Halo - A Personal IoT Air Monitor Powered by Harvested Energy

Urban air pollution leads to widespread respiratory illness and millions of deaths annually. PM2.5, particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, is the product of many common combustion reactions and poses a particularly serious health risk. Its small size allows it to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Existing air quality monitors are aimed at scientific research, di↵erentiating between pollutants and providing high accuracy in measurement. These devices are prohibitively expensive and cannot easily be carried around. Due to the highly localized nature of air pollution, and in order to allow individuals and institutions to easily monitor their real-time exposure to PM2.5, we propose Halo, an air quality monitor costing less than $100. Halo is powered by a 500 mW solar panel and equipped with a 1500 mAh Lithium-Ion battery in order to handle 150 mW peak power consumption and operate continuously for over 24 hours without power input. The device is small enough to be clipped to a backpack or bag for easy portability, and it can be used in personal or public settings. Using an IR emitter and detector, Halo measures reflected IR light to determine the particulate concentration in the air with an error less than 10%. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to communicate these values to a user’s phone. From the phone, air data can be time-stamped, stored in a cloud database, and visualized in an app for easy monitoring of pollution trends and pollution exposure. Additionally, the cloud database allows for the aggregation of data from multiple devices to create crowdsourced pollution maps. These maps can be used to pinpoint areas with particularly bad air quality in order to try to make changes to these areas or to help users to know to avoid these areas in possible

Riots, demonstrations, strikes and the Coalition programme

The current UK government’s policies include headlong spending cuts and a far-reaching restructuring of public provision. State welfare arguably contributes to political legitimacy and social stability, as well as to better social conditions and economic prosperity. The fact that current policies bear disproportionately on lower income groups may damage legitimacy. This article analyses a dataset covering 26 countries for more than two decades to show that spending cuts, privatisation and increases in poverty undermine legitimacy. It uses a direct measure of legitimacy in terms of the frequency of riots and political demonstrations and strikes rather than the usual indirect measures in terms of attitudes and trust in government. Findings in relation to the increased work-centredness of the benefit and labour market reforms are more equivocal: a stricter benefit regime may not undermine legitimacy

'Customers were not objects to suck blood from': Social relations in UK retail banks under changing performance management systems

Utilising an analytical framework informed by a moral economy approach, this article examines the social relationships between bank workers and customers in the context of changing performance management. Informed by 46 in‐depth interviews with branch workers and branch managers from UK banks, this article focusses on the interplay of the pressures arising from an intensified and all‐encompassing performance management system and bank workers lay morality. The article seeks to analyse why one group of bank workers engages with customers in a primarily instrumental manner, while another group tends to mediate and engage in oppositional practices which aim to avoid such an instrumentalisation. The article argues that moral economy gives voice to the agency of workers and the critical concerns of the social, economic and moral consequences of market‐driven and purely profit‐oriented workplace regimes

Moral economies of the welfare state: A qualitative comparative study

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway and the UK to examine people’s ideas about welfare state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences: a distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, on inclusion and equality in Norway and on individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK

Political legitimacy and welfare state futures: Introduction

Welfare attitudes are pivotal in understanding the preferences and demands of citizens to help shape future policy reforms in welfare states. Accordingly, and due to the availability of large scale comparative survey data on attitudes, large numbers of studies of welfare attitudes have emerged during the past few decades. However, some limitations still exist in the field, such as the background assumptions informing the questionnaire design and top down framing of issues, the population represented and finally limitations in teasing out the causal mechanisms of relationships, especially pertaining to that of policy reform. This regional issue brings together papers that address some of these issues and others in welfare attitude research to provide some guidance for future studies. This paper first summarises the existing studies on welfare attitudes to identify some of the key limitations, and introduces the five articles in this special issue. It concludes with some suggestions for future studies in welfare attitudes

Physical function improvements and relief from fatigue and pain are associated with increased productivity at work and at home in rheumatoid arthritis patients treated with certolizumab pegol

