Longitudinal Analysis of Economic Clusters: A Novel Methodology and Application of UK Regions

Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) classify organizations based on their business activities. However, choosing appropriate SIC code that represents an organization’s business activities in a challenging task. In the UK, there are almost 100 categories each having several subcategories of predefined business activities designed by experts. However, such scheme cannot cater for emerging business needs while some organizations cannot be easily defined by a single SIC code, due to the complexity of their business nature. Similarly, if a company expands or changes its operation during the year, a new SIC code needs to be assigned. This results in organizations having difficulties picking representative SIC code to use in defining their business activities. In this paper, we propose a dynamic framework that can automatically group organizations based on their business activities. Our framework leverages techniques from topic modelling. Result shows that our proposed framework can automatically adapt to changing business needs and cluster organizations effectively

The most dark-matter-dominated galaxies : predicted gamma-ray signals from the faintest milky way dwarfs

We use kinematic data from three new nearby, extremely low luminosity Milky Way dwarf galaxies (Ursa Major II, Willman 1, and Coma Berenices) to constrain the properties of their dark matter halos, and from these we make predictions for the γ-ray flux from annihilation of dark matter particles in these halos. We show that these ~10^3 L⊙ dwarfs are the most dark-matter-dominated galaxies known, with total masses within 100 pc that are in excess of 10^6 M⊙. Coupled with their relative proximity, their large masses imply that they should have mean γ-ray fluxes that are comparable to or greater than those of any other known satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Our results are robust to both variations of the inner slope of the density profile and the effect of tidal interactions. The fluxes could be boosted by up to 2 orders of magnitude if we include the density enhancements caused by surviving dark matter substructure

Teleradiology usage and user satisfaction with the telemedicine system operated by Médecins Sans Frontières

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) began a pilot trial of store-and-forward telemedicine in 2010, initially operating separate networks in English, French, and Spanish; these were merged into a single, multilingual platform in 2013. We reviewed the pattern of teleradiology usage on the MSF telemedicine platform in the 4-year period from April 2010. In total, 564 teleradiology cases were submitted from 22 different countries. A total of 1114 files were uploaded with the 564 cases, the majority being of type JPEG (n = 1081, 97%). The median file size was 938 kb (interquartile range, IQR 163-1659). A panel of 14 radiologists was available to report cases, but most (90%) were reported by only 4 radiologists. The median radiologist response time was 6.1 h (IQR 3.0-20). A user satisfaction survey was sent to 29 users in the last 6 months of the study. There was a 28% response rate. Most respondents found the radiologist's advice helpful and all of them stated that the advice assisted in clarification of a diagnosis. Although some MSF sites made substantial use of the system for teleradiology, there is considerable potential for expansion. More promotion of telemedicine may be needed at different levels of the organization to increase engagement of staff

Indication of Gamma-ray Emission from the Newly Discovered Dwarf Galaxy Reticulum II

We present a search for gamma-ray emission from the direction of the newly discovered dwarf galaxy Reticulum II. Using Fermi-LAT data, we detect a signal that exceeds expected backgrounds between ~2-10 GeV and is consistent with annihilation of dark matter for particle masses less than a few x 10^2 GeV. Modeling the background as a Poisson process based on Fermi-LAT diffuse models, and taking into account trials factors, we detect emission with p-value less than 9.8 x 10^-5 (>3.7 sigma). An alternative, model-independent treatment of background reduces the significance, raising the p-value to 9.7 x 10^-3 (2.3 sigma). Even in this case, however, Reticulum II has the most significant gamma-ray signal of any known dwarf galaxy. If Reticulum II has a dark matter halo that is similar to those inferred for other nearby dwarfs, the signal is consistent with the s-wave relic abundance cross section for annihilation.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures; matches version to appear in Physical Review Letter

Potential for energy production from farm wastes using anaerobic digestion in the UK : An economic comparison of different size plants

Anaerobic digestion (AD) plants enable renewable fuel, heat, and electricity production, with their efficiency and capital cost strongly dependent on their installed capacity. In this work, the technical and economic feasibility of different scale AD combined heat and power (CHP) plants was analyzed. Process configurations involving the use of waste produced in different farms as feedstock for a centralized AD plant were assessed too. The results show that the levelized cost of electricity are lower for large-scale plants due to the use of more efficient conversion devices and their lower capital cost per unit of electricity produced. The levelized cost of electricity was estimated to be 4.3 p/kWhe for AD plants processing the waste of 125 dairy cow sized herds compared to 1.9 p/kWhe for AD plants processing waste of 1000 dairy cow sized herds. The techno-economic feasibility of the installation of CO2 capture units in centralized AD-CHP plants was also undertaken. The conducted research demonstrated that negative CO2 emission AD power generation plants could be economically viable with currently paid feed-in tariffs in the UK

Genetic algorithms and the analysis of SnIa data

The Genetic Algorithm is a heuristic that can be used to produce model independent solutions to an optimization problem, thus making it ideal for use in cosmology and more specifically in the analysis of type Ia supernovae data. In this work we use the Genetic Algorithms (GA) in order to derive a null test on the spatially flat cosmological constant model $\Lambda$CDM. This is done in two steps: first, we apply the GA to the Constitution SNIa data in order to acquire a model independent reconstruction of the expansion history of the Universe $H(z)$ and second, we use the reconstructed $H(z)$ in conjunction with the Om statistic, which is constant only for the $\Lambda$CDM model, to derive our constraints. We find that while $\Lambda$CDM is consistent with the data at the $2\sigma$ level, some deviations from $\Lambda$CDM model at low redshifts can be accommodated.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of the 14th Conference on Recent Developments in Gravity (NEB-14), Ioannina, Greece, 8-11 June 201