Step-free railway station access in the UK: The value of inclusive design

Background: Despite substantial investment in step-free access at UK railway stations, persons with reduced mobility (PRMs) continue to travel less than their able-bodied counterparts and little is known about the value of step-free access. This research examines the benefits of step-free access and its relationship with rail usage among PRMs, and the wider benefits of railway station accessibility. Methods: These issues are explored through a mixed methods approach. Semi-structured interviews with ten key organisations were undertaken, as was an analysis of Senior/Disabled Persons Railcard data from 17 railway stations in Buckinghamshire, each with varying levels of step-free accessibility. Results: The results show that the benefits of step-free access extend beyond benefits at the individual level typically associated with those limited to PRMs, and demonstrate the potential to positively affect the society at large economically, environmentally, and socially. The findings also show a positive correlation between the level of step-free accessibility at a railway station and the percentage of PRMs using it. Conclusions: This research argues that government and interested stakeholders should commit to expanding the number and coverage of step-free stations throughout the UK. They should ensure that the appraisal process for investment in step-free accessibility appropriately captures both user and non-user benefits

High frequency sampling of the 1984 spring bloom within the mid-Atlantic Bight: Synoptic shipboard, aircraft, and in situ perspectives of the SEEP-I experiment

Moorings of current meters, thermistors, transmissometers, and fluorometers on the mid-Atlantic shelf, south of Long Island, suggest a cumulative seaward export of perhaps 0.35 g C/sq m/day between the 80 and 120 m isobaths during February-April 1984. Such a horizontal loss of algal carbon over the lower third of the water column would be 23 to 78% of the March-April 1984 primary production. This physical carbon loss is similar to daily grazing losses from zooplankton of 32-40% of the algal fixation of carbon. Metabolic demands of the benthos could be met by just the estimated fecal pellet flux, without direct consumption of algal carbon, while bacterioplankton needs could be served by excretory release of dissolved organic matter during photosynthesis. Sediment traps tethered 10 m off the bottom at the 120 m isobath and 50 m above the 500 m isobath caught as much as 0.16 to 0.26 g C /sq m/day during March-April 1984, in reasonable agreement with the flux estimated from the other moored instruments

A comprehensive integrated drug similarity resource for in-silico drug repositioning and beyond.

Drug similarity studies are driven by the hypothesis that similar drugs should display similar therapeutic actions and thus can potentially treat a similar constellation of diseases. Drug-drug similarity has been derived by variety of direct and indirect sources of evidence and frequently shown high predictive power in discovering validated repositioning candidates as well as other in-silico drug development applications. Yet, existing resources either have limited coverage or rely on an individual source of evidence, overlooking the wealth and diversity of drug-related data sources. Hence, there has been an unmet need for a comprehensive resource integrating diverse drug-related information to derive multi-evidenced drug-drug similarities. We addressed this resource gap by compiling heterogenous information for an exhaustive set of small-molecule drugs (total of 10 367 in the current version) and systematically integrated multiple sources of evidence to derive a multi-modal drug-drug similarity network. The resulting database, 'DrugSimDB' currently includes 238 635 drug pairs with significant aggregated similarity, complemented with an interactive user-friendly web interface (http://vafaeelab.com/drugSimDB.html), which not only enables database ease of access, search, filtration and export, but also provides a variety of complementary information on queried drugs and interactions. The integration approach can flexibly incorporate further drug information into the similarity network, providing an easily extendable platform. The database compilation and construction source-code has been well-documented and semi-automated for any-time upgrade to account for new drugs and up-to-date drug information

Linear response subordination to intermittent energy release in off-equilibrium aging dynamics

The interpretation of experimental and numerical data describing off-equilibrium aging dynamics crucially depends on the connection between spontaneous and induced fluctuations. The hypothesis that linear response fluctuations are statistically subordinated to irreversible outbursts of energy, so-called quakes, leads to predictions for averages and fluctuations spectra of physical observables in reasonable agreement with experimental results [see e.g. Sibani et al., Phys. Rev. B74:224407, 2006]. Using simulational data from a simple but representative Ising model with plaquette interactions, direct statistical evidence supporting the hypothesis is presented and discussed in this work. A strict temporal correlation between quakes and intermittent magnetization fluctuations is demonstrated. The external magnetic field is shown to bias the pre-existent intermittent tails of the magnetic fluctuation distribution, with little or no effect on the Gaussian part of the latter. Its impact on energy fluctuations is shown to be negligible. Linear response is thus controlled by the quakes and inherits their temporal statistics. These findings provide a theoretical basis for analyzing intermittent linear response data from aging system in the same way as thermal energy fluctuations, which are far more difficult to measure.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures. Text improve

No-hidden-variables proof for two spin-1/2 particles preselected and postselected in unentangled states

It is a well-known fact that all the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics on the state of any physical system represented by a two-dimensional Hilbert space can always be duplicated by a noncontextual hidden-variables model. In this paper, I show that, in some cases, when we consider an additional independent (unentangled) two-dimensional system, the quantum description of the resulting composite system cannot be reproduced using noncontextual hidden variables. In particular, a no-hidden-variables proof is presented for two individual spin-1/2 particles preselected in an uncorrelated state AB and postselected in another uncorrelated state aB, B being the same state for the second particle in both preselection and postselection.Comment: LaTeX, 8 page

Defect chaos and bursts: Hexagonal rotating convection and the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation

We employ numerical computations of the full Navier-Stokes equations to investigate non-Boussinesq convection in a rotating system using water as the working fluid. We identify two regimes. For weak non- Boussinesq effects the Hopf bifurcation from steady to oscillating (whirling) hexagons is supercritical and typical states exhibit defect chaos that is systematically described by the cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. For stronger non-Boussinesq effects the Hopf bifurcation becomes subcritical and the oscil- lations exhibit localized chaotic bursting, which is modeled by a quintic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation