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Drawing together contemporary research and thinking from leading scholars in the field to discuss the concept of the quantified self and life-logging, this book takes a lifecourse approach addressing (among others) usability and accessibility issues. As people engage with digital technologies (such as Fitbits and mHealth apps), to monitor physical activity and nutrition and for managing chronic conditions (like diabetes or fall prevention), there is increasing interest in this emerging field. The use of digital games used for cognitive or physical rehabilitation in conjunction with these issues is relatively new, and a book covering the utility, use and best-design of these technologies for specific demographics will be a very welcome addition to the field. Focusing on life logging activities, mHealth apps and digital gaming across the lifespan (with particular emphasis on the over 70s), the book will provide readers with an overview of how research and development is converging from a variety of disciplines including human-computer interaction, public health, psychology, sociology and gerontology, with different questions being addressed and different research frameworks being utilised.

Background Orodispersible tablets (ODTs) are tablet or wafer forms of medication that disintegrate in the mouth, aided only by saliva. ODTs rely on different fast dissolve/disintegration manufacturing technologies. Objectives Disintegration time differences for several olanzapine ODT forms were investigated. Risperdal M-Tab® was included as a non-olanzapine ODT comparator. Research Design and Methods Eleven olanzapine ODT examples and orodispersible risperidone strengths were evaluated in vitro for formulation composition, manufacturing method, disintegration and dissolution characteristics, and formulation differences in comparison with freeze dried Zydis® ODT. Automated dissolution test equipment captured ODT dissolution rates by measuring real-time release of active ingredient. A high-speed video camera was used to capture tablet disintegration times in warm simulated saliva. Main Outcome Measure The main outcome measure was the disintegration and dissolution characteristics of the ODT formulations. Results The ODT manufacturing method was associated with time to disintegrate; the fastest were freeze dried tablets, followed by soft compressed tablets and then hard/dense tablets. Olanzapine Zydis® was the only ODT that completely disintegrated in less than 4 s for all strengths (5, 10, 15, and 20 mg), followed by 5-mg Prolanz FAST® (12 s) and then risperidone ODT 4 mg (40 s). Reasons for slow dissolution of the olanzapine generics may include low product potency, excipient binding, excipient solubility, active ingredient particle size and incomplete disintegration. Conclusions Differences in the formulation and manufacturing process of olanzapine ODTs appear to have a strong influence on the disintegration time of the active compound; differences that may potentially impact their use in clinical practice. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40268-013-0030-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Gaia Data Release 1 (Gaia DR1) contains astrometric results for more than 1 billion stars brighter than magnitude 20.7 based on observations collected by the Gaia satellite during the first 14 months of its operational phase. We give a brief overview of the astrometric content of the data release and of the model assumptions, data processing, and validation of the results. For stars in common with the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues, complete astrometric single-star solutions are obtained by incorporating positional information from the earlier catalogues. For other stars only their positions are obtained by neglecting their proper motions and parallaxes. The results are validated by an analysis of the residuals, through special validation runs, and by comparison with external data. Results. For about two million of the brighter stars (down to magnitude ~11.5) we obtain positions, parallaxes, and proper motions to Hipparcos-type precision or better. For these stars, systematic errors depending e.g. on position and colour are at a level of 0.3 milliarcsecond (mas). For the remaining stars we obtain positions at epoch J2015.0 accurate to ~10 mas. Positions and proper motions are given in a reference frame that is aligned with the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to better than 0.1 mas at epoch J2015.0, and non-rotating with respect to ICRF to within 0.03 mas/yr. The Hipparcos reference frame is found to rotate with respect to the Gaia DR1 frame at a rate of 0.24 mas/yr. Based on less than a quarter of the nominal mission length and on very provisional and incomplete calibrations, the quality and completeness of the astrometric data in Gaia DR1 are far from what is expected for the final mission products. The results nevertheless represent a huge improvement in the available fundamental stellar data and practical definition of the optical reference frame., Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Author version made available in accordance with publisher copyright policy., This paper describes a first principles approach to understanding how 3D digital animation of human motion can be processed and produced from raw data, without the use of proprietary software. The paper describes how students collected motion data using a custom marker set, how this was used to create a point cloud, how errors were corrected, and finally how the skeleton was rigged, skinned and modelled in Maya.

