Our future in space: The physical and virtual opening-up of parliaments to publics

Parliaments are physical symbols of nationhood and democracy. Public access to these spaces is often strictly regulated, yet it remains highly influential to public experiences of parliament (and their engagement with it). Drawing on data collected for the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s 2022 Global Parliamentary Report, this article discusses ways in which parliamentary ‘space’ can be utilised to encourage public engagement. This encompasses the effective use of physical space, virtual reality and augmented reality for the purpose of public engagement. In doing so, we show the most important and effective strategy for (re)using, and opening up, parliamentary spaces: the complementary use of physical and virtual methods in not only bringing publics to parliament, but also bringing parliament to publics

FINITE H-DIMENSION DOES NOT IMPLY EXPRESSIVE COMPLETENESS

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Product design as a vehicle to integrate arts and sciences in design education

In many parts of the world, Higher Education has often considered arts and sciences as an odd combination and many institutions have avoided this particular mix. Historically, this has been the accepted view; however, this view is changing. This paper provides a detailed account of curriculum development and strategies for enabling arts and science disciplines to blend in an effective way. It shows how strong alliances can be built in line with industry and general design practice expectations through “Live Projects”, that is projects sponsored by industry or other clients. The case studies provided in the paper are based on work conducted in the Product Design and Engineering Department at Middlesex University. The paper further demonstrates the importance of industry involvement, and how industrial collaborations can be managed to ensure that the academic provision is both relevant to the sector as well as responding to the needs of students. The paper was presented at the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR07), held at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The papers for the conference were reviewed in a double blind review process, and the conference was attended by an audience of over 400 delegates, focusing on emerging trends in design research

Optimising cash flows in APVIOBPCS using control theory.

This paper describes the investigation of the effects on profitability of production for an Automatic Pipeline, Variable Inventory and Order Based Production Control System (APVIOBPCS) production system using as an example electronic RAM production. The investigation includes varying the order up to inventory and WIP using PID control to illustrate the profit gain from using control analysis. The results show that greater PID gains for a controlled production system will increase profitability. The value of desired inventory level increases profitability with a defined optimum value

Comparing the personality type of design students in the UK and Taiwan.

This paper explores the use of personality type instruments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in a cross-cultural analysis of UK and Taiwanese Design students. Personality typing is now widely used in the western business community for Human Resources, training, counseling and career planning, however very little information exists with regards to the Asian personality type. The results of this study have shown that the most important of the type preferences is the Sensing-iNtuitive (S-N) one, with its proven link to creativity

Synthesis and antibacterial effects of cobalt–cellulose magnetic nanocomposites

© The Royal Society of Chemistry. Green synthesis is employed to prepare cobalt/cellulose nanocomposites with cubic (α-cobalt) cobalt as a main component with antibacterial and magnetic properties. An in situ reduction of aqueous solutions of cobalt ions on a model cellulose substrate surface using hydrogen gas affords spherical, cellulose-stabilised cobalt nanoclusters with magnetic properties and an average diameter of 7 nm that are distributed evenly over the surface of the cellulose fibres. These cobalt/cellulose nanocomposites exhibit good antibacterial action against opportunistic pathogens both Gram-positive (S. aureus) and Gram-negative (E. coli, A. baumannii and P. aeruginosa), with zones of inhibition up to 15 mm, thereby encouraging the deployment of these advanced materials for the treatment of wastewater or within medical dressings. This method of preparation is compared with the analogous in situ reduction of cobalt ions on a cellulose surface using sodium borohydride as reducing agent

Phase-dependent exciton transport and energy harvesting from thermal environments

Non-Markovian effects in the evolution of open quantum systems have recently attracted widespread interest, particularly in the context of assessing the efficiency of energy and charge transfer in nanoscale biomolecular networks and quantum technologies. With the aid of many-body simulation methods, we uncover and analyse an ultrafast environmental process that causes energy relaxation in the reduced system to depend explicitly on the phase relation of the initial state preparation. Remarkably, for particular phases and system parameters, the net energy flow is uphill, transiently violating the principle of detailed balance, and implying that energy is spontaneously taken up from the environment. A theoretical analysis reveals that non-secular contributions, significant only within the environmental correlation time, underlie this effect. This suggests that environmental energy harvesting will be observable across a wide range of coupled quantum systems.Comment: 5 + 4 pages, 3 + 2 figures. Comments welcom