Voting on sustainable transport: communication and governance challenges in Greater Manchester's ‘congestion charge’ referendum

In December 2008, the Greater Manchester electorate voted to reject a £3 billion package of transport measures that would have included investment in the conurbation's bus, tram and rail networks and walking and cycling infrastructure, together with, and partially funded by, the introduction of a congestion charge. The proposals followed a successful bid to the UK Government Transport Innovation Fund (TIF). High levels of car use present challenges to cities, and the TIF bid can be seen as an attempt to address these by promoting and facilitating a modal shift. The paper reflects on the debates surrounding the proposals, which led to a referendum. In particular, it explores the challenges of communicating complex, controversial plans in a fragmented and contested political arena

Danish results from the monitoring of pesticide residues in food

<p>This dataset contains the analytical results of pesticide residues measured in the food products analysed by the national competent authorities. Pesticide residues resulting from the use of plant protection products on crops that are used for food or feed production may pose a risk factor for public health. For this reason, a comprehensive legislative framework has been established in the European Union (EU), which defines rules for the approval of active substances used in plant protection products, the use of plant protection products and for pesticide residues in food. In order to ensure a high level of consumer protection, legal limits, so called “maximum residue levels” or briefly “MRLs”, are established in Regulation (EC) No 396/2005. EU-harmonised MRLs are set for all pesticides covering all types of food products. A default MRL of 0.01 mg/kg is applicable for pesticides not explicitly mentioned in the MRL legislation. Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 imposes on Member States the obligation to carry out controls to ensure that food placed on the market is compliant with the legal limits.</p> <p>A sample is considered <strong>free of quantifiable residues</strong> if the analytes were not present in concentrations at or above the limit of quantification (LOQ). The LOQ is the smallest concentration of an analyte that can be quantified with the analytical method used to analyse the sample. It is commonly defined as the minimum concentration of the analyte in the test sample that can be determined with acceptable precision and accuracy.</p> <p>If a sample is <strong>contains quantifiable residues</strong> but within the legally permitted limit (maximum residue level, MRL), it is described as a sample  with quantified residue levels within the legal limits (below or at the MRL)</p> <p>A sample is considered <strong>non-compliant</strong> with the legal limit (MRL), if the measured residue concentrations clearly exceed the legal limits, taking into account the measurement uncertainty. It is current practice that the uncertainty of the analytical measurement is taken into account before legal or administrative sanctions are imposed on food business operators for infringement of the MRL legislation.</p

Artificial datasets for "Online Conformance Checking Using Behavioural Patterns"

Dataset containing artificial datasets for the stress test of the online conformance prototype and for the correlation of the results of the online conformance checker with state of the art technique. Stress test log We randomly generated a BPMN model containing 64 activities and 26 gateways. The model was then used to simulate an event stream of 2 million events. Correlation logs We generated 12 random process models with number of activities according to a triangular distribution with lower bound 10, mode 20, and upper bound 30. We did not include duplicate labels, a probability of 0.2 for addition of silent activities, moreover, the probability of control-flow operator insertion was: 0.45 for sequence, 0.2 for parallel and xor-split operators, 0.05 for an inclusive-or operator and 0.1 for loop constructs. Incremental noise levels (both on a trace- and event-level) were introduced in the logs. Probability of trace- and event-level noises ranged from 0.1 to 0.5 with steps of 0.1

Data from: The dominant detritus-feeding invertebrate in arctic peat soils derives its essential amino acids from gut symbionts

Supplementation of nutrients by symbionts enables consumers to thrive on resources that might otherwise be insufficient to meet nutritional demands. Such nutritional subsidies by intracellular symbionts has been well studied; however, supplementation of de novo synthesized nutrients to hosts by extracellular gut symbionts is poorly documented, especially for generalists with relatively undifferentiated intestinal tracts. Although gut symbionts facilitate degradation of resources that would otherwise remain inaccessible to the host, such digestive actions alone cannot make up for dietary insufficiencies of macronutrients such as essential amino acids (EAA). Documenting whether gut symbionts also function as partners for symbiotic EAA supplementation is important because the question of how some detritivores are able to subsist on nutritionally insufficient diets has remained unresolved. To answer this poorly-understood nutritional aspect of symbiont-host interactions, we studied the enchytraeid worm, a bulk soil feeder that thrives in arctic peatlands. In a combined field and laboratory study, we employed stable isotope fingerprinting of amino acids to identify the biosynthetic origins of amino acids to bacteria, fungi and plants in enchytraeids. Enchytraeids collected from arctic peatlands derived more than 80% of their EAA from bacteria. In a controlled feeding study with the enchytraeid Enchytraeus crypticus, EAA derived almost exclusively from gut bacteria when the worms fed on higher fiber diets, whereas most of the enchytraeids' EAA derived from dietary sources when fed on lower fiber diets. Our gene sequencing results of gut microbiota showed that the worms harbor several taxa in their gut lumen absent from their diets and substrates. Almost all gut taxa are candidates for EAA supplementation because almost all belong to clades capable of biosynthesizing EAA. Our study provides the first evidence of extensive symbiotic supplementation of EAA by microbial gut symbionts, and demonstrate that symbiotic bacteria in the gut lumen appear to function as partners for both symbiotic EAA supplementation as well as for digestion of insoluble plant fibers

Data from "Tracking single adatoms in liquid in a Transmission Electron Microscope"

Raw data is in FEI (EMI/SER) format. Can be opened using open source python library hyperspy (https://hyperspy.org). Experimental metadata is contained within the files, and sample conditions are tabulated in information.txt