Planning travel as everyday design

This paper examines the implications of conceptualising planning as a type of design activity. This is explored through results from a two-month field study that investigated the planning and decision making behaviour of people engaged in preparing for multipoint, international air travel. Planning travel is a type of ill-structured complex problem that is characterised as being temporally sporadic, sometimes synchronous, often asynchronous, frequently collaborative, and spatially varied with participants at different times co-located and in separate places. Research participants were professional travel agents and non-professional but experienced travel planners. Ancillary material collected included photographs of the planning situation and drawings and notes made by participants. In contrast to the formalised prescriptive planning models common in cognitive science and operations research, the everyday planning activity featured in this study is situated and naturalistic. This research is undertaken with a view to designing systems to support the design and decision making activity of travel planners. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG

The importance of social relations in shaping energy demand

Current efforts to change patterns of energy demand tend to target people as discrete and isolated individuals. In so doing, they ignore the fact that energy use occurs in places such as homes, workplaces and communities in which complex webs of social relations already exist. Here, we argue that more attention should be paid to how people’s social relations influence energy demand. We review recent qualitative research to show how social relations shape how much energy people use, when and where they use it, as well as how they respond to interventions. We propose a typology that identifies three types of social relation as especially significant: those with family and friends, with agencies and communities, and those associated with social identities. We show how a focus on social relations can generate new forms of policy and intervention in efforts to build more just and sustainable energy futures

A study of email and SMS use in rural Indonesia

This paper describes a two-year research study that piloted and evaluated the use of low-cost, low-bandwidth Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support meetings between agricultural researchers and farmers in rural Indonesia and researchers in Australia. We found that the primary constraints to ICT use in rural Indonesia are rarely technical, but rather relate to the knowledge, social and economic systems within which they are used. This study revealed how different local appropriations of email and mobile phone SMS clash, which often resulted in misunderstanding, frustration and reduced team cohesion and performance. This research contributes to understanding the role of ICT to enhance social inclusion of those in remote parts of developing countries. © ACM 2009

Planning to meet future demands

Presented at the 2002 USCID/EWRI conference, Energy, climate, environment and water - issues and opportunities for irrigation and drainage on July 9-12 in San Luis Obispo, California.Includes bibliographical references.There is now insufficient food for half of the world's population and in many areas the population is increasing faster than the food supply. Part of the current food supply is produced by depleting groundwater, overgrazing, degrading agricultural lands, and slash and burn agriculture. In order to conserve resources for future generations, these practices need to be eliminated. Countries with a good food supply also have good population stability. If food production from irrigated alluvial lands can be increased fast enough, then irrigated agriculture can stabilize population growth and greatly reduce the depletion of resources. Slash and burn agriculture results in deforestation, flooding of alluvial lands, and erosion. High priority needs to be given to eliminating this practice. This paper present methods and equations for simplifying water resource development planning and management. The World Water and Climate Atlas is briefly described. Development of a surface water Atlas is proposed. Some of the benefits that have resulted from the construction of large dams and the irrigation of alluvial lands are described

Low-energy electron scattering by tetrahydrofuran

Cross sections for elastic scattering of low-energy electrons by tetrahydrofuran, a prototype for the furanose ring found in the backbone of DNA, have been measured and calculated over a wide energy range, with an emphasis on energies below 6 eV, where previous data are scarce. The measurements employ a thin-aperture version of the relative-flow method, while the calculations employ the Schwinger multichannel method with an extensive treatment of polarization effects. Comparisons with earlier results, both experimental and theoretical, are presented and discussed. A proper accounting for the strong permanent electric dipole of tetrahydrofuran is found to be essential to obtaining reliable cross sections, especially at energies below 5 eV

