Including the urban heat island in spatial heat health risk assessment strategies: a case study for Birmingham, UK

Background Heatwaves present a significant health risk and the hazard is likely to escalate with the increased future temperatures presently predicted by climate change models. The impact of heatwaves is often felt strongest in towns and cities where populations are concentrated and where the climate is often unintentionally modified to produce an urban heat island effect; where urban areas can be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. The purpose of this interdisciplinary study is to integrate remotely sensed urban heat island data alongside commercial social segmentation data via a spatial risk assessment methodology in order to highlight potential heat health risk areas and build the foundations for a climate change risk assessment. This paper uses the city of Birmingham, UK as a case study area. Results When looking at vulnerable sections of the population, the analysis identifies a concentration of "very high" risk areas within the city centre, and a number of pockets of "high risk" areas scattered throughout the conurbation. Further analysis looks at household level data which yields a complicated picture with a considerable range of vulnerabilities at a neighbourhood scale. Conclusions The results illustrate that a concentration of "very high" risk people live within the urban heat island, and this should be taken into account by urban planners and city centre environmental managers when considering climate change adaptation strategies or heatwave alert schemes. The methodology has been designed to be transparent and to make use of powerful and readily available datasets so that it can be easily replicated in other urban areas

Evidence against memorial facilitation and context-dependent memory effects through the chewing of gum

The experiment examined the prediction that chewing gum at learning and/or recall facilitated subsequent word recall. Chewing gum at learning significantly impaired recall, indicating that the chewing of gum has a detrimental impact upon initial word encoding. In addition, a context-dependent memory effect was reported for those participants who both learned and recalled in the absence of gum, however a context dependent effect was not found with chewing gum. The findings contradict previous research

Assessment of the impact of climate change on road maintenance

Climate affects road deterioration, vehicle operating costs, road safety and the environment. Current and past pavement design guides and engineering models assume a static climate whose variability can be determined from past data. This fixed climate assumptions is often used in road management decision support models such as the Highway Development and Management system (HDM-4) to simulate future behaviour of road sections and consequently inform long-term road maintenance strategies and policies. Contrary to the assumption of a static climate in road management approaches, observations over the last 40 or 50 years show increasing trend in global warming. This raises the possibility that the severity and frequency of pavement defects may be altered leading to premature pavement deterioration and increased costs of managing and using roads. As a consequence, current road management strategies and policies may not offer sufficient resilience to increased frequency of future extreme climate events. A study was undertaken at the University of Birmingham to develop improved deterioration model for asphalt rut depth prediction. The approach used entailed the application of Bayesian Monte Carlo analysis. The output of the study will be used to improve existing road management systems such as HDM-4 and to consequently facilitate the investigation of strategies for adapting to future changes in climate

Smoothed Dissipative Particle Dynamics model for mesoscopic multiphase flows in the presence of thermal fluctuations

Thermal fluctuations cause perturbations of fluid-fluid interfaces and highly nonlinear hydrodynamics in multiphase flows. In this work, we develop a novel multiphase smoothed dissipative particle dynamics model. This model accounts for both bulk hydrodynamics and interfacial fluctuations. Interfacial surface tension is modeled by imposing a pairwise force between SDPD particles. We show that the relationship between the model parameters and surface tension, previously derived under the assumption of zero thermal fluctuation, is accurate for fluid systems at low temperature but overestimates the surface tension for intermediate and large thermal fluctuations. To analyze the effect of thermal fluctuations on surface tension, we construct a coarse-grained Euler lattice model based on the mean field theory and derive a semi-analytical formula to directly relate the surface tension to model parameters for a wide range of temperatures and model resolutions. We demonstrate that the present method correctly models the dynamic processes, such as bubble coalescence and capillary spectra across the interface

Video Games: Their Effect on Society and How We Must Modernize Our Pedagogy for Students of the Digital Age

This thesis aims to explore how video games have become an extremely beneficial tool in regards to education, art, medicine, psychology, economics, and beyond. Chapter 1 focuses on how ubiquitous video games have become in America, and what makes video games such a uniquely enjoyable experience to warrant such popularity. Chapter 2 explores how video games have become instrumental in various fields. Chapter 3 discusses the role that video games now play in the world of education; specifically how we, as educators, must adapt a modern pedagogy best suited to students who have grown up with video games, which have influenced how they learn. This is the thesis’ primary contention and purpose. Chapter 4 dissects the two most studied controversies which surround video games as a medium: video game violence and video game addiction

Radiation pressure-tunable photoluminescence and upconversion lasing on a chip

The ability to tune the wavelength of light emission on a silicon chip is important for scalable photonic networks, distributed photonic sensor networks and next generation computer architectures. Here we demonstrate light emission in a chip-scale optomechanical device, with wide tunablity provided by radiation pressure. To achieve this, we develop an optically active double-disk optomechanical system through implantation of erbium ions. We observe radiation pressure tuning of photoluminescence in the telecommunications band with a wavelength range of 520 pm, green upconversion lasing with a threshold of $340\pm 70 \; \mu$W, and optomechanical self-pulsing caused by the interplay of radiation pressure and thermal effects. These results provide a path towards widely-tunable micron-scale lasers for photonic networks.Comment: Main text 6 pages, 5 figures; Appendix 3 pages, 3 figure

An Exploratory Study Investigating Leader and Follower Characteristics at U.S. Healthcare Organizations

Leadership has been studied by a myriad of scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries. One recent stream of research focuses on the followers of leaders. Today, followership is recognized as a construct that has value, and there is a broad call for additional research in this area (Gardner et al., 2005; Howell and Shamir, 2005.) In this study, the authors propose hypotheses that focus on followers and on their adoption of characteristics that are leader-like. The central thesis in this study is that followers have the ability to share roles with leaders. To test that thesis, a model is presented of specific leader and follower behaviors that (a) are thought to be related and overlapping, and (b) are relevant to role-sharing. Borrowing from prior work in which role sharing has been discussed, this study presents hypotheses and findings from analysis of field survey data collected from employees in healthcare organizations