A Key and check-list to Kenya Orchids

Volume: XXI

Promoting the achievement of looked after children and young people in the City of Nottingham

As of March 2016, there were 70,440 children and young people in care in England. The number of looked after children has continued to increase steadily over the last eight years. Sixty per cent of these children are in care because of abuse or neglect and three-quarters are placed in foster care arrangements. Children and young people who are in or have experienced care remain one of the lowest performing groups in terms of educational outcomes. Last year, 14% of looked after children achieved five or more A*–C GCSEs or equivalent, including English and mathematics. As a consequence, they also experience poorer employment and health outcomes after leaving school compared to their peers. They are over-represented amongst the offender population and those who experience homelessness. However, research is emerging to show that children and young people in care can have very positive experiences of school and are supported effectively to reach their full potential academically and socially. The purpose of this report is to share practice in selected City of Nottingham schools that is contributing to improved outcomes and school experiences for children and young people in care. In July 2015, the City of Nottingham Virtual School (VS) commissioned UCL Institute of Education to run their Promoting the Achievement of Looked After Children (PALAC) programme with seven schools in the Local Authority (LA). This report presents an account of the programme, including the activities undertaken by the participants and the outcomes of the programme to date for pupils in care and staff in the participating schools

Acceleressence: Dark Energy from a Phase Transition at the Seesaw Scale

Simple models are constructed for "acceleressence" dark energy: the latent heat of a phase transition occurring in a hidden sector governed by the seesaw mass scale v^2/M_Pl, where v is the electroweak scale and M_Pl the gravitational mass scale. In our models, the seesaw scale is stabilized by supersymmetry, implying that the LHC must discover superpartners with a spectrum that reflects a low scale of fundamental supersymmetry breaking. Newtonian gravity may be modified by effects arising from the exchange of fields in the acceleressence sector whose Compton wavelengths are typically of order the millimeter scale. There are two classes of models. In the first class the universe is presently in a metastable vacuum and will continue to inflate until tunneling processes eventually induce a first order transition. In the simplest such model, the range of the new force is bounded to be larger than 25 microns in the absence of fine-tuning of parameters, and for couplings of order unity it is expected to be \approx 100 microns. In the second class of models thermal effects maintain the present vacuum energy of the universe, but on further cooling, the universe will "soon" smoothly relax to a matter dominated era. In this case, the range of the new force is also expected to be of order the millimeter scale or larger, although its strength is uncertain. A firm prediction of this class of models is the existence of additional energy density in radiation at the eV era, which can potentially be probed in precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background. An interesting possibility is that the transition towards a matter dominated era has occurred in the very recent past, with the consequence that the universe is currently decelerating.Comment: 10 pages, references adde

2+1 flavor domain wall QCD on a (2 fm)^3 lattice: light meson spectroscopy with Ls = 16

We present results for light meson masses and pseudoscalar decay constants from the first of a series of lattice calculations with 2+1 dynamical flavors of domain wall fermions and the Iwasaki gauge action. The work reported here was done at a fixed lattice spacing of about 0.12 fm on a 16^3\times32 lattice, which amounts to a spatial volume of (2 fm)^3 in physical units. The number of sites in the fifth dimension is 16, which gives m_{res} = 0.00308(4) in these simulations. Three values of input light sea quark masses, m_l^{sea} \approx 0.85 m_s, 0.59 m_s and 0.33 m_s were used to allow for extrapolations to the physical light quark limit, whilst the heavier sea quark mass was fixed to approximately the physical strange quark mass m_s. The exact rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm was used to evaluate the fractional powers of the fermion determinants in the ensemble generation. We have found that f_\pi = 127(4) MeV, f_K = 157(5) MeV and f_K/f_\pi = 1.24(2), where the errors are statistical only, which are in good agreement with the experimental values.Comment: RBC and UKQCD Collaborations. 17 pages, 14 figures. Typeset with ReVTEX4. v2: replaced with the version published in PRD with improved introductio

Precision Measurement of the Weak Mixing Angle in Moller Scattering

We report on a precision measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in fixed target electron-electron (Moller) scattering: A_PV = -131 +/- 14 (stat.) +/- 10 (syst.) parts per billion, leading to the determination of the weak mixing angle \sin^2\theta_W^eff = 0.2397 +/- 0.0010 (stat.) +/- 0.0008 (syst.), evaluated at Q^2 = 0.026 GeV^2. Combining this result with the measurements of \sin^2\theta_W^eff at the Z^0 pole, the running of the weak mixing angle is observed with over 6 sigma significance. The measurement sets constraints on new physics effects at the TeV scale.Comment: 4 pages, 2 postscript figues, submitted to Physical Review Letter

