Considerate constructors scheme : Glenfarg water treatment works

The project to modify Glenfarg Water Treatment Works by Scottish Water, working in conjunction with its partners Black and Veatch Ltd. and Scottish Water Solutions, received a gold award and ‘the ultimate accolade’ of ‘The Most Considerate Site 2009’ at the considerate constructors scheme (CCS) awards. Although previous projects undertaken by Scottish Water have achieved high considerate constructor scores, Glenfarg exceeded previous projects’ standards. This level of performance was delivered across the eight categories of the scheme: considerate, environment, cleanliness, good neighbour, respectful, safe responsible and accountable. The steps the project team took under each of these categories to deliver the project are reviewed in this article. The article also outlines some of the challenges the project team faced while delivering such a high level of performance. Furthermore, the article makes particular reference to ‘soft’ management skills and the development of a project organisational culture that emphasised pride and passion through engagement of the workforce. Overall, the article presents valuable insights into how performing beyond the CCS requirements remains a dynamic and ongoing activity for all parties involved with the scheme

A modified flood severity assessment for enhanced decision support: application to the Boscastle flash flood of 2004

A modified flash flood severity assessment is presented, based on scoring a set of factors according to their potential for generating extreme catchment-scale flooding. Improvements are made to the index through incorporation of parameter uncertainties, managing data absence, and clearer graphical communication. The motive for proposing these changes is to better inform flood managers during the development of a flash flood that may require an emergency response. This modified decision-support system is demonstrated for the Boscastle flood of 2004 and other historical floods in the United Kingdom. For Boscastle, the extreme nature of the flood is underestimated, which is likely to be due to the lack of sophistication in weighting flood parameters. However, the proposed amendments are able to rapidly reflect the reliability of a catchment severity rating, which may further enhance this technique as a decision-support tool alongside radar observations of localized storms

The Marketing Structure in Agribusiness during the Transition in Bulgaria

Bulgaria is moving toward a food processing and marketing system which resembles that of Western Europe and the U.S. Large grocery chains from Germany, Austrai and Turkey are building supermarkets and hypermarkets in Bulgaria’s larger cities. However, income in Bulgaria remains much lower than in Western Europe and most Bulgarian consumers cannot afford to shop in the new stores yet. Neighborhood markets, which serve average Bulgarians, are expanding their product selections and remain the primary shopping venue. Food processing plants in Bulgaria are being upgraded to meet EU standards. Farmers are getting more efficient as land is consolidated. On the whole, the agriculture and agribusiness sectors in Bulgaria are improving.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40124/3/wp738.pd

The Marketing Structure in Agribusiness during the Transition in Bulgaria

Bulgaria is moving toward a food processing and marketing system which resembles that of Western Europe and the U.S. Large grocery chains from Germany, Austrai and Turkey are building supermarkets and hypermarkets in Bulgaria’s larger cities. However, income in Bulgaria remains much lower than in Western Europe and most Bulgarian consumers cannot afford to shop in the new stores yet. Neighborhood markets, which serve average Bulgarians, are expanding their product selections and remain the primary shopping venue. Food processing plants in Bulgaria are being upgraded to meet EU standards. Farmers are getting more efficient as land is consolidated. On the whole, the agriculture and agribusiness sectors in Bulgaria are improving.Bulgaria, food marketing, transition

The Insignificance of Global Reheating in the Abell 1068 Cluster: X-Ray Analysis

We report on a Chandra observation of the massive, medium redshift (z=0.1386) cooling flow cluster Abell 1068. We detect a clear temperature gradient in the X-ray emitting gas from kT ~ 5 keV in the outer part of the cluster down to roughly 2 keV in the core, and a striking increase in the metallicity of the gas toward the cluster center. The total spectrum from the cluster can be fit by a cooling flow model with a total mass deposition rate of 150 solar masses/yr. Within the core (r < 30 kpc), the mass depositon rate of 40 solar masses/yr is comparable to estimates for the star formation rate from optical data. We find an apparent correlation between the cD galaxy's optical isophotes and enhanced metallicity isocontours in the central ~100 kpc of the cluster. We show that the approximate doubling of the metallicity associated with the cD can be plausibly explained by supernova explosions associated with the cD's ambient stellar population and the recent starburst. Finally, we calculate the amount of heating due to thermal conduction and show that this process is unlikely to offset cooling in Abell 1068.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 26 pages, 12 b+w figures, 3 color figure

