The political identities of neighbourhood planning in England

The rise of neighbourhood planning has been characterised as another step in a remorseless de-politicisation of the public sphere. A policy initiated by the Coalition Government in England to create the conditions for local communities to support housing growth, neighbourhood planning appears to evidence a continuing retreat from political debate and contestation. Clear boundaries are established for the holistic integration of participatory democracy into the strategic plan-making of the local authority. These boundaries seek to take politics out of development decisions and exclude all issues of contention from discussion. They achieve this goal at the cost of arming participatory democracy with a collective identity around which new antagonisms may develop. Drawing on the post-political theories of Chantal Mouffe this paper identifies the return of antagonism and conflict to participation in spatial planning. Key to its argument is the concept of the boundary or frontier that in Mouffe’s theoretical framework institutionalises conflict between political entities. Drawing on primary research with neighbourhood development plans in England the paper explores how boundary conditions and boundary designations generate antagonism and necessitate political action. The paper charts the development of the collective identities that result from these boundary lines and argues for the potential for neighbourhood planning to restore political conflict to the politics of housing development

DNA Evidence of a Croatian and Sephardic Jewish Settlement on the North Carolina Coast Dating from the Mid to Late 1500s

While the British origins of North American colonization currently are widely accepted, there is new evidence that other countries and non-Christians may have been earlier in establishing permanent settlements on the North Atlantic coast. Using the new research tool of human genomics, this paper provides DNA evidence that Croatians and Sephardic Jews were absorbed into the ancestral population of the Lumbee Native American tribe of North Carolina during the mid- to late-1500s. We further propose that these Sephardic Jews originated, in part, from a subgroup of the Roanoke colonists of 1586. Given this, a new historical narrative of early European colonization in North America during the 1500s is proposed

Large-scale diversity estimation through surname origin inference

The study of surnames as both linguistic and geographical markers of the past has proven valuable in several research fields spanning from biology and genetics to demography and social mobility. This article builds upon the existing literature to conceive and develop a surname origin classifier based on a data-driven typology. This enables us to explore a methodology to describe large-scale estimates of the relative diversity of social groups, especially when such data is scarcely available. We subsequently analyze the representativeness of surname origins for 15 socio-professional groups in France

Some examples of exponentially harmonic maps

The aim of this paper is to study some examples of exponentially harmonic maps. We study such maps firstly on flat euclidean and Minkowski spaces and secondly on Friedmann-Lema\^ itre universes. We also consider some new models of exponentially harmonic maps which are coupled with gravity which happen to be based on a generalization of the lagrangian for bosonic strings coupled with dilatonic field.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Social network dynamics of face-to-face interactions

The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our understanding of the "microscopic structure" of a social tie. A social tie indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as face-to-face conversations or phone-calls. Analysis of data on face-to-face interactions shows that such events, as many other human activities, are bursty, with very heterogeneous durations. In this paper we present a model for social interactions at short time scales, aimed at describing contexts such as conference venues in which individuals interact in small groups. We present a detailed anayltical and numerical study of the model's dynamical properties, and show that it reproduces important features of empirical data. The model allows for many generalizations toward an increasingly realistic description of social interactions. In particular in this paper we investigate the case where the agents have intrinsic heterogeneities in their social behavior, or where dynamic variations of the local number of individuals are included. Finally we propose this model as a very flexible framework to investigate how dynamical processes unfold in social networks.Comment: 20 pages, 25 figure

Fabrication of Fully Isolated nFETs Using Oxidized Porous Silicon

SOl (Silicon on Insulator) technology is an option in improving device performance as smaller devices run into scaling challenges. The devices for this study were fabricated using a FIPOS (Fully Isolated Porous Oxidized Silicon) process, which results in localized SOl active regions. The oxidation of electrochemically etched porous silicon (PSi) has demonstrated success in the formation of device quality localized S01 for CMOS applications 11,21. The formation of PSi can be done selectively by controlling the Fermi level in areas to be etched or not etched, which is typically done by adjusting the level of doping Ill. An alternative method is to introduce a reversible donor species such as protons 121 or fluorine (this work) for the selective formation of islands of crystalline silicon surrounded by porous silicon. Implanted fluorine in silicon has demonstrated a donor effect upon annealing at low temperature (600°C), which is reversible as the fluorine outdiffuses during higher temperature annealing (1000°C). This technique has been used to form crystalline silicon active regions with thickness less than 200 nm completely surrounded by oxidized porous silicon 131, shown in figure 1. This study involves the fabrication and characterization of nFETs on the active areas to investigate the electronic integrity of the silicon device regions

Data preparation and interannotator agreement: BioCreAtIvE Task 1B

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>We prepared and evaluated training and test materials for an assessment of text mining methods in molecular biology. The goal of the assessment was to evaluate the ability of automated systems to generate a list of unique gene identifiers from PubMed abstracts for the three model organisms Fly, Mouse, and Yeast. This paper describes the preparation and evaluation of answer keys for training and testing. These consisted of lists of normalized gene names found in the abstracts, generated by adapting the gene list for the full journal articles found in the model organism databases. For the training dataset, the gene list was pruned automatically to remove gene names not found in the abstract; for the testing dataset, it was further refined by manual annotation by annotators provided with guidelines. A critical step in interpreting the results of an assessment is to evaluate the quality of the data preparation. We did this by careful assessment of interannotator agreement and the use of answer pooling of participant results to improve the quality of the final testing dataset.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Interannotator analysis on a small dataset showed that our gene lists for Fly and Yeast were good (87% and 91% three-way agreement) but the Mouse gene list had many conflicts (mostly omissions), which resulted in errors (69% interannotator agreement). By comparing and pooling answers from the participant systems, we were able to add an additional check on the test data; this allowed us to find additional errors, especially in Mouse. This led to 1% change in the Yeast and Fly "gold standard" answer keys, but to an 8% change in the mouse answer key.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We found that clear annotation guidelines are important, along with careful interannotator experiments, to validate the generated gene lists. Also, abstracts alone are a poor resource for identifying genes in paper, containing only a fraction of genes mentioned in the full text (25% for Fly, 36% for Mouse). We found that there are intrinsic differences between the model organism databases related to the number of synonymous terms and also to curation criteria. Finally, we found that answer pooling was much faster and allowed us to identify more conflicting genes than interannotator analysis.</p