Valuing the Vernacular: Scotland's earth-built heritage and the impacts of climate change

Scotland’s vernacular earth-built heritage has received inadequate recognition over a number of decades, being the reserve of a small group of academic, architectural and conservation practitioners, with negative perceptions of the structures and their inhabitants having been developed over the long-term. This has ultimately contributed to the loss of a wide number of earth building traditions previously widespread across Scotland. Heritage custodians have invested in the restoration and maintenance of a select few sites, but wider recognition of the significance of extant structures, including the intangible aspects of inherited traditions, remains limited. This thesis therefore seeks in the first instance to promote improved understandings of Scotland’s earth-built heritage through historical appraisals that underline its wider heritage value within global, regional and local contexts, whilst demonstrating the limitations of survey evidence hitherto relied upon. Heritage policies and management procedures are increasingly driven in response to the climate changes projected for the remainder of the twenty-first century, partly informed by the impacts of changes that have already been observed. As a result of this, new fields of research such as heritage climatology have developed with a view to offering bases from which to develop longer term mitigation and management strategies that recognise potential changes to the causes and processes of deterioration in the historic environment. Alongside the development of academic interest in climate and heritage has been an ever-increasing accessibility to advanced analysis methods through technical apparatus (often portable) that can be used to create improved evidence repositories based on processes-led approaches to investigation. Scotland’s earth-built heritage is susceptible to a range of climate-related phenomena that are likely to manifest in different ways over coming decades. Conservation strategies have continued to rely, however, upon the empirical observations and the experience of very few individuals since the latter-twentieth century. Consequently, the ad hoc approaches to the management of Scotland’s earth-built heritage and lack of strategic planning that have been typical to this point require amendment. This interdisciplinary thesis therefore seeks to contribute to addressing the issues outlined above through the exploration and application of portable scientific sampling apparatus that allow for in situ, rapid and non-intrusive insights to be gained at various scales of interest. These, together with other minimally intrusive approaches to assessing performance in earth building materials, allow for the development of processes-led strategies to extending the evidence base beyond that presently relied upon. Amongst the key outcomes of this are the generation of a locally-focused dataset of climate projections that are used to develop understandings of future climate conditions in the Carse of Gowrie, Perthshire, and in turn garner insights as to how these will impact in relation to the earth-built heritage for which this region is noted. Temperature and humidity monitoring evidence gathered from within the walls of extant structures over the course of fourteen months from March 2012 to April 2013 are set against contemporary external weather conditions and alongside measurements of moisture ingress. These serve to highlight both aspects of inherent resilience and points of particular risk to the future integrity of earth-built structures. An extended benefit of this work is the demonstration that the novel procedures used are easily replicated and could be employed in a variety of local contexts to develop suites of intra-site data across Scotland, with the potential for offering evidence-based inferences relevant to management procedures and policy discussion. The utility of the understandings and methods of investigation long established in the field of soil science but conspicuously overlooked in earth buildings research is also addressed, with insights into micro-scale processes offered using micromorphological and micromorphometric methods and the results being directly related to macro-scale observations

The Past Ubiquity and Environment of the Lost Earth Buildings of Scotland

This paper investigates the once ubiquitous vernacular earth-built structures of Scotland and how perceptions of such buildings were shaped and developed through periods of intense cultural and environmental change. We focus upon the past exploitation of traditional resources to construct vernacular architectures and on changes in the perception of the resultant buildings. Historic earth-built structures are today deeply hidden within the landscapes of Scotland, although they were once a common feature of both urban and rural settlements. Whilst the eighteenth and nineteenth century period of Improvement – during which many of these structures were destroyed, repurposed, or left to decay – has received extensive attention by historians, there exists no previous serious study of the human and environmental dimensions. Through analysis of the material aspects of landscape resource use and analysis of the historical perceptions of such use, we emphasize the national significance of this undervalued aspect of Scotland’s built and cultural heritage, increasingly at risk of being lost completely, highlighting the prior ubiquity of mudwall structures

Measurement of the total optical angular momentum transfer in optical tweezers

We describe a way to determine the total angular momentum, both spin and orbital, transferred to a particle trapped in optical tweezers. As an example an LG02 mode of a laser beam with varying degrees of circular polarisation is used to trap and rotate an elongated particle with a well defined geometry. The method successfully estimates the total optical torque applied to the particle. For this technique, there is no need to measure the viscous drag on the particle, as it is an optical measurement. Therefore, knowledge of the particle's size and shape, as well as the fluid's viscosity, is not required.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Load balancing for massively multiplayer online games

Supporting thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of players is a requirement that must be satisfied when delivering server based online gaming as a commercial concern. Such a requirement may be satisfied by utilising the cumulative processing resources afforded by a cluster of servers. Clustering of servers allow great flexibility, as the game provider may add servers to satisfy an increase in processing demands, more players, or remove servers for routine maintenance or upgrading. If care is not taken, the way processing demands are distributed across a cluster of servers may hinder such flexibility and also hinder player interaction within a game. In this paper we present an approach to load balancing that is simple and effective, yet maintains the flexibility of a cluster while promoting player interaction

