What now for urban regeneration?

It is against recent experiences of virulent neoliberalism and commodification in UK urban environments that regeneration practitioners and core professionals must confront assumptions about the impact and purpose of recent renewal strategies. Over the last decade, urban landscapes have been reinvigorated through intense design and renewal and a massification of private investment, which have come to characterise a new urbanism. Urban regeneration – the broad banner under which much of this change has occurred – has been encouraged by many localities to the extent that it has been beyond reproach by political and critical analysts. This paper makes use of the current respite in urban renewal, which has been brought about by changes in financial markets, to revisit the policy principles and impacts of existing renewal projects as well as the strategic aspirations of several urban areas. It is hoped that this paper might stimulate debate about the future form of urban regeneration and consideration of the need for changes in policy design

Maxwell demons in phase space

Although there is not a complete "proof" of the second law of thermo- dynamics based on microscopic dynamics, two properties of Hamiltonian systems have been used to prove the impossibility of work extraction from a single thermal reservoir: Liouville's theorem and the adiabatic invariance of the volume enclosed by an energy shell. In this paper we analyze these two properties in the Szilard engine and other systems related with the Maxwell demon. In particular, we recall that the enclosed volume is no longer an adiabatic invariant in non ergodic systems and explore the consequences of this on the second law.Comment: 14 pages, to appear in EPJS

Learning salience amoung [sic] features through contingency in the CEL framework

Determining which features in an environment are salient given a task, salience assignment, is a central problem in Machine Learning. A related phenomenon, contingency (the conditions under which relative salience among environmental features is acquired), is central to learning and memory in animal psychology. This paper presents an analysis of a set of empirical data on contingency and an algorithm for the salience assignment problem. The algorithm presented is implemented in a working computer program which interacts with a simulated environment to produce contingent associative learning corresponding to relevant behavioral data. The model also makes specific empirical predictions that can be experimentally tested

Species interactions differ in their genetic robustness

Conflict and cooperation between bacterial species drive the composition and function of microbial communities. Stability of these emergent properties will be influenced by the degree to which species' interactions are robust to genetic perturbations. We use genome-scale metabolic modeling to computationally analyze the impact of genetic changes when Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica compete, or cooperate. We systematically knocked out in silico each reaction in the metabolic network of E. coli to construct all 2583 mutant stoichiometric models. Then, using a recently developed multi-scale computational framework, we simulated the growth of each mutant E. coli in the presence of S. enterica. The type of interaction between species was set by modulating the initial metabolites present in the environment. We found that the community was most robust to genetic perturbations when the organisms were cooperating. Species ratios were more stable in the cooperative community, and community biomass had equal variance in the two contexts. Additionally, the number of mutations that have a substantial effect is lower when the species cooperate than when they are competing. In contrast, when mutations were added to the S. enterica network the system was more robust when the bacteria were competing. These results highlight the utility of connecting metabolic mechanisms and studies of ecological stability. Cooperation and conflict alter the connection between genetic changes and properties that emerge at higher levels of biological organization.The authors thank reviewers for comments that substantially improved this manuscript. BG and DS were partially supported by grants from the US Department of Energy (DE-SC0004962) and NIH (R01GM089978 and R01GM103502). (DE-SC0004962 - US Department of Energy; R01GM089978 - NIH; R01GM103502 - NIH)Published versio

`Electronic Publishing' -- Practice and Experience

Electronic Publishing -- Origination, Dissemination and Design (EP-odd) is an academic journal which publishes refereed papers in the subject area of electronic publishing. The authors of the present paper are, respectively, editor-in-chief, system software consultant and senior production manager for the journal. EP-odd's policy is that editors, authors, referees and production staff will work closely together using electronic mail. Authors are also encouraged to originate their papers using one of the approved text-processing packages together with the appropriate set of macros which enforce the layout style for the journal. This same software will then be used by the publisher in the production phase. Our experiences with these strategies are presented, and two recently developed suites of software are described: one of these makes the macro sets available over electronic mail and the other automates the flow of papers through the refereeing process. The decision to produce EP-odd in this way means that the publisher has to adopt production procedures which differ markedly from those employed for a conventional journal

Creative spaces: the role of the underground and the prospect of lock-in in the creative industries