Context. As part of the data processing for Gaia Data Release 1 (Gaia DR1) a special astrometric solution was computed, the so-called auxiliary quasar solution. This gives positions for selected extragalactic objects, including radio sources in the second realisation of the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF2) that have optical counterparts bright enough to be observed with Gaia. A subset of these positions was used to align the positional reference frame of Gaia DR1 with the ICRF2. Although the auxiliary quasar solution was important for internal validation and calibration purposes, the resulting positions are in general not published in Gaia DR1. Aims. We describe the properties of the Gaia auxiliary quasar solution for a subset of sources matched to ICRF2, and compare their optical and radio positions at the sub-mas level. Methods. Descriptive statistics are used to characterise the optical data for the ICRF sources and the optical-radio differences. The most discrepant cases are examined using online resources to find possible alternative explanations than a physical optical-radio offset of the quasars. Results. In the auxiliary quasar solution 2191 sources have good optical positions matched to ICRF2 sources with high probability. Their formal standard errors are better than 0.76 milliarcsec (mas) for 50% of the sources and better than 3.35 mas for 90%. Optical magnitudes are obtained in Gaia’s unfiltered photometric G band. The Gaia results for these sources are given as a separate table in Gaia DR1. The comparison with the radio positions of the defining sources shows no systematic differences larger than a few tenths of a mas. The fraction of questionable solutions, not readily accounted for by the statistics, is less than 6%. Normalised differences have extended tails requiring case-by-case investigations for around 100 sources, but we have not seen any difference indisputably linked to an optical-radio offset in the sources. Conclusions. With less than a quarter of the data expected from the nominal mission it has been possible to obtain positions at the sub-mas level for most of the ICRF sources having an optical counterpart brighter than 20.5 mag.

Starting in 2013, Gaia will deliver highly accurate astrometric data, which eventually will supersede most other stellar catalogues in accuracy and completeness. It is, however, lim- ited to observations from magnitude 6 to 20 and will therefore not include the brightest stars. Nano-JASMINE, an ultrasmall Japanese astrometry satellite, will observe these bright stars, but with much lower accuracy. Hence, the Hipparcos catalogue from 1997 will likely remain the main source of accurate distances to bright nearby stars. We are investigating how this might be improved by optimally combining data from all three missions in a joint astrometric solu- tion. This would take advantage of the unique features of each mission: the historic bright-star measurements of Hipparcos, the updated bright-star observations of Nano-JASMINE, and the very accurate reference frame of Gaia. The long temporal baseline between the missions pro- vides additional benefits for the determination of proper motions and binary detection, which indirectly improve the parallax determination further. We present a quantitative analysis of the expected gains based on simulated data for all three missions., Final draft for the proceedings of the IAU Symposium 289: Advancing the physics of cosmic distances, held in Beijing, China, August 2012, eds. Richard de Grijs and Giuseppe Bono, Cambridge Univ. Press

This paper provides a description of the Java software framework which has been constructed to run the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution for the Gaia mission. This is the mathematical framework to provide the rigid reference frame for Gaia observations from the Gaia data itself. This process makes Gaia a self calibrated, and input catalogue independent, mission. The framework is highly distributed typically running on a cluster of machines with a database back end. All code is written in the Java language. We describe the overall architecture and some of the details of the implementation., Comment: Accepted for Experimental Astronomy

Accurate characterization of the errors in the global astrometric solution for Gaia is essential for making optimal use of the catalogue data. We investigate the structure of the covariance between the estimated astrometric parameters by studying the properties of the astrometric least squares solution. We find that astrometric errors can be separated in a star and an attitude part, due to the estimation of the star and attitude parameters respectively. Hence the covariances can be separated in a star, an attitude and a cross term. This is demonstrated using our scalable simulation tool AGISLab, where the covariances are estimated statistically using Monte Carlo techniques.

The ESA space astrometry mission Gaia, due for launch in early 2012, will in addition to its huge output of fundamental astrometric and astrophysical data also provide stringent tests of general relativity. In this paper we present an updated analysis of Gaia's capacity to measure the PPN parameter γ as part of its core astrometric solution. The analysis is based on small-scale astrometric solutions taking into account the simultaneous determination of stellar astrometric parameters and the satellite attitude. In particular, the statistical correlation between PPN γ and the stellar parallaxes is considered. Extrapolating the results to a full-scale solution using some 100 million stars, we find that PPN γ could be obtained to about 10−6, which is significantly better than today's best estimate from the Cassini mission of 2 × 10−5.

Accurate characterization of the astrometric errors in the forthcoming Gaia catalogue is essential for making optimal use of the data. Using small-scale numerical simulations of the astrometric solution, we investigate the expected spatial correlation between the astrometric errors of stars as function of their angular separation. Extrapolating to the full-scale solution for the final Gaia catalogue, we find that the expected correlations are generally very small, but could reach some fraction of a percent for angular separations smaller than about one degree. The spatial correlation length is related to the size of the field of view of Gaia, while the maximum correlation coefficient is related to the mean number of stars present in the field at any time. Our scalable simulation tool (AGISLab) makes it possible to characterize the astrometric errors and correlations, e.g., as functions of position and magnitude.

We have successfully incorporated high surface area particles of titanate ion-exchange materials (monosodium titanate and crystalline silicotitanate) into porous and inert support membrane fibrils. The resulting membrane sheets were used to evaluate the removal of surrogate radioactive materials for cesium-137 and strontium-90 from high caustic nuclear waste simulants. The membrane supports met the nominal requirement for non-chemical interaction with the embedded ion-exchange materials and were porous enough to allow sufficient liquid flow. Most of the stamped out 47-mm size titanium impregnated ion-exchange membrane discs removed more than 96% of dissolved cesium-133 and strontium-88 from caustic nuclear waste salt simulants.

Accessible mobile phones for people with physical disabilities is an area that is still developing with new products and services emerging to assist these people to access the telecommunications equipment that is currently available. This research evaluated the effectiveness a prototype interface system for a mobile phone and accompanying speech generating device that enabled the user to independently initiate, answer, conduct and terminate voice calls and send text messages through the use of their communication device. Separate trials were conducted with two teenage participants with a physical disability who cannot speak and require a communication device to communicate. After their respective trials, both participants recorded very high overall performance and satisfaction outcomes. This paper highlights that involving the end-user in customization of the interface system during the trial had resulted in a very successful outcome. The trials demonstrated that people with severe mobility and speech impairments are able to effectively use a mobile phone in its many modes of operation. The trials affirmed that the system has given the participants a sense of independence, safety and security, and also contributed to improving their communication skills, leading to the self confidence to engage in conversation and social activities.

‘Goods for processing’ (‘toll processing’) has the potential to cause mismeasurement of key economic statistics. This paper outlines practical, economic and taxation aspects of the issue and describes the pragmatic approach adopted by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). This paper concludes that it is clear that ‘goods for processing’ / toll processing presents a range of practical and statistical problems that need to be addressed via international agreement on the definition, treatment and measurement of such activity. As part of the deliberations towards the revision of the System of National Accounts 1993, some progress has been made towards deciding upon a common treatment but there remains a degree of disagreement and some unease about the practical implications of the recommended revised approach. The ONS pragmatic approach, described within the paper, is put forward as an example of how one country’s NSI has dealt with the issue to date.

Gaia's very accurate astrometric measurements will allow the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to be improved by a few orders of magnitude in the optical. Several sets of quasars are used to define a kinematically stable non-rotating reference frame with the barycentre of the Solar System as its origin. Gaia will also observe a large number of galaxies which could obtain accurate positions and proper motions although they are not point-like. The optical stability of the quasars is critical and we investigate how accurately the reference frame can be recovered. Various proper motion patterns are also present in the data, the best known is caused by the acceleration of the Solar System Barycentre, presumably, towards the Galactic centre. We review some other less-well-known effects that are not part of standard astrometric models. We model quasars and galaxies using realistic sky distributions, magnitudes and redshifts. Position variability is introduced using a Markov chain model. The reference frame is determined using the algorithm developed for the Gaia mission which also determines the acceleration of the Solar System. We also test a method to measure the velocity of the Solar System barycentre in a cosmological frame. We simulate the recovery of the reference frame and the acceleration of the Solar System and conclude that they are not significantly disturbed in the presence of quasar variability which is statistically averaged. However, the effect of a non-uniform sky distribution of the quasars can result in a correlation between the reference frame and acceleration which degrades the solution. Our results suggest that an attempt should be made to astrometrically determine the redshift dependent apparent drift of galaxies due to our velocity relative to the CMB, which in principle could allow the determination of the Hubble parameter., Comment: published in A&A, revised version (v2) (Abstract is same as v1 as the character limit is 1920, see the pdf for v2)

Land Based Air Power or Aircraft Carriers?: A case study of the British debate about maritime air power in the 1960s by Gjert Lage Dyndal Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Farnham, 2012, £60 (hb) 212 pages, ...

[structure: see text] Two novel hybrid polyketide-terpenoid metabolites were isolated from a Penicillium sp. growing in the Berkeley Pit Lake of Butte, Montana. Their structures were deduced by spectroscopic analysis and confirmed by single-crystal X-ray analysis on berkeleydione (1). Both compounds inhibited matrix metalloproteinase-3 and caspase-1, and berkeleydione showed activity toward non-small-cell lung cancer in NCI's human cell line antitumor screen.

The first release of astrometric data from Gaia is expected in 2016. It will contain the mean stellar positions and magnitudes from the first year of observations. For more than 100 000 stars in common with the Hipparcos Catalogue it will be possible to compute very accurate proper motions due to the time difference of about 24 years between the two missions. This Hundred Thousand Proper Motions (HTPM) project will be part of the first release. Our aim is to investigate how early Gaia data can be optimally combined with information from the Hipparcos Catalogue in order to provide the most accurate and reliable results for HTPM. The Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) was developed to compute the astrometric core solution based on the Gaia observations and will be used for all releases of astrometric data from Gaia. We adapt AGIS to process Hipparcos data in addition to Gaia observations, and use simulations to verify and study the joint solution method. For the HTPM stars we predict proper motion accuracies between 14 and 134 muas/yr, depending on stellar magnitude and amount of Gaia data available. Perspective effects will be important for a significant number of HTPM stars, and in order to treat these effects accurately we introduce a scaled model of kinematics. We define a goodness-of-fit statistic which is sensitive to deviations from uniform space motion, caused for example by binaries with periods of 10-50 years. HTPM will significantly improve the proper motions of the Hipparcos Catalogue well before highly accurate Gaia- only results become available. Also, HTPM will allow us to detect long period binary and exoplanetary candidates which would be impossible to detect from Gaia data alone. The full sensitivity will not be reached with the first Gaia release but with subsequent data releases. Therefore HTPM should be repeated when more Gaia data become available., Comment: Revised manuscript following referee report. Accepted for publication in A&A

The crystalline and magnetic structures of all known polymorphs of Mn have been investigated using generalized spin-density functional theory based on an unconstrained vector-field description of the magnetization density. We find that at atomic volumes smaller than 12 A3, the magnetic ground state of α-Mn is collinear with magnetic moments ranging between 0 and 3 µB depending on the local symmetry of the atomic positions. At larger atomic volumes, a metastable collinear configuration coexists with a stable noncollinear state. The noncollinearity of the magnetic structure is driven by the appearance of magnetic moments on sites IV, leading to a frustration of exchange interactions in local triangular configurations. A similar situation is found in β-Mn, with a collinear structure with coexisting magnetic and nonmagnetic sites. The α-phase is found to be stable over a wide range of volumes; under compression a phase transition to hexagonal -Mn is predicted.

Spin-polarized calculations in solids have generally been confined to a global quantization axis to simplify both the theoretical model and its implementation in self-consistent codes. This approximation is justified as many materials exhibit a collinear magnetic order. However, in recent years much interest has been directed towards noncollinear magnetism in which the magnetization density is a continuous vector variable of position. In this paper we develop the all-electron projector augmented-wave (PAW) method for noncollinear magnetic structures, based on a generalized local-spin-density theory. The method allows both the atomic and magnetic structures to relax simultaneously and self-consistently. The algorithms have been implemented within a powerful package called VASP (Vienna ab initio simulation package), which has been used successfully for a large variety of different systems such as crystalline and amorphous semiconductors, simple liquids, and transition metals. The approach has been used to study small clusters of Fe and Cr; some of these clusters show noncollinear magnetic arrangements.

