Wind turbulence inputs for horizontal axis wind turbines

Wind turbine response characteristics in the presence of atmospheric turbulence was predicted using two major modeling steps. First, the important atmospheric sources for the force excitations felt by the wind turbine system were identified and characterized. Second, a dynamic model was developed which describes how these excitations are transmitted through the structure and power train. The first modeling step, that of quantifying the important excitations due to the atmospheric turbulence was established. The dynamic modeling of the second step was undertaken separately

Commuting, transitions and belonging: the experiences of students living at home in their first year at university

In this study, our cross-case analysis of students’ lives challenges the conventional home–university model of transition and highlights the importance of acknowledging the influence of this complex symbiotic relationship for students who attend university and live at home. We argue that as with stay-at-home holidays, or “staycations”, which are of such crucial importance to the tourism industry, so stay-at-home students or commuter students are vital to higher education and the term utilised here is “stayeducation”. Through the narratives of “stayeducation” students, we see how family and community aspects of students’ lives are far more significant than previously realised, and our study suggests that these heavily influence the development of a student sense of belonging. Drawing upon biographical narrative method, this paper introduces three first-year Business and Economics students enrolled at different universities in London and explores their journeys through their transition through home, school and early university life. Ways in which key themes play out in the transition stories of our students and the challenges and obstacles for the individual are drawn out through the cross-case analysis. Findings support the existing literature around gender, class and identity; however, new insights into the importance, for these students, of family, friendships and community are presented. Our work has implications for academic staff, those writing institutional policies, and argues for the creation of different spaces within which students can integrate into their new environment

The impact of risk management practice upon the implementation of recovery-oriented care in community mental health services: a qualitative investigation

Background: Recovery-oriented care has become guiding principle for mental health policies and practice in the UK and elsewhere. However, a pre-existing culture of risk management practice may impact upon the provision of recovery-oriented mental health services. Aims: To explore how risk management practice impacts upon the implementation of recovery-oriented care within community mental health services. Method: Semi-structured interviews using vignettes were conducted with 8 mental health worker and service user dyads. Grounded theory techniques were used to develop explanatory themes. Results: Four themes arose: 1) recovery and positive risk taking; 2) competing frameworks of practice; 3) a hybrid of risk and recovery; 4) real-life recovery in the context of risk. Discussion: In abstract responses to the vignettes, mental health workers described how they would use a positive risk taking approach in support of recovery. In practice, this was restricted by a risk-averse culture embedded within services. Mental health workers set conditions with which service users complied to gain some responsibility for recovery. Conclusion: A lack of strategic guidance at policy level and lack of support and guidance at practice level may result in resistance to implementing ROC in the context of RMP. Recommendations are made for policy, training and future research

Mobile ‘Comfort’ Zones: Overcoming Barriers to Enable Facilitated Learning in the Workplace.

The affordances of mobile technologies are well documented (cf Sharples, Vavolua, Wali, Cook, Pachler). Linked with the rapid expansion of the ‘SMART’ phones, where users access fast/high quality information, new opportunities are offered to engage students at a time/place of their own choosing. This small-scale study is located within the dominant discourse of mobile learning literature of context specific learning; it explores the attitudes and habits of trainee teachers using their own mobile devices when working full time in a school setting. We present a conceptual model for looking strategically at mobile learners in different personal/ professional contexts. This highlights the design barriers to be overcome before the full potential of mobile learning can be successful with our own students when isolated on placement and juggling busy, complex lives. Our findings indicate that students have complex/interwoven narratives that relate to issues of identity, personal/private space and their involvement in an emergent community of practice

Developing a Succession and Transition Plan for Chairs

This session will discuss the process of developing a succession plan and making the transition to chair. The presenters will share their experience in making this transition together twice and provide participants with a checklist for planning their own transitions into and out of the position

Thermal Recovery of Multi-Limbed Robots with Electric Actuators

The problem of finding thermally minimizing configurations of a humanoid robot to recover its actuators from unsafe thermal states is addressed. A first-order, data-driven, effort based, thermal model of the robots actuators is devised, which is used to predict future thermal states. Given this predictive capability, a map between configurations and future temperatures is formulated to find what configurations, subject to valid contact constraints, can be taken now to minimize future thermal states. Effectively, this approach is a realization of a contact-constrained thermal inverse-kinematics (IK) process. Experimental validation of the proposed approach is performed on the NASA Valkyrie robot hardware

A journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic Governmental Policy Document in the UK.

For our analysis we draw upon Macherey’s essay ‘The text says what is does not say’ (in Walder 1990) where he argues for the legitimacy of interrogating a text for ‘what it tacitly implies, what it does not say … for in order to say anything there are things which must not be said’ (Ibid 217, his italics). As with society, all works have their margins – the incompleteness that reveals their birth and production … ‘ What is important in the work is what it does not say … what the work cannot say … because there the elaboration of the utterances is acted out in a sort of journey to silence’ (Ibid 218). Our critical analysis of the Government e-learning strategy (2005) reveals that rather than harnessing technology to empower the typically disenfranchised within the educational debate, it is those very stakeholders at the margins who are silenced whilst the interests of those with institutional and economic power are given voice. Our analysis will show that rather than creating a stakeholder society, Government through its policy documents positions the already disempowered as either silent or deficit and our conclusions suggest that rather than a discourse of transformation, ‘regulation not education’ (Lillis 2001), is the real goal of the dominant stakeholders

Survey of Maintenance and Management Needs in Omaha Housing Authority\u27s Apartments for Senior Citizens

The purpose of this study was to obtain input from residents of Omaha Housing Authority apartments for senior citizens regarding maintenance and management needs

Supporting students on placement: developing observational skills using mobile technology.

Trainee teachers spend only a fraction of their course time in university with the majority of the year (120 days) spent in placement schools. Therefore, there is always the need to maintain close links with trainees and to enable them to link the theory learned at university to their practice in the classroom. A key aspect of developing as a practitioner is learning from experts in the field, known as cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, 2006). Our trainees spend most of their time at the beginning of their placement observing and taking notes while observing experienced teachers delivering lessons. Training is needed to gain the maximum amount from observation (Borich, 2011) and mobile technology can help in providing some scaffolding to this training. Mobile technology has many uses in education and we describe a bespoke mobile application we have developed called Standards Tag to enable trainee teachers to tag key events observed in the classroom. The application has two major features: audio clips for key theoretical concepts behind aspects of teaching and learning, linked to the Teacher Standards (DfE, 2013); and a tag feature for noticed observations which are then sent by email to the student’s email address