The Options for UK Domestic Water Reduction: A Review

Demand pressure on UK water supplies is expected to increase in the next 20 years driven by increasing population, new housing development and reducing household size. Regionally and locally migration will also afect demand particularly in the South-East. The water reduction trends that will have the greatest reduction effect on UK consumption are: 1. For new homes; metering and new efficiencies in design and construction (e.g. low flush toilets, heating and plumbing efficiences) 2. For established housing; metering and modern washing machines

MACROWater: a Top-down, Policy-driven Model for Forecasting Domestic Water Demand

MACROWater is a top-down domestic water demand model developed for the WaND project (Water Cycle Management for New Developments). Forecasts have been produced for all local authorities in England and Wales. They can be aggregrated for different reporting areas (such as Government Office Regions, Sustainable Communities and water companies). Sustainable community is the official term for key strategic areas, earmarked for rapid expansion of housing supply (such as the M11 corridor, Ashford, Milton Keynes). This model description uses the UK's biggest Sustainable Community, Thames Gateway, as the example case study. Utilising Domestic Consumption Monitors from the water companies supplying this area, combined with housing, household and population projections, the authors have modelled domestic demand in detail. Alternative futures are considered using a set of urban water management scenarios, which represent different levels of adoption of water-saving technologies and different consumption patterns. For example, under the greener scenarios, new homes are fitted out with water-efficient equipment, allied with incentives to replace/refurbish as much old housing stock as possible. The modelling work demonstrates that increased demand from new developments can be accommodated but only through strict demand management and some new water supply measures

WaND Briefing Note 28 Revised Options for UK Domestic Water Reduction - A Review

Demand pressure on UK water supplies is expected to increase in the next 20 years driven by increasing population, new housing development and reducing household size. Regionally and at town level migration will also affect demand particularly in the South-East which is forecast to have a larger than average growth in population and house building. The water demand moderating trends that are considered to have the greatest effect on UK consumption, in approximate order, are: 1. Metering 2. Low flush toilets 3. Normal showers 4. Efficient washing machines 5. Dishwashers 6. Cistern displacement devices (in existing homes with large cisterns) 7. Water efficient gardening measures can play an important role in reducing demand during critical drought period

Great cities look small

Great cities connect people; failed cities isolate people. Despite the fundamental importance of physical, face-to-face social-ties in the functioning of cities, these connectivity networks are not explicitly observed in their entirety. Attempts at estimating them often rely on unrealistic over-simplifications such as the assumption of spatial homogeneity. Here we propose a mathematical model of human interactions in terms of a local strategy of maximising the number of beneficial connections attainable under the constraint of limited individual travelling-time budgets. By incorporating census and openly-available online multi-modal transport data, we are able to characterise the connectivity of geometrically and topologically complex cities. Beyond providing a candidate measure of greatness, this model allows one to quantify and assess the impact of transport developments, population growth, and other infrastructure and demographic changes on a city. Supported by validations of GDP and HIV infection rates across United States metropolitan areas, we illustrate the effect of changes in local and city-wide connectivities by considering the economic impact of two contemporary inter- and intra-city transport developments in the United Kingdom: High Speed Rail 2 and London Crossrail. This derivation of the model suggests that the scaling of different urban indicators with population size has an explicitly mechanistic origin.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

On the gamma-ray emission of Type Ia Supernovae

A multi-dimension, time-dependent Monte Carlo code is used to compute sample gamma-ray spectra to explore whether unambiguous constraints could be obtained from gamma-ray observations of Type Ia supernovae. Both spherical and aspherical geometries are considered and it is shown that moderate departures from sphericity can produce viewing-angle effects that are at least as significant as those caused by the variation of key parameters in one-dimensional models. Thus gamma-ray data could in principle carry some geometrical information, and caution should be applied when discussing the value of gamma-ray data based only on one-dimensional explosion models. In light of the limited sensitivity of current gamma-ray observatories, the computed theoretical spectra are studied to revisit the issue of whether useful constraints could be obtained for moderately nearby objects. The most useful gamma-ray measurements are likely to be of the light curve and time-dependent hardness ratios, but sensitivity higher than currently available, particularly at relatively hard energies (~2-3 MeV), is desirable.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Accepted by MNRAS. Minor changes to clarify discussion in Section

Identifying patients with chronic widespread pain in primary care.

