Extended Measures of Investment and Saving

National accountants treat as consumption all expenditure incurred in purchasing consumer durables and in forming intangible assets such as knowledge, education and good health. The case is made in this paper that the national accounts measures of saving and investment understate both the extent to which we save and the extent of the resources that we allocate to investment. Moreover, the national accounts data do not allow us to monitor substitution between tangible and intangible assets.Saving; Investment; National accounts; Knowledge; Human Capital; Physical Capital; Intangible Capital

Population Synthesis of Normal Radio and Gamma-ray Pulsars Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Techniques

We present preliminary results of a pulsar population synthesis of normal pulsars from the Galactic disk using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to better understand the parameter space of the assumed model. We use the Kuiper test, similar to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, to compare the cumulative distributions of chosen observables of detected radio pulsars with those simulated for various parameters. Our code simulates pulsars at birth using Monte Carlo techniques and evolves them to the present assuming initial spatial, kick velocity, magnetic field, and period distributions. Pulsars are spun down to the present, given radio and gamma-ray emission characteristics, filtered through ten selected radio surveys, and a {\it Fermi} all-sky threshold map. Each chain begins with a different random seed and searches a ten-dimensional parameter space for regions of high probability for a total of one thousand different simulations before ending. The code investigates both the "large world" as well as the "small world" of the parameter space. We apply the K-means clustering algorithm to verify if the chains reveal a single or multiple regions of significance. The outcome of the combined set of chains is the weighted average and deviation of each of the ten parameters describing the model. While the model reproduces reasonably well the detected distributions of normal radio pulsars, it does not replicate the predicted detected $\dot P - P$ distribution of {\it Fermi} pulsars. The simulations do not produce sufficient numbers of young, high-$\dot E$ pulsars in the Galactic plane.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, The proceedings from the Pulsar Conference: Electromagnetic Radiation from Pulsars and Magnetars will be published in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Serie

The role of beam geometry in population statistics and pulse profiles of radio and gamma-ray pulsars

We present results of a pulsar population synthesis study that incorporates a number of recent developments and some significant improvements over our previous study. We have included the results of the Parkes multi-beam pulsar survey in our select group of nine radio surveys, doubling our sample of radio pulsars. We adopted with some modifications the radio beam geometry of Arzoumanian, Chernoff & Cordes (2002). For the $\gamma$-ray beam, we have assumed the slot gap geometry described in the work of Muslimov & Harding (2003). To account for the shape of the distribution of radio pulsars in the $\dot P-P$ diagram, we continue to find that decay of the magnetic field on a timescale of 2.8 Myr is needed. With all nine surveys, our model predicts that EGRET should have seen 7 radio-quiet (below the sensitivity of these radio surveys) and 19 radio-loud $\gamma$-ray pulsars. AGILE (nominal sensitivity map) is expected to detect 13 radio-quiet and 37 radio-loud $\gamma$-ray pulsars, while GLAST, with greater sensitivity is expected to detect 276 radio-quiet and 344 radio-loud $\gamma$-ray pulsars. When the Parkes multi-beam pulsar survey is excluded, the ratio of radio-loud to radio-quiet $\gamma$-ray pulsars decreases, especially for GLAST. The decrease for EGRET is 45%, implying that some fraction of EGRET unidentified sources are radio-loud $\gamma$-ray pulsars. In the radio geometry adopted, short period pulsars are core dominated. Unlike the EGRET $\gamma$-ray pulsars, our model predicts that when two $\gamma$-ray peaks appear in the pulse profile, a dominant radio core peak appears in between the $\gamma$-ray peaks. Our findings suggest that further improvements are required in describing both the radio and $\gamma$-ray geometries.Comment: 39 pages, 13 eps figures, accepted for publication in ApJ, April 1, 200

Constraining pulsar gap models with the light-curve and flux properties of the gamma-ray pulsar population

We compare population synthesis results for inner and outer magnetosphere emission models with the various characteristics measured in the first LAT pulsar catalogue for both the radio-loud and radio-weak or radio-quiet gamma-ray pulsars. We show that all models fail to reproduce the observations: for each model there is a lack of luminous and energetic objects that suggest a non dipolar magnetic field structure or spin-down evolution. The large dispersion that we find in the simulated gamma-ray luminosity versus spin-down power relation does not allow to use the present trend seen in the Fermi data to distinguish among models. For each model and each Fermi detected pulsar, we have generated light curves as a function of obliquity and inclination angles. The theoretical curves were fitted to the observed one, using a maximum-likelihood approach, to derive the best-fit orientations and to compare how well each model can reproduce the data. Including the radio light-curve gives an additional key constraint to restrict the orientation spaceComment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the Pulsar 2010 Conference, Italy, 10 - 15 October 201

The use of honey in healing a recalcitrant wound following surgical treatment of hidradenitis suppurativa

Ancient civilizations used honey to heal wounds. Despite the rediscovery of honey by modern physicians1 its use in conventional medicine, unlike in complementary medicine, remains limited. Much anecdotal evidence, some clinical observations, some animal models and some randomised controlled trials support the efficacy of honey in managing wounds2,3 , but few detailed descriptions of the use of honey in healing difficult surgical wounds have previously been published

New technology for interactive CAL: The origami project

Origami is a three‐year EPSRC project that forms part of a general research programme on human‐computer interaction. The goal of this research is to investigate and implement new methods for human‐computer interaction, and to apply and evaluate their use. The research centres on the DigitalDesk, an ordinary desk augmented with a computer display using projection television and a video camera to monitor inputs. The DigitalDesk allows electronic and printed documents to be combined to give richer presentation and interaction possibilities than are possible with either separate medium. This paper examines the implications of such a system for CAL, and presents two prototype applications that demonstrate the possibilities