The boundedly rational employee: Security economics for behaviour intervention support in organizations

Security policy-makers (influencers) in an organization set security policies that embody intended behaviours for employees (as decision-makers) to follow. Decision-makers then face choices, where this is not simply a binary decision of whether to comply or not, but also how to approach compliance and secure working alongside other workplace pressures, and limited resources for identifying optimal security-related choices. Conflict arises because of information asymmetries present in the relationship, where influencers and decision-makers both consider costs, gains, and losses in ways which are not necessarily aligned. With the need to promote ‘good enough’ decisions about security-related behaviours under such constraints, we hypothesize that actions to resolve this misalignment can benefit from constructs from both traditional economics and behavioural economics. Here we demonstrate how current approaches to security behaviour provisioning in organizations mirror rational-agent economics, even where behavioural economics is embodied in the promotion of individual security behaviours. We develop and present a framework to accommodate bounded security decision-making, within an ongoing programme of behaviours which must be provisioned for and supported. Our four stage plan to Capture, Adapt, Realign, and Enable behaviour choices provides guidance for security managers, focusing on a more effective response to the uncertainty associated with security behaviour in organizations

Monitoring middleware for distributed applications

With growing maturity Internet services are proving integral to the provision of computer services. To provide consistent end-user experiences these services are increasingly augmented with some notion of 'Quality-of-Service' (QoS), which typically requires the management of computing resources to maintain a predictable level of service performance. It is difficult to guarantee consistent servIce provision In dynamic and open environments such as the Internet. However service monitoring can be used to inform compensatory actions by collecting meaningful service performance data from strategic points in an active service environment. Due to the unpredictable nature of the Internet distributed monitoring mechanisms face challenges with respect to the various communication protocols, application languages, and monitoring requirements associated with a service environment. With the growing popularity of Internet services creation of monitoring solutions on a per- service basis becomes time-consuming and misses opportunities to re-use existing logic. Ideally monitoring solutions would be domain-agnostic, automatically generated and automatically deployed. This thesis progresses these ambitions by providing a generic, distributed monitoring and evaluation framework based on Metric Collector (MeCo) components. These components can transparently gather measurement data across a range of service technologies as used within E-Commerce service environments. MeCo components form part of a framework which can interpret Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to automatically provide tailored service monitoring. The evaluation paradigms of the Meeo Framework are re-appropriated for use in Distributed Virtual Environments (DYEs). Quantifiable QoS requirements are established for Interest Management mechanisms (which limit message production based on object localities within a DYE). These are then incorporated into a DVE Simulator application. This application allows DYE application developers to evaluate Interest Management configurations for their suitability. Extensions to the DVE Simulator are exhibited in the Evolutionary Optimisation Simulator (EOS), which provides automated optimisation capabilities for DVE configurations through utilisation of genetic algorithm techniques.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Optical Torque and Symmetry

The ability to controllably rotate, align, or freely spin microparticles in optical tweezers greatly enhances the manipulation possible. A variety of different techniques for achieving alignment or rotation have been suggested and demonstrated. Although these methods are diverse, employing specially shaped particles, birefringent particles, multiple trapping beams, complex beam profiles, vortex modes, plane polarised beams, circularly polarised beams, or other methods, the fundamental principle - that optical torque results from the exchange of electromagnetic angular momentum between the trapping beam and the particle - remains the same. The symmetry of both the particle and the beam play a central role in the transfer of angular momentum. We discuss this in detail, with particular attention paid to the special case of optical torque exerted by an incident beam with zero angular momentum

Measurement of orbital angular momentum in optical tweezers

Several techniques have been proposed and used for the rotation or alignment of microparticles in optical tweezers. In every case the optical torque results from the exchange of angular momentum between the beam and the particle, and, in principle, can be measured by purely optical means. Measurement of this torque could be useful for quantitative measurements in biological systems and is required to measure properties such as viscosity of liquids in microlitre (or less) volumes. Although elongated particles will align with the plane of polarisation, the torque efficiency is low, typically about 0.05 hbar per photon. The use of a beam with an elongated focal spot can increase this torque by a factor of 10-20 times, due to the transfer of orbital angular momentum. We report measurements of the orbital component using an analysing (Laguerre-Gauss) hologram. As a proof of principle experiment, an elliptical beam scattered off a glass rod was simulated on a macroscopic scale. The torque was found to be as much as 0.8 hbar per photon. Microscopic elongated objects have been aligned and rotated in optical tweezers and we plan to make measurements of the torques involved. ©2004 COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only

Optical microrheology of biopolymers

We use passive and active techniques to study microrheology of a biopolymer solution. The passive technique is video tracking of tracer particles in the biopolymer, a technique which is well established. The active technique is based on rotating optical tweezers, which is used to study viscosity. A method to actively measure viscoelascity using time varying rotation of a particle trapped in optical tweezers is also presented