A recently developed fully unconstrained approach to non-collinear magnetism has been applied to the investigation of the magnetic ground state of triangular free-standing Cr and Mn monolayers and overlayers on Cu(111) substrates. Such systems represent a physical realization of a frustrated two-dimensional antiferromagnet. We find that the ground state of the Cr monolayers is non-collinear; it shows (3)1/2×(3)1/2 periodicity with ±120° angles between the directions of the magnetic moments on neighbouring sites. Mn monolayers on the other hand have a collinear ground state with antiferromagnetically coupled rows and c(2×2) periodicity. The fully unconstrained description allows for a detailed investigation of the spin densities in the interstitial regions.

Recent density-functional studies of the structural and electronic properties of a wide range of transition-metal sulphides (Raybaud P, Kresse G, Hafner J and Toulhoat H 1997 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 9 11 085, 11 107) are extended to consider the effect of magnetic ordering in sulphides formed by 3d transition metals. We find that CrS is well described as an itinerant antiferromagnet and that the magnetic ordering leads to a substantial increase of the equilibrium volume and a reduction in the axial ratio of the NiAs-type lattice. MnS(NaCl structure) is correctly described as a high-spin type-II antiferromagnet (AFM) with a very large magneto-volume effect, but the semiconducting gap is underestimated - probably due to the neglect of correlation effects. Correlation effects are also important for stabilizing the high-spin AFM type-III state of MnS2 over the low-spin state. The phase transitions between non-magnetic (NM) NiAs-type FeS and antiferromagnetic troilite are well described by spin-density-functional theory, but the formation of a semiconducting gap and the magnitude of the magnetic moments and exchange splitting can be explained only by postulating correlation effects of intermediate strength. FeS2(pyrite or marcasite) and CoS are predicted to be non-magnetic, while cubic CoS2 is well characterized as an itinerant weak ferromagnet. NiS and NiS2 are predicted to be non-magnetic by local spin-density theory, in contrast to experiment.

The appointment of good new teachers is a significant feature in the maintenance and enhancement of teaching quality in schools. In the United Kingdom the selection of new teachers of mathematics is particularly critical given the shortage of recruits and the reportedly low standards currently achieved by pupils. But what is a ‘good new teacher'? This paper analyses recruitment and selection policy in the professions generally and within education in particular. A number of general trends across all employment sectors are identified. Reported attitudes and practices in the schools' sector are also highlighted. These are then compared with the expressed needs of employing schools, as indicated by a sample of job descriptions sent to university tutors acting as candidate referees, and a list of the most commonly cited selection criteria is proposed. Most significantly, employing schools appear to place greatest stress on candidates' personal qualities and attitudes, an approach which is mirrored by...

1. Students' understanding of integration According to Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins [1] writing more than fifty years ago in their classic book What is Mathematics? (which is still in print) '... today the calculus can be taught without a trace of mystery.' Sadly for many students entering university with A level Mathematics, and for some leaving university with a degree in Mathematics, this is not so. As was noted by John Smith [2], for some students there appears to be little understanding of the principles. For such students calculus is about manipulating symbols according to rules without attaching any meaning to those symbols. This is apparent in the process of finding areas under curves for example. Twelve undergraduates training to be teachers, all with A level Mathematics, and six students following a PGCE Mathematics course were asked the following question: Find the area under the graph of y = x2 + x from x = 1 tox = 3.

The first purpose of this paper is to describe different series which converge at varying speeds to Euler's constant, 7. Limits are set for the errors of approximation in these series. Our second aim is to illustrate the scope for numerical exploration of these and similar results by means of graphical calculators, spreadsheets or other computer programs. Such facilities are now increasingly easy to use and widely available to mathematics students. Exercises or project work based on this material serve to motivate the ideas of limits, size of error, order of convergence and methods of numerical approximation, and are a valuable means of developing students’ skills of investigation and analysis.

Calculations that minimize the energy and optimize the geometry of all atomic coordinates for two proposed kaolinite crystal structures were performed using a first-principles, quantum chemical code based on local density functional theory. All calculations were performed using published unit-cell parameters. Inner- and interlayer H atom positions agree well with those determined by Bish (1993) from neutron diffraction data and confirm a unit cell with C1 symmetry.