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Spaces of Harassment: A Multilevel Analysis of the Role of Community Ethnic Composition, Segregation and Social Disorganisation Among Ethnic Minorities in Britain
No full textThis paper examines the community-level drivers of ethnic minorities' experiences of harassment in Britain, particularly the role of community ethnic structure (ethnic composition, ethnic segregation and ethnic-change), socio-economic disadvantage, and residential stability. Drawing on an ethnic minority-booster sample of a large-scale UK panel dataset, we address several potential shortcomings with prior analyses to make novel contributions, including taking a multilevel approach, using self-reported harassment data and not police statistics, testing across multiple geographic-scales, and measuring both actual harassment experiences and fear of future harassment. Key findings suggest minorities in areas with a higher share of Whites report a higher likelihood of harassment and that living in more residentially segregated areas increases minorities’ likelihoods of harassment. We also find strong evidence that socio-economic disadvantage and residential instability foster harassment. We find that these same community-level drivers are also significant for minorities’ fear of harassment; in part, because experiences of harassment affect the victim’s fear of future harassment, but also because harassment experiences spill over to impact fear among a victim’s close social contacts. These findings have important implications for the theorising of harassment and support the inclusion of community-level measures in national policy to reduce harassment
Coarticulation across morpheme boundaries:An ultrasound study of past-tense inflection in Scottish English
No full textIt has been hypothesized that morphologically-complex words are mentally stored in a decomposed form, often requiring online composition during processing. Morphologically-simple words can only be stored as a whole. The way a word is stored and retrieved is thought to influence its realization during speech production, so that when retrieval requires less time, the articulatory plan is executed faster. Faster articulatory execution could result in more coarticulation. Accordingly, we hypothesized that morphologically-simple words might be produced with more coarticulation than apparently homophonous morphologically-complex words, because the retrieval of monomorphemic forms is direct, in contrast to morphologically-complex ones, which might need to be composed online into full word forms. Using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging, we tested this hypothesis with nine speakers of Scottish English. Over two days of training, participants learned phonemically identical monomorphemic and morphologically-complex nonce words, while on the third consecutive testing day, they produced them in two prosodic contexts. Two types of articulatory analyses revealed no systematic differences in coarticulation between monomorphemic and morphologically-complex items, yet a few speakers did idiosyncratically produce some morphological effects on articulation. Our work contributes to our understanding of how morphologically complex words are stored and processed during speech production
Decision-Making under Uncertainty on Preventive Actions Boosting Power Grid Resilience
No full textThe growing impact of weather-related power outages on economy and society in the last decades underlines the rising need for power system resilience. Power system resilience can be boosted through adoption of probabilistic approaches and preventive actions building on smart grid capabilities. Decisions on the best-performing preventive action, however, are non-trivial and must consider the expected impact of an upcoming event, weather forecasts, fault probabilities and their corresponding uncertainties. This paper presents a three-stage decision-making methodology that is based on assessing weighted pre-event and post-event performance loss and considers spatial uncertainty of fault probabilities, modeled by probability distributions. The methodology is demonstrated using preventive actions, such as additional network constraints and islanding, aiming to mitigate cascading failures in transmission networks. Their performance loss is compared to the traditional N-1 criterion. Simultaneous faults of up to three lines are considered as initiating cause in the IEEE 30-bus network and the 489-bus German transmission network to verify potential and scalability of the methodology. Results show that the decision-making methodology effectively identifies the best-performing action to reduce the risk of cascading failures for any level of uncertainty
Tannic interfacial linkage within ZnO-loaded fabrics for durable UV-blocking applications
No full textTo defend against the impact of ultraviolet (UV) irradiation from daily life and even changes in climate and stratospheric ozone, wearing UV-protective clothing is a simple and effective approach to reduce risks to human health from excessive UV exposure. However, normal clothes with traditional dye or additional modifications have limited UV-blocking activity and low washing fastness, bringing huge pressure on the environment. Herein, we applied a bio-interfacial material, tannic acid, to enhance the π interaction for better reusability of the nanostructured zinc oxide (ZnO) modified highly-improved-UV-protective natural textiles, which ultraviolet protection factor (UPF) maintained 309 despite 50 washing cycles. Moreover, the UV-protective properties of cotton-based or wool-based samples have both been significantly enhanced to UPF 500, which increased up to 4200 % compared to the previous metal salt ultraviolet screening agent method. Additionally, the endowed UV-protective characteristic contributed to tensile mechanical properties of modified wool textiles even after 120-hour UV irradiation. This biomass-inspired interface facilitated in-situ synthesis method suggested a promising strategy to take full advantage of the inner and outer walls of natural hollow fibre substrates to deposit active materials for advanced protective textiles
Uncertainty analysis on FDTD computation with artificial neural network
No full textThe artificial neural network (ANN) has appeared as a potential alternative for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in the finite difference time domain (FDTD) computation. It is applied to build a surrogate model for the compute-intensive FDTD simulation and to bypass the numerous simulations required for UQ. However, when the surrogate model utilizes the ANN, a considerable number of data is generally required for high accuracy and generating such large quantities of data becomes computationally prohibitive. To address this drawback, a number of adaptations for ANN are proposed which additionally improves the accuracy of the ANN in UQ for the FDTD computation while maintaining a low computational cost. The proposed algorithm is tested for application in bioelectromagnetics and considerable speed-up, as well as improved accuracy of UQ, is observed compared to traditional methods such as the non-intrusive polynomial chaos method
What are the experiences and practices of educational psychologists when working with and supporting autistic, gender-diverse children and young people?
