Modelling take-up of Family Credit and Working Families' Tax Credit

Many people in the UK do not claim benefits to which they seem to be entitled. Amongst those of working-age, take-up rates for Family Credit ֠an in-work benefit available to those with children and working at least 16 hours a week ֠were the lowest of the main three means-tested benefits. In 1999, the UK Government replaced Family Credit with Working Families' Tax Credit, which was more generous, and delivered in a different way from FC. As a prelude to further work (now published as an update to this in the final report), we have analysed the decision to take up FC, and how take-up changed during the initial 6 month phase-in period of WFTC. Although there are differences in how well each records receipt of FC, we find reassuring similarities in comparable econometric models of take-up estimated on three different micro-data-sets. Entitlement, earnings, non-labour income, and education attainment are the most important determinants of FC take-up. We investigated FC take-up in greater detail using only the Family Resources Survey. Social renters are more likely to claim FC than owner occupiers or those in the private rental market, and we find that housing benefit recipients seem to under-value the potential fall in HB when considering whether to claim FC. We find that the Family Credit childcare disregard had little impact on the likelihood of take-up. Take-up of WFTC, conditional on entitlement, fell immediately after its introduction, compared to FC, but the majority of the effect is explained by the relatively low take-up rates of those families who were not previously entitled to FC. This is unsurprising, as we would not expect this group to have claimed WFTC on the first day of its existence. Work currently in progress is examining how take-up of WFTC, and the factors associated with take-up, changed between April 2000 and March 2003

Reset and switch protocols at Landauer limit in a graphene buckled ribbon

Heat produced during a reset operation is meant to show a fundamental bound known as Landauer limit, while simple switch operations have an expected minimum amount of produced heat equal to zero. However, in both cases, present-day technology realizations dissipate far beyond these theoretical limits. In this paper we present a study based on molecular dynamics simulations, where reset and switch protocols are applied on a graphene buckled ribbon, employed here as a nano electromechanical switch working at the thermodynamic limit

Exoticism, Cultural Hybridity, and Subaltern Identity in Three Macanese Novels

Although the novels of Austin Coates, Henrique de Senna Fernandes, and Rodrigo Leal de Carvalho’s depict life in the former Portuguese colony of Macau, their individual perspectives reflect a contrast between literary colonialism and coloniality. A British public servant, Coates perceives Macanese reality through the competing biased eyes of an Englishman resenting Portuguese culture and administration in the colony; Leal de Carvalho, a Portuguese resident of Macau, romantically depicts the social nature of Portuguese colonialism; Senna Fernandes, a native Macanese educated in Portugal, offers his interpretation of the colony’s Eurasian inhabitants vis-à-vis its Chinese population. The aim of this article is to contrast the literary representation of three issues in Coates’s City of Broken Promises, Fernandes’s The Bewitching Braid, and Carvalho’s The Count and his Three Wives: exoticism, cultural hybridity, and subaltern identity

Fast Fight Detection

Action recognition has become a hot topic within computer vision. However, the action recognition community has focused mainly on relatively simple actions like clapping, walking, jogging, etc. The detection of specific events with direct practical use such as fights or in general aggressive behavior has been comparatively less studied. Such capability may be extremely useful in some video surveillance scenarios like prisons, psychiatric centers or even embedded in camera phones. As a consequence, there is growing interest in developing violence detection algorithms. Recent work considered the well-known Bag-of-Words framework for the specific problem of fight detection. Under this framework, spatio-temporal features are extracted from the video sequences and used for classification. Despite encouraging results in which high accuracy rates were achieved, the computational cost of extracting such features is prohibitive for practical applications. This work proposes a novel method to detect violence sequences. Features extracted from motion blobs are used to discriminate fight and non-fight sequences. Although the method is outperformed in accuracy by state of the art, it has a significantly faster computation time thus making it amenable for real-time applications

First Principles Simulations of Boron Diffusion in Graphite

Boron strongly modifies electronic and diffusion properties of graphite. We report the first ab initio study of boron interaction with the point defects in graphite, which includes structures, thermodynamics, and diffusion. A number of possible diffusion mechanisms of boron in graphite are suggested. We conclude that boron diffuses in graphite by a kick-out mechanism. This mechanism explains the common activation energy, but large magnitude difference, for the rate of boron diffusion parallel and perpendicular to the basal plane. © 2007 The American Physical Society

EEG Classification with Discrete Wavelet Transforms and Energy Distribution

The overall aim of this investigation is to allow paralyzed individuals to regain motor movement with thought controlled robotic devices and in doing so provide them with a higher level of independence. The specific goal of this project is to classify EEG movement signals through a combination of discrete wavelet transforms and energy distribution. Using the energy distribution of these signals a neural network can be implemented to more accurately differentiate distinct motor movements