Pituophis melanoleucus

Number of Pages: 8Integrative BiologyGeological Science

'Just eating and sleeping': asylum seekers' constructions of belonging within a restrictive policy environment

The ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe has drawn attention to the reasons why people risk desperate journeys to seek safety. However, less research has focussed on what happens to those on the move once they have reached their destination country. In recent years the UK government's ‘hostile environment’ policy for asylum seekers has taken precedence over attempts to integrate refugees, creating a system in which destitution, dispersal and detention have all become pervasive features. This paper takes a discursive psychological approach to the analysis of interviews with asylum seekers in Wales, UK. It argues that participants draw on economic repertoires of effortfulness to construct accounts in which belonging is dependent upon being able to contribute to the economic and civic life of the host society. It further highlights how participants construct accounts in which restriction from the asylum system is positioned as the reason for not belonging and that time spent as an asylum seeker is policy-imposed liminality. The findings suggest that allowing asylum seekers to work would be a key step forward in integration policy and contribute to generating a greater sense of belonging

Land Grant Application- Parker, Samuel (Lyman, NH)

Land grant application submitted to the Maine Land Office for Samuel Parker for service in the Revolutionary War.https://digitalmaine.com/revolutionary_war_mass/1254/thumbnail.jp

Absorption phenomena in quantum walks

The quantum walk is a unitary analogue to the discrete random walk, and its properties have been increasingly studied since the turn of the millennium. In comparison with the classical random walk, the quantum walk exhibits linear spreading and initial condition dependent asymmetries. As noted early on in the conjecture and subsequent calculation of absorption probabilities in the one dimensional Hadamard walk, the interaction of the quantum walk with an absorbing boundary is fundamentally divergent from classical case. Here, we will survey absorption probabilities for a more general collection of one dimensional quantum walks and extend the method to consider d-dimensional walks in the presence of d-1 dimensional absorbing walls. However, these results are concerned only with local behavior at the boundary in the form of absorption probabilities. The main results of this thesis are concerned with the global behavior of finite quantum walks, which can be described by linear spreading in the short term, modal phenomena in the mid term, and stable distributions in the exceedingly long term. These theorems will be rigorously proved in the one-dimensional case and extrapolated to higher dimensional quantum walks. To this end we introduce QWSim, a new and robust computational engine for displaying finite two dimensional quantum walks

Observation of PT phase transition in a simple mechanical system

If a Hamiltonian is PT symmetric, there are two possibilities: Either the eigenvalues are entirely real, in which case the Hamiltonian is said to be in an unbroken-PT-symmetric phase, or else the eigenvalues are partly real and partly complex, in which case the Hamiltonian is said to be in a broken-PT-symmetric phase. As one varies the parameters of the Hamiltonian, one can pass through the phase transition that separates the unbroken and broken phases. This transition has recently been observed in a variety of laboratory experiments. This paper explains the phase transition in a simple and intuitive fashion and then describes an extremely elementary experiment in which the phase transition is easily observed.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

The Pink Passenger

The work I have created during my time as a graduate student is a reflection of the dialogues I have engaged in with other artists and acquaintances both in and outside of the academic arena. Stylistically this work is derivative of my involvement with graffiti, Tattooing, and underground comics. I have developed the icon of the rider to represent the agency and responsibility of myself as an artist in reflecting these various contexts

Patterns, Processes, And Scale: An Evaluation Of Ecological And Biogeochemical Functions Across An Arctic Stream Network

Ecosystems are highly variable in space and time. Understanding how spatial and temporal scales influence the patterns and processes occurring across watersheds presents a fundamental challenge to aquatic ecologists. The goal of this research was to elucidate the importance of spatial scale on stream structure and function within the Oksrukuyik Creek, an Arctic watershed located on the North Slope of Alaska (68°36’N, 149°12’W). The studies that comprise this dissertation address issues of scale that affect our ability to assess ecosystem function, such as: methodologies used to scale ecosystem measurements, multiple interacting scales, translation between scales, and scale-dependencies. The first methodological study examined approaches used to evaluate chlorophyll a in ethanol extracts of aquatic biofilms. Quantification of chlorophyll a is essential to the study of aquatic ecosystems, yet differences in methodology may introduce significant errors to its determination that can lead to issues of comparability between studies. A refined analytical procedure for the determination of chlorophyll a was developed under common acidification concentrations at multiple common reaction times. The refined procedure was used to develop a series of predictive equations that could be used to correct and normalize previously evaluated chlorophyll a data. The predictive equations were validated using benthic periphyton samples from northern Alaska and northwestern Vermont, U.S.A. The second study examined interaction and translation between scales by examining how normalization approaches affect measurements of metabolism and nutrient uptake in stream sediment biofilms. The effect of particle size and heterogeneity on rates of biofilm metabolism and nutrient uptake was evaluated in colonized and native sediments normalized using two different scaling approaches. Functional rates were normalized by projected surface area and sediment surface area scaling approaches, which account for the surface area in plan view (looking top-down) and the total surface area of all sediment particles, respectively. Findings from this study indicated that rates of biogeochemical function in heterogeneous habitats were directly related to the total sediment surface area available for biofilm colonization. The significant interactions between sediment surface area and rates of respiration and nutrient uptake suggest that information about the size and distribution of sediment particles could substantially improve our ability to predict and scale measurements of important biogeochemical functions in streams. The final study examined how stream nutrient dynamics are influenced by the presence or absence of lakes across a variety of discharge conditions and how catchment characteristics can be used to predict stream nutrients. Concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and other inorganic nutrients were significantly greater in streams without lakes than in streams in with lakes and DOC, total dissolved nitrogen (TDN), and soluble reactive phosphorus concentrations increased as a function of discharge. Catchment characteristic models explained between 20% and 76% of the variance of the nutrients measured. Organic nutrient models were driven by antecedent precipitation and watershed vegetation cover type while inorganic nutrients were driven by antecedent precipitation, landscape characteristics and reach vegetation cover types. The developed models contribute to existing and future understanding of the changing Arctic and lend new confidence to the prediction of nutrient dynamics in streams where lakes are present

