A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues

Citizen sensing is an approach that develops and uses lightweight technologies with local communities to collect, share and act upon data. In doing so it enables them to become more aware of how they can tackle local issues. We report here on the development and uptake of the 'City- Commons Framework for Citizen Sensing', a conceptual model that builds on Participatory Action Research with the aim of playing an integrating role: outlining the processes and mechanisms for ensuring sensing technologies are co-designed by citizens to address their concerns. At the heart of the framework is the idea of a city commons: a pool of community-managed resources. We discuss how the framework was used by communities in Bristol to measure and monitor the problem of damp housing

Charge dependent azimuthal correlations in Pb--Pb collisions at sNN=2.76\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76 TeV

Separation of charges along the extreme magnetic field created in non-central relativistic heavy--ion collisions is predicted to be a signature of local parity violation in strong interactions. We report on results for charge dependent two particle azimuthal correlations with respect to the reaction plane for Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}} = 2.76$ TeV recorded in 2010 with ALICE at the LHC. The results are compared with measurements at RHIC energies and against currently available model predictions for LHC. Systematic studies of possible background effects including comparison with conventional (parity-even) correlations simulated with Monte Carlo event generators of heavy--ion collisions are also presented.Comment: Published in the proceedings of "Quark Matter 2011", Annecy-Franc

Die Wirkung von egoistischem, altruistischem und biosphärischem Framing der Plastikverschmutzung in der Umweltkommunikation

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Wirkung von Value-Based-Framing (egoistisch, altruistisch und biosphärisch) im Kontext einer Poster-Kampagne zum Thema Plastikverschmutzung. Die Norm-Activation Theory (Schwartz, 1977) dient als theoretischer Hintergrund zur Beschreibung des umweltrelevanten Verhaltensbildungsprozesses. Nach Schwartz' Theorie (1992; 1994) werden die verschiedenen Arten des Value-Based-Framings - egoistisches, altruistisches und biosphärisches Framing - miteinander verglichen und mit einer Version ohne Value-Based-Framing in der Wirkung auf den umweltbezogenen Verhaltensbildungsprozess analysiert. Zusätzlich wird die Relevanz einer Übereinstimmung des Werteframings und der bestehenden Wertorientierung der Rezipierenden untersucht. Die Studie zeigt, dass sich altruistisches Framing, verglichen mit einer Kommunikation ohne Werteframing, signifikant auf den umweltrelevanten Verhaltensbildungsprozess auswirkt: Die Wirkung des altruistischen Framings verglichen zu keinem Einsatz von Value-Based-Framing auf den Verhaltensbildungsprozess zeigt sich für alle Personen, unabhängig von bestehender Wertorientierung. Biosphärisches und altruistisches Framing zeigen sich hier als nicht relevant in der Wirkung auf den Verhaltensbildungsprozess. Die Ergebnisse sind konsistent mit den theoretischen Annahmen von Schwartz (1992; 1994) und werden in diesem Zusammenhang diskutiert. Nicht signifikante Ergebnisse werden auch in Bezug auf eine geringe Effektstärke diskutiert..

Targeting Leader Cells in Ovarian Cancer as an Effective Therapeutic Option

Majority of ovarian cancers are diagnosed at advanced stages with intra-peritoneal spread as the most common mode of disease metastasis. The formation of cancer spheroids is essential for the collective migration process, where shed tumour cells from the primary tumour form aggregates rather than disseminating as individual cells and seed within the peritoneal cavity. These cancer spheroids consist of leader cells (LC) and follower cells (FC), with the LC subset as key drivers of cellular movement and invasion. LCs have stem cell-like properties and are highly chemo-resistant with a specific survival addiction to several cell signalling pathways, such as the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway. We explore in this book chapter, the evidence supporting the role of LC in OC metastasis and the suppression of LC as an attractive therapeutic option for the treatment of advanced OC

Fluctuation and flow probes of early-time correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Fluctuation and correlation observables are often measured using multi-particle correlation methods and therefore mutually probe the origins of genuine correlations present in multi-particle distribution functions. We investigate the common influence of correlations arising from the spatially inhomogeneous initial state on multiplicity and momentum fluctuations as well as flow fluctuations. Although these observables reflect different aspects of the initial state, taken together, they can constrain a correlation scale set at the earliest moments of the collision. We calculate both the correlation scale in an initial stage Glasma flux tube picture and the modification to these correlations from later stage hydrodynamic flow and find quantitative agreement with experimental measurements over a range of collision systems and energies.Comment: Proceedings of the 28th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Dorado del Mar, Puerto Rico, April 7-14, 201

Classical approximation to quantum cosmological correlations

We investigate up to which order quantum effects can be neglected in calculating cosmological correlation functions after horizon exit. As a toy model, we study $\phi^3$ theory on a de Sitter background for a massless minimally coupled scalar field $\phi$. We find that for tree level and one loop contributions in the quantum theory, a good classical approximation can be constructed, but for higher loop corrections this is in general not expected to be possible. The reason is that loop corrections get non-negligible contributions from loop momenta with magnitude up to the Hubble scale H, at which scale classical physics is not expected to be a good approximation to the quantum theory. An explicit calculation of the one loop correction to the two point function, supports the argument that contributions from loop momenta of scale $H$ are not negligible. Generalization of the arguments for the toy model to derivative interactions and the curvature perturbation leads to the conclusion that the leading orders of non-Gaussian effects generated after horizon exit, can be approximated quite well by classical methods. Furthermore we compare with a theorem by Weinberg. We find that growing loop corrections after horizon exit are not excluded, even in single field inflation.Comment: 44 pages, 1 figure; v2: corrected errors, added references, conclusions unchanged; v3: added section in which we compare with stochastic approach; this version matches published versio