Analysis of a typical railway turnout sleeper system using grillage beam analogy

A simplified grillage beam analogy was performed to investigate the behaviour of railway turnout sleeper system with a low value of elastic modulus on different support moduli. This study aimed at determining an optimum modulus of elasticity for an emerging technology for railway turnout application - fibre composites sleeper. The finite element simulation suggests that the changes in modulus of elasticity of sleeper, Esleeper and the sleeper support modulus, Us have a significant influence on the behaviour of turnout sleepers. The increase in Us from 10 to 40 MPa resulted in a 15% reduction in the bending moment while the increase in Esleeper from 1 GPa to 10 GPa has resulted in almost 75% increase in the bending moment. The shear forces in turnout sleepers is not sensitive to both the changes of the Esleeper and Us while the sleeper with low Esleeper tend to undergo greater settlement into the ballast. An Esleeper of 4 GPa was found optimal for an alternative fibre composite turnout sleeper provided that the Us is at least 20 MPa from the consideration of sleeper ballast pressure and maximum vertical deflection. It was established that the turnout sleeper has a maximum bending moment of 19 kN-m and a shear force of 158 kN under service conditions

Citizens and security threats : issues, perceptions and consequences beyond the national frame

Citizens are now central to national security strategies, yet governments readily admit that little is known about public opinion on security. This article presents a unique and timely examination of public perceptions of security threats. By focusing on the breadth of security threats that citizens identify, their psychological origins, how they vary from personal to global levels, and the relationships between perceptions of threats and other political attitudes and behaviours, the article makes several new contributions to the literature. These include extending the levels at which threats are perceived from the national versus personal dichotomy to a continuum spanning the individual, family, community, nation and globe, and showing the extent to which perceptions of threat at each level have different causes, as well as different effects on political attitudes and behaviour. These findings are also relevant to policy communities’ understanding of what it means for a public to feel secure

Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security : the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge

Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies (NSS) and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritised do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate: 1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct, and narrate 'security threats'; and 2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with, and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalisations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes, and stories reproduce the police order in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticise the grounds on which national security agendas are authorised, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease

Was the UK public prepared for a pandemic? Fear and awareness before COVID-19

Using public opinion data, Dan Stevens and Nick Vaughan-Williams explain that a pandemic was simply not seen as a major threat by the British public prior to 2020, despite its prominence in government security strategy. Going forward, and given pandemics will continue to be a major threat, public knowledge needs to remain close to where it is now as opposed to where it seems to have been before COVID-19

Optimal contracting and incentives for public transport in Sydney: what has been learned from the Sydney Metro experience?

The New South Wales (NSW) government created the Sydney Metro Authority to design, build and operate a completely separate underground Metro rail system to supplement the existing public transport network in Sydney. By the time the NSW government abruptly cancelled the entire Metro project in early 2010, the Authority had conceived and designed a contract that was proceeding to procurement. This paper examines the nature of the proposed Sydney Metro contract in relation to its performance framework and compares this to the frameworks in current contracts for bus, rail and ferry public transport in NSW. Against this background, the paper examines the extent to which the Sydney Metro approach has had an impact on subsequent public transport contracts in the context of the literature on optimal contracting and optimal incentives. The paper concludes that little has been implemented, although the other mode contracts now enable more performance measurement and incentivisation. In particular, the decision to award contracts to existing (and mostly public sector) operators appears to have acted as a brake on developing these performance elements

Male warriors and worried women? Understanding gender and perceptions of security threats

Differences between women and men in perceptions of security threats are firmly established in public opinion research, with the “male warrior” and the “worried woman” two well documented stereotypes. Yet, we argue in this paper, the differences are not as well understood as such labels, or the search for explanations, imply. One reason for this is the lack of dialogue between public opinion research and feminist security studies. In bringing the two fields into conversation in analyzing mixed methods research data gathered in Britain, we suggest that while the extent of the gender gap in opinions of security is overstated, the gaps that do exist are more complex than previously allowed: men and women define “security” in slightly different ways; women tend to identify more security threats than men not necessarily because they feel more threatened but due to a greater capacity to consider security from perspectives beyond their own; women are more confident about government’s ability to deal with security threats in the future but not simply because of greater faith in government than men. This complexity implies a need to revisit assumptions, methods and analytical approaches in order to develop the field of gender and security further

Poll Tax photograph © Garry Clarkson/Alamy used in 'Society Now', the journal of The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Summer 2013. Nick Stevens, Editor - [email protected]

Poll Tax photograph from 1990, used in 'Society Now', the journal of The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Summer 2013. Used to illustrate, 'The Blunders of Our Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe (Oneworld Publications September 2013. Contact Professor Anthony King, University of Essex Email [email protected] Telephone 01206 873393 ESRC Grant Number RES-062-23-2036 Nick Stevens, Editor - [email protected]. Photograph licensed through Alamy photo agency, © Garry Clarkson worldwide rights

Developing fibre optic Raman probes for applications in clinical spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy has been shown by various groups over the last two decades to have significant capability in discriminating disease states in bodily fluids, cells and tissues. Recent development in instrumentation, optics and manufacturing approaches has facilitated the design and demonstration of various novel in vivo probes, which have applicability for myriad of applications. This review focusses on key considerations and recommendations for application specific clinical Raman probe design and construction. Raman probes can be utilised as clinical tools able to provide rapid, non-invasive, real-time molecular analysis of disease specific changes in tissues. Clearly the target tissue location, the significance of spectral changes with disease and the possible access routes to the region of interest will vary for each clinical application considered. This review provides insight into design and construction considerations, including suitable probe designs and manufacturing materials compatible with Raman spectroscopy

History, Fandom, and Online Game Communities

Historical activity around persistent online game environments such as EVE Online and EverQuest is significant and ongoing, particularly as these games age. A wide range of attempts have been made to capture and concentrate tales of those experiences which players have considered significant. Yet as with all historical work, attempts to curate and represent the history of a community are political and often contested. Projects can be compromised by competing interests and by differing perceptions of what does or does not ‘count’ as history. The distinctions made in this online historical work evoke the debates of contemporary public history: issues of ownership, power and acceptability are central, and the outputs of this historical activity are varied, constituting a short forum thread collecting player reminiscences in one instance, for example, compared with a book-length piece of self-consciously historical writing in another. Yet they also parallel debates within the space of fan studies. This chapter discusses the tension between fandom and history that exists in player communities by examining fanworks as forms of historical work

The Fan-Historian

In this article, we propose the compound term fan-historian to describe fans who undertake historical fanwork of a variety of types. In doing so, we seek to define fan-historians in a way which is inclusive, and which recognises the common practices that exist between the work of fans and of historians, who both take what we might understand as curatorial and transformative approaches to knowledge. Our formulation also serves to emphasize that fans are not merely the subjects of historical work, but are participants in it. Fan-historians, then, work both as fans and as historians in producing fan-historical work. We argue that we must value this labor, as it is centrally important in fan communities, and that fan-historians help to make sense of the past, and make it usable, for those communities, acting as public historians as they do so. We close by reflecting on the importance of recognising the huge range of memory, archival and other past-focused fanwork as historical work, given the longstanding links between history and power