Review: How to Be a Games User Researcher

Review: How to Be a Games User Researcher, by Steve Bromley. 2021. Self-Published. 173 pp

The Effects of Sex-Sorted Semen on Southern Dairy Farms

This paper examines the impact of sex-sorted semen adoption on dairy farm level economics. Representative dairies are used to simulate the financial impacts of moving to this new technology. Key economic, financial and herd dynamics will be compared among dairies to show how the uses of sex-sorted semen will affect dairy farms. All seven of the representative dairies that were analyzed sold surplus replacement heifers using sex-sorted semen. The increase use of sex-sorted semen can have very positive impacts on dairies throughout the Southern United States.Dairy production, sex sorted semen, production economics, scenario analysis, Agribusiness, Farm Management, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics,

Sensitivity of tidewater glaciers to submarine melting governed by plume locations

This work was funded by NERC award NE/P011365/1 (CALISMO: Calving laws for Ice Sheet Models) to PI Benn.The response of tidewater glaciers to ocean warming remains a key uncertainty in sea level rise predictions. Here we use a 3‐D numerical model to examine the response of an idealized tidewater glacier to spatial variations in submarine melt rate. While melting toward the center of the terminus causes only a localized increase in mass loss, melting near the lateral margins triggers increased calving across the width of the glacier, causing the terminus to retreat at several times the width‐averaged melt rate. This occurs because melting near the margins has a greater disruptive impact on the compressive stress arch that transfers resistance from the side walls to the body of the glacier. We suggest that the rate of terminus advance or retreat may thus be governed by the difference between ice velocity and submarine melting in the slow‐flowing zones away from the glacier center.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Redescribing God : the roles of scripture, tradition and reason in Karl Barth's doctrines of divine unity, constancy and eternity

This thesis is an analysis of Karl Barth's theological method as it appears in his treatment of three divine perfections-unity, constancy, and eternity-in Church Dogmatics, II/l, chapter VI. In order to discern the method by which Barth reaches his doctrinal conclusions, the thesis examines the respective roles of Scripture, tradition and reason-the 'threefold cord'-in this portion of his Church Dogmatics. The conclusion reached in the thesis is that, within Barth's treatment of God's unity, constancy and eternity, Scripture functions as the authoritative source and basis for theological critique and construction, and tradition and reason are functionally subordinate to Scripture. That said, Barth employs a predominantly indirect way of relating Scripture and theological proposals, a way in which tradition and reason play important 'mediatory' roles. The thesis defends these claims in the following manner. Chapter 1 surveys recent scholarship relevant to the thesis and shows how this thesis will make a distinctive contribution to scholarly discussion of Barth's theology. Chapter 2 sets up the exposition of Barth's theological method that is provided in the remaining chapters by providing a 'conceptual framework'- an orderly arrangement of definitions and conceptual categories. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the main features of Barth's Doctrine of God as whole, as it appears in Church Dogmatics, with a special emphasis on the roles of Scripture, tradition and reason within those doctrines. Chapters 4-6 are an expository analysis of Barth's treatments of divine unity, constancy and eternity respectively, and form the primary basis for the claims of the thesis. Chapter 7, the conclusion, summarises the argument and makes some final observations

Retirement And Estate Planning With An Emphasis On Individual Retirement Accounts

Tax sheltering earned income for use in later years has become the cornerstone of many taxpayers’ retirement plans since so many companies have dropped their defined benefit pension plans in order to remain competitive in today’s international market place. Many taxpayers are utilizing Traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs and designated Roth accounts as important financial planning tools when the other plans are not readily available or no longer useful for their situations

Strengthening Social Ties While Walking the Neighbourhood?

