National Policies for Local Urban Sustainability: A New Governance Approach?

Cities have become a focal point for efforts to transition towards a more sustainable, low-carbon society, with many municipal agencies championing ‘eco city’ initiatives of one kind or another. And yet, national policy initiatives frequently play an important – if sometimes overlooked – role, too. This chapters provides comparative perspectives on four recent national sustainable city programmes from France, India, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The analysis reveals two key insights: first, national policy is found to exercise a strong shaping role in what sustainable development for future cities is understood to be, which helps explain the considerable differences in priorities and approaches across countries. Second, beyond articulating strategic priorities, national policy may exercise a ‘soft’ governance function by incentivising and facilitating wider, voluntary governance networks in the effort to implement sustainable city projects locally. This innovative role, however, depends on the ability of national policy to produce resonance among societal actors and on its effective interaction with formal planning processes.

An integrated 256-point complex FFT processor for real-time spectrum analysis and measurement

This paper describes in detail the design of a custom CMOS Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor for computing 256-point complex FFT. The FFT is well suited for real-time spectrum analysis in instrumentation and measurement applications. The FFT butterfly processor consists of one parallel-parallel multiplier and two adders. It is capable of computing one butterfly computation every 100 ns thus it can compute 256-complex point FFT in 25.6 μs excluding data input and output processes.

Parallel decoding of turbo codes using multi-point trellis termination and collision-free interleavers

The UMTS turbo encoder is composed of parallel concatenation of two Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) encoders which start and end at a known state. This trellis termination directly affects the performance of turbo codes. This paper presents performance analysis of multi-point trellis termination of turbo codes which is to terminate RSC encoders at more than one point of the current frame while keeping the interleaver length the same. For long interleaver lengths, this approach provides dividing a data frame into sub-frames which can be treated as independent blocks. A novel decoding architecture using multi-point trellis termination and collision-free interleavers is presented. Collision-free interleavers are used to solve memory collision problems encountered by parallel decoding of turbo codes. The proposed parallel decoding architecture reduces the decoding delay caused by the iterative nature and forward-backward metric computations of turbo decoding algorithms. Our simulations verified that this turbo encoding and decoding scheme shows Bit Error Rate (BER) performance very close to that of the UMTS turbo coding while providing almost %50 time saving for the 2-point termination and %80 time saving for the 5-point termination.

Introducing EbolaCheck: potential for point-of-need infectious disease diagnosis

The 2013–2015 Ebolavirus disease humanitarian crisis has spurred the development of laboratory-free, point-of-care nucleic acid testing solutions. EbolaCheck is an international consortium of public health, academic and biotechnology industry stakeholders aiming to deliver clinical molecular diagnostic standard-of-care testing suitable for the West African milieu within 12 months. In this article, the current status of the EbolaCheck platform is discussed in the context of the current regulatory framework. Presented here are future goals to achieve differential diagnosis of hemorrhagic fever disease from <5-μl of whole blood samples or mucosal biofluids, in a single tube process, under 40 min and with minimal operator training requirements.