The implications of a change in business travel policy on the wider organisation and public policy

Business travel, although only accounting in the UK in 2008 for 3% of trips and 9% of the UK's domestic distance travelled (Department for Transport, 2009, pp28), form a higher proportion in major cities (15% of mileage in London), where transport networks are most congested. Additionally, business journeys can be time consuming and tiring for the business traveller, affecting work/life balance and productivity, and also costly for businesses and the economy. The carbon emissions from business travel are an important factor due to longer distances travelled and the high proportion of journeys undertaken by air. In some cases business travel can be as much as two thirds of an organisations total carbon emissions. This paper reports the findings of a study designed to understand the motivations and attitudes of key actors in private sector organisations towards business travel. These motivations include: • The increasing importance of business travel on business costs and productivity due to the recession • Reductions in carbon emissions and the links to corporate responsibility • The demands of customers to reduce carbon emissions through the procurement process • The extent to which advancements in virtual communication technologies reduce the need to travel • A greater awareness of the vulnerability of travellers and to business continuity highlighted by the volcanic ash cloud. The insights into these causal factors and an understanding of the business practices that support, and barriers that hinder a reduction in business travel, are important in forecasting and developing public policy to produce a more holistic approach to managing personal travel, for both business travel and the commute. This paper will report some of these insights and discuss how a change in business travel policy can have extensive repercussions within an organisation, resulting in major impacts on business travel behaviour

Learning and Libraries: Competencies for Full Participation

published or submitted for publicatio

PERANCANGAN MESIN PRESS TEBU

Tujuan perancangan mesin press tebu ini yaitu untuk menentukan ukuran dari setiap bagian dari mesin. Dalam perancangan ini kita juga mendapatkan rancangan transmisi pada mesin serta mengetahui pemilihan bahan dan perancangan komponen – komponen yang benar pada mesin. Selain itu kita juga dapat mengetahui analisis ekonomi dari mesin press tebu tersebut. Metode yang digunakan untuk merancang mesin press tebu ini adalah mengacu pada konsep Pahl dan Beitz yang terbagi menjadi empat tahap. Empat tahap tersebut adalah perencanaan dan penjelasan tugas, perencanaan konsep produk, perencanaan produk, dan perencanaan detail. Dengan demikian kita dapat menghasilkan detail berupa dokumen pembuatan produk (gambar kerja). Hasil perancangan adalah desain dan gambar kerja produk mesin press tebu ini dengan dengan sumber penggerak motor listrik AC 0,5 HP. Diameter poros yang digunakan 25,4 mm dari bahan ST-60. Sistem transmisi yang digunakan pada mesin ini adalah puli masing-masing berdiameter 2inc , 10inc, 3inc, 12inc yang mereduksi putaran motor 1400 Rpm yang diharapkan menjadi 70 Rpm. Mesin press tebu ini memiliki konstruksi yang kuat dan ergonomis dengan spesifikasi mesin panjang 450 × lebar 400 × tinggi 1150 mm dengan rangka baja profil L 40x40x4. Taksiran harga jual mesin yang ditawarkan, yaitu senilai Rp 1.685.475,00

Bulk and nano GaN: Role of Ga d states

We have studied the role of Ga 3d states in determining the properties of bulk as well as nanoparticles of GaN using PAW potentials. A significant contribution of the Ga d states in the valence band is found to arise from the interaction of Ga 4d states with the dominantly N p states making up the valence band. The errors arising from not treating the Ga 3d states as a part of the valence are found to be similar, ~ 1%, for bulk as well as for nanoclusters of GaN.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Diffusion-based neuromodulation can eliminate catastrophic forgetting in simple neural networks

A long-term goal of AI is to produce agents that can learn a diversity of skills throughout their lifetimes and continuously improve those skills via experience. A longstanding obstacle towards that goal is catastrophic forgetting, which is when learning new information erases previously learned information. Catastrophic forgetting occurs in artificial neural networks (ANNs), which have fueled most recent advances in AI. A recent paper proposed that catastrophic forgetting in ANNs can be reduced by promoting modularity, which can limit forgetting by isolating task information to specific clusters of nodes and connections (functional modules). While the prior work did show that modular ANNs suffered less from catastrophic forgetting, it was not able to produce ANNs that possessed task-specific functional modules, thereby leaving the main theory regarding modularity and forgetting untested. We introduce diffusion-based neuromodulation, which simulates the release of diffusing, neuromodulatory chemicals within an ANN that can modulate (i.e. up or down regulate) learning in a spatial region. On the simple diagnostic problem from the prior work, diffusion-based neuromodulation 1) induces task-specific learning in groups of nodes and connections (task-specific localized learning), which 2) produces functional modules for each subtask, and 3) yields higher performance by eliminating catastrophic forgetting. Overall, our results suggest that diffusion-based neuromodulation promotes task-specific localized learning and functional modularity, which can help solve the challenging, but important problem of catastrophic forgetting

Paths to Understanding Birational Rowmotion on Products of Two Chains

Birational rowmotion is an action on the space of assignments of rational functions to the elements of a finite partially-ordered set (poset). It is lifted from the well-studied rowmotion map on order ideals (equivariantly on antichains) of a poset $P$, which when iterated on special posets, has unexpectedly nice properties in terms of periodicity, cyclic sieving, and homomesy (statistics whose averages over each orbit are constant) [AST11, BW74, CF95, Pan09, PR13, RuSh12,RuWa15+,SW12, ThWi17, Yil17. In this context, rowmotion appears to be related to Auslander-Reiten translation on certain quivers, and birational rowmotion to $Y$-systems of type $A_m \times A_n$ described in Zamolodchikov periodicity. We give a formula in terms of families of non-intersecting lattice paths for iterated actions of the birational rowmotion map on a product of two chains. This allows us to give a much simpler direct proof of the key fact that the period of this map on a product of chains of lengths $r$ and $s$ is $r+s+2$ (first proved by D.~Grinberg and the second author), as well as the first proof of the birational analogue of homomesy along files for such posets.Comment: 31 pages, to appear in Algebraic Combinatoric

Elastic Properties of Carbon nanotubes : An atomistic approach

Energetically the single sheet of graphite (graphene) is more stable than the nanotube. The energy difference between the two systems can be directly related to the strain energy involved in rolling up the graphene sheet to form the nanotube. We have carried out first principle electronic structure calculations and evaluated the strain energy as a function of the nanotube radius. The dependence of the strain energy on the diameter of the nanotube has been found by several groups to be welldescribed by a continuum elasticity model. We attempt to examine why this is the case and show where atomistics enter the description.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure