the kernel density enhanced (KD) time-frequency trace of the signal. Using the simulated data based on the two LIGO detectors, we were able to detect 77 signals out of 126 above SNR 5 in coincidence, with 43 missed events characterized by signal to noise ratio SNR less than 10. Characterization of the detected signals revealed the merger part of the waveform in high time and frequency resolution, free from time-frequency uncertainty. We estimated the timelag of the signals between the detectors based on the optimal overlap of the individual KD time-frequency maps, yielding estimates accurate within a fraction of a millisecond for half of the events. A coherent addition of the data sets according to the estimated timelag eventually was used in a characterization of the event.Comment: Accepted for publication in CQG, special issue NRDA proceedings 200