UIEGA and the rise and rise of gaming and gambling in the UK

The paper explores gaming and gambling cultures in the UK and US arguing that they are ripe for a renewed sociological and criminological attention

Making the Red One Green – Renewable Heat from Abandoned Flooded Mines

Abandoned mines are often allowed to flood, sometimes overflowing at the surface to form discharges of potentially contaminated (often ochreous, acidic or metal-rich) mine water. Other such mines are actively pumped and managed to prevent contaminated water overspilling at the surface. They are usually regarded as environmental or economic liabilities. At increasing numbers of locations throughout the world, the huge reservoir of warm(ish) water contained in these mines is being utilised as a thermal resource or store, providing “green” space heating or cooling. The underground network of tunnels and shafts provides a heat exchange interface with the rocks in the mined area. In this way, it is possible to convert an ochreous reddish-orange environmental liability into a green renewable energy asset. Five main factors hinder the adoption of mine water as a thermal resource: (i) the lack of proven heating and cooling demand in the vicinity of some mines; (ii) the major investment required in district heating/cooling systems to optimally utilise the resource; (iii) legislative and licensing uncertainty; (iv) the perceived risk of ochre/metal precipitate clogging of heat exchangers and injection wells; (v) the perceived risk of rapid thermal breakthrough of re-injected thermally spent water at the production well. This paper examines how these issues have been tackled at a number of European mine water sites. “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red" William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene

Social choice theory, game theory, and positive political theory

We consider the relationships between the collective preference and non-cooperative game theory approaches to positive political theory. In particular, we show that an apparently decisive difference between the two approachesthat in sufficiently complex environments (e.g. high-dimensional choice spaces) direct preference aggregation models are incapable of generating any prediction at all, whereas non-cooperative game-theoretic models almost always generate predictionis indeed only an apparent difference. More generally, we argue that when modeling collective decisions there is a fundamental tension between insuring existence of well-defined predictions, a criterion of minimal democracy, and general applicability to complex environments; while any two of the three are compatible under either approach, neither collective preference nor non-cooperative game theory can support models that simultaneously satisfy all three desiderata

Data Mining in Electronic Commerce

Modern business is rushing toward e-commerce. If the transition is done properly, it enables better management, new services, lower transaction costs and better customer relations. Success depends on skilled information technologists, among whom are statisticians. This paper focuses on some of the contributions that statisticians are making to help change the business world, especially through the development and application of data mining methods. This is a very large area, and the topics we cover are chosen to avoid overlap with other papers in this special issue, as well as to respect the limitations of our expertise. Inevitably, electronic commerce has raised and is raising fresh research problems in a very wide range of statistical areas, and we try to emphasize those challenges.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000204 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Energy absorption and bending stiffness in CFRP laminates : the effect of 45º plies

The impact characteristics of cross-ply and angle-ply composite laminates were investigated, with an instrumented impact drop tester by performing gravity assisted drop tests on [0/90]6s and [0/45/90]4s laminates. The impact energy was kept constant at 12 J for all the tests. From the dynamic responses presented here as force history, energy history and force-displacement plots, relevant characteristics such as contact time, delamination load, absorbed energy, bending stiffness, after impact deflection etc were obtained. The plots were non-smooth, disclosing the salient features of the composites. It was important to note that the [0/45/90]4s was more resistant to impact bending, but incurred more damage as exhibited by its higher contact time and absorbed energy. The laminates were sectioned through the impact point and magnified macro and micro photographs were taken to show the failure modes, which include delamination, matrix cracking etc

Surface flow visualization of separated flows on the forebody of an F-18 aircraft and wind-tunnel model

A method of in-flight surface flow visualization similar to wind-tunnel-model oil flows is described for cases where photo-chase planes or onboard photography are not practical. This method, used on an F-18 aircraft in flight at high angles of attack, clearly showed surface flow streamlines in the fuselage forebody. Vortex separation and reattachment lines were identified with this method and documented using postflight photography. Surface flow angles measured at the 90 and 270 degrees meridians show excellent agreement with the wind tunnel data for a pointed tangent ogive with an aspect ratio of 3.5. The separation and reattachment line locations were qualitatively similar to the F-18 wind-tunnel-model oil flows but neither the laminar separation bubble nor the boundary-layer transition on the wind tunnel model were evident in the flight surface flows. The separation and reattachment line locations were in fair agreement with the wind tunnel data for the 3.5 ogive. The elliptical forebody shape of the F-18 caused the primary separation lines to move toward the leeward meridian. Little effect of angle of attack on the separation locations was noted for the range reported

Modelling dynamic decision making with the ACT-R cognitive architecture

This paper describes a model of dynamic decision making in the Dynamic Stocks and Flows (DSF) task, developed using the ACT-R cognitive architecture. This task is a simple simulation of a water tank in which the water level must be kept constant whilst the inflow and outflow changes at varying rates. The basic functions of the model are based around three steps. Firstly, the model predicts the water level in the next cycle by adding the current water level to the predicted net inflow of water. Secondly, based on this projection, the net outflow of the water is adjusted to bring the water level back to the target. Thirdly, the predicted net inflow of water is adjusted to improve its accuracy in the future. If the prediction has overestimated net inflow then it is reduced, if it has underestimated net inflow it is increased. The model was entered into a model comparison competition-the Dynamic Stocks and Flows Challenge-to model human performance on four conditions of the DSF task and then subject the model to testing on five unseen transfer conditions. The model reproduced the main features of the development data reasonably well but did not reproduce human performance well under the transfer conditions. This suggests that the principles underlying human performance across the different conditions differ considerably despite their apparent similarity. Further lessons for the future development of our model and model comparison challenges are considered