Glasgow time signals

From 1859 to 1864, both visual and audio one o’clock time signals operated in Glasgow. Although the University carried a remit to provide the city’s time, following convoluted processes of establishment, a local chronometer-maker operated a time ball for 4 years. Towards the end of the period, time guns were triggered by telegraph from the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Both exercises caused aggravation for the University. For the ball, the Professor of Astronomy, John Pringle Nichol, failed to convince the City Council that the “drop” control should originate from the University’s Observatory. For the guns, Robert Grant, the newly appointed Astronomy Chair holder, was aggrieved by the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Piazzi Smyth, appearing to operate above his station. Rather than having only a once per day reference, both projects were abandoned as the University laid a dedicated telegraph cable from its observatory to control many public clocks and additional clocks with large sweep fingers indicating exact time to the second

Towards Other Planetary Systems (TOPS): A technology needs identification workshop

The workshop identified a strong commonality between the technology needs for NASA's TOPS program and the technology needs that were identified for NASA's astrophysics program through its Astrotech 21 survey. The workshop encourages NASA to have the Solar System Exploration and Astrophysics Div. work cooperatively to share in technology studies that are common to both programs, rather than to conduct independent studies. It was also clear, however, that there are technology needs specific to TOPS, and these should be pursued by the Solar System Exploration Div. There are two technology areas that appear to be particularly critical to realizing the ultimate performance that is being sought under the TOPS program, these areas are metrology and optics. The former is critical in calibration and verification of instrument performance, while the latter is needed to provide optical systems of sufficient quality to conduct a search for and characterization of other planetary systems at the more extreme levels of performance identified in TOPS program

Internet information on birth options after caesarean compared to the RCOG patient information leaflet : a web survey

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The Re-engagement in Education of Early School Leavers

By OECD standards, the share of the Australian labour force with at least a secondary school qualification is low. One way to rectify this shortfall is to improve rates of re-engagement in education among early school leavers. This paper examines the patterns of re-engagement among early school leavers in the HILDA sample. A key finding is that the early years after leaving school are crucially important, with rates of re-engagement dropping dramatically in the first three years out from school. For those who enter the labour market after school, results suggest that finding work, especially satisfying work, is an important driver for returning to study.Early school leavers, vocational education and training, re-engaging in education

La politique du gouvernement Mulroney à l'égard de l'Afrique du Sud : précurseur de la « sécurité humaine durable »

La politique du gouvernement Mulroney à l'égard de l'Afrique du Sud et les mesures privilégiées pour sa mise en oeuvre ont rompu de manière importante avec les normes et les pratiques canadiennes de politique étrangère depuis longtemps établies. Elles ont de ce fait été les éléments précurseurs des politiques plus intrusives que l'on associe volontiers à la notion de « sécurité humaine durable » défendue aujourd'hui par Lloyd Axworthy, concept déjà présent à l'époque Mulroney. La politique conservatrice à l'égard de l'Afrique du Sud peut en conséquence être considérée comme un pont, quoique incomplet entre les politiques étrangères canadiennes d'après-guerre et celles de l'après-guerre froide. L'analyse de trois dimensions capitales de la politique canadienne envers l'Afrique australe permet de conclure en faveur de cet argument. Par contre, le caractère incomplet de la politique est bien illustré par l'appui aux mesures de sécurité rendues nécessaires au Mozambique à cause de l'impitoyable campagne de déstabilisation que le gouvernement sud-africain y menait.The Mulroney government's South Africa policy and the specific measures through which it was implemented broke with long-standing norms and practices of Canadian foreign policy in several significant ways. They foreshadowed the more expansive and intrusive conception of foreign policy associated with Lloyd Axworthy's notion of « human security », but which was already taking shape under Mulroney in the early 1990s. In this connection, the Tories' South Africa policy can be seen as an important, albeit incomplete, bridge from the post-Second World War to the post-Cold War eras in Canadian foreign policy. In support of this argument, three key dimensions of Canadian policy towards South(ern) Africa in the 1985-90 period are analyzed: sanctions; diplomatic activity in support of change; and aid to « victims and opponents of apartheid » inside South Africa. To illustrate the incompleteness of this foreign policy transition or departure, a brief consideration will be given to the contentious issue of security assistance to Mozambique in response to South Africa's ruthless campaign of destabilization during this time

An analysis of subsidies within the plastics recycling industry

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is widely used in the manufacture of food and beverage containers, in addition to a variety of fibres. PET is considered to be 100% recyclable and can be recycled into a number of different end-use streams: bottle-to-bottle; bottle-to-foodgrade, or bottle-to-fibre. In South Africa, the PET Recycling Company (trading as PETCO) was established to avoid the possibility of government-imposed punitive legislation and to alleviate the impact of PET-based litter. PETCO generates revenue through the collection of voluntary levies from PET manufacturers and supports the recycling of PET through the administration of recycling subsidies and the unlocking of constraints in the PET recycling value chain. This study sets out to describe the PET recycling industry and empirically assess the effectiveness of PETCO's recycling subsidies through regression analysis. As a background to the regression analysis, the study builds the theory behind production and cost function analysis (in addition to the associated duality theory). However, due to the combination of the research question and the limited data availability, an alternative model was adopted, in order to explain as much variation in production tonnages as possible

TaskInsight: Understanding Task Schedules Effects on Memory and Performance

Recent scheduling heuristics for task-based applications have managed to improve their by taking into account memory-related properties such as data locality and cache sharing. However, there is still a general lack of tools that can provide insights into why, and where, different schedulers improve memory behavior, and how this is related to the applications' performance. To address this, we present TaskInsight, a technique to characterize the memory behavior of different task schedulers through the analysis of data reuse between tasks. TaskInsight provides high-level, quantitative information that can be correlated with tasks' performance variation over time to understand data reuse through the caches due to scheduling choices. TaskInsight is useful to diagnose and identify which scheduling decisions affected performance, when were they taken, and why the performance changed, both in single and multi-threaded executions. We demonstrate how TaskInsight can diagnose examples where poor scheduling caused over 10% difference in performance for tasks of the same type, due to changes in the tasks' data reuse through the private and shared caches, in single and multi-threaded executions of the same application. This flexible insight is key for optimization in many contexts, including data locality, throughput, memory footprint or even energy efficiency.We thank the reviewers for their feedback. This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research project FFL12-0051 and carried out within the Linnaeus Centre of Excellence UPMARC, Uppsala Programming for Multicore Architectures Research Center. This paper was also published with the support of the HiPEAC network that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 687698.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version