Battlegrounds of environmental change

The Thames catchment encompasses one of Europe’s largest cities, the UK’s principal aquifer, an extensive zone of coastal interaction and much else. It presents a unique conjunction of geological, hydrogeological, environmental and socio-economic factors that are intrinsically linked by the effects of environmental change and the pressures of developmen

Street graphics : thirty-one silkscreen prints, based on South African iconography, with reference to certain characteristics of the street poster

An exploration by graphic means of selected South African iconography is the subject of this thesis. I have produced a collection of thirty-one silkscreen prints, which combine elements of the fine print and the street poster. The screen-prints have been mounted on board and presented in a box, accompanied by an illustrated dissertation. During the production of the printer I displayed a number of individual screen-prints, and later complete series, at various public locations (e.g. bus shelters, fences and walls of buildings) on the U.C.T. campus, in order to relate my working process to a direct public response. The whole collection of prints is ultimately envisaged as an exhibition on simple screens in a public place . The imagery in these prints is drawn from magazines and other mass publications, as well as from personal observation. My themes are based on aspects of South African popular culture and have been developed under eight different titles. The first five prints: OBSERVATIONS, can be seen as the visual parallel to a preface. Series One: ARTEFACTS, asserts the associative values of a well-known object when it is taken out of its context. Series Two: PROTOTYPES, links the quest for individuation with identification by means of uniform or dress. Series Three: INTERIORS, depicts environments that represent the concerns of the people who inhabit them. Series Four: MERE FACADES, portrays selected buildings which reveal aspects of the nature of the society they shelter. Series Five: AHEAD OF OUR TIME, focuses on outward appearance as a denominator of identity and on the resulting loss of individuality. Series Six: SUNNY SKIES, is a personal interpretation of some typical South African images (icons). Series Seven: MEMORABILIA, serves as a conclusion to the collection and is a personal homage to Joseph Cornell. This dissertation comprises a discussion of aspects of the practical work, concentrating on some elements of the historical background to my investigation; notes on my graphic methods and their implications; a documentary report on the display of the prints on the U.C.T. campus and an introduction to the prints

The most problematic symptoms of prion disease - an analysis of carer experiences

Objectives: Prion diseases are rare dementias that most commonly occur sporadically, but can be inherited or acquired, and for which there is no cure. We sought to understand which prion disease symptoms are most problematic for carers, to inform the development of outcome measures. Design: Self-completed questionnaire with follow-up of a subset of participants by structured interview. Setting: A nested study in the UK National Prion Monitoring Cohort, a longitudinal observational study. Participants and measurements: 71 carers, of people with different prion diseases with a wide range of disease severity, identified 236 of their four most problematic symptoms by questionnaire which were grouped into ten domains. Structured interviews were then done to qualitatively explore these experiences. Eleven family carers of people with prion disease were selected, including those representative of a range of demographics and disease subtypes and those who cared for people with prion disease, living or recently deceased. Interviews were transcribed and formally studied. Results: The six most problematic symptom domains were: mobility and coordination; mood and behavior; personal care and continence; eating and swallowing; communication; and cognition and memory. The prevalence of these symptoms varied significantly by disease stage and type. A formal analysis of structured interviews to explore these domains is reported. Conclusions: We make suggestions about how healthcare professionals can focus their support for people with prion disease. Clinical trials that aim to generate evidence regarding therapies that might confer meaningful benefits to carers should consider including outcome measures that monitor the symptomatic domains we have identified as problematic

Entanglement without Dissipation: A Touchstone for an exact Comparison of Entanglement Measures

Entanglement, which is an essential characteristic of quantum mechanics, is the key element in potential practical quantum information and quantum communication systems. However, there are many open and fundamental questions (relating to entanglement measures, sudden death, etc.) that require a deeper understanding. Thus, we are motivated to investigate a simple but non-trivial correlated two-body continuous variable system in the absence of a heat bath, which facilitates an \underline{exact} measure of the entanglement at all times. In particular, we find that the results obtained from all well-known existing entanglement measures agree with each other but that, in practice, some are more straightforward to use than others