Chronic widespread pain (CWP) is common in the general population. It is unclear how people reporting this problem present in primary care; they may regularly consult for regional pains without being recognized as having a generalized condition. Our objectives were to determine the prevalence of people consulting in primary care for musculoskeletal conditions in different body regions on different occasions (recurrent regional pain consultation), the proportion with diagnosed generalized pain and survey-reported widespread pain, and if they have features characteristic of CWP. Phase 1 used electronic records from 12 general practices in North Staffordshire (Consultations in Primary Care Archive) from 2005 to 2009. Phase 2 used linked self-reported health and primary healthcare data from 8,286 people aged 50 plus in eight general practices (North Staffordshire Osteoarthritis Project) between 2002 and 2005. In Phase 1, 11% of registered patients fulfilled criteria for recurrent regional pain consultation. Three-quarters had no recorded CWP-related generalized pain condition (e.g. fibromyalgia). In Phase 2, 53% of recurrent regional pain consulters had survey-reported widespread pain and 88% had consulted for somatic symptoms. Self-reported general health was worse in recurrent regional pain consulters than in single-region consulters, and poorest in those who also reported persistent widespread pain. Recurrent regional pain consulters are a heterogeneous group of frequent consulters sharing features with CWP (e.g. somatic symptoms) but including those less severely affected. They lie on the spectrum of polysymptomatic distress characteristic of CWP and represent a group whose needs may be better met by earlier diagnosis of multi-site pain.This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Expanding the Family of Grassmannian Kernels: An Embedding Perspective

Modeling videos and image-sets as linear subspaces has proven beneficial for many visual recognition tasks. However, it also incurs challenges arising from the fact that linear subspaces do not obey Euclidean geometry, but lie on a special type of Riemannian manifolds known as Grassmannian. To leverage the techniques developed for Euclidean spaces (e.g, support vector machines) with subspaces, several recent studies have proposed to embed the Grassmannian into a Hilbert space by making use of a positive definite kernel. Unfortunately, only two Grassmannian kernels are known, none of which -as we will show- is universal, which limits their ability to approximate a target function arbitrarily well. Here, we introduce several positive definite Grassmannian kernels, including universal ones, and demonstrate their superiority over previously-known kernels in various tasks, such as classification, clustering, sparse coding and hashing

Pengaruh Ilustrasi Visual Meme “Rage Face” Terhadap Frekuensi Kunjungan Website 9gag

Dunia maya saat ini telah menjadi salah satu hiburan yang cukup populer di kalangan remaja dan pemuda. Kemudahan mengakses internet saat ini membuat pengguna internet semakin bertambah di berbagai belahan dunia, contohnya seperti bertambahnya jumlah pengunjung pada website 9GAG. 9GAG merupakan suatu website yang berisi gambar-gambar lucu yang menggunakan ilustrasi Rage Face. Ilustrasi Rage Face merupakan ilustrasi yang dianggap lucu oleh banyak orang dan sedang marak digunakan. Dengan demikian, Rage Face sebagai salah satu ilustrasi yang sedang marak digunakan di internet ikut berperan dalam frekuensi kunjungan terhadap suatu website. Teknik analisa yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah kuantitatif yang digunakan untuk menguji hipotesa penulis, yaitu ilustrasi Rage Face berpengaruh pada frekuensi kunjungan pada website 9GAG. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan hipotesa penulis kurang tepat, karena Rage Face hanya berpengaruh pada kunjungan awal saja tetapi tidak pada kunjungan-kunjungan berikutnya

Language and social/emotional problems identified at a universal developmental assessment at 30 months

Background: Preschool language and neurodevelopmental problems often persist and impede learning. The aims of the current study are to assess the uptake of a new universal 30 month health visitor contact and to quantify the prevalence of language delay and social/emotional difficulties.<p></p> Methods: All families of 30 month old children in four Glasgow localities were offered a visit from their health visitor. Structured data were collected relating to language, social and emotional development using three instruments; The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), the abbreviated Sure Start Language Measure and a two-item language screen.<p></p> Results: From an eligible population of 543 children, there was a 90% return rate of contact forms from the health visitors, and assessments were completed on 78% of eligible children. Visit completion rates did not differ significantly by socio-economic status. 3-8% of children were reported to have language delay depending on the method of assessment. 8.8% of children scored in the “abnormal” range of SDQ total difficulties scores and 31.1% had an abnormality in at least one subscale. There was substantial overlap between language delay and abnormal scores on the SDQ.<p></p> Conclusions: Universal assessment of neurodevelopmental function at 30 months identified a significant proportion of children, including those previously considered at low risk, with both language and social/emotional difficulties. Further work is required to assess the precise nature of these difficulties and to assess the potential impact on services.<p></p&gt