Anomalous thresholds and edge singularities in Electrical Impedance Tomography

Studies of models of current flow behaviour in Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) have shown that the current density distribution varies extremely rapidly near the edge of the electrodes used in the technique. This behaviour imposes severe restrictions on the numerical techniques used in image reconstruction algorithms. In this paper we have considered a simple two dimensional case and we have shown how the theory of end point/pinch singularities which was developed for studying the anomalous thresholds encountered in elementary particle physics can be used to give a complete description of the analytic structure of the current density near to the edge of the electrodes. As a byproduct of this study it was possible to give a complete description of the Riemann sheet manifold of the eigenfunctions of the logarithmic kernel. These methods can be readily extended to other weakly singular kernels.Comment: Correction of a misprint which occurred in the unnumbered formula preceding Eq. (14), LaTeX file as an uuencoded file, 40 pages with 12 figures, uses epsf.st

What is the impact of subject benchmarking?

The introduction of subject benchmarking led to fears of increased external intervention in the activities of universities and a more restrictive view of institutional autonomy, accompanied by an undermining of the academic profession, particularly through the perceived threat of the introduction of a national curriculum for higher education. For this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted in one old and one new university with higher education professionals in chemistry, history and quality assurance, who were asked about their perceptions of subject benchmarking and its impact. The investigation did not bear out the fears articulated at the inception of subject benchmarking. Furthermore, the investigation showed that subject benchmarking was not perceived as having the principal characteristic normally associated with a benchmarking system, in that it was not perceived as leading to improvement. The article ends with suggestions for future research

Assessment of Coating Performance on Waterwalls and Superheaters in a Pulverised Fuel-Fired Power Station

Protective coatings offer one route to increase the lives of heat exchangers in pulverised fuel power plants. A range of candidate coatings have been exposed on the waterwall and superheaters of a 500 MWe UK power station unit for periods of up to ~4 years (24,880 operating hours), during which time this unit was fired on a mixture of UK and world-traded coals. Both nickel- and iron-based candidate coatings were included, applied using high velocity oxy-fuel or arc-wire process; a selection of these also had a surface sealant applied to investigate its effectiveness. Dimensional metrology was used to evaluate coating performances, with SEM/EDX examinations used to investigate the various degradation mechanisms found. Both the waterwall and superheater environments generated their characteristic corrosion damage morphologies which depended on the radial positions around the tube. Coating performances were found to depend on the initial coating quality rather than composition, and were not improved by the use of a sealant

Organisationa heritage: exploring effects on employee outcomes and perceptions of organisational attractiveness

This research study is one of the first to explore how Organisational Heritage may affect employees and potential employees. It examines employee outcomes that may be related to heritage and provides insight into the effect heritage can have on potential employees’ perception of organisational attractiveness. The first part of the study focused on heritage characteristics and employees of a Corporate Heritage Brand (CHB). In-depth interviews were conducted with employees of a Canadian CHB to determine if heritage was a significant organisational identity characteristic, to establish which employee outcomes it was likely to influence and to explore the effects it had on the outcomes being identified. Results suggested that heritage characteristics are a distinct part of the organisational identity (the organisational heritage identity) which may positively affect organisational identification, organisational affective commitment, employee engagement, organisational pride and intent to stay. Heritage also appeared to diminish the negative impact of transformational organisational change on employee outcomes. A model is presented that summarizes the findings. The second study used the repertory grid technique to determine the characteristics that a sample of potential employees used to differentiate between employer organisations which included CHB and non-CHB companies. Honey’s content analysis was used to ascertain which of these characteristics positively affect perceptions of organisational attractiveness. The study looked specifically at heritage as an organisational characteristic. The results identified nine characteristics, including heritage, which potential employees use to differentiate amongst employer organisations. Another set of nine characteristics were found to be strongly aligned with organisational attractiveness. Four characteristics were common to both groups, and importantly heritage was a part of these. A matrix is presented that categorises organisational characteristics on two dimensions: potential for differentiation and alignment with organisational attractiveness. Four types of characteristics were defined in the matrix: Key Organisational Identity (KOICs) – high differentiation, high attractiveness, Hygiene – low differentiation, high attractiveness, Differentiator – high differentiation, low attractiveness and Low Value – low differentiation, low attractiveness. Heritage was categorized as a KOIC. The discussion suggests heritage can be key to increasing perceptions of organisational attractiveness and organisational identification. Employer branding can be proactively used to convey the organisational heritage. In general, employer branding efforts to communicate key organisational identity and hygiene characteristics to potential employees can increase the likelihood of inclusion in the potential employees’ employer consideration set. Overall, this research contributes to our increased understanding of heritage in an organisational setting. Specifically, it is one of the first academic efforts to provide empirical evidence in the nascent field of organisational heritage. The first part identified five employee outcomes likely to be affected positively by heritage. The findings also suggested that heritage may diminish the negative impact of organisational change on such organisational outcomes. The second part examined the importance of heritage in regard to potential employees and found evidence that heritage may be activated to differentiate employer organisations and can increase the perceived attractiveness. The findings allowed classifying several elicited organisational characteristics (including heritage) along their potential for organisational differentiation and organisational attractiveness