No full textAims: Research into the nature of educational psychologist (EP) practice when supporting autistic, gender-diverse children and young people (CYP) is within its infancy. This study explores the experiences and practices of five EPs with applied knowledge of work in this emerging area. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted and a reflexive thematic analysis carried out to develop themes. Findings: Findings highlight distinct areas of practice and challenges faced by participants. In particular, this study highlights the uncertainty and complexity of work in this area with a specific focus upon the intersectionality of autism and gender diversity. The nature of direct work with CYP and support for inclusive schooling practices are also explored alongside current gaps in educational psychology practice in this area. Limitations: Given the aim of this study to provide an exploratory entry point into the practices of EPs working with this population of young people, the researchers did not aim for representativeness. Therefore, subjective participant experiences cannot be assumed to reflect those of all EPs with applied knowledge in this area.Conclusions: Implications for research and practice are discussed including the development of resources and guidance within educational psychology services to support practitioners in their work in this area. A discussion of the need for EPs to utilise their knowledge of intersectionality when working with the uncertainty of dual identity casework is provided alongside reflections about the nature of EP work in supporting schools to further develop their inclusive practices
Working collaboratively to create a legacy: the development of The Critical Incident Resource
No full textCritical incidents (CIs) are sudden, unexpected events that have a significant impact upon children and young people. In response to the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017, the association of regional educational psychology services (EPSs) created face-to-face training materials to support schools with CI response. In order to embed the legacy of this cross-service training initiative, the aim of this research was then to explore how these materials could be developed into an online resource through a process of action research. Supported by an IT expert, one trainee educational psychologist (TEP) and five EPs from different EPSs across the region formed a ‘task-and-finish’ group and followed a seven-phase process, including a pre- and post-phase. ‘The Critical Incident Resource’ (TCIR) website was created, to support EPs in their support for school CI response. The online resource development highlighted key project management skills for EPs including conceptual, human, negotiation and technical abilities
Studies of the Temperature-Dependence of the Structure and Magnetism of a Hexagonal Bipyramidal Dysprosium(III) Single-Molecule Magnet
No full textThe hexagonal-bipyramidal lanthanide(III) complex [Dy(OtBu)Cl(18-C-6)][BPh4] (18-C-6 = 1,4,7,10,13,16-hexaoxacycloocta-decane ether 1) displays an energy barrier for magnetization reversal (Ueff) of ca. 1000 K in zero DC field. Temperature dependent X-ray diffraction studies of 1 down to 30 K of compound reveal bending of the Cl-Ln-OtBu angle at low temperature. Using ab initio calculations, we show that the significant bending of the O-Dy-Cl angle upon cooling from 273 K to 100 K leads to a ca. 10% decrease in the energy of the excited electronic states. A thorough exploration of the temperature- and field-dependencies of the magnetic relaxation rate reveals that magnetic relaxation is dictated by five mechanisms in different regimes: Orbach, Raman-I, QTM and Raman-II, in addition to the observation of a phonon bottleneck effect
Generative Adversarial Networks for Synthetic Data Generation: A Comparative Study
No full textGenerative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are gaining increasing attention as a means for synthesising data. So far much of this work has been applied to use cases outside of the data confidentiality domain with a common application being the production of artificial images. Here we consider the potential application of GANs for the purpose of generating synthetic census microdata. We employ a battery of utility metrics and a disclosure risk metric (the Targeted Correct Attribution Probability) to compare the data produced by tabular GANs with those produced using orthodox data synthesis methods
The Role of Government Policies in Explaining the Internationalization of Chinese Firms
No full textAlthough prior research has recognized the prominent role of governments in stimulating outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from emerging countries, understanding of the mechanisms through which and the extent to which government policies influence internationalization at the firm level remains rather limited. Drawing from institutional economics and the resource-based view, we examine how OFDI-specific government policies in China influence the decision of Chinese firms to invest abroad. Using a comprehensive dataset of 407,765 firms between 2004 and 2013, our framework indicates that the effectiveness of government policies in stimulating OFDI differs significantly across firms depending on how efficient firms are and their ownership. This study helps us understand the mechanisms through which country-specific institutions in the form of government policies influence foreign investment decisions at the firm level, and how certain contingencies change these effects.<br/