The community waste sector and waste services in the UK: current state and future prospects

YesTheory predicts that the voluntary or community sector will contribute a range of services that are not delivered by the state or private sectors. This paper examines the changing contributions of the community waste sector in the UK to reflect upon these claims. A rosy picture of the community waste sector is presented from research on the sector in 2002, with a growing number of organisations carrying out a range of services, drawing on multiple and diverse sources of funding. More recent evidence, and information drawn from outside the sector, however, suggests that regulation, competition, and changes to funding regimes are putting the sector under considerable pressure, such that it is likely to change, and that some parts of it will contract. In terms of the claims from theory, the paper finds evidence that the community sector can and has been innovative in the services it provides and the way that it provides them, though similar innovations may emerge from the private and public sectors. The sparse evidence on participation and recycling rates in kerbside and civic amenity sites are equivocal on whether the sector provides enhanced communication as theory would predict. Overall, the paper highlights the difficulty in achieving direct comparisons between the waste sectors without specific focused research for this purpose. It concludes that the challenge for European, national and local government is to influence the necessarily constructed waste markets in a way which will enhance rather than discourage service providers to innovate in the waste material collected, and to communicate effectively with the public whom they serve. Such policies promise to encourage the effective delivery of sustainable waste services from all three - public, private and community - sectors

Early Dropout Prediction for Programming Courses Supported by Online Judges

Many educational institutions have been using online judges in programming classes, amongst others, to provide faster feedback for students and to reduce the teacher’s workload. There is some evidence that online judges also help in reducing dropout. Nevertheless, there is still a high level of dropout noticeable in introductory programming classes. In this sense, the objective of this work is to develop and validate a method for predicting student dropout using data from the first two weeks of study, to allow for early intervention. Instead of the classical questionnaire-based method, we opted for a non-subjective, data-driven approach. However, such approaches are known to suffer from a potential overload of factors, which may not all be relevant to the prediction task. As a result, we reached a very promising 80% of accuracy, and performed explicit extraction of the main factors leading to student dropout

Is the pen mightier than the sword? Exploring urban and rural health in Victorian England and Wales using the Registrar General Reports

YesIn AD 1836, the General Register Office (GRO) was established to oversee the national system of civil registration in England and Wales, recording all births, deaths and marriages. Additional data regarding population size, division size and patterns of occupation within each division permit urban and rural areas (and those with both urban and rural characteristics, described here as ‘mixed’) to be directly compared to each other. The annual Reports of the Registrar General summarize the collected data, including cause of and age at death, which is of particular value to historical demographers and bioarcheologists, allowing us to investigate demographic patterns in urban and rural districts in the nineteenth century. Overall, this paper aims to highlight how this documentary evidence can supplement osteological and paleopathological data to investigate how urbanization affected the health of past populations. It examines the data contained within the first Registrar General report (for 1837-8), in order to assess patterns of mortality of diverse rural, urban, and mixed populations within England and Wales at a point in time during a period of rapid urbanization. It shows that urban and mixed districts typically had lower life expectancy and different patterns in cause of death compared to rural areas. The paper briefly compares how the documentary data differs from information regarding health from skeletal populations, focusing on the city of London, highlighting that certain age groups (the very young and very old) are typically underrepresented in archeological assemblages and reminding us that, while the paleopathological record offers much in terms of chronic health, evidence of acute disease and importantly cause of death can rarely be ascertained from skeletal remains.This research was funded by the Royal Society of London (Grant Reference IES\R1\180138) and supported by the University of Bradford and SUNY Plattsburgh

Environmental Taxation and Red-Green Politics

This article examines the arguments for and potential of environmental tax reform (ETR) from the standpoint of red-green politics. ETR has been criticised in relation to ethics, democracy and social justice. However, the ethical and democratic critiques can be countered through a critical examination of the potential of ETR as they take the fallacious neo-classical perspective as their reference point. In relation to social justice, the potential regressive consequences of some environmental taxes will, however, require mitigation and compensation. Despite the unsatisfactory nature of the recent reforms implemented in a number of European countries ETR has much to offer, both in terms of the effectiveness of environmental regulation and in reducing unemployment. In the longer term it could contribute to the creation of more favourable conditions for radical change. </jats:p

The CERN-ELENA Electron Cooler Magnetic System

Phase space compression of the antiproton beam in ELENA will be performed by a new electron cooler the performance of which is greatly influenced by the properties of the electron beam. Careful design of the electron gun electrodes, the efficient recuperation of the electrons in the collector and the quality of the guiding magnetic field ensure an optimal performance of the cooler. The ELENA cooler is a compact device incorporating an adiabatic expansion to reduce the electron beam temperature as well as electrostatic bending plates for efficient collection of the electron beam. The transverse components of the longitudinal field in the cooling section must be kept small (Bt/Bl ≤ 5x10-4) to ensure a minimal perturbation to the electron beam transverse temperature. The longitudinal field itself needs to be as low as possible such that the distortion to the closed orbit of the circulating ion beam due to the short 90° toroids is kept as small as possible. We present the solutions chosen to design and construct a magnetic system within the above constraints as well as the setup used to measure and optimise the magnetic field components