Objectives. To evaluate the association between improvements in physical function, fatigue and pain and improvements in productivity at work and at home in patients treated with certolizumab pegol (CZP) in combination with MTX

Regimes, Social Risks and the Welfare Mix: Unpacking Attitudes to Pensions and Childcare in Germany and the UK through De-liberative Forums

Modern welfare regimes rest on a range of actors – state, market, family/households, em-ployers and charities – but austerity programmes diminish the contribution of the state. While changes in this ‘welfare mix’ require support from the population, attitude studies have focused mainly on people’s views on state responsibilities, using welfare regime the-ory to explain differences. This paper contributes to our understanding of the welfare mix by including other providers such as the market, the family or employers, and also intro-duces social risk theories, contrasting new and old risks. Regime theory implies differences will persist over time, whereas risk theory suggests that growing similarities in certain risks may tend to promote international convergence. This article examines attitudes to the roles of state, market, family, charity/community and employer for pension and childcare in Ger-many and the UK. For data collection we used deliberative forums, a new method in social policy research that allows citizens space to pursue extended lightly moderated discussion and permits researchers to analyse people’s justifications for their attitudes. Our results show that there are patterns of convergence especially in preferences for childcare, but that regime predominates in people’s justifications for their attitudes: regime differences in atti-tudes are resilient

Climatic Variability of the Circulation in the Rhode Island Sound: A Modeling Study

Seasonal and interannual variability of the circulation in the Rhode Island Sound (RIS) is investigated by employing the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) with two configurations in which a local-scale model with very fine resolution over the RIS is nested within a regional-scale model covering the entire US Northeastern Continental Shelf. The models are driven by tidal harmonics, climatological river discharge, and realistic ocean open boundary conditions and atmospheric forcing from January 2004 to December 2009. Results show that the tidal residual current forms a cyclonic circulation in the RIS, with amplitude of a few centimeters per second. During summer, the cyclonic circulation is significantly strengthened owing to tidal mixing and local stratification. However, due to strong northwesterly winds in winter, the cyclonic circulation disappears and instead the surface currents in the RIS move offshore. Simulations further indicate that the RIS winter currents, in terms of their magnitude and direction, have interannual variability that appears to be related to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) winter index. In addition, the southwestward jet near the southern New England shelf break is found to intensify (weaken) during the low (high) phases of the NAO with a lag of about 1 year. The ROMS models are also used to examine the response of the regional ocean circulation to global warming, with both atmospheric forcing and open boundary conditions obtained from global climate model outputs. As the climate warms, it is found that the cyclonic gyre in the RIS is intensified, and this change is due to an intensification of the larger-scale cyclonic coastal ocean circulation over the Middle Atlantic Bight in a warming climate

Production properties of K*(892) vector mesons and their spin alignment as measured in the NOMAD experiment

First measurements of K*(892) mesons production properties and their spin alignment in nu_mu charged current (CC) and neutral current (NC) interactions are presented. The analysis of the full data sample of the NOMAD experiment is performed in different kinematic regions. For K*+ and K*- mesons produced in nu_mu CC interactions and decaying into K0 pi+/- we have found the following yields per event: (2.6 +/- 0.2 (stat.) +/- 0.2 (syst.))% and (1.6 +/- 0.1 (stat.) +/- 0.1 (syst.))% respectively, while for the K*+ and K*- mesons produced in nu NC interactions the corresponding yields per event are: (2.5 +/- 0.3 (stat.) +/- 0.3 (syst.))% and (1.0 +/- 0.3 (stat.) +/- 0.2 (syst.))%. The results obtained for the rho00 parameter, 0.40 +/- 0.06 (stat) +/- 0.03 (syst) and 0.28 +/- 0.07 (stat) +/- 0.03 (syst) for K*+ and K*- produced in nu_mu CC interactions, are compared to theoretical predictions tuned on LEP measurements in e+e- annihilation at the Z0 pole. For K*+ mesons produced in nu NC interactions the measured rho00 parameter is 0.66 +/- 0.10 (stat) +/- 0.05 (syst).Comment: 20 p