CFD modeling of all gas-liquid and vapor-liquid flow regimes predicted by the Baker chart

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The key drivers and barriers to the sustainable development of commercial property in New Zealand

In 2011 research was conducted to identify the key drivers and barriers to the sustainable development of commercial property in New Zealand (NZ) by surveying a cross-section of these market participants. The overall aim of the research was to identify any barriers that need to be overcome so that progress can be made towards advancing the sustainable building agenda in NZ’s commercial property sector that will help improve building energy performance and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The results indicate there remain key issues for the property industry to resolve, the most significant of which is the commercial property sectors’ view of the cost premium for green buildings versus conventional buildings

Sustaining exits from long-term homelessness

Executive Summary: Journey to Social Inclusion was a three year pilot that provided intensive support designed to break the cycle of long-term homelessness. This report presents the social and economic outcomes of the J2SI pilot. It covers the three years the trial ran, and the 12 month period following the completion of the trial. The evaluation used a randomised controlled trial to track and compare the outcomes of the J2SI participants (Group J) with those of an equivalent group of long-term homeless people (Group E) who were supported by existing services. After 48 months 67% of the original participants remained involved in the trial. The evidence suggests that J2SI had a positive impact on the lives of most participants, over time and relative to the control group. The physical health of Group J improved, with the proportion reporting no bodily pain increasing from 27% to 45% over the four year period. In other measures of bodily pain Group J also report larger gains over time and relative to Group E. Although there is some variation in the use of health services with both groups showing greater improvements in some areas relative to the other group, the most important pattern to note is that Group J’s average use of emergency hospital services and their average number of days hospitalised in general hospitals and psychiatric units declined by about 80% over the 48 month period. Group E’s need for emergency hospital treatment increased by 21%. While the average number of days Group E spent in hospital declined by about one third, the reduction is considerably less than observed in Group J. These results represent a substantial health care impact and suggest that an intervention comprising of stable housing and intensive case management can reduce the public burden associated with the over-utilisation of health services. The report also shows improvements over time and relative to Group E in the use of welfare and homelessness services, and the amount of time incarcerated. In the absence of the J2SI Program, Group J’s use of welfare service has started to rise. Finally, there was only a modest improvement in the extent to which the participants’ felt connected to and supported by the community over the four years. However, the trend was always in a positive direction, and in the final survey J2SI participants recorded their highest scores on both social support and social acceptance indexes. There are signs, however that the impact of J2SI is declining in some areas. After three years 85% of J2SI participants were housed compared to 41% of those who were receiving existing services. In the 12 months following its closure the proportion of J2SI participants who were housed dropped by 10 percentage points to 75%. Although this was substantially higher than at baseline, compares favourably with international studies, and is still 17 percentage points higher than that reported by the control group (58%), it was the first ‘substantial’ decline we have observed over the four year period. Similarly, while the emotional health of the J2SI participants improved and they report lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression after four years compared to where they were at the start of the trial, the results are not much different to those reported by Group E. Similarly, although there had been substantial gains in the labour force participation rate during the trial, these gains were not sustained when J2SI closed. Throughout the trial we found little change in the substance use behaviour of the participants, although this is a common finding in studies evaluating service impacts among the long-term homeless. Finally, we found the short-term economic benefit to be modest but trending upwards, with a return of 0.25 for every dollar invested. Taking into account lives saved over a 10 year time frame the economic benefit was more substantial, with a $1.32 return for every dollar invested. J2SI shows that breaking the cycle of long-term homelessness is possible and that intensive support coupled with stable housing can reduce demand on expensive health, justice and welfare services. However, some of the successes and improvements were not sustained and some individuals subsequently became homeless once J2SI support ended. About one quarter of the participants would have benefitted from ongoing support. The agencies they had been referred to after J2SI ended failed to provide the level and breadth of support necessary for ongoing stability. This presents two challenges for policy makers. First, many services, particularly clinical health services, are configured in such a way as to exclude the long-term homeless for the very issues they seek assistance with. Second, policy makers need to explicitly acknowledge that a small minority of homeless people require ongoing and indefinite support. Among those who had succeeded in maintaining their housing some had made a successful journey out of homelessness and were continuing to move on with their lives. Equally, it was clear that having a home did not lead to social acceptance and social inclusion for everyone. With limited employment options, few social networks outside of the homeless population, and few alternative social activities, opportunities for social inclusion remain limited for many individuals whose experience of social exclusion is both wide and deep. In this context programs designed to permanently end long-term homelessness such as J2SI need to temper their expectations and accept that years immersed in homelessness not only have physical and emotional effects, but long-term social and economic effects as well. Further, despite sharing many similar characteristics and experiences the long-term homeless are a heterogeneous group. Recognising similarities and differences among the long-term homeless is important in terms of designing appropriate interventions – whereas some participants would benefit from ongoing support, for others the support requirements were less. Much has been learnt from the J2SI pilot – what works, what doesn’t, for whom and why. The key now is to translate these findings into a more balanced policy framework that is sensitive to the challenges and complexities of permanently ending long-term homelessness

