Glasgow: The City Centre Opportunity for Change

After a brief introduction, this thesis begins by exploring the nature of the centre of Glasgow in both functional and physical terms in order to assess its prospects for change. This assessment is fairly general and includes a review of recent planning policies of Glasgow District Council, in its attempts to counteract the disastrous policies of the 1950's and 1960's a period where Glasgow was struggling to cope with slums clearance. This part of the thesis concludes that Glasgow city centra has been trying to respond to the decline of its residential population and the loss of much of its original heavy industries. This resulted in changes to the form of the centre which has been identified mainly in respect to its component parts, namely the inner core of the city in which are concentrated the major economic activites as well as the physically structured fabric and the decaying and derelict fringes. We then turn to one of the main reasons for the rapid loss of identity of many cities namely the failure to adopt and implement visual policies. A brief summary is then given to the Glasgow Action report and the work of Gordon Cullen. This study shows how powerly influential is the combination of an economic strategy to a physical process of visual manipulation in the effort to revitalise the centre of a city. The concluding chapter looks at the opportunities necessary to achieve an inclusive guided future development of the city centre. It focusses mainly on ideas and principles rather than on detailed proposal We believe that the principles and proposals emitted throughout this thesis can be relevant in any other city where opportunities are given in bringing a new identity to its centre

ConSUS: A light-weight program conditioner

Program conditioning consists of identifying and removing a set of statements which cannot be executed when a condition of interest holds at some point in a program. It has been applied to problems in maintenance, testing, re-use and re-engineering. All current approaches to program conditioning rely upon both symbolic execution and reasoning about symbolic predicates. The reasoning can be performed by a ‘heavy duty’ theorem prover but this may impose unrealistic performance constraints. This paper reports on a lightweight approach to theorem proving using the FermaT Simplify decision procedure. This is used as a component to ConSUS, a program conditioning system for the Wide Spectrum Language WSL. The paper describes the symbolic execution algorithm used by ConSUS, which prunes as it conditions. The paper also provides empirical evidence that conditioning produces a significant reduction in program size and, although exponential in the worst case, the conditioning system has low degree polynomial behaviour in many cases, thereby making it scalable to unit level applications of program conditioning

Analysis of the Effect of a Gyrotropic Anisotropy on the Phase Constant and Characteristic Impedance of a Shielded Microstrip Line

In this work, we present an analytical modeling of a highly complex medium-based shielded microstrip line. The study aims at a numerical evaluation of the characteristic impedance and the dispersion characteristics of the dominant hybrid mode in the microstrip line printed on an anisotropic medium. The newly considered complex anisotropy has a full 3×3 tensor form of permittivity and permeability. The study is based on the derivation of the Green's functions of the general complex-medium-based structure in the Fourier domain. The spectral Method of Moments (MoM) and the Galerkin's procedure are combined to solve the resulting homogeneous system of equations. The effect of the gyrotropic anisotropy on the phase constant and the characteristic impedance is particularly investigated. Original and interesting numerical results are obtained and discussed. Our results are found to be in good agreement with available isotropic case data reported in literature

Two-dimensional spatiotemporal monitoring of temperature in photothermal therapy using hybrid photoacoustic-ultrasound transmission tomography

Recently, we presented an add-on to a photoacoustic (PA) computed tomography imager that permits the simultaneous imaging of ultrasound (US) transmission parameters such as the speed of sound (SOS), without additional measurements or instruments. This method uses strong absorbers positioned outside the object in the path of light for producing laser-induced US to interrogate the object in a conventional PA imager. Here, we investigate the feasibility of using this approach, first with PA to pin-point the location of photothermal therapeutic agents and then with serial SOS tomograms to image and monitor the resulting local temperature changes when the agents are excited with continuous wave (CW) light. As the object we used an agar-based tissue-mimicking cylinder carrying beads embedded with different concentrations of gold nanospheres. PA and SOS tomograms were simultaneously acquired as the gold nanospheres were photothermally heated using a 532-nm CW laser. In a first approximation, using the relation between SOS of water and temperature, the SOS tomograms were converted into temperature maps. The experimental results were verified using simulations: Monte Carlo modeling of light propagation through a turbid medium and using the obtained absorbed energy densities in heat diffusion modeling for spatial temperature distributio

Surface reconstruction of wear in carpets by using a wavelet edge detector

Carpet manufacturers have wear labels assigned to their products by human experts who evaluate carpet samples subjected to accelerated wear in a test device. There is considerable industrial and academic interest in going from human to automated evaluation, which should be less cumbersome and more objective. In this paper, we present image analysis research on videos of carpet surfaces scanned with a 3D laser. The purpose is obtaining good depth Images for an automated system that should have a high percentage of correct assessments for a wide variety of carpets. The innovation is the use of a wavelet edge detector to obtain a more continuously defined surface shape. The evaluation is based on how well the algorithms allow a good linear ranking and a good discriminance of consecutive wear labels. The results show an improved linear ranking for most carpet types, for two carpet types the results are quite significant

Vulnérabilité climatique et stratégies productives d’adaptation des agropasteurs de Hadj Mechri

Abstract and keywords provided in EnglishInterannual variability which characterizes climate of northern Algeria is exacerbated with climate change. In the steppe, where agropastoral activities are totally dependent on rainfall, the increase of pluviometry variability aggravate agro-pastoralists vulnerability, particularly those weakly endowed and compromises their farming systems. Faced with this situation, these agropastoralists develop coping strategies. Those who remain on rangelands after droughts resort in rainy years to livestock guarding or to association in livestock /cereal crop that allow them to rebuild their capital by taking advantage of the occasional natural offer of rangelands.La variabilité interannuelle qui caractérise le climat de l’Algérie du Nord est exacerbée avec le changement climatique. Dans la steppe, où les activités agropastorales dépendent totalement de la pluviométrie, l’augmentation de la variabilité de cette dernière aggrave la vulnérabilité des agropasteurs, notamment ceux faiblement dotés et compromet leurs systèmes de production. Face à cette situation, ces agropasteurs développent diverses stratégies d’adaptation. Ceux qui se maintiennent sur les parcours après les périodes de sécheresse, recourent en bonnes années au gardiennage d’animaux ou à l’association d’élevage/céréaliculture qui leur permettent de reconstituer leur capital en tirant profit de l’offre naturelle occasionnelle des parcours

Gyro-Chirality Effect of Bianisotropic Substrate On the operational of Rectangular Microstrip Patch Antenna

yesIn this paper, the gyrotropic bi-anisotropy of the chiral medium in substrate constitutive parameters (ξc and ηc) of a rectangular microstrip patch antenna is introduced in order to observe its effects on the complex resonant frequency, half-power bandwidth and input impedance. Numerical calculations and analysis based on the dominant mode are carried out to show that the latter is directly related to the former. This paper is based on the Moment Method as full-wave spectral domain approach using sinusoidal basis functions. Two new results, namely the appearance of the difference (ξc-ηc) and sum (ξc+ηc) of the two magneto-electric elements are obtained in the electric transverse components and Green tensor expressions, respectively. These new results can be considered as a generalisation form of the previously published work

Diagnostic et traitement de la Maladie du charbon à localisation palpébrale: à propos d’un cas et revue de littérature

L´anthrax est une zoonose causée par le Bacillus anthracis. les humains contractent généralement cette maladie dans des régions endémiques, par contact direct avec des animaux infectés ou avec leurs produits contaminés. Les localisations palpébrales sont rares dans la pratique clinique et posent des problèmes de diagnostic différentiel. Les auteurs rapportent l'observation d'un patient admis dans un tableau de cellulite préseptale, avec escarre noirâtre étendue de la paupière supérieure et oedème extensif de l´hémiface, faisant suspecter une localisation palpébrale de la maladie du charbon. L'examen bactériologique a permis de confirmer le diagnostic. Le patient a bénéficié d´une antibiothérapie à base de pénicilline G avec une bonne évolution.Key words: Maladie du charbon, oeil, oedème, blépharoplasti