Unlocking the potential of community composting: Full project report

Community based composting schemes can make valuable contributions to the development of local infrastructure and amenities by improving soils and green spaces in addition to diverting waste from landfill. Furthermore, well managed community activities have potential for providing work and volunteering opportunities, as well as bringing people together and improving skills, knowledge and self-confidence. Considered collectively these factors may contribute to local sustainability more effectively than focusing on meeting particular waste related targets. Although there is some anecdotal and financial evidence for the growth in, and diversity of, community composting, there is very little comprehensive data that draws together the activity of the sector as a whole. This research set out to understand and assess the current and potential role of the community composting sector in achieving Defra’s waste related targets and Government’s other wider environmental and social objectives. Thus this research is timely both in terms of establishing what has been achieved in the community composting sector to-date and in terms of possibilities for future achievements

Active versus passive damping in large flexible structures

Optimal passive and active damping control can be considered in the context of a general control/structure optimization problem. Using a mean square output response approach, it is shown that the weight sensitivity of the active and passive controllers can be used to determine an optimal mix of active and passive elements in a flexible structure

Nests, arcs and cycles in the lifespan of a studio project

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted

A disturbance based control/structure design algorithm

Some authors take a classical approach to the simultaneous structure/control optimization by attempting to simultaneously minimize the weighted sum of the total mass and a quadratic form, subject to all of the structural and control constraints. Here, the optimization will be based on the dynamic response of a structure to an external unknown stochastic disturbance environment. Such a response to excitation approach is common to both the structural and control design phases, and hence represents a more natural control/structure optimization strategy than relying on artificial and vague control penalties. The design objective is to find the structure and controller of minimum mass such that all the prescribed constraints are satisfied. Two alternative solution algorithms are presented which have been applied to this problem. Each algorithm handles the optimization strategy and the imposition of the nonlinear constraints in a different manner. Two controller methodologies, and their effect on the solution algorithm, will be considered. These are full state feedback and direct output feedback, although the problem formulation is not restricted solely to these forms of controller. In fact, although full state feedback is a popular choice among researchers in this field (for reasons that will become apparent), its practical application is severely limited. The controller/structure interaction is inserted by the imposition of appropriate closed-loop constraints, such as closed-loop output response and control effort constraints. Numerical results will be obtained for a representative flexible structure model to illustrate the effectiveness of the solution algorithms

Changing recycling behaviour: an evaluation of attitudes and behaviour to recycling in the Western Riverside area of London

Key to improving recycling performance in the UK is the need to more effectively engage the public and improve levels of participation. The research described in this paper combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of attitudinal and behavioural changes as part of an evaluation project to measure the impact of a multi-faceted waste awareness and education campaign in the Western Riverside Waste Authority area of central London. Analysis links attitudinal and behavioural responses to infrastructure provision and performance indicators for each area surveyed, as well as socio-demographic indicators. This paper presents the results and analysis of the attitudes, motivations and behaviours of a representative profile of households from this area of central London, in an attempt to better understand how behavioural change can be achieved and recycling targets met