Comparative Effectiveness of Step-up Therapies in Children with Asthma Prescribed Inhaled Corticosteroids : A Historical Cohort Study

This work was supported by the Respiratory Effectiveness Group. Acknowledgments We thank the Respiratory Effectiveness Group for funding this work, Annie Burden for assistance with statistics, and Simon Van Rysewyk and Lisa Law for assistance with medical writing.Peer reviewedPostprin

Deep Architectures for Articulatory Inversion

We implement two deep architectures for the acousticarticulatory inversion mapping problem: a deep neural network and a deep trajectory mixture density network. We find that in both cases, deep architectures produce more accurate predictions than shallow architectures and that this is due to the higher expressive capability of a deep model and not a consequence of adding more adjustable parameters. We also find that a deep trajectory mixture density network is able to obtain better inversion accuracies than smoothing the results of a deep neural network. Our best model obtained an average root mean square error of 0.885 mm on the MNGU0 test dataset. Index Terms: Articulatory inversion, deep neural network, deep belief network, deep regression network, pretrainin

Multiplicative LSTM for sequence modelling

We introduce multiplicative LSTM (mLSTM), a recurrent neural network architecture for sequence modelling that combines the long short-term memory (LSTM) and multiplicative recurrent neural network architectures. mLSTM is characterised by its ability to have different recurrent transition functions for each possible input, which we argue makes it more expressive for autoregressive density estimation. We demonstrate empirically that mLSTM outperforms standard LSTM and its deep variants for a range of character level language modelling tasks. In this version of the paper, we regularise mLSTM to achieve 1.27 bits/char on text8 and 1.24 bits/char on Hutter Prize. We also apply a purely byte-level mLSTM on the WikiText-2 dataset to achieve a character level entropy of 1.26 bits/char, corresponding to a word level perplexity of 88.8, which is comparable to word level LSTMs regularised in similar ways on the same task

Le cycle Terminator 1984-2003 : du simple outil jusqu'au Terminator. Comment définir l'évolution de la relation entre l'Homme, la société et la technologie

L'évolution de l'Homme est indissociable de celle de la technologie. Dans cette relation d'interdépendance, la définition du ± vivant » et celle de la ± machine » est appelée à changer constamment. Dans cette transformation conjointe, on peut observer une part d'humanité dans la machine mais également une part technologique comme extension de l'Homme L'aboutissement de cette relation est encore inconnu. Qu'adviendrait-il si l'outil, le premier pas technologique de l'Homme, venait à le dépasser au point où il ne pourrait être rejoint ? The Terminator, Judgement Day et Rise of the Machines exposent justement ce questionnement concernant la technologie, la place qu'elle occupe et sa relation avec l'humanité à trois époques distinctes. L'image de la technologie dans ces trois films illustre une certaine représentation de la société, surtout américaine, avec ses valeurs et ses préoccupations, et ce, aux époques précises où les films ont été produits. Lorsqu'on observe le personnage du Terminator modèle 101 interprété par Arnold Schwarzenegger, on constate qu'il est un point de repère à partir duquel s'orchestre la représentation du contexte social et politique des années 1980, 1990 et 2000. Il est intéressant de noter que ce personnage a été grandement influencé par le cheminement de l'acteur qui l'interprétait. L'intégration de ce dernier et son changement de statut dans la société américaine tant au niveau personnel, professionnel que politique se reflètent à travers les transformations du T-101 de film en film