Social connectedness among neighbours impacts health and well-being, especially during stressful life events like a pandemic. An activity such as neighbourhood walking enables urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociability and acts of "neighbouring" - that is, authentic social interactions with neighbours - to potentially bolster the social fabric of neighbourhoods and strengthen relationships. With the potential of neighbourhood walking in mind, this article investigates how everyday encounters while engaged in routine neighbourhood walks strengthen and/or weaken social ties among neighbours. To this end, the article draws on three sources of qualitative data from neighbourhood walkers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada: (a) "walking diaries" in which participants took note of their walking routes, the people they observed on their walks, and other details of their walking experiences; (b) maps of their neighbourhoods that outlined the boundaries of their self-identified neighbourhoods, their routine walking routes, and the people they recognized during their neighbourhood walks; and (c) one-on-one interviews during which participants provided crucial context and meaning to the maps and their walking experiences. The findings provide evidence of how interactions among inhabitants, while engaged in neighbourhood walking, help generate greater social connectedness

A framework for time-dependent Ice Sheet Uncertainty Quantification, applied to three West Antarctic ice streams

Ice sheet models are the main tool to generate forecasts of ice sheet mass loss; a significant contributor to sea-level rise, thus knowing the likelihood of such projections is of critical societal importance. However, to capture the complete range of possible projections of mass loss, ice sheet models need efficient methods to quantify the forecast uncertainty. Uncertainties originate from the model structure, from the climate and ocean forcing used to run the model and from model calibration. Here we quantify the latter, applying an error propagation framework to a realistic setting in West Antarctica. As in many other ice-sheet modelling studies we use a control method to calibrate grid-scale flow parameters (parameters describing the basal drag and ice stiffness) with remotely-sensed observations. Yet our framework augments the control method with a Hessian-based Bayesian approach that estimates the posterior covariance of the inverted parameters. This enables us to quantify the impact of the calibration uncertainty on forecasts of sea-level rise contribution or volume above flotation (VAF), due to the choice of different regularisation strengths (prior strengths), sliding laws and velocity inputs. We find that by choosing different satellite ice velocity products our model leads to different estimates of VAF after 40 years. We use this difference in model output to quantify the variance that projections of VAF are expected to have after 40 years and identify prior strengths that can reproduce that variability. We demonstrate that if we use prior strengths suggested by L-curve analysis, as is typically done in ice-sheet calibration studies, our uncertainty quantification is not able to reproduce that same variability. The regularisation suggested by the L-curves is too strong and thus propagating the observational error through to VAF uncertainties under this choice of prior leads to errors that are smaller than those suggested by our 2-member &ldquo;sample&rdquo; of observed velocity fields. Additionally, our experiments suggest that large amounts of data points may be redundant, with implications for the error propagation of VAF.</p

Sensitivity of calving glaciers to ice-ocean interactions under climate change: New insights from a 3D full-Stokes model

Iceberg calving accounts for between 30% and 60% of net mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has intensified and is now the single largest contributor to global sea level rise in the cryosphere. Changes to calving rates and the dynamics of calving glaciers represent a significant uncertainty in projections of future sea level rise. A growing body of observational evidence suggests that calving glaciers respond rapidly to regional environmental change, but predictive capacity is limited by the lack of suitable models capable of simulating calving mechanisms realistically. Here, we use a 3-D full-Stokes calving model to investigate the environmental sensitivity of Store Glacier, a large outlet glacier inWest Greenland.We focus on two environmental processes: undercutting by submarine melting and buttressing by ice mélange, and our results indicate that Store Glacier is likely to be able to withstand moderate warming perturbations in which the former is increased by 50% and the latter reduced by 50 %. However, severe perturbation with a doubling of submarine melt rates or a complete loss of ice mélange destabilises the calving front in our model runs. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that stress and fracture patterns at Store’s terminus are complex and varied, primarily due to the influence of basal topography. Calving style and environmental sensitivity vary greatly, with propagation of surface crevasses significantly influencing iceberg production in the northern side, whereas basal crevasses dominate in the south. Any future retreat is likely to be initiated in the southern side by a combination of increased submarine melt rates in summer and reduced mélange strength in winter. The lateral variability, as well as the importance of rotational and bending forces at the terminus, underlines the importance of using the 3-D full-Stokes stress solution when modelling Greenland’s calving glaciers.Article is output from NERC PhD studentship (Todd) and NERC grant (Christoffersen