European Union and international students in Scottish Higher Education Institutions

In Scotland the share of students attending Scottish Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) who come from countries outside of the UK is higher than for the UK as a whole. Over the last decade, the number of students at Scottish HEIs from other member states of the European Union (EU students) and from countries outside of the European Union (international students) has grown considerably. The tuition fees paid by such students have become a significant source of income for most Scottish HEIs. Therefore, any change to UK immigration rules, regardless of the outcome of the current debate on constitutional change, would likely have more of an impact on Scottish HEIs compared to HEIs in other parts of the UK

Stopping and Fronting in New Zealand Pasifika English

New Zealand has some 250,000 people whose families immigrated from the South Pacific islands, making up seven percent of the New Zealand population. The majority of these people come from four main islands or groups: Samoa, Cook Islands, Tonga and Niue. The first generation immigrants are second language speakers of English, with their first languages being the Polynesian language of their country of origin. New Zealand born members of the community are often dominant in English rather than their community language. This leads to a complex situation of language contact which seems to be resulting in the emergence of a Pasifika ethnolect of New Zealand English in the younger members of these communities. This study analyses the realisation of the interdental fricatives (DH) and (TH) in the speech of ten young Samoan and Niuean New Zealanders. (DH) was frequently realised as a stop, particularly after a pause and in stressed syllables. (TH) had both stopped and fronted forms, with fronting occurring at high rates in syllable coda position. A more detailed analysis of the speech of one Samoan participant revealed several other features which may be associated with Pasifika English in New Zealand. These include the occurrence of non-prevocalic /r/ after NURSE and the absence of linking /r/ and other sandhi consonants

Psychrometric Properties of Humid Air from Multi-Fluid Helmholtz-Energy-Explicit Models

Psychrometric properties of humid air are widely used in the analysis and modeling of thermal systems. In this work we present a method for obtaining these properties from the multi-fluid mixture formulation of the GERG mixture model. This mixture model was originally developed to model the thermodynamics of natural gas mixtures, and now has been extended to model thermodynamic properties relevant for carbon capture and storage. The primary advantage of this formulation is that the dry air composition is not fixed, and can be adjusted to suit the application, for instance in submarines, for Martian atmospheres, etc. We present an algorithm that can be used to calculate the saturated vapor water composition in vapor-liquid equilibrium, and other properties that arise out of this equilibrium calculation, such as relative humidity and dewpoints. Solid-vapor equilibrium is not considered, and neither is the calculation of wet-bulb temperatures

OA policies & traditional publishing agreements: Status of non-exclusive licenses in Canadian copyright law?

To ease the problem of paywall-blocked access to scholarly articles arising from publicly funded research, some universities have adopted a rights-retention OA policy. In this type of policy, faculty grant to the university a blanket non-exclusive license to make the accepted manuscript version of their scholarly articles publicly available in the university's research repository. But what happens if a university adopts an OA policy and faculty subsequently continue to sign publishers' standard publishing agreements that typically require an author to either transfer all copyrights or provide an exclusive license to the publisher? This presentation outlines a project that explores this question within Canadian copyright law

How many calories do nurses burn at work? A real-time study of nurses’ energy expenditure

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: These data were collected as part of a Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office funded study (CZH/4/460). Julia Allan is currently (2018) an Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) sabbatical grant holder.Peer reviewedPostprin

On the power of non-local boxes

A non-local box is a virtual device that has the following property: given that Alice inputs a bit at her end of the device and that Bob does likewise, it produces two bits, one at Alice's end and one at Bob's end, such that the XOR of the outputs is equal to the AND of the inputs. This box, inspired from the CHSH inequality, was first proposed by Popescu and Rohrlich to examine the question: given that a maximally entangled pair of qubits is non-local, why is it not maximally non-local? We believe that understanding the power of this box will yield insight into the non-locality of quantum mechanics. It was shown recently by Cerf, Gisin, Massar and Popescu, that this imaginary device is able to simulate correlations from any measurement on a singlet state. Here, we show that the non-local box can in fact do much more: through the simulation of the magic square pseudo-telepathy game and the Mermin-GHZ pseudo-telepathy game, we show that the non-local box can simulate quantum correlations that no entangled pair of qubits can in a bipartite scenario and even in a multi-party scenario. Finally we show that a single non-local box cannot simulate all quantum correlations and propose a generalization for a multi-party non-local box. In particular, we show quantum correlations whose simulation requires an exponential amount of non-local boxes, in the number of maximally entangled qubit pairs.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

A limit on nonlocality in any world in which communication complexity is not trivial

Bell proved that quantum entanglement enables two space-like separated parties to exhibit classically impossible correlations. Even though these correlations are stronger than anything classically achievable, they cannot be harnessed to make instantaneous (faster than light) communication possible. Yet, Popescu and Rohrlich have shown that even stronger correlations can be defined, under which instantaneous communication remains impossible. This raises the question: Why are the correlations achievable by quantum mechanics not maximal among those that preserve causality? We give a partial answer to this question by showing that slightly stronger correlations would result in a world in which communication complexity becomes trivial.Comment: 13 pages, no figure