Our shifting perspectives on the oceans

In the last 15 years new research findings have radically reshaped our understanding of human effects on ocean ecosystems. Here I describe five major shifts in perspective that reveal our impacts to be more severe and persistent than previously appreciated. Firstly, scientists have delved deep into the past and found that the global expansion of European nations across the planet caused the large-scale loss of marine megafauna. In the past century, expansion of industrial scale fishing has continued the process, massively reducing the biomass of exploited species. Secondly, once depleted we are finding that populations rarely rebound rapidly, contrary to a widespread belief in greater resilience of marine compared to terrestrial species. Thirdly, marine ecosystems are being shifted into alternative states that are less desirable from the human perspective and may be stable. It could be difficult, or impossible in some cases, to reverse impacts once inflicted. Fourthly, marine species are at risk of extinction. Loss of shallow water marine habitats is proceeding as rapidly as on land, many species have small geographic ranges, and many possess life history characteristics that leave them highly susceptible to overexploitation. Finally, the deep sea is not beyond harm. Depletion of shallow water fisheries and technological advances are opening up the deep to exploitation and its collateral impacts. If we are to reverse these negative trends we must establish large-scale networks of marine reserves that are off limits to damaging activities and fishing. Such reserves would protect biodiversity, and recover and sustain the world's fisheries productivity

Keeping a reflective journal : reflections of a mature student

Reflective journals are used increasingly in Higher Education. Examples from an unstructured journal kept by the author in her role as a new Mechanical Engineering student raise issue of what 'ought' to be in journals, how emotional effects should be dealt with and how the subjective nature of reflection may cause problems for assessment

Nuclear weapons and European interests : Discussions in the Assembly of the Western European Union, 1955–1975

In the 1950s and 1960s the Defence Committee of the Western European Union (WEU) Assembly submitted a series of conspicuous reports on nuclear control issues, culminating in a plea for an Atlantic nuclear force. The article analyses the reports and discussions in the Assembly in the field of defence as well as its attempts to have their recommendations adopted by national parliaments. Internal political and national differences notwithstanding, the representatives in the WEU Assembly developed a clear understanding of European interests.

The quantum anharmonic oscillator in the Heisenberg picture and multiple scale techniques

Multiple scale techniques are well-known in classical mechanics to give perturbation series free from resonant terms. When applied to the quantum anharmonic oscillator, these techniques lead to interesting features concerning the solution of the Heisenberg equations of motion and the Hamiltonian spectrum.Comment: 18 page

Continuous canonical correlation analysis

Given a bivariate distribution, the set of canonical correlations and functions is in general finite or countable. By using an inner product between two functions via an extension of the covariance, we find all the canonical correlations and functions for the so-called Cuadras-Aug´e copula and prove the continuous dimensionality of this distribution

Design Margins: Impact on Building Energy Performance

This paper examines the addition of design margins for building services energy infrastructure during the design process. It argues that care must be taken when applying margins; ensuring cumulative effects do not undermine the ability of systems to be energy efficient. An example of a hospital Trust is provided showing the addition of design margins impacting the energy efficiency of services provided. Tensions are found between delivery of flexibility, adaptability and other change parameters and the need for the system to be bounded, so as to encourage effectiveness

Acetic and formic acids emitted from wood samples and their effect on selected materials in museum environments

The concentrations of acetic acid and formic acid vapours emitted by a number of wood samples held in sealed environments were measured to assess differences between hardwood and softwood species. Three cases studies are reported where sodium formate, lead formate and acetate-based efflorescences were identified on glass, lead and calcareous artefacts held in heritage environments with elevated acetic acid and formic acid vapours. Simulated experiments were undertaken to assess the affect of formic acid vapour on limestone, egg shell, copper, lead and brass coupons and it was confirmed that porous limestone preferentially scavenged formic acid vapours from air

Safety arguments for next generation location aware computing

Concerns over the accuracy, availability, integrity and continuity of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have limited the integration of GPS and GLONASS for safety-critical applications. More recent augmentation systems, such as the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) and the North American Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) have begun to address these concerns. Augmentation architectures build on the existing GPS/GLONASS infrastructures to support locationbased services in Safety of Life (SoL) applications. Much of the technical development has been directed by air traffic management requirements, in anticipation of the more extensive support to be offered by GPS III and Galileo. WAAS has already been approved to provide vertical guidance against ICAO safety performance criteria for aviation applications. During the next twelve months, we will see the full certification of EGNOS for SoL applications. This paper identifies strong similarities between the safety assessment techniques used in Europe and North America. Both have relied on hazard analysis techniques to derive estimates of the Probability of Hazardously Misleading Information (PHMI). Later sections identify significant differences between the approaches adopted in application development. Integrated fault trees have been developed by regulatory and commercial organisations to consider both infrastructure hazards and their impact on non-precision RNAV/VNAV approaches using WAAS. In contrast, EUROCONTROL and the European Space Agency have developed a more modular approach to safety-case development for EGNOS. It remains to be seen whether the European or North American strategy offers the greatest support as satellite based augmentation systems are used within a growing range of SoL applications from railway signalling through to Unmanned Airborne Systems. The key contribution of this paper is to focus attention on the safety arguments that might support this wider class of location based services

Estimation effects on stop-loss premiums under dependence

Even a small amount of dependence in large insurance portfolios can lead to huge errors in relevant risk measures, such as stop-loss premiums. This has been shown in a model where the majority consists of ordinary claims and a small fraction of special claims. The special claims are dependent in the sense that a whole group is exposed to damage. In this model, the parameters have to be estimated. The effect of the estimation step is studied here. The estimation error is dominated by the part of the parameters related to the special claims, because by their nature we do not have many observations of them. Although the estimation error in this way is restricted to a few parameters, it turns out that it may be quite substantial. Upper and lower confidence bounds are given for the stop-loss premium, thus protecting against the estimation effect

Contribution of the Internal Field to the Anisotropic Optical Reflectance of GaP(110)

This article presents the theory of optical reflection from thin slabs of GaP(110) by means of the discrete dipole model and focusses especially upon the possible implications of this model for the surface induced optical anisotropy. The reflectance of a semi-infinite sample is extracted from slab calculations and compared with experiments. We find that the internal field has a very important role in determining the surface induced optical anisotropy. We also show that the surface sensitivity of such experiments can be estimated to be about five monolayer