Using urban foresight techniques in city visioning: lessons from the Reading 2050 vision

The emergence of urban (or city) foresight techniques focuses on the need to create coherent city visions to plan and manage for future long-term change and create opportunities for new investment into the local urban economy. This paper reviews the concepts of ‘co-created’ city visioning and urban foresight, setting this in the context of new and emerging practice and policy in the UK, and elsewhere. The paper critically reviews the development of the vision for a small city (the ‘Reading 2050’ project, linked to the UK Future of Cities Foresight Programme), and the lessons it holds for visioning, foresight and planning, using the ‘quadruple helix’ framework as a conceptual lens for analysis

Querying Large Physics Data Sets Over an Information Grid

Optimising use of the Web (WWW) for LHC data analysis is a complex problem and illustrates the challenges arising from the integration of and computation across massive amounts of information distributed worldwide. Finding the right piece of information can, at times, be extremely time-consuming, if not impossible. So-called Grids have been proposed to facilitate LHC computing and many groups have embarked on studies of data replication, data migration and networking philosophies. Other aspects such as the role of 'middleware' for Grids are emerging as requiring research. This paper positions the need for appropriate middleware that enables users to resolve physics queries across massive data sets. It identifies the role of meta-data for query resolution and the importance of Information Grids for high-energy physics analysis rather than just Computational or Data Grids. This paper identifies software that is being implemented at CERN to enable the querying of very large collaborating HEP data-sets, initially being employed for the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer using microring resonators

We report a reconfigurable four-channel optical add-drop multiplexer for use in access networks. The optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) is based on vertically coupled thermally tunable Si/sub 3/N/sub 4/--SiO/sub 2/ microring resonators (MRs) and has been realized on a footprint of 0.25 mm/sup 2/. Individual MRs in the OADM can be tuned across the full free-spectral range of 4.18 nm and have a 3-dB bandwidth of 50 GHz

Bristol

Bristol is a major city and port in the south-west of England. In medieval times, it became the third largest city in the kingdom, behind London and York. Bristol was founded in the late Saxon period and grew rapidly in the 12th and 13th centuries. Initially, seaborne trading links with Ireland and France were particularly significant; later, from the 16th century onwards, the city became a focus for trade with Iberia, Africa, and the New World. This led to the growth of new industries such as brass manufacture, glass production and sugar refining, producing items for export, and processing imported raw materials. Bristol also derived wealth from the slave trade between Africa and the New World. The city has a long history of antiquarian and archaeological investigation. This volume provides, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the historical development of Bristol, based on archaeological and architectural evidence.Part 1 describes the geological and topographical context of Bristol and discusses evidence for the environment prior to the foundation of the city. The history of archaeological work in Bristol is discussed in detail, as is the pictorial record and the cartographic evidence for the city. In Part 2, a series of period-based chapters considers the historical background and archaeological evidence for Bristol’s development from the prehistoric, Roman, and post-Roman eras through the establishment and growth of Bristol between about 950 and 1200 AD; the medieval city; early modern period; and the period from 1700 to 1900 AD, when Bristol was particularly important for its role in transatlantic trade. Each chapter discusses the major civic, military, and religious monuments of the time and the complex topographical evolution of the city. Part 3 assesses the significance of Bristol’s archaeology and presents a range of themes for future research

Towns, tenements and buildings: aspects of medieval urban archaeology and geography

