Enchantment with ‘the East’: an individual response to the problem of being Western under conditions of reflexive modernization

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Spectral/hp element methods for plane Newtonian extrudate swell

Spectral/hp element methods and an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) moving-boundary technique are used to investigate planar Newtonian extrudate swell. Newtonian extrudate swell arises when viscous liquids exit long die slits. The problem is characterised by a stress singularity at the end of the slit which is inherently difficult to capture and strongly influences the predicted swelling of the fluid. The impact of inertia (0 <Re < 100) and slip along the die wall on the free surface profile and the velocity and pressure values in the domain and around the singularity are investigated. The high order method is shown to provide high resolution of the steep pressure profile at the singularity. The swelling ratio and exit pressure loss are compared with existing results in the literature and the ability of high-order methods to capture these values using significantly fewer degrees of freedom is demonstrated

My Experiences with Summer Lovegrass

I first heard about teff (Eragrostis tef) being used as a hay crop in early 2006 at a meeting near the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia. The meeting was about orchardgrass production, so I was speaking about new varieties that are available for producers to grow. Several farmers had experienced massive stand losses of their established orchardgrass hay fields, so they had tried this ‘new’ summer annual grass. Some of the farmers were surprised that I knew about this grass, but I didn’t know about its use as a hay or pasture grass. Teff is the Ethiopian name for a grain crop that supplies the majority of the calories for the diet of the people in Ethiopia (and Erytrea). The straw is used as a fodder for animal feed after the seed is threshed, but this would be of lower forage quality than if the grass were harvested in a vegetative stage of growth

Visualizing Sensor Network Coverage with Location Uncertainty

We present an interactive visualization system for exploring the coverage in sensor networks with uncertain sensor locations. We consider a simple case of uncertainty where the location of each sensor is confined to a discrete number of points sampled uniformly at random from a region with a fixed radius. Employing techniques from topological data analysis, we model and visualize network coverage by quantifying the uncertainty defined on its simplicial complex representations. We demonstrate the capabilities and effectiveness of our tool via the exploration of randomly distributed sensor networks

The role of Building Information Modelling in retrofitting works within the UK social housing sector

The deadline for greenhouse gas emissions in the UK to be reduced by 80 per cent against the 1990 baseline is 2050. Over a quarter of these emissions are attributable to the 28m properties within the residential sector, with over 4m homes being maintained and managed by social housing registered providers. The UK Government advocates retrofitting of the existing housing stock to help meet the carbon reduction targets, with the UK social housing sector being ideally placed to deliver these types of energy-efficient retrofit projects on a large scale. The Government’s industrial strategy also supports the acceleration of the adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) as an efficient and collaborative way of working throughout the UK construction supply chain. BIM is already used across the social housing sector with respect to new build projects and the aim of this research is to: 1) examine whether the social housing sector has accepted the implementation of BIM for retrofitting works; and 2) endeavour to identify new areas and roles where BIM may contribute in future. The findings indicate that if the diffusion of BIM within the social housing sector is to be successful with respect to retrofitting works, then BIM should not be adopted in isolation. Innovative developments in cloud technology, geomatics and the introduction of complementary software may also need to be accepted in conjunction with a change in the perception of BIM by actors within the sector

Bringing the feelings back : returning emotions to criminal justice practice

This article argues that probation policy needs to take much greater account of the important role of emotion in probation and other criminal justice practice. Drawing on the findings of three separate pieces of research, we argue that emotions play a critical role in practice despite their absence from policy in recent years. Emotions, we argue, are important in terms of developing effective practice. Moreover, there are several consequences of using emotion in practice and relevant organisations need to recognise this and provide sufficient support for staff in dealing with such consequences. This, we argue, would allow for practitioners to be both emotionally literate whilst also enabling practice which encourages offenders to take responsibility for their actions. In sum, it will lead to an intuitively intelligent system of justic

FASER: Binary Code Similarity Search through the use of Intermediate Representations

Being able to identify functions of interest in cross-architecture software is useful whether you are analysing for malware, securing the software supply chain or conducting vulnerability research. Cross-Architecture Binary Code Similarity Search has been explored in numerous studies and has used a wide range of different data sources to achieve its goals. The data sources typically used draw on common structures derived from binaries such as function control flow graphs or binary level call graphs, the output of the disassembly process or the outputs of a dynamic analysis approach. One data source which has received less attention is binary intermediate representations. Binary Intermediate representations possess two interesting properties: they are cross architecture by their very nature and encode the semantics of a function explicitly to support downstream usage. Within this paper we propose Function as a String Encoded Representation (FASER) which combines long document transformers with the use of intermediate representations to create a model capable of cross architecture function search without the need for manual feature engineering, pre-training or a dynamic analysis step. We compare our approach against a series of baseline approaches for two tasks; A general function search task and a targeted vulnerability search task. Our approach demonstrates strong performance across both tasks, performing better than all baseline approaches.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security (CAMLIS

Comparison of the antibacterial activity of essential oils and extracts of medicinal and culinary herbs to investigate potential new treatments for irritable bowel syndrome

BACKGROUND:Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common functional gastrointestinal disorder, which may result from alteration of the gastrointestinal microbiota following gastrointestinal infection, or with intestinal dysbiosis or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. This may be treated with antibiotics, but there is concern that widespread antibiotic use might lead to antibiotic resistance. Some herbal medicines have been shown to be beneficial, but their mechanism(s) of action remain incompletely understood. To try to understand whether antibacterial properties might be involved in the efficacy of these herbal medicines, and to investigate potential new treatments for IBS, we have conducted a preliminary study in vitro to compare the antibacterial activity of the essential oils of culinary and medicinal herbs against the bacterium, Esherichia coli.METHODS:Essential oils were tested for their ability to inhibit E. coli growth in disc diffusion assays and in liquid culture, and to kill E. coli in a zone of clearance assay. Extracts of coriander, lemon balm and spearmint leaves were tested for their antibacterial activity in the disc diffusion assay. Disc diffusion and zone of clearance assays were analysed by two-tailed t tests whereas ANOVA was performed for the turbidometric assays.RESULTS:Most of the oils exhibited antibacterial activity in all three assays, however peppermint, lemon balm and coriander seed oils were most potent, with peppermint and coriander seed oils being more potent than the antibiotic rifaximin in the disc diffusion assay. The compounds present in these oils were identified by gas chromatography mass spectrometry. Finally, extracts were made of spearmint, lemon balm and coriander leaves with various solvents and these were tested for their antibacterial activity against E. coli in the disc diffusion assay. In each case, extracts made with ethanol and methanol exhibited potent antibacterial activity.CONCLUSIONS:Many of the essential oils had antibacterial activity in the three assays, suggesting that they would be good candidates for testing in clinical trials. The observed antibacterial activity of ethanolic extracts of coriander, lemon balm and spearmint leaves suggests a mechanistic explanation for the efficacy of a mixture of coriander, lemon balm and mint extracts against IBS in a published clinical trial

The evolution of human altruism towards non-kin through sexual selection

Altruistic or selfless behaviour is a major puzzle for evolutionary biology which predicts competition between organisms in the struggle for existence. One explanation for altruism towards non-kin proposes that it evolved as a reliable signal of individual quality to others, including potential mates. It is thus possible to see altruistic traits as handicaps that act as indicators of the phenotypic and genetic quality under sexual selection. Here, I also suggest that sexual selection mechanisms other than the handicap principle might have favoured the evolution of altruism towards non-kin. I focus on human altruistic traits and speculate that the expansion of the brain in human evolution would have made increasing levels of parental investment essential. If displays of altruism towards non-kin had correlated with sustained parental investment then conditions particularly favourable to the evolution of altruistic traits could have existed. I make three predictions based on this scenario, each of which requires measurement of mate preference towards altruistic traits. I therefore develop and test a psychometric scale to measure this mate preference. Firstly, I predict that mate choice on the basis of altruistic traits will be found, a prediction supported in one sub-sample. Secondly, I predict significantly stronger female mate preference towards altruistic traits, a prediction that is also supported. Finally, I predict that, in line with sexual selection theory, variation in mate preference and preferred trait will be subject to genetic influence. This prediction is supported in a twin study of responses to the scales employed. I also examine one form of altruistic behaviour, voluntary activity on behalf of others, and measure six possible motivations to perform this behaviour. I conclude that one motivation alone, altruistic motivation, accounts for volunteer commitmen