Designing a visible city for visually impaired users

This paper reports on an ongoing doctoral research project which aims to identify the main barriers to access within the built environment for persons with a visual impairment. The research seeks to investigate whether these barriers are common for all types of visual impairment and degree of vision loss and if so, what inclusive design solutions can accommodate the needs of the majority of visually impaired users. An access audit has been conducted within Glasgow city centre which sought to quantify the number and type of hazards present within a typical built environment. This was followed up by a questionnaire which asked participants to rate factors which may prevent them from making independent visits to their nearest city centre including psychological factors, physical features and obstructions resulting from the presence of street furniture. Participants also indicated the colours and contrasts which they find easiest to detect within the built environment. These findings will be used to inform the creation of a new set of design guidelines to assist designers, architects and urban planners as to how they can provide more accessible and inclusive environments for the visually impaired population

Operation “SPRING”

Lieut.-General Guy Granville Simonds wrote this account of Operation “SPRING” in response to a statement written for the Minister of National Defence by the Official Historian C.P. Stacey. The statement was based on a detailed study of the battle which Stacey completed in late 1945

Short-Term Labour Market Outlook and Key Challenges in G20 Countries

[Excerpt] The latest available forecasts from the IMF and the OECD point to a weak uptick in economic activity in 2013 and 2014. This will continue to hold back short-term employment growth and hinder progress towards the medium-term objective of restoring the employment to working-age population ratio prevailing before the crisis. Persistently high and mainly cyclical unemployment in several G20 countries is heightening the risks of labour market exclusion and structural unemployment. In over half of countries, the share of longterm unemployment in total unemployment remains above its pre-crisis level. Overall slower economic growth in emerging economies in the last 12 months is weighing on the growth of rewarding and productive formal employment and on the pace of decline in working poverty and underemployment. The situation calls for strong and well-designed employment, labour and social protection policies applied in conjunction with supportive macroeconomic policy mixes to address the underlying demand and supply conditions of each economy. Only a few emerging and advanced countries, applying different policy mixes, have sustained or raised employment levels and seen a decline in unemployment and underemployment. In a majority of G20 countries labour market conditions have either improved only marginally or not improved and deteriorated, at times significantly so. This bears heavily on the underlying strength of the recovery

Sulfur-house operation /

C38

Statistical quantum operation

A generic unital positive operator-valued measure (POVM), which transforms a given stationary pure state to an arbitrary statistical state with perfect decoherence, is presented. This allows one to operationally realize thermalization as a special case. The loss of information due to randomness generated by the operation is discussed by evaluating the entropy. Thermalization of the bipartite spin-1/2 system is discussed as an illustrative example.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

MOP /Matrix Operation Programs system/

MOP /Matrix Operation Programs/ system consists of a set of FORTRAN 4 subroutines which are related through a small common allocation. The system accomplishes all matrix algebra operations plus related input-output and housekeeping details