The Cerevoice Blizzard Entry 2007: Are Small Database Errors Worse than Compression Artifacts?

In commercial systems the memory footprint of unit selection systems is often a key issue. This is especially true for PDAs and other embedded devices. In this years Blizzard entry CereProc R○gave itself the criteria that the full database system entered would have a smaller memory footprint than either of the two smaller database entries. This was accomplished by applying speex speech compression to the full database entry. In turn a set of small database techniques used to improve the quality of small database systems in last years entry were extended. Finally, for all systems, two quality control methods were applied to the underlying database to improve the lexicon and transcription match to the underlying data. Results suggest that mild audio quality artifacts introduced by lossy compression have almost as much impact on MOS perceived quality as concatenation errors introduced by sparse data in the smaller systems with bulked diphones. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection. 1

Thrombospondin-1: Multiple Paths to Inflammation

Inflammation is a defensive process against tissue injury. Once this self-protective strategy is initiated, an effective resolution of the process is crucial to avoid major and unnecessary tissue damage. If the underlying event inducing inflammation is not addressed and homeostasis is not restored, this process can become chronic and lead to angiogenesis and carcinogenesis. Thrombospondin-1 (TSP-1) is a matricellular protein involved in angiogenesis, cancer, and inflammation. The effects of TSP-1 have been studied in many preclinical tumor models, and mimetic peptides are being tested in cancer clinical trials. However, the molecular mechanisms explaining its role in inflammatory processes are not well understood. This paper will discuss the role of TSP-1 in inflammation and its interaction with key receptors that may explain its functions in that process. Recent literature will be reviewed showing novel mechanisms by which this multifaceted protein could modulate the inflammatory process and impact its resolution

A Privacy-Friendly Architecture for Mobile Social Networking Applications

The resources and localization abilities available in modern smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of location-based applications. In these applications, users send their current locations to a central service provider and can receive content or an enhanced experience predicated on their provided location. Privacy issues with location- based applications can arise from a central entity being able to store large amounts of information about users (e.g., contact information, attributes) and locations (e.g., available businesses, users present). We propose an architecture for a privacy-friendly location hub to encourage the development of mobile location-based social applications with privacy- preserving features. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity in our architecture can link a user’s identity to her location. We also aim to decouple storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes. Other goals include designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases and avoiding considerable client-side computation. Our architecture consists of separate server components for storing information about users and storing information about locations, as well as client devices and optional com- ponents in the cloud for supporting applications. We describe the design of API functions exposed by the server components and demonstrate how they can be used to build some sample mobile location-based social applications. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided with in-depth descriptions of how each function was realized, as well as experi- ments examining the practicality of our architecture. Finally, we present two real-world applications developed on the Android platform to demonstrate how these applications work from a user’s perspective

The role of CAA in helping engineering undergraduates to learn mathematics

The Smith Inquiry (1) makes the following points: Many important stakeholders believe there to be a crisis in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Mathematics is a major intellectual discipline in its own right, as well as providing the underpinning language for the rest of science and engineering. We currently face a situation of long term decline in the numbers of young people continuing to study mathematics post–16