Abdominal Wall Reconstruction: Improving Research Quality and Identifying the Predictors of Ventral Hernia Recurrence

Abdominal wall reconstruction (AWR) is an emerging subspecialty within general surgery. To date, research has focused mostly on surgical reconstruction techniques without sufficient regard to research quality. As a result, much published work has produced spurious data with unstandardised variable definitions. Published data is therefore challenging to interpret, giving little robust evidence to guide AWR surgeons. Consequently, the first part of this thesis focuses on improving research quality. Initially, I performed two systematic reviews analysing variable reporting amongst interventional trials, demonstrating the current heterogeneous reporting of perioperative variables, post-operative outcomes, and patient reported outcomes as well as poor trial methodology. Next, I targeted “loss of domain” (LOD) and published a systematic review and a clinician survey which revealed current inconsistent definitions, both in the literature and amongst practicing surgeons. Whilst performing these systematic reviews, I also identified that terms used to defined and name abdominal wall planes were used inconsistently. To rectify this, I performed a series of consensus studies. First, I performed a Nominal Group Technique study and established minimum datasets for primary and incisional ventral hernia interventional trials. These datasets reached consensus on standardised peri-operative variable definitions and detection methods, outcomes reporting, follow-up duration, and criteria to improve trial methodology. Next, I performed two Delphi studies with 20 international hernia experts. The first established new written and volumetric definitions for LOD. The second study created ‘ICAP’, an International Classification of Abdominal wall Planes, which defines and names the tissue planes into which mesh can be placed for ventral hernia repair. The second part of this thesis uses systematic review and meta-analysis across 20 years of AWR literature to identify peri-operative factors that significantly predispose to hernia recurrence after apparently curative repair. This systematic review forms the evidence-base from which to develop a prognostic model of ventral hernia recurrence

Improving the quantitative research skills of Welsh Baccalaureate teachers through university engagement

In 2015 the re-designed Welsh Baccalaureate Qualification (WBQ) was launched and, for the first time, students undertaking the qualification were required to complete the Skills Challenge Certificate (SCC). Consisting of four components: the Individual Project, the Enterprise and Employability Challenge, the Global Citizenship Challenge, and the Community Challenge, the SCC aims to enable learners to develop seven skills needed for education, employment and life. The Individual Project requires students to undertake a research project that includes analysing data using/utilising quantitative data analysis skills. This paper identifies the teaching of such quantitative skills as a difficulty for some teachers involved in the delivery of the qualification drawing on recent engagement work between Cardiff University and schools and colleges in South Wales. It argues that universities have an opportunity to engage with schools, teachers and pupils in the delivery of quantitative research skills that can be beneficial for both schools and universities

An automated OpenCL FPGA compilation framework targeting a configurable, VLIW chip multiprocessor

Modern system-on-chips augment their baseline CPU with coprocessors and accelerators to increase overall computational capacity and power efficiency, and thus have evolved into heterogeneous systems. Several languages have been developed to enable this paradigm shift, including CUDA and OpenCL. This thesis discusses a unified compilation environment to enable heterogeneous system design through the use of OpenCL and a customised VLIW chip multiprocessor (CMP) architecture, known as the LE1. An LLVM compilation framework was researched and a prototype developed to enable the execution of OpenCL applications on the LE1 CPU. The framework fully automates the compilation flow and supports work-item coalescing to better utilise the CPU cores and alleviate the effects of thread divergence. This thesis discusses in detail both the software stack and target hardware architecture and evaluates the scalability of the proposed framework on a highly precise cycle-accurate simulator. This is achieved through the execution of 12 benchmarks across 240 different machine configurations, as well as further results utilising an incomplete development branch of the compiler. It is shown that the problems generally scale well with the LE1 architecture, up to eight cores, when the memory system becomes a serious bottleneck. Results demonstrate superlinear performance on certain benchmarks (x9 for the bitonic sort benchmark with 8 dual-issue cores) with further improvements from compiler optimisations (x14 for bitonic with the same configuration