9 research outputs found
Nanoparticles from shipping and road traffic
No full textIn the urban environment road traffic is the dominant source of aerosol particles while in
coastal and harbour areas shipping is also a significant source. For shipping there are no direct
regulations regarding particle emissions. For road traffic the emissions of particle mass has
been regulated for over two decades but only during the last few years particle number has
been included in emission regulations. Generally, nanoparticles are better described by their
number rather than mass since they contribute insignificantly to the total particle mass of
urban particles. Furthermore, particle number is believed to be a better metric for describing
health effects than particle mass. Particle number and mass of the nanoparticles is however
more difficult to measure both because of their small size but also because they are part of a
highly dynamic system with constant exchange with the gas phase.
The studies described in this thesis were conducted with the aim of increasing the knowledge
on the emissions of nanoparticles from shipping and city transit buses. The focus has been on
size resolved particle number emissions. The evolution of nanoparticles was studied by
conducting measurements by extractions from the inside of the exhaust system and from the
exhaust plume.
Emissions of nanoparticles depend on combustion conditions, exhaust aftertreatments, the
fuel and ship/vehicle variations. In this study engine load and engine speed was found to be
the most important factors studying individual vehicles or ships. For example, manoeuvring
of a ship in the port areas was found to contribute to up to a factor of 64 times higher particle
number emissions than during stable engine load at open sea. It was found the variation
between vehicles or ships was the most important factor when studying a fleet of vehicles or
ships operating on different fuels and/or exhaust aftertreatments. For example, from a
selection of 35 buses a few diesel fuelled buses were responsible for most of the particle mass
emissions while a few buses fuelled with compressed natural gas were responsible for most of
the particle number emissions. Controlling these extreme emitting individuals or specific
operating conditions could be an effective way of reducing the total emission of
nanoparticles.
Nanoparticles extracted from the exhaust system are different compared to the nanoparticles
found in the exhaust plume. In the ship exhaust system a soot mode was often found together
with a volatile nucleation mode. In the ship exhaust plume the volatile nucleation mode
coagulated quickly leaving soot covered with volatile material. Soot emissions were lower for
the studied buses which supress condensation and the lower total number concentrations in
the bus emissions reduce the rate of coagulation. Nucleation mode particles for the studied
buses were found both in the exhaust system and in the exhaust plume. Nucleation versus
condensation of volatile material has implications for the measured particle number and in
addition, soot covered with volatile material has a denser structure than soot without
condensable material.
Non-volatile particles with a diameter of ~10 nm were found in the ship plume measurements
which were not present in the on-board measurements. A hypothesis of organo-sulphates
being formed in the exhaust plume was presented which could explain the formation of these
particles. This emphasis that processes in the atmosphere can be of importance but they will
not be covered in on-board or laboratory measurements
Global REACH?: The Potential International Impact of EU Chemicals Regulation
No full textThe central question of this paper is: Could the new EU chemicals regulation REACH play a role in international chemicals governance – and if so, how? The REACH
Regulation is one of the largest and most controversial pieces of legislation that the EU has ever adopted. It introduces a comprehensive and ambitious system for
chemicals management, which moves away from a hazard-based approach toward a more risk-based approach. Furthermore, REACH introduces increased responsibilities for private actors and aims at encouraging more innovation. These
new EU rules for the management of chemical substances are more comprehensive and more ambitious than current efforts at the international level. Therefore, this paper argues that there could be a mutual supplementation of international chemicals initiatives and REACH. On the one hand, REACH could complement international activities through the diffusion of its ambitious requirements and the
data that it will produce. Diffusion could potentially happen faster than the international negotiation procedures and create facts that facilitate consensus finding
for ensuing international agreement. Policy diffusion could also potentially reach a very broad scope of countries, including jurisdictions that are not part of current
international agreements. On the other hand, international organisations could foster and enhance the diffusion process and institutionalise some of the REACH provisions. Furthermore, international agreements play an important role in taking particular account of the situation of developing countries and in providing a certain ‘baseline’ degree of safe international chemicals management. This paper first introduces the main features of the REACH Regulation. Then, it describes the international system of chemicals governance before discussing the contribution that REACH could make to this system. In the subsequent section, the different ways in which REACH requirements could diffuse to other jurisdictions and benefit international governance are analysed. These conceptual considerations are then applied to the US and California in a brief discussion of first signs of the potential influence of REACH. Since the REACH Regulation only entered into force on 1 June 2007 and will only be fully implemented by 2016, the full international impact of REACH will only become clear at a future point in time
Correction to: Prenatal gyrification pattern affects age at onset in frontotemporal dementia
No full textCopyright © The Author(s) 2023. This is a correction to: Luke Harper, Olof Lindberg, Martina Bocchetta, Emily G Todd, Olof Strandberg, Danielle van Westen, Erik Stomrud, Maria Landqvist WaldÖ, Lars-Olof Wahlund, Oskar Hansson, Jonathan D Rohrer, Alexander Santillo, Prenatal gyrification pattern affects age at onset in frontotemporal dementia, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 32, Issue 18, 15 September 2022, Pages 3937–3944, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab457.