Where and how 3D printing is used in teaching and education

The emergence of additive manufacturing and 3D printing technologies is introducing industrial skills deficits and opportunities for new teaching practices in a range of subjects and educational settings. In response, research investigating these practices is emerging across a wide range of education disciplines, but often without reference to studies in other disciplines. Responding to this problem, this article synthesizes these dispersed bodies of research to provide a state‐of‐the‐art literature review of where and how 3D printing is being used in the education system. Through investigating the application of 3D printing in schools, universities, libraries and special education settings, six use categories are identified and described: (1) to teach students about 3D printing; (2) to teach educators about 3D printing; (3) as a support technology during teaching; (4) to produce artefacts that aid learning; (5) to create assistive technologies; and (6) to support outreach activities. Although evidence can be found of 3D printing‐based teaching practices in each of these six categories, implementation remains immature, and recommendations are made for future research and education policy.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [number EP/K039598/1]

Fleet planning and technology upgrade projects: supporting decision-making through visualisation

In project planning, visualisations can be powerful tools for communication and in supporting decision-making between stakeholders. However the graphical elements, in terms of form and presentational style, are typically poorly treated and can therefore diminish both the impact and conveyance of information. Traditional timeline representations need to be adapted and modified in order to meet the requirements of specific stakeholder groups and thus fulfil their role as effective visual boundary objects. This paper describes the visualisation designed and developed for the planning of technology upgrade projects across a fleet of military platforms. A real-world application of the visualisation is provided through an illustrative case study based on the front-line fleet of Type 23 frigates of the Royal Navy

Quantum Field Theory Constrains Traversable Wormhole Geometries

Recently a bound on negative energy densities in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime was derived for a minimally coupled, quantized, massless, scalar field in an arbitrary quantum state. The bound has the form of an uncertainty principle-type constraint on the magnitude and duration of the negative energy density seen by a timelike geodesic observer. When spacetime is curved and/or has boundaries, we argue that the bound should hold in regions small compared to the minimum local characteristic radius of curvature or the distance to any boundaries, since spacetime can be considered approximately Minkowski on these scales. We apply the bound to the stress-energy of static traversable wormhole spacetimes. Our analysis implies that either the wormhole must be only a little larger than Planck size or that there is a large discrepancy in the length scales which characterize the wormhole. In the latter case, the negative energy must typically be concentrated in a thin band many orders of magnitude smaller than the throat size. These results would seem to make the existence of macroscopic traversable wormholes very improbable.Comment: 26 pages, plain LaTe

Quantum inequalities and `quantum interest' as eigenvalue problems

Quantum inequalities (QI's) provide lower bounds on the averaged energy density of a quantum field. We show how the QI's for massless scalar fields in even dimensional Minkowski space may be reformulated in terms of the positivity of a certain self-adjoint operator - a generalised Schroedinger operator with the energy density as the potential - and hence as an eigenvalue problem. We use this idea to verify that the energy density produced by a moving mirror in two dimensions is compatible with the QI's for a large class of mirror trajectories. In addition, we apply this viewpoint to the `quantum interest conjecture' of Ford and Roman, which asserts that the positive part of an energy density always overcompensates for any negative components. For various simple models in two and four dimensions we obtain the best possible bounds on the `quantum interest rate' and on the maximum delay between a negative pulse and a compensating positive pulse. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that - in four dimensions - it is impossible for a positive delta-function pulse of any magnitude to compensate for a negative delta-function pulse, no matter how close together they occur.Comment: 18 pages, RevTeX. One new result added; typos fixed. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Regional Economic Implications of Water Allocation and Reliability

The understanding of how allocation decisions can maximise the economic returns to the community from water for irrigation has received little attention, but is a significant issue for regional councils, those interested in water allocation policy development, and for irrigated farmers. There is a tradeoff between the amount of irrigated area and the reliability with which it can be undertaken. Overseas studies have generated a curve with optimum levels of allocation which maximise the economic return to the community from the resource. The study on which this paper is based used a single case study to model the individual and regional economic outcomes for four scenarios of water allocation, using daily time step simulation models of the hydrological, irrigation, farm and financial systems over the 1973 – 2000 period. The results show that there is an increasing return to the region as the allocation from the resource increases, at the expense of lower returns to existing users.Irrigation, reliability, regional economic impacts, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Land Economics/Use, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,