Observation of Parity Nonconservation in Moller Scattering

We report a measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in fixed target electron-electron (Moller) scattering: A_PV = -175 +/- 30 (stat.) +/- 20 (syst.) parts per billion. This first direct observation of parity nonconservation in Moller scattering leads to a measurement of the electron's weak charge at low energy Q^e_W = -0.053 +/- 0.011. This is consistent with the Standard Model expectation at the current level of precision: sin^2\theta_W(M_Z)_MSbar = 0.2293 +/- 0.0024 (stat.) +/- 0.0016 (syst.) +/- 0.0006 (theory).Comment: Version 3 is the same as version 2. These versions contain minor text changes from referee comments and a change in the extracted value of Q^e_W and sin^2\theta_W due to a change in the theoretical calculation of the bremsstrahulung correction (ref. 16

Baryon Number in Warped GUTs : Model Building and (Dark Matter Related) Phenomenology

In the past year, a new non-supersymmetric framework for electroweak symmetry breaking (with or without Higgs) involving SU(2)_L * SU(2)_R * U(1)_{B-L} in higher dimensional warped geometry has been suggested. In this work, we embed this gauge structure into a GUT such as SO(10) or Pati-Salam. We showed recently (in hep-ph/0403143) that in a warped GUT, a stable Kaluza-Klein fermion can arise as a consequence of imposing proton stability. Here, we specify a complete realistic model where this particle is a weakly interacting right-handed neutrino, and present a detailed study of this new dark matter candidate, providing relic density and detection predictions. We discuss phenomenological aspects associated with the existence of other light (<~ TeV) KK fermions (related to the neutrino), whose lightness is a direct consequence of the top quark's heaviness. The AdS/CFT interpretation of this construction is also presented. Most of our qualitative results do not depend on the nature of the breaking of the electroweak symmetry provided that it happens near the TeV brane.Comment: 61 pages, 12 figures; v2: minor changes; v3: Two additional diagrams in Fig. 10; a numerical factor corrected in section 16.1 (baryogenesis section), corresponding discussion slightly modified but qualitative results unchange

Experiment, monitoring, and gradient methods used to infer climate change effects on plant communities yield consistent patterns

Inference about future climate change impacts typically relies on one of three approaches: manipulative experiments, historical comparisons (broadly defined to include monitoring the response to ambient climate fluctuations using repeat sampling of plots, dendroecology, and paleoecology techniques), and space-for-time substitutions derived from sampling along environmental gradients. Potential limitations of all three approaches are recognized. Here we address the congruence among these three main approaches by comparing the degree to which tundra plant community composition changes (i) in response to in situ experimental warming, (ii) with interannual variability in summer temperature within sites, and (iii) over spatial gradients in summer temperature. We analyzed changes in plant community composition from repeat sampling (85 plant communities in 28 regions) and experimental warming studies (28 experiments in 14 regions) throughout arctic and alpine North America and Europe. Increases in the relative abundance of species with a warmer thermal niche were observed in response to warmer summer temperatures using all three methods; however, effect sizes were greater over broad-scale spatial gradients relative to either temporal variability in summer temperature within a site or summer temperature increases induced by experimental warming. The effect sizes for change over time within a site and with experimental warming were nearly identical. These results support the view that inferences based on space-for-time substitution overestimate the magnitude of responses to contemporary climate warming, because spatial gradients reflect long-term processes. In contrast, in situ experimental warming and monitoring approaches yield consistent estimates of the magnitude of response of plant communities to climate warming

Representing kidney development using the gene ontology.

Gene Ontology (GO) provides dynamic controlled vocabularies to aid in the description of the functional biological attributes and subcellular locations of gene products from all taxonomic groups (www.geneontology.org). Here we describe collaboration between the renal biomedical research community and the GO Consortium to improve the quality and quantity of GO terms describing renal development. In the associated annotation activity, the new and revised terms were associated with gene products involved in renal development and function. This project resulted in a total of 522 GO terms being added to the ontology and the creation of approximately 9,600 kidney-related GO term associations to 940 UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) entries, covering 66 taxonomic groups. We demonstrate the impact of these improvements on the interpretation of GO term analyses performed on genes differentially expressed in kidney glomeruli affected by diabetic nephropathy. In summary, we have produced a resource that can be utilized in the interpretation of data from small- and large-scale experiments investigating molecular mechanisms of kidney function and development and thereby help towards alleviating renal disease