National standards for community engagement

The National Standards for Community Engagement have been developed with the involvement of over 500 people from communities and agencies throughout Scotland. They are a practical tool to help improve the experience of all participants involved in community engagement to achieve the highest quality of process and results

Better community engagement: a framework for learning

Because different needs and priorities call for different approaches, the document does not present a single curriculum. Instead it provides a statement of the purpose, elements and competences for community engagement practice that should enable training providers to develop their own curricula to address the needs of practitioners operating in different settings. We hope that this approach can make a significant contribution to establishing a range of learning opportunities that will deliver the best practice needed to deliver on policy commitments and to put communities first

Reflections on preserving the state of new media art

As part of its work to explore emerging issues associated with characterisation of digital materials, Planets has explored vocabularies and information structures for expressing the properties integral to the value of digital art. Value encompasses those qualities that must be understood and captured in order to ensure that art works’ sensory, emotional, mental and spiritual resonance remain. Facets of interactivity, modularity and temporality associated with digital art present some critical questions that the preservation community must increasingly be equipped to answer. Because digital art materials exhibit fundamental multidimensionality, validating the successful preservation of creative experience demands the explication of more than just file characteristics. Understanding relationships between objects also implies an understanding of their respective functional qualities. This paper presents a Planets’ vocabulary for encapsulating contextual and implicit characteristics of digital art, optimised for preservation planning and validation

Floquet topological transitions in extended Kane-Mele models with disorder

In this work we use Floquet theory to theoretically study the influence of circularly polarized light on disordered two-dimensional models exhibiting topological transitions. We find circularly polarized light can induce a topological transition in extended Kane-Mele models that include additional hopping terms and on-site disorder. The topological transitions are understood from the Floquet-Bloch band structure of the clean system at high symmetry points in the first Brillouin zone. The light modifies the equilibrium band structure of the clean system in such a way that the smallest gap in the Brillouin zone can be shifted from the $M$ points to the $K(K')$ points, the $\Gamma$ point, or even other lower symmetry points. The movement of the minimal gap point through the Brillouin zone as a function of laser parameters is explained in the high frequency regime through the Magnus expansion. In the disordered model, we compute the Bott index to reveal topological phases and transitions. The disorder can induce transitions from topologically non-trivial states to trivial states or vice versa, both examples of Floquet topological Anderson transitions. As a result of the movement of the minimal gap point through the Brillouin zone as a function of laser parameters, the nature of the topological phases and transitions is laser-parameter dependent--a contrasting behavior to the Kane-Mele model.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Reforming Pensions

This article, based on two books (2008, forthcoming), sets out principles for pension design: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be in a second-best context, different systems share risks differently and have different effects by generation and by gender. The article considers policy implications: there is no single best pension design; earlier retirement does not reduce unemployment; unsustainable pension promises should be addressed directly; adding funding in a PAYG mandatory system may or may not be welfare improving; and implementation matters – design should not exceeds a country’s capacity to implement.pension, social security

Threshold Effects in Slepton-Pair Production at the LHC

We present a study of threshold resummation effects for slepton pair production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). After confirming the known NLO QCD corrections and generalizing the NLO SUSY-QCD corrections to the case of mixing squarks in the virtual loop contributions, we employ the Mellin N-space resummation formalism to compute logarithmically enhanced soft-gluon terms to all perturbative orders.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, presented at HEP 2007 (Manchester, July 2007

Elastocaloric response of PbTiO3 predicted from a first-principles effective Hamiltonian

A first-principles based effective Hamiltonian is used within a molecular dynamics simulation to study the elastocaloric effect in PbTiO3. It is found that the transition temperature is a linear function of uniaxial tensile stress. Negative temperature change is calculated, when the uniaxial tensile stress is switched off, as a function of initial temperature Delta-T(T_initial). It is predicted that the formation of domain structures under uniaxial tensile stress degrades the effectiveness of the elastocaloric effect.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, published in JPS

Resilience of Hierarchical Critical Infrastructure Networks

Concern over the resilience of critical infrastructure networks has increased dramatically over the last decade due to a number of well documented failures and the significant disruption associated with these. This has led to a large body of research that has adopted graph-theoretic based analysis in order to try and improve our understanding of infrastructure network resilience. Many studies have asserted that infrastructure networks possess a scale-free topology which is robust to random failures but sensitive to targeted attacks at highly connected hubs. However, many studies have ignored that many networks in addition to their topological connectivity may be organised either logically or spatially in a hierarchical system which may significantly change their response to perturbations. In this paper we explore if hierarchical network models exhibit significantly different higher-order topological characteristics compared to other network structures and how this impacts on their resilience to a number of different failure types. This is achieved by investigating a suite of synthetic networks as well as a suite of ‘real world’ spatial infrastructure networks