Iron ochre: a pre-catalyst for the cracking of methane

Background: Iron ochres are gelatinous sludges which can cause problems in terms of water management. In this manuscript, the application of iron ochre obtained from a river has been applied to catalytically crack methane – another potential waste product - into two useful products, hydrogen and a magnetic carbon containing composite.<p></p> Results: The powder XRD pattern of the iron ochre was found to be consistent with the expected 2-line ferrihydrite and EDX analysis showed Fe to be a major component although some Si was present. The sample was observed to contain a fraction with a tubular morphology consistent with the presence of extra-cellular biogenic iron oxide formed by leptothrix. Upon exposure to methane at elevated temperatures, the material was found to transform into an active catalyst for hydrogen production yielding a magnetic carbon containing composite material comprising filamentous carbon and encapsulating graphite.<p></p> Conclusion: The application of two waste products – iron ochre and methane – to generate two useful products – hydrogen and a magnetic carbon containing composite- has been demonstrated. Furthermore, the ochre has been shown to comprise tubular morphology extra-cellular biogenic iron oxide which may be of interest in terms of other applications.<p></p&gt

Targeting Mr Average: Participation, gender equity and school sport partnerships

The School Sport Partnership Programme (SSPP) is one strand of the national strategy for physical education and school sport in England, the physical education and school sport Club Links Strategy (PESSCL). The SSPP aims to make links between school physical education (PE) and out of school sports participation, and has a particular remit to raise the participation levels of several identified under-represented groups, of which girls and young women are one. National evaluations of the SSPP show that it is beginning to have positive impacts on young people's activity levels by increasing the range and provision of extra curricular activities (Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), 2003, 2004, 2005; Loughborough Partnership, 2005, 2006). This paper contributes to the developing picture of the phased implementation of the programme by providing qualitative insights into the work of one school sport partnership with a particular focus on gender equity. The paper explores the ways in which gender equity issues have been explicitly addressed within the 'official texts' of the SSPP; how these have shifted over time and how teachers are responding to and making sense of these in their daily practice. Using participation observation, interview and questionnaire data, the paper explores how the coordinators are addressing the challenge of increasing the participation of girls and young women. The paper draws on Walby's (2000) conceptualisation of different kinds of feminist praxis to highlight the limitations of the coordinators' work. Two key themes from the data and their implications are addressed: the dominance of competitive sport practices and the PE professionals' views of targeting as a strategy for increasing the participation of under-represented groups. The paper concludes that coordinators work within an equality or difference discourse with little evidence of the transformative praxis needed for the programme to be truly inclusive. © 2008 Taylor & Francis

OAR BLADE FORCE COEFFICIENTS AND A MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF ROWING

The aim of this study was to validate the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to determine oar blade force coefficients for use in a mathematical model of rowing mechanics to predict the performance of a boat. Experimental and CFD derived lift and drag force coefficients for a Macon oar blade were taken from previously published research. Each set of coefficients was used to drive a mathematical model of rowing, and predicted instantaneous and mean steady state boat velocity compared. Instantaneous boat velocity was similar throughout the stroke and mean boat velocity varied by only 1.33%. In conclusion, this investigation has demonstrated that lift and drag coefficients obtained by computational methods may be used successfully to predict boat behaviour in a mathematical model of rowing. The use of computational data closely matches model outputs derived from experimental data

A Dynamical Fossil in the Ursa Minor Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

The nearby Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal (UMi dSph) is one of the most dark matter dominated galaxies known, with a central mass to light ratio roughly equal to 70. Somewhat anomalously, it appears to contain morphological substructure in the form of a second peak in the stellar number density. It is often argued that this substructure must be transient because it could not survive for the > 10 Gyr age of the system, given the crossing time implied by UMi's 8.8 km/s internal velocity dispersion. In this paper, however, we present evidence that the substructure has a cold kinematical signature, and argue that UMi's clumpiness could indeed be a primordial artefact. Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate that substructure is incompatible with the cusped dark matter haloes predicted by the prevailing Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm, but is consistent with an unbound stellar cluster sloshing back and forth within the nearly harmonic potential of a cored dark matter halo. Thus CDM appears to disagree with observation at the least massive, most dark matter dominated end of the galaxy mass spectrum.Comment: Astrophysical Journal (Letters), in pres