From production to selection of interpretations for novel conceptual combinations: A developmental approach

This study looks at how combinations of two French nouns are interpreted. The order of occurrence of the constituents of two types of conceptual combinations, relation and property, was manipulated in view of determining how property-based and relation-based interpretations evolve with age. Three groups of French-speaking children (ages 6, 8, and 10) and a group of adults performed an interpretation-selection task. The results for the children indicated that while property-based interpretations increased with age, relation-based interpretations were in the majority for both combination types, whereas for the adults, relation-based interpretations were in the minority for property combinations. For the children and adults alike, the most frequent interpretations were ones in which the head noun came first and was followed by the modifier (the opposite of the order observed for English)

Click grafting of seaweed polysaccharides onto PVC surfaces using an ionic liquid as solvent and catalyst

International audienceSeaweed antibacterial polysaccharides were grafted onto poly(vinylchloride) (PVC) surfaces using an original click chemistry pathway. PVC isothiocyanate surfaces (PVC-NCS) were first prepared by nucleophilic substitution of the chloride groups by isothiocyanate groups in DMSO/water medium. Then, unmodified Ulvan, Fucan, Laminarin or Zosterin was directly grafted onto the PVC-NCS surface using 1-ethyl-3-methyl imidazolium phosphate, an ionic liquid, as solvent and catalyst. To attest the grafting effectiveness, the new PVC surfaces were well characterized by AFM, XPS and contact angle measurement

A semantic space for modeling children's semantic memory

The goal of this paper is to present a model of children's semantic memory, which is based on a corpus reproducing the kinds of texts children are exposed to. After presenting the literature in the development of the semantic memory, a preliminary French corpus of 3.2 million words is described. Similarities in the resulting semantic space are compared to human data on four tests: association norms, vocabulary test, semantic judgments and memory tasks. A second corpus is described, which is composed of subcorpora corresponding to various ages. This stratified corpus is intended as a basis for developmental studies. Finally, two applications of these models of semantic memory are presented: the first one aims at tracing the development of semantic similarities paragraph by paragraph; the second one describes an implementation of a model of text comprehension derived from the Construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1988, 1998) and based on such models of semantic memory

A Computational Model for Simulating Text Comprehension

International audienceIn the present article, we outline the architecture of a computer program for simulating the process by which humans comprehend texts. The program is based on psycholinguistic theories about human memory and text comprehension processes, such as the onstruction-integration model (Kintsch, 1998), the latent semantic analysis theory of knowledge representation (Landauer & Dumais, 1997), and the predication algorithms (Kintsch, 2001; Lemaire & Bianco, 2003), and it is intended to help psycholinguists investigate the way humans comprehend texts

National minorities and their representation in social surveys: which practices make a difference?

This paper presents a systematic study of survey mechanisms that produce or reduce minority bias in social surveys. It extends the work of Lipps etal. (2011) who have demonstrated that, in the Swiss context, the more an ethno-national minority community differs, socio-culturally and socio-economically, from the national majority, the less it is likely to be represented in its proper proportion in the major national surveys. Minority bias furthermore has a vertical dimension: socio-economic bias against individuals from the most deprived backgrounds becomes extreme within ethno-national minority communities. Using data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the Swiss sample of the European Social Survey, in the present work we empirically assess the impact of three types of survey practices on minority bias: (1) strategies to increase overall response rates of the whole population indiscriminately from its minority status, (2) the use of pre- and post-stratification measures that take into account the overall share of foreigners in the national population, and (3) the conduct of interviews in a wider range of languages, in order to facilitate survey response among certain (linguistic) minorities. Our findings show that efforts to increase overall response rates can, paradoxically, create even more minority bias. On the other hand, they suggest that a combination of stratified sampling and a wider range of survey languages can have a positive effect in reducing survey bias, both between and within national categories. We conclude that measures that take into account and adapt to the social and cultural heterogeneity of surveyed populations do make a difference, whereas additional efforts that only replicate existing routine practices can be counter-productiv

How does the geography of surveillance affect collective action?

How does residing in the proximity of surveillance infrastructure—i.e., checkpoints, the separation barrier, and military installations—affect support for cooperative and confrontational forms of collective action? Cooperative actions involve engagement with outgroups to advance the ingroup cause (e.g., negotiations, joint actions, and peace movements), whereas confrontational actions involve unilateral tactics to weaken the outgroup (e.g., boycott, armed resistance). In the context of West Bank and Jerusalem, we combine geo‐coded data on the surveillance infrastructure with a representative survey of the adult population from 49 communities (N = 1,000). Our multilevel analyses show that surveillance does not affect support for confrontational actions but instead decreases support for cooperative actions. Moreover, we identify a new, community‐level mechanism whereby surveillance undermines cooperative actions through weakening inclusive norms that challenge dominant us‐versus‐them perspectives. These effects are empirically robust to various individual‐ and community‐level controls, as well as to the potential of reverse causality and residential self‐selection. Our findings illustrate how cooperative voices and the fabric of social communities become the first casualties of exposure to surveillance. They also speak to the importance of considering structural factors, with broader implications for the socio‐psychological study of collective action