In the originally published version of this manuscript, in the Methods and Materials section, under subheading Participants, there was an error in the following text:
`The bvFTD group consisted of 105 participants (2 possible, 92 probable, and 10 definite bvFTD), 70 males and 35 females with a mean age at scan (AAS) of 66.9 years (SD 8.15) and AAO of 62.2 (SD 8.23). The second group consisted of 110 cognitively healthy controls (HCs), 72 males and 38 females with a Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of ≥26 and mean AAS 62.4 (SD 12.11).
This text has now been corrected, in the online version of the manuscript, to read as follows:
`The bvFTD group consisted of 105 participants (2 possible, 93 probable, and 10 definite bvFTD), 70 males and 35 females with a mean age at scan (AAS) of 66.9 years (SD 8.15) and AAO of 62.2 (SD 8.23). The second group consisted of 110 cognitively healthy controls (HCs), 72 males and 38 females with a Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of ≥26 and mean AAS 62.4 (SD 12.11).'
In addition, the title of the supplementary data file accompanying the manuscript was originally incorrectly given as `Anterior Cingulate Sulcation affects disease expression in Frontotemporal Dementia'. This has now been corrected to `Prenatal gyrification pattern affects age at onset in frontotemporal dementia: Supplementary material'
Continuous metadata flows for distributed multimedia
No full textThe practical use of temporal multimedia has increased markedly in recent years as enabling technologies for the distribution and streaming of media have become available. As a part of this trend, hypermedia systems and models have adapted accordingly to incorporate such distributed multimedia for presentation. Structured interpretation of information has long been a fundamental feature of both open hypermedia systems and knowledge systems. Metadata, in its many forms, has become the cornerstone for providing this structured knowledge above and beyond basic data and information. This thesis presents the rationale and requirements for continuous metadata, which supports the metadata accompanying distributed multimedia throughout the lifecycle of streamed media, from generation, through distribution, to presentation. Throughout this process it is the temporal and continuous nature of the metadata which is paramount. A conceptual framework for continuous metadata is proposed to encapsulate these principles and ideas. Continuous metadata and the associated framework enable the development, in particular, of real-time, collaborative, semantically enriched distributed multimedia applications. Experience building one such system using continuous metadata is evaluated within the framework. An ontology is developed for the system to enable the collation, distribution, and presentation of structure aiding navigation of multimedia, and it is shown how continuous metadata utilising the ontology can be distributed using multicas
Interactive infographics and news values
No full textThis is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Journalism [PUBLICATION DETAILS], copyright @ Taylor & Francis, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21670811.2013.841368.This study is concerned with the news values and working practices that inform the creation of interactive infographics in UK online news. The author draws upon organisational theory in journalism studies, and considers how conventional journalistic news values compare with best practice as espoused in different literatures within this field. A series of open-ended, depth interviews with visual news journalists from the UK national media were undertaken, along with a short-term observation case study at a national online news publisher. Journalistic and organisational norms are found to shape the selection, production, and treatment of interactive graphics, and a degree of variation is found to exist amongst practitioners as to definitions of quality in this field. Some news stories are considered to be better suited to rendering in interactive form than others. The availability of “big data” does not drive decision-making in itself, but some numbers are considered more newsworthy than others. Budgetary constraint drives practice and limits potential in this field. Risk aversion, embodied in various forms; from the use of templates, to a perceived need to avoid audience complaint, is found to dampen experimentation. Detailed audience research was found to inform the choice of methods used in data visualisation at one national news producer. This warrants further investigation as to how audiences engage with news interactives, and what the framing of news in certain (preferred) data visualisation formats means in terms of how news is understood
Swedish integration policy documents: a close dialogic reading
No full textSweden as the great welfare state where everybody is equally welcomed and cared for has for long been the prevailing view. Although Swedish integration policy seems to confirm this view, this is far removed from many people’s experienced reality. I argue that part of this disharmony lies in how West European languages contain and relate to an ‘identity’ construction, which perpetuates and is perpetuated through dichotomies that strengthen the social and political cogency of concepts such as ‘race’, ethnicity and culture. Based on this, I carry out a discourse analysis of Sweden’s major integration policy documents from the mid 1970s up to today.
