The lean paradox : How can healthcare facilities shrink while clinical spaces expand?

Lean principles create highly efficient healthcare facilities by maximising the clinical value of every part of a facility and by removing everything else. In order that clinical accommodation can be used for a diverse set of functions including unexpected tasks and processes that haven’t even been invented, they have to be big. But somewhat surprisingly, whole facilities tend to shrink in terms of gross floor areas by disposing of non-clinical spaces when designed using Lean principles. And with the whole unit – the building costs shrink too. Using examples from the UK and the USA, this talk explores the unexpected solutions and improved outcomes when designers use a Lean approach to design.

Place making facilitators of knowledge and innovation spaces: Insights from European best practices

Knowledge economy seeks its nourishment from diversity and dissemination of ideas and creativity of its talent base. This has led to the acknowledgement of place making as a major strategy to attract and retain the knowledge base into the emerging knowledge and innovation spaces. The study seeks to explore the adoption of place making in this context. Literature and practice provide information to understand the evolution of various spatial typologies and the specialised role of place making in such locations. This helps in determining the key facilitators of place making. The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach and develops an integrated conceptual framework considering dimensions and facilitators of place making. Through the lens of the framework, best practices across Europe—i.e., Cambridge Science Park (UK), 22@Barcelona (Spain), Arabianranta (Finland), Strijp-S (Netherlands), and Digital Hub (Ireland)—are scrutinised to highlight various approaches to place making. The findings provide insights and a discussion into the interplay of form, function, image and underlying processes in globally emerging spatial typologies of contemporary knowledge and innovation spaces.

Ecological infrastructure vs. techno-fix: A design framework for renewable energy infrastructure in public spaces

Renewable energy is commonly considered a technological addition to urban environments. By contrast, this PhD used a holistic approach to develop a design framework for integrating local electricity production into the ecological function and cultural use of public space. The framework addresses social engagement related to public interaction, and economic engagement related to the estimated quantity of electricity produced, in conjunction with environmental engagement related to the embodied energy required to construct the renewable energy infrastructure. The outcomes will contribute to social and environmental change by engaging society, enriching the local economy and increasing social networks.

He II spectra of La, Ce and Yb: Novel features in the valence band region

He II photoelectron spectra of La, Ce and Yb show features which cannot be explained in terms of single electron excitations. It is proposed that these are due to formation of electron-hole paris.

Methodological innovation in precarious spaces: The case of Twitter

Social media analytics is a rapidly developing field of research at present: new, powerful ‘big data’ research methods draw on the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of social media platforms. Twitter has proven to be a particularly productive space for such methods development, initially due to the explicit support and encouragement of Twitter, Inc. However, because of the growing commercialisation of Twitter data, and the increasing API restrictions imposed by Twitter, Inc., researchers are now facing a considerably less welcoming environment, and are forced to find additional funding for paid data access, or to bend or break the rules of the Twitter API. This article considers the increasingly precarious nature of ‘big data’ Twitter research, and flags the potential consequences of this shift for academic scholarship.

Fibre diffraction of lithium DNA shows structural variability and deviation from a regular helical structure for the B-form

Recently, reports have appeared which show structural variations in B-DNA and indicate deviations from a uniform helical structure. We report for the first time that these indications are also present in the B-form fibre diffraction patterns for the lithium salt of natural DNA. We have used an improved method of controlling the salt concentration in the fibres. Our results are based on the appearance and disappearance of meridional reflections on different layer lines depending upon the salt.

Public Open Spaces in Kathmandu Valley: A Review of Contemporary Problems and Historic Precedents

The current growth of Kathmandu Valley has been malignant in many ways which suggests a decline of public realm in the city. As the current efforts for planning and design of public open space exhibit numerous problems related to both physical and social aspects of city building, this book examines the shortcomings with contemporary urban development from urban planning and design point of view and attempts to suggest methods to overcome such shortcomings based on the study of historic urban squares. This book identifies the inherent urban design qualities of the historic urban squares in order to learn from them and also attempts to put forward the principles and guidelines for contemporary public space design based on such findings.

Connections not boundaries: Future learning and physical spaces

In the developed world, we feel the effects of "digital disruption" in our experiences of the spaces of retail, hospitality, entertainment, finance, arts and culture, and even healthcare. This disruption can take many forms: augmentation of physical experience with a digital complement such as the use of a bespoke mobile application to navigate an art museum, ordering food on digital tablets in a restaurant, recording our health data to share with a doctor. We also rate and review our experiences of a wide range of services and share these opinions with diverse others via the social web.

Policing LGBTIQ people in rural spaces: Emerging issues and future concerns

This article argues identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and/or questioning (LGBTIQ) in rural spaces can produce specific types of policing experiences. While some literature examines the experiences of LGBTIQ people with police, very little has focused on how rurality explicitly shapes these experiences. This is significant considering research highlights how rurality can be connected to pronounced experiences of homophobia and trans-phobia. The article highlights examples from three research projects that explored: LGBTIQ young people's interactions with police; LGBTI people's interactions with police liaison services; and LGBTIQ-identifying police officers. The examples demonstrate the need for further research to examine how policing “happens” with rural LGBTIQ people to ensure more accountable policing policies and practice, and to highlight the complexities of localized, rural policing contexts that can both support and marginalize LGBTIQ people.

Ce CORE level X-ray photo electron spectroscopy of CeX2Si2 (X = Fe, Co, Ni and Cu)

Ce(3d) and (4d) core level XPS spectra of CeX = Fe, Co, Ni and Cu) suggest that the mean valence of Ce was as well as 4f hybridization strength decrease systematically from Fe to Cu. This observation is in agreement with the results of Bremstrahlung Isochromat Spectroscopy (BIS), but in disagreement with LIII-edge data reported earlier.

Multipath Dissemination in Regular Mesh Topologies

Mesh topologies are important for large-scale peer-to-peer systems that use low-power transceivers. The Quality of Service (QoS) in such systems is known to decrease as the scale increases. We present a scalable approach for dissemination that exploits all the shortest paths between a pair of