Stuck on the starting blocks : a response to Mr Steven's comment on the SNP General Election Budget 1997

Mr Steven's paper, and his earlier letters to the Scottish press, provide a welcome focus on the SNP programme. This economic perspective will respond specifically to Mr Steven's comments on the SNP General Election Budget

Vacuum degasification of water

A procedure for design of a water vacuum degasifier is presented for removing oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon from water from‘35 to 90 F. This procedure is based on gas solubilities following Henry’s law and diffusivities fol­ lowing the Stokes-Einstein equation. Column mass transfer is described in terms of the number and height of overall liquid transfer units, Nₒₗ and Hₒₗ. A computer performance program is presented

The Radio Emission from the Ultra-Luminous Far-Infrared Galaxy NGC 6240

We present new radio observations of the ``prototypical'' ultra-luminous far- infrared galaxy NGC~6240, obtained using the VLA at 20~cm in `B' configuration and at 3.6~cm in `A' configuration. These data, along with those from four previous VLA observations, are used to perform a comprehensive study of the radio emission from NGC~6240. Approximately 70\% (~3 x 10$^{23}$ W~Hz$^{-1}$) of the total radio power at 20 cm originates from the nuclear region ( <~ 1.5 kpc), of which half is emitted by two unresolved ($R <~ 36 pc) cores and half by a diffuse component. The radio spectrum of the nuclear emission is relatively flat ($\alpha$=~ 0.6;$S_{\nu} \propto \nu^{-\alpha}). The supernova rate required to power the diffuse component is consistent with that predicted by the stellar evolution models of Rieke \etal (1985). If the radio emission from the two compact cores is powered by supernova remnants, then either the remnants overlap and form hot bubbles in the cores, or they are very young ( <~ 100 yr). Nearly all of the other 30\% of the total radio power comes from an ``arm-like'' region extending westward from the nuclear region. The western arm emission has a steep spectrum (\alpha$=~ 1.0), suggestive of aging effects from synchrotron or inverse-Compton losses, and is not correlated with starlight; we suggest that it is synchrotron emission from a shell of material driven by a galactic superwind. Inverse-Compton scattering of far-infrared photons in the radio sources is expected to produce an X-ray flux of ~2-6 x 10$^{-14}$ erg/s/cm2 in the 2-10 keV band. No significant radio emission is detected from or near the possible ultra-massive ``dark core'' hypothesized by Bland-Hawthorn, Wilson \& Tully (1991).Comment: 36 pages (text and tables) as an uuencoded compressed postscript file (figures available upon request), accepted for the ApJ (20 Nov issue), STScI preprint no. ?? -- May 199

An Intelligent Fuse-box for use with Renewable Energy Sources integrated within a Domestic Environment

This paper outlines a proposal for an intelligent fuse-box that can replace existing fuse-boxes in a domestic context such that a number of renewable energy sources can easily be integrated into the domestic power supply network, without the necessity for complex islanding and network protection. The approach allows intelligent control of both the generation of power and its supply to single or groups of electrical appliances. Energy storage can be implemented in such a scheme to even out the power supplied and simplify the control scheme required, and environmental monitoring and load analysis can help in automatically controlling the supply and demand profiles for optimum electrical and economic efficiency. Simulations of typical scenarios are carried out to illustrate the concept in operation