After an eclectic reading of discourses on migration and integration terminology, ‘identity’ and language, I assert the centrality of ‘identity’ construction to everything we do. With this in mind, taking the dialogism promoted by the Bakhtinian Circle as the dichotomy to monologism, I carry out a close dialogic reading in the tradition of Lynn Pearce (1994) and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986).
Contextualising the policy documents, I present the history of migration and integration from a Swedish perspective. Focusing on the last five decades, I divide the different historic tendencies into themes ranging from: emigration to labour migration, refugee migration and the European Union, and from immigrant policy to integration policy.
Believing that the conceptualisation and the handling of categorisation, segregation, culture, discrimination and racism are all central to a successful integration policy, I analyse the policy documents thematically accordingly. I show how the interdependence of the common ‘identity’ constructions and language sometimes obscures and frequently counteracts the intention of the author. As a result, I argue that the Bakhtinian Circle holds the key to a better understanding of the invincibility of stereotyping within racialised discourses, through applying absolute ‘identity’ constructions in monologic speech, and how this may be counteracted in order to strive for a dialogic approach to the world
Hypermedia Interoperability: Navigating the Information Continuum
No full textOpen Hypermedia Systems are designed to allow links to be authored and followed on top of any media format. The link structures are held separately from the documents in a software component called a Link Server. As hypermedia has matured as a research topic attention has turned to standardising the way in which components talk to Link Servers in order to provide interoperability. The Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group took up this challenge and proposed an Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP). However, the scope of this proposal proved to be too large and the protocol was divided into domain specific parts (Navigational, Spatial and Taxonomic Hypermedia), tackling each domain differently, but consistently. It is questionable whether this step was the correct one, as the domains share many similar features. In this thesis I present a detailed examination of the information spaces that the OHP was attempting to model (from all these considered hypertext domains), which incorporates notions of both behaviour and context. This examination looks at what it means to navigate around the many dimensions of information, across these domains, and reveals a cohesive and continuous structure that I call the Information Continuum. The Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model (FOHM) is presented, which is capable of representing the structures of this continuum in a consistent and meaningful way. FOHM is coupled with an agent infrastructure to produce an implementation that demonstrates the model being used for cross-domain interoperability
Author Correction: Imidazole propionate is increased in diabetes and associated with dietary patterns and altered microbial ecology (Nature Communications, (2020), 11, 1, (5881), 10.1038/s41467-020-19589-w)
No full textMany spheres of music : hermeneutic interpretation of musical signification
No full textConsiderable interest has been shown in the field of music aesthetics in recent years,
not only by aestheticians but also by writers from diverse fields such as musicology,
psychology and linguistics. What we have witnessed in these discussions have been
not only painstaking analyses of music in terms of its aesthetic value, but also
explorations of music in relation to a varied range of research areas from examining
the relations between music and mind using psychological methods, through
evaluating music in terms of our post-modem notion of art, to exploring the relations
between language and music in terms of their semantic and semiotic characteristics.
Such accounts typically seek to show that music is more than mere sound, and, in
particular, several accounts focus on its expressiveness and its possibility of
conveying a certain significance
