1,083 research outputs found
Service Performance Indicators for Infrastructure Investment
Infrastructure systems serving modern economies are highly complex, highly interconnected, and often highly
interactive. The result is increased complexity in investment decision-making, and increased challenges in prioritising
that investment. However, this prioritisation is vital to developing a long-term, sound, robust and achievable pipeline
of national infrastructure.
One key to effective, objective and prudent investment prioritisation is understanding the real performance of
infrastructure. Many metrics are employed to this end, and many are imposed by governments or regulators, but
often these metrics relate only to inputs or outputs in a production process. Whilst these metrics may be useful for
delivery agencies, they largely fail to address the real expectations or requirements of infrastructure users — quality of
service, safety, reliability, and resilience.
What is required is a set of metrics which address not outputs but outcomes — that is, how well does the
infrastructure network meet service needs? This paper reports on a study undertaken at a national level, to identify
service needs across a range of infrastructure sectors, to assess service performance metrics in use, and to show
how they or other suitable metrics can be used to prioritise investment decisions across sectors and jurisdictions
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Biosynthesis of Two Dilignol Rhamnosides in Leaves of Thuja Plicata Donn
One of a series of dilignol glycosides previously isolated from western red cedar leaves has now been identified as 2, 3-dihydro-7-hydroxy-2- (4'-hydroxy-3'methoxyphenyl)-3-hydroxymethyl-5-benzofuran-propan-3"-0-α-L-rhamnopyranoside. In an experiment to determine biosynthesis rate, cut western red cedar leaves took up 37% radioactive phenylalanine (label) after 10 h. The newly identified compound took 3 h to reach a maximum uptake of label of 0.4%. A previously identified dilignol glycoside reached a maximum uptake of 0.3% in the same period. Both glycosides in leaves were rapidly anabolized, therefore, and since their label decreased after 5 h, they were precursors to other unknown compounds. The possible role of these glycosides in wound response or leaf lignin formation is considered
Treatment of overlapping gaseous absorption with the correlated-k method in hot Jupiter and brown dwarf atmosphere models
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from EDP Sciences via the DOI in this record.The correlated-k method is frequently used to speed up radiation calculations in both one-dimensional and three-dimensional atmosphere models. An inherent difficulty with this method is how to treat overlapping absorption, i.e. absorption by more than one gas in a given spectral region. We have evaluated the applicability of three different methods in hot Jupiter and brown dwarf atmosphere models, all of which have been previously applied within models in the literature: (i) Random overlap, both with and without resorting and rebinning, (ii) equivalent extinction and (iii) pre-mixing of opacities, where (i) and (ii) combine k-coefficients for different gases to obtain k-coefficients for a mixture of gases, while (iii) calculates k-coefficients for a given mixture from the corresponding mixed line-by-line opacities. We find that the random overlap method is the most accurate and flexible of these treatments, and is fast enough to be used in one-dimensional models with resorting and rebinning. In three-dimensional models such as GCMs it is too slow, however, and equivalent extinction can provide a speed-up of at least a factor of three with only a minor loss of accuracy while at
the same time retaining the flexibility gained by combining k-coefficients computed for each gas individually. Pre-mixed opacities are significantly less flexible, and we also find that particular care must be taken when using this method in order to to adequately resolve steep variations in composition at important chemical equilibrium boundaries. We use the random overlap method with resorting and rebinning in our one-dimensional atmosphere model and equivalent extinction in our GCM, which allows us to e.g. consistently treat the feedback of non-equilibrium chemistry on the total opacity and therefore the calculated P–T profiles in our modelsWe thank the referee, Mark Marley, for comments that significantly improved the paper. This work is partly supported by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 Grant Agreement No. 247060-PEPS and grant No.
320478-TOFU). D.S.A. acknowledges support from the NASA Astrobiology Program through the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science. J.M. acknowledges the support of a Met Office Academic Partnership secondment. The calculations for this paper were performed on the DiRAC Complexity machine, jointly funded by STFC and the Large Facilities Capital Fund of BIS, and the University of
Exeter Super-computer, a DiRAC Facility jointly funded by STFC, the Large Facilities Capital Fund of BIS and the University of Exeter
The EU and Asia within an evolving global order: what is Europe? Where is Asia?
The papers in this special edition are a very small selection from those presented at the EU-NESCA (Network of European Studies Centres in Asia) conference on "the EU and East Asia within an Evolving Global Order: Ideas, Actors and Processes" in November 2008 in Brussels. The conference was the culmination of three years of research activity involving workshops and conferences bringing together scholars from both regions primarily to discuss relations between Europe and Asia, perceptions of Europe in Asia, and the relationship between the European regional project and emerging regional forms in Asia. But although this was the last of the three major conferences organised by the consortium, it in many ways represented a starting point rather than the end; an opportunity to reflect on the conclusions of the first phase of collaboration and point towards new and continuing research agendas for the future
The effect of metallicity on the atmospheres of exoplanets with fully coupled 3D hydrodynamics, equilibrium chemistry, and radiative transfer (article)
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from EDP Sciences for European Southern Observatory (ESO) via the DOI in this record.The dataset associated with this article is located in ORE at: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/32593In this work we have performed a series of simulations of the atmosphere of GJ 1214b assuming different metallicities
using the Met Office Unified Model (UM). The UM is a general circulation model (GCM) that solves the deep, nonhydrostatic
equations of motion and uses a flexible and accurate radiative transfer scheme, based on the two-stream
and correlated-k approximations, to calculate the heating rates. In this work we consistently couple a well-tested
Gibbs energy minimisation scheme to solve for the chemical equilibrium abundances locally in each grid cell for a
general set of elemental abundances, further improving the flexibility and accuracy of the model. As the metallicity
of the atmosphere is increased we find significant changes in the dynamical and thermal structure, with subsequent
implications for the simulated phase curve. The trends that we find are qualitatively consistent with previous works,
though with quantitative differences. We investigate in detail the effect of increasing the metallicity by splitting the
mechanism into constituents, involving the mean molecular weight, the heat capacity and the opacities. We find the
opacity effect to be the dominant mechanism in altering the circulation and thermal structure. This result highlights
the importance of accurately computing the opacities and radiative transfer in 3D GCMs.This work is partly supported by the European
Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 Grant Agreement No.
247060-PEPS and grant No. 320478-TOFU). BD acknowledges funding
from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European
Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC
grant agreement no. 336792 and thanks the University of Exeter for
support through a PhD studentship. DSA acknowledges support from
the NASA Astrobiology Program through the Nexus for Exoplanet
System Science. NJM and JG’s contributions were in part funded by
a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant, and in part by a University
of Exeter College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical
Sciences studentship. This work used the DiRAC Complexity system,
operated by the University of Leicester IT Services, which forms
part of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility. This equipment is funded
by BIS National E-Infrastructure capital grant ST/K000373/1 and
STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/K0003259/1. DiRAC is part of
the National E-Infrastructure. This work also used the University of
Exeter Supercomputer, a DiRAC Facility jointly funded by STFC,
the Large Facilities Capital Fund of BIS and the University of Exeter.
Material produced using Met Office Software
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