Motivated by thinking that culture can be promoted as a driver of economic development, there has been widespread policy consensus about the importance of developing culture and the creative economy as wider attempts to promote growth in cities and regions. While the impact of creative industries differs from area to area as do the conditions and resources for this, several towns and cities have been quick to recognise and exhort the benefits of creative sectors and creative workers and to invest heavily in their creative offer: investing in creative industries as a subset of the cultural economy; showcasing their cultural assets, and implementing strategies to attract creative professionals and retain graduates

Economic Impact Assessment: the creative sector in the Western Region

Introduction. Developments around the globe are re-defining media, arts and other related sectors as ‘creative industries’ which are being recognised for their potential impact on local and national economies. This economic impact assessment builds on previous work commissioned by the Western Development Commission and contends that artistic and cultural activities are not simple by-products of a developed economy but essential elements of economic success and sustainability. Such activities represent alternate forms of expression of human creativity that encourage lateral thinking and thus complement scientific and technological innovation. As we will see, these activities lie at the core of a number of growing sectors in the region, and contribute directly to employment growth and wealth creation2. Internationally, the case for fostering the creative economy is a convincing one. In the ten years up to 2005, the creative economy grew at twice the annual rate of the service industries and four times the rate of manufacturing in OECD countries3. In Europe, the growth of the cultural and creative sector was 12.3% higher than the growth of the overall economy from 1999 to 2003. From an economic perspective, international trade is a key component, from 2000 – 2005, trade in creative-industry products grew on average by 8.7% annually. These figures have grabbed the attention of policy makers here and abroad. This report was commissioned by the Western Development Commission (WDC) in July 2010 to consider the economic impact of the Creative Economy in the Western Region of Ireland4. It builds on previous work carried out by Oxford Economics and the WDC. That work, published as the Creative West document in early 2009 informed a great deal of debate at the regional and national level. This work attempts to add a dynamic element to what was a snapshot of the sector

A Method for the Dynamic Evaluation of the Geotropic Response

A procedure for the study of the negative geotropic response in the Coleus stem and Avena coleoptile is presented. Time-lapse photography, employing a motordriven 35mm camera and specially designed chambers, is utilized in recording plant responses. Data from 3 x 7 photographic prints are recorded on computer punch cards, a line of best fit is determined and the rate of geotropic curvature at forty-five degrees calculated. This unique technique of reporting curvature rates emphasizes the dynamic character of the geotropic response and eliminates variation involved in the plant\u27s perceptive mechanism

Planning for peak oil: learning from Cuba's special period

It is against recent experiences of proliferative consumption of the earth’s resources that planners and politicians must confront the challenge of peak oil over the coming years. With so few examples of peak oil available worldwide, this paper explores the realities of this in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 – the so-called special period, which decimated the country’s imports of energy, food and other vital supplies. Drawing on primary research collected in Cuba during 2008 and in an attempt to stimulate debate about how western countries and cities might respond to future losses of global resources, this paper examines the policy responses implemented in Cuba in the fields of transport, spatial planning, agriculture and energy. Despite the Cuban situation being politically different from other countries and the fact that the loss of resources during the special period were abrupt and unplanned, it is argued that there is still considerable scope for a wider application of the concepts to other towns and cities, if not countries and cultures

On the contrast-dependence of crowding

Visual clutter affects our ability to see: objects that would be identifiable on their own, may become unrecognizable when presented close together ("crowding") -- but the psychophysical characteristics of crowding have resisted simplification. Image properties initially thought to produce crowding have paradoxically yielded unexpected results, e.g., adding flanking objects can ameliorate crowding (Manassi, Sayim et al., 2012; Herzog, Sayim et al., 2015; Pachai, Doerig et al., 2016). The resulting theory revisions have been sufficiently complex and specialized as to make it difficult to discern what principles may underlie the observed phenomena. A generalized formulation of simple visual contrast energy is presented, arising from straightforward analyses of center and surround neurons in the early visual stream. Extant contrast measures, such as RMS contrast, are easily shown to fall out as reduced special cases. The new generalized contrast energy metric surprisingly predicts the principal findings of a broad range of crowding studies. These early crowding phenomena may thus be said to arise predominantly from contrast, or are, at least, severely confounded by contrast effects. (These findings may be distinct from accounts of other, likely downstream, "configural" or "semantic" instances of crowding, suggesting at least two separate forms of crowding that may resist unification.) The new fundamental contrast energy formulation provides a candidate explanatory framework that addresses multiple psychophysical phenomena beyond crowding.Comment: Journal of Vision, in pres