Applying project management concepts and tools to built environment research projects

This paper concerns the issue of Built Environment research students utilising a formal approach for designing and conducting research projects. The authors draw upon their experience of supervising and examining Built Environment research projects at undergraduate and postgraduate levels to critically reflect upon issues faced by researchers. Furthermore, student feedback has been obtained via semi formal interviews. Within the paper a case is presented for research students in built environment disciplines to adopt and use Project Management concepts and tools in order to exercise better management control of research projects and increase the possibility of bringing the research to a successful conclusion. The works of Phillips and Pugh (2005), Rudestam and Newton (2001) and Delamont et al (1997) support the authors’ observations and conclusions that research students would benefit from having a more formalised approach when conducting their research in order to better control and succeed in their research activities

Applying a unified public relations evaluation model in a European context

The evaluation of public relations programmes has been a topic of keen interest to the public relations community for many years. A number of three level/stage models have been proposed to describe and explain the evaluation process. They have not been successful in terms of practitioner acceptance and have been criticised for being unrealistic and lacking feedback mechanisms. More recently the short-term and continuing models have been developed in response to these criticisms. This paper suggests a Unified Evaluation model which uses an established analysis of the communication/persuasion process as a framework to integrate and unify existing models that describe the public relations evaluation process. The proposed testing of this model in a European, transnational context is then outlined

UK energy in a global context: synthesis report

No description supplie

Atmospheric effects and spurious signals in GPS analyses

Improvements in the analyses of Global Positioning System (GPS) observations yield resolvable millimeter to submillimeter differences in coordinate estimates, thus providing sufficient resolution to distinguish subtle differences in analysis methodologies. Here we investigate the effects on site coordinates of using different approaches to modeling atmospheric loading deformation (ATML) and handling of tropospheric delays. The rigorous approach of using the time-varying Vienna Mapping Function 1 yields solutions with lower noise at a range of frequencies compared with solutions generated using empirical mapping functions. This is particularly evident when ATML is accounted for. Some improvement also arises from using improved a priori zenith hydrostatic delays (ZHD), with the combined effect being site-specific. Importantly, inadequacies in both mapping functions and a priori ZHDs not only introduce time-correlated noise but significant periodic terms at solar annual and semiannual periods. We find no significant difference between solutions where nontidal ATML is applied at the observation level rather than as a daily averaged value, but failing to model diurnal and semidiurnal tidal ATML at the observation level can introduce anomalous propagated signals with periods that closely match the GPS draconitic annual (∼351.4 days) and semiannual period (∼175.7 days). Exacerbated by not fixing ambiguities, these signals are evident in both stacked and single-site power spectra, with each tide contributing roughly equally to the dominant semiannual peak. The amplitude of the propagated signal reaches a maximum of 0.8 mm with a clear latitudinal dependence that is not correlated directly with locations of maximum tidal amplitude.Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project

Manufacturing Growth, Technological Progress, and Military Expenditure

During the Cold War a major justification of high levels of military spending was the ‘spin off’ of innovations to the civil sector, such as computers, which could then be exploited profitably and to the benefit of the economy and society. There is evidence that this has changed in more recent times, with the speed of consumer industry led technological change leading to ‘spin in’ to advanced weapons systems. If this is the case it has removed a major benefit of military spending. There is, however, little systematic evidence and little recent empirical work. This paper makes a contribution to the debate, analysing the impact of military spending on technological progress, and hence labour productivity and economic growth, for a number of major weapons producers. It uses data on the manufacturing sector, for the period 1966-2002 and estimates a CES production function in which military spending is assumed to effect growth through its impact on trend technological change.

An overview of the collaborative partnership between Sheffield Hallam University and Tunku Abdul Rahman College

This paper provides an outline of the strategic partnership between Tunku Abdul Rahman College and Sheffield Hallam University's Built Environment Department. Within the paper curriculum design and key course developments, with supporting rationale are established. The different cultural aspects of teaching international students are explored, noting how student engagement and behaviour has changed and developed over a 13 year relationship. The paper concludes with the identification of future collaborative ventures

Blocking of word-boundary consonant lengthening in Sienese Italian

This paper examines an aspect of Raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), the lengthening of word-initial consonants following certain words e.g. tre [mm]ele ‘three apples’ in Italian. Most phonological accounts claim the phenomenon is predictable and obligatory (e.g. Nespor & Vogel 1986). However, descriptive sources on Italian (e.g. Camilli 1941) have long claimed that RS interacts with and can be blocked by other phenomena operative in natural speech e.g. pausing. In this paper we outline the phonetic details of the RS blocking phenomena and present the results of an auditory and preliminary acoustic analysis of the interaction between RS and these other phenomena based on a corpus of spontaneous speech data

Real Snail Mail

RDFID tagged snails were used as part of a messaging system in order introduce an element of uncertainty in the the delivery mechanism. One inspiration for the project was the Slow Art movement which aims to make people slow down and think about what they are doing. This project was a collaboration between Boredom Research within the Media School and The Creative technologies Research Group within DEC at Bournemouth University