High Specification Offshore Blades: Work Package: 1B: Blades Design

This report outlines the current state of the art in offshore wind turbine blade aerodynamic design, along with the key technical limitations and possible technologies which may improve the aerodynamic design of blades and turbine rotors in the future. It is suggested that there are three principal areas in which aerodynamic improvements can be made to the design of offshore wind turbine systems: improved rotor system and blade tip design for operation at higher tip speeds, optimisation of wind farm design to alleviate aerodynamic interactions between individual turbines, and the aerodynamic feasibility of using structural mode coupling to achieve pitch and/or stall control of the loads on blades

Turning marketing promises into business value: The experience of an industrial SME

The article studies the value that businesses should have for their customers and shareholders. It explains how to develop such value to meet or exceed customer's expectations through the application of the promise framework. The promise model includes promises made to customers, promises kept, and promises that involve a synchronized effort from the whole firm to create and deliver value to customers

The impact of organic livestock standards on animal welfare – a questionnaire survey of advisors, inspectors and veterinarians

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. A questionnaire survey of organic sector body inspectors, organic advisors and farm animal veterinarians was conducted to examine the respondents’ perceptions of the ability of the organic standards to deliver positive impacts on welfare of organic livestock. A total of 44 separate standards concerning livestock production were extracted from the United Kingdom Register of Organic Food Production livestock production standards. The respondents were asked to consider the potential impact of each standard on animal welfare in comparison to the routine practices used on conventional farms, using a five-point scale (improve significantly, improve slightly, no impact, deteriorate slightly and deteriorate significantly). A simple scoring system was used to rank the different standards in terms of their perceived positive impact on animal welfare. The significance of differences between respondent groups and livestock species were examined. Preliminary findings of the survey are summarised and the usefulness of the approach to evaluate livestock production standards is discussed

Development of Beluga, Delphinapterus leucas, Capture and Satellite Tagging Protocol in Cook Inlet, Alaska

Attempts to capture and place satellite tags on belugas, Delphinapterus leucas, in Cook Inlet, Alaska were conducted during late spring and summer of 1995, 1997, and 1999. In 1995, capture attempts using a hoop net proved impractical in Cook Inlet. In 1997, capture efforts focused on driving belugas into nets. Although this method had been successful in the Canadian High Arctic, it failed in Cook Inlet due to the ability of the whales to detect and avoid nets in shallow and very turbid water. In 1999, belugas were successfully captured using a gillnet encirclement technique. A satellite tag was attached to a juvenile male, which subsequently provided the first documentation of this species’ movements within Cook Inlet during the summer months (31 May–17 September)

Ultrafast Plasmonic Control of Second Harmonic Generation

Efficient frequency conversion techniques are crucial to the development of plasmonic metasurfaces for information processing and signal modulation. In principle, nanoscale electric-field confinement in nonlinear materials enables higher harmonic conversion efficiencies per unit volume than those attainable in bulk materials. Here we demonstrate efficient second-harmonic generation (SHG) in a serrated nanogap plasmonic geometry that generates steep electric field gradients on a dielectric metasurface. An ultrafast pump is used to control plasmon-induced electric fields in a thin-film material with inversion symmetry that, without plasmonic enhancement, does not exhibit an an even-order nonlinear optical response. The temporal evolution of the plasmonic near-field is characterized with ~100as resolution using a novel nonlinear interferometric technique. The ability to manipulate nonlinear signals in a metamaterial geometry as demonstrated here is indispensable both to understanding the ultrafast nonlinear response of nanoscale materials, and to producing active, optically reconfigurable plasmonic device

From Open Content Repositories to Open Sensemaking Communities

The Open Content movement is concerned with enabling students and educators to access material, in order to then learn from it, and reuse it either in one’s studies or one’s own courses. The core efforts to date has focused on enabling access, e.g. building the organizational/political will to release and license content, and in developing open infrastructures for educators to then publish and reassemble it. The key challenge in the next phase of the open content movement is to improve the support for prospective students to engage with and learn from the material, and with each other though peer learning support, in the absence of formally imposed study timetables and assessment deadlines. This paper reports on tools for e-learning and collaborative sensemaking developed at the UK Open University which are now being considered as candidates for open content learning support

Changes in American and British Stature Since the Mid-Eighteenth Century: A Prelimanary Report on the Usefulness of Data on Height...

This paper is a progress report on the usefulness of data on physical height for the analysis of long-ten changes in the level of nutrition and health on economic, social, and demographic behavior. It is based on a set of samples covering the U.S. and several other nations over the years from 1750 to the present. The preliminary results indicate that native-born. American Revolution, but there were long periods of declining nutrition and height during the 19th century. Similar cycling has been established for England. A variety of factors, including crop mix, urbanization, occupation, intensity of labor, and immigration affected the level of height and nutrition, although the relative importance of these factors has changed over time. There is evidence that nutrition affected labor productivity. In one of the samples individuals who were one standard deviation above the mean height (holding weight per inch of height constant) were about 8% more productive than individuals one standard deviation below the mean height. Another finding is that death did not choose people at random. Analysis of data for Trinidad indicates that the annual death rate for the shortest quintile of males was more than twice as great as for the tallest quintile of males.