Influence and originality in the creative writing process

Using an approach that distinguishes between the epistemologies of critical theory and creative practice, this study investigates notions of originality and influence in literary theory and considers their applicability to the teaching of creative writing and creative writing practice. It argues that current paradigms offer limited and contradictory explanations of these phenomena and makes the case that, through the assimilation of recent philosophical and scientific perspectives into a framework of socially-situated theory, a fresh approach can be developed that acknowledges the embodied experience of the writing process. The study consists of two main research areas: qualitative and literary/theoretical. The literary/theoretical research falls into two strands of enquiry that are closely linked and run parallel to each other throughout the thesis. One strand is concerned with the need to find an ontological structure for creative writing that accommodates practical and theoretical approaches and provides a conceptual framework that allows issues of originality and influence to be seen from both inside the writing process and from an external theoretical perspective. The second strand, evolving within the former, analyses notions of originality and influence historically and more specifically within romanticism and the socially situated theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The qualitative research was designed to offer a practical and experiential set of findings that could be used to guide the theoretical research. In this research project, using a phenomenological methodology, a group of part-time adult creative writing students (14 participants) were asked to reflect on their perception and experience of originality and influence in the writing process. Their responses were returned in the form of questionnaires and the findings were collated into fourteen key themes. The theoretical research contextualizes the study within debates with student writers in writing workshop sessions about issues of influence and originality in critical peer review. After a discussion of the pedagogic and theoretical issues that these debates generated, including an analysis of the impact of romanticism on contemporary notions of creativity and a survey of developments in pedagogic theory in creative writing, the literary/theoretical research goes on to explore notions of originality and influence in the work of Bakhtin and romanticism in greater detail. It develops a critique of Bakhtin’s socially-situated theory of creativity and argues that this is due to a weakness in the ontological premises of Bakhtin’s conceptual framework. Moving to a study of romanticism it proposes that Bakhtin’s socially-situated theory fails to fully understand or assimilate embodied emotionality into its ontology and that the embodied emotionality in romanticism, when seen through a more contemporary paradigm of embodied realism reveals the shortcomings in socially-situated theory. The final section on embodied realism and the impact of neuroscience on studies of the body and emotionality argues for a fresh ontological perspective, which would resolve the paradoxical nature of the relationship between an epistemic, socially constructed view of reality and a more biologically determined notion of human nature. In the discussion of key findings and in the conclusion to the research the thesis shows how, by adopting the ontological perspective of embodied realism and incorporating it into socially-situated theory, new perspectives on originality, influence and creativity can be developed that fully integrate epistemologies of theory and practice, and offer a grounded theoretical position from which to construct a viable pedagogy for creative writing. Finally, the thesis offers idea

Subglacial-discharge plumes drive widespread subsurface warming in northwest Greenland’s fjords

This work was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (Grants NE/W00531X/1 and NE/T011920/1).Greenland’s glacial fjords modulate the exchange between the ice sheet and ocean. Subglacial-discharge-driven plumes adjacent to glaciers may exert an important influence on fjord water properties, submarine glacier melting and the export of glacially-modified waters to the shelf. Here we use a numerical plume model in conjunction with observations from proximal to 14 glaciers in northwest Greenland to assess the impact of these plumes on near-glacier water properties. We find that in late summer, waters emanating from glacial plumes often make up > 50 % of the fjord water composition at intermediate depths. These plume waters are comprised largely of upwelled Atlantic Water, warming the near-glacier water profile and likely increasing submarine melting. Our findings demonstrate the key role played by plumes in driving water modification in Greenland’s fjords, and the potential for simple models to capture these impacts across a range of settings.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

PlantID – DNA-based identification of multiple medicinal plants in complex mixtures

Background An efficient method for the identification of medicinal plant products is now a priority as the global demand increases. This study aims to develop a DNA-based method for the identification and authentication of plant species that can be implemented in the industry to aid compliance with regulations, based upon the economically important Hypericum perforatum L. (St John’s Wort or Guan ye Lian Qiao). Methods The ITS regions of several Hypericum species were analysed to identify the most divergent regions and PCR primers were designed to anneal specifically to these regions in the different Hypericum species. Candidate primers were selected such that the amplicon produced by each species-specific reaction differed in size. The use of fluorescently labelled primers enabled these products to be resolved by capillary electrophoresis. Results Four closely related Hypericum species were detected simultaneously and independently in one reaction. Each species could be identified individually and in any combination. The introduction of three more closely related species to the test had no effect on the results. Highly processed commercial plant material was identified, despite the potential complications of DNA degradation in such samples. Conclusion This technique can detect the presence of an expected plant material and adulterant materials in one reaction. The method could be simply applied to other medicinal plants and their problem adulterants