This thesis will argue that the most effective way of understanding the physical development of medieval towns, particularly the larger, more complex, towns and those which lack extensive and detailed contemporary documentation is by a structured integration of the data derived from the archaeological investigation of individual sites with detailed town-plan analyses following the methodology introduced and developed by Conzen. This will be demonstrated by two case-studies, designed to explore the Interaction of the different sources of evidence at two different scales of investigation. The first case-study is a detailed analysis of the plan and development of the whole of a large medieval town,(Worcester), the second is a study of a single street (Pride Hill) in Shrewsbury. The analysis of Worcester illuminates, in particular, the boundaries and internal layout of the late 9th-century burh, suggesting that it was an extension to the pre-existing Roman earthwork circuit and incorporated an area subject to regular town planning, possibly following Wessex models, and an area of irregular settlement that included the bishop of Worcester's haga recorded in 904. The defences were, it is argued, partly dismantled for the extension of urban settlement. The Shrewsbury case-study examines an unusually concentrated building pattern of halls behind the street frontage, and sets this in its contemporary context by an analysis of the contemporary plot-pattern, identified in part by its association with surveyed medieval undercrofts. The earlier history of the area is explored through further analysis of the plot-pattern which predates and is cut by the town wall. It is suggested that the area in question was, like other sectors of the early medieval urban fringe, possibly subject to some type of regular land-allotment for grazing and access to the riverbank. Issues, illustrating the mutually-illuminating character of town plan analysis and urban archaeology, arising from the two case-studies, are discussed. These include the role of archaeology in reconstructing morphological change, the problems of the chronology of urban extensions, archaeology and the interpretation of cartographically-recorded features, and the role of plan-analysis in establishing a contemporary spatial context for individual and multiple archaeological investigations in early medieval towns

Bristol

Bristol is a major city and port in the south-west of England. In medieval times, it became the third largest city in the kingdom, behind London and York. Bristol was founded in the late Saxon period and grew rapidly in the 12th and 13th centuries. Initially, seaborne trading links with Ireland and France were particularly significant; later, from the 16th century onwards, the city became a focus for trade with Iberia, Africa, and the New World. This led to the growth of new industries such as brass manufacture, glass production and sugar refining, producing items for export, and processing imported raw materials. Bristol also derived wealth from the slave trade between Africa and the New World. The city has a long history of antiquarian and archaeological investigation. This volume provides, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the historical development of Bristol, based on archaeological and architectural evidence.Part 1 describes the geological and topographical context of Bristol and discusses evidence for the environment prior to the foundation of the city. The history of archaeological work in Bristol is discussed in detail, as is the pictorial record and the cartographic evidence for the city. In Part 2, a series of period-based chapters considers the historical background and archaeological evidence for Bristol’s development from the prehistoric, Roman, and post-Roman eras through the establishment and growth of Bristol between about 950 and 1200 AD; the medieval city; early modern period; and the period from 1700 to 1900 AD, when Bristol was particularly important for its role in transatlantic trade. Each chapter discusses the major civic, military, and religious monuments of the time and the complex topographical evolution of the city. Part 3 assesses the significance of Bristol’s archaeology and presents a range of themes for future research

Net Yield Efficiency:Comparing Salad and Vegetable Waste between Community Supported Agriculture and Supermarkets in the UK

Food security is high on the global agenda. Two factors make it particularly pressing: the continuing rise in the global population, and the failure to adequately feed the current one. An area that has been the focus of much recent attention has been food waste; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that as much as a third of all food is lost or wasted. This paper argues that by taking a food system approach that accounts for yields as well as loss and waste in distribution and consumption, we can compare the contribution of different food systems to food security. A novel concept of “net yield efficiency” (NYE) is introduced that accounts for this. We present an illustrative case study of the levels of fresh vegetable and salad waste in the supermarket-controlled food system compared with a commu­nity supported agriculture (CSA) scheme. This case study explores whether the CSA and its members are less wasteful than the supermarket system. The study found that when all stages of the food system were measured for waste, the CSA dramatically outperformed the supermarket system, wasting only 6.71% by weight compared to 40.7–47.7%. Even accounting for difficulties in estimating waste, the findings underline the differences between these systems. On this basis, the paper argues that the NYE measure provides a more accurate picture of food system performance than current measures, which tend to focus on yield alone

A Component Based Approach to Scientific Workflow Management

CRISTAL is a distributed scientific workflow system used in the manufacturing and production phases of HEP experiment construction at CERN. The CRISTAL project has studied the use of a description driven approach, using meta- modelling techniques, to manage the evolving needs of a large physics community. Interest from such diverse communities as bio-informatics and manufacturing has motivated the CRISTAL team to re-engineer the system to customize functionality according to end user requirements but maximize software reuse in the process. The next generation CRISTAL vision is to build a generic component architecture from which a complete software product line can be generated according to the particular needs of the target enterprise. This paper discusses the issues of adopting a component product line based approach and our experiences of software reuse