Monitoring and the Risk Governance of Repository Development and Staged Closure:Exploratory Engagement Activity in Three European Countries.

This report is the product of research activity within the EC Seventh Framework Programme “Monitoring Developments for Safe Repository Operation and Staged Closure” (MoDeRn) Project. This project aims to further develop understanding of the role of monitoring in staged implementation of geological disposal to a level of description that is closer to the actual implementation of monitoring. It focuses on monitoring conducted to confirm the basis of the long term safety case and on monitoring conducted to inform on options available to manage the stepwise disposal process from construction to closure (including e.g. the option of waste retrieval). This report investigates the potential of citizen stakeholder engagement in the identification of monitoring objectives and the development of monitoring strategies for geological disposal of high level waste (HLW) or spent nuclear fuel (SNF). It builds on an earlier MoDeRn report describing monitoring the safe disposal of radioactive waste as a socio-technical activity (Bergmans, Elam, Simmons and Sundqvist 2012)

Mark Simmons in a Senior Tenor Recital

This is the program for the senior tenor recital of Mark Simmons. Mr. Simmons was accompanied by Lowella Cherry on the piano. This recital took place on April 10, 2000, in the McBeth Recital Hall

Smartphone chronic gaming consumption and positive coping practice

Purpose: Chronic consumption practice has been greatly accelerated by mobile, interactive and smartphone gaming technology devices. This study explores how chronic consumption of smartphone gaming produces positive coping practice. Design/methodology/approach: Underpinned by cognitive framing theory, empirical insights from eleven focus groups (n=62) reveal how smartphone gaming enhances positive coping amongst gamers and non-gamers. Findings: The findings reveal how the chronic consumption of games allows technology to act with privileged agency that resolves tensions between individuals and collectives. Consumption narratives of smartphone games, even when play is limited, lead to the identification of three cognitive frames through which positive coping processes operate: (a) the market generated frame, (b) the social being frame, and (c) the citizen frame. Research limitations/implications: This paper adds to previous research by providing an understanding of positive coping practice in the smartphone chronic gaming consumption. Originality/value: In smartphone chronic gaming consumption, cognitive frames enable positive coping by fostering appraisal capacities in which individuals confront, hegemony, culture and alterity-morality concerns

Selling the African wilds : a history of the safari tourism industry in East Africa, 1900-1939

This dissertation examines the rise and development of the safari tourism industry in the British East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) between 1900 and 1939. It shows how the establishment of British rule and the introduction of modern transportation technology made East Africa accessible and gradually transformed the region into a tourist attraction of great economic value that would come to be managed by imperial powers, advertised in a globalized marketplace, and visited by tourists who desired to hunt, photograph, and observe East Africa’s abundant wildlife on an adventure known as the “safari.” It became a lucrative business. Numerous outfitters, safari and travel companies, guides, and other safari workers entered the business and helped to make the industry a model of its kind in Africa. As the safari trade expanded and animal populations came under pressure, however, this industry began to adopt new, eco-friendly forms of wildlife tourism that could preserve the main elements of the tourist safari while reducing its toll on wildlife populations, a shift exemplified by the introduction of motorized tours, photographic and filmmaking safaris, and the quest to establish national parks. The research presented in this study, drawn from archival collections across three continents, demonstrates that the four decades between 1900 and 1939 became a crucial phase in the development of safari tourism in Kenya. During this time, safari tourism became a leading sector of the regional economy and gave rise to a highly developed commercial and institutional infrastructure that laid the foundations of modern wildlife tourism in Kenya. At the same time, the safari industry became a product of the British Empire, shaped by the laws, institutions, and attitudes of colonial rule. While the introduction of British rule and the arrival of British colonists promoted tourist development, built roads and railways, ensured a degree of security demanded by travelers, and linked foreign tourists with Africa, it also relegated indigenous Africans to subordinate positions in the industry, and forcibly relocated African settlements to make way for parks and tourist spaces. This meant that the prerogatives of the tourism industry often clashed with indigenous ideas of land use and economic management, instead serving the interests of the British community in Kenya who owned and controlled the trade. Thus, the development of safari tourism under the aegis of the British colonial state aided the material development of the industry, but also created economic, social, and racial inequalities that remain evident to the present day.Histor

Predicting the distribution of thickets and forests on the Cape Peninsula, Cape Province using linear regression analyses

Forest and thicket communities are distributed throughout fynbos. The species constituents exhibit life history characteristics significantly different from fynbos species, in that reproductive biology and recruitment are not coupled to fire. The limited occurrence of forests and thickets suggest that there may be specific abiotic factors which limit their distribution. In an attempt to determine which factors are significant in prediction, data from 600 plots covering a substantial part of the Cape Peninsula was analyzed using linear regression models. Although trends in predictive variables were detected for both forest and thickets, the models were largely unsuccessful. This was due both to the lack of inclusion or poor transformation of certain factors and the fact that not all potential forest and thicket sites are filled. The role of fire as the stochastic element in the system as well as the significance of measured environmental variables in determining forest and thicket location is discussed

Segmentation of neuroanatomy in magnetic resonance images

Segmentation in neurological Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is necessary for volume measurement, feature extraction and for the three-dimensional display of neuroanatomy. This thesis proposes several automated and semi-automated methods which offer considerable advantages over manual methods because of their lack of subjectivity, their data reduction capabilities, and the time savings they give. Work has concentrated on the use of dual echo multi-slice spin-echo data sets in order to take advantage of the intrinsically multi-parametric nature of MRI. Such data is widely acquired clinically and segmentation therefore does not require additional scans. The literature has been reviewed. Factors affecting image non-uniformity for a modem 1.5 Tesla imager have been investigated. These investigations demonstrate that a robust, fast, automatic three-dimensional non-uniformity correction may be applied to data as a pre-processing step. The merit of using an anisotropic smoothing method for noisy data has been demonstrated. Several approaches to neurological MRI segmentation have been developed. Edge-based processing is used to identify the skin (the major outer contour) and the eyes. Edge-focusing, two threshold based techniques and a fast radial CSF identification approach are proposed to identify the intracranial region contour in each slice of the data set. Once isolated, the intracranial region is further processed to identify CSF, and, depending upon the MRI pulse sequence used, the brain itself may be sub-divided into grey matter and white matter using semiautomatic contrast enhancement and clustering methods. The segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) plaques has also been considered. The utility of the stack, a data driven multi-resolution approach to segmentation, has been investigated, and several improvements to the method suggested. The factors affecting the intrinsic accuracy of neurological volume measurement in MRI have been studied and their magnitudes determined for spin-echo imaging. Geometric distortion - both object dependent and object independent - has been considered, as well as slice warp, slice profile, slice position and the partial volume effect. Finally, the accuracy of the approaches to segmentation developed in this thesis have been evaluated. Intracranial volume measurements are within 5% of expert observers' measurements, white matter volumes within 10%, and CSF volumes consistently lower than the expert observers' measurements due to the observers' inability to take the partial volume effect into account