Notes on the Limitations of Strategic Philanthropy

While there are benefits to strategic grantmaking, organizations should beware of taking the trend too far. As Scanlon concludes about the Public Welfare Foundation's adoption of a strictly strategic approach to philanthropy, "We threw the PWF baby -- and many of its best qualities -- out with the bathwater.

Ideas of the Good in Moral and Political Philosophy

Article to accompany the Routledge Lecture in Philosophy entitled "Value in Morality and Politics", given at the University of Cambridge, March 15, 2011

A use of geometric calculus to reduce Berezin integral to the limit of a Riemann sum

Berezin integration of functions of anticommuting Grassmann variables is usually seen as a formal operation, sometimes even defined via differentiation. Using the formalism of geometric algebra and geometric calculus in which the Grassmann numbers are endowed with a second associative product coming from a Clifford algebra structure, we show how Berezin integrals can be realized in the high dimensional limit as integrals in the sense of geometric calculus. We then show how the concepts of spinors and superspace transform into this framework.Comment: 34 pages, no figure

Computational and Experimental Study on the effect of flow field distortion on the accuracy of the measurements made by anemometers on the Fino3 Meteorological mast

This paper reports on the experimental and computational modelling of the flow field around the FINO3 mast and provides an estimate of the amount of distortion that might be expected on instrumentation mounted on such a large structure. The open source C++ toolbox OpenFOAM was used for the CFD analysis. In order to validate the CFD model, experimental work was carried out in an open section wind tunnel using hot wire anemometry to measure the velocity profile around a sub-scale model of part of the FINO3 mast. The experimental data are in good agreement with the data from the CFD simulatio

Feasibility Study of using a LiDAR in the complex flowfield of an offshore platform, to measure wind shear profile.

Offshore wind is the major growth area in the wind industry sector today. However, there remains a key, fundamental missing element - a thorough understanding of the offshore wind climatology and likely wind resource. In 2008 the EU FP7 funded project NORSEWInD was created with a remit to deliver offshore wind speed data at a nominal project hub height acquired in offshore locations in the North, Baltic and Irish seas. Part of the overall NORSEWInD project was the use of LiDAR remote sensing (RS) systems mounted on offshore platforms to measure wind velocity profiles at a number of locations offshore. The data acquired from the offshore RS measurements was fed into a large and novel wind speed dataset suitable for use by the wind industry. The data was also fed into key areas such as forecasting and MESOSCALE modelling improvements. One significant problem identified was the effect of platform interference effects on the RS data. Therefore, part of the fundamental research incorporated into the NORSEWInD project was an investigation into the possible extent and effect of the interference on the measured data from the various mounting platforms. This paper reports on the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling of the wind flows over the platforms and the verification of the CFD models by the use of sub scale wind tunnel models employing three dimensional Constant Temperature Anemometers (CTAs) to measure local velocity vector data

User Defined Function: lidar_3D : NORSEWInD Report UoSNW006

This report describes the User Defined Function Lidar_3D used to interrogate FLUENT data files to provide the relevant data for the MathCAD LiDAR simulation program. The UDF was written in the C programming language and compiled using Microsoft visual studio 2008. This report contains a listing of the program (version 1.03). This report contains a description of the methodology required to compile the UDF so that it may be called by an "execute on demand" call from FLUENT. The report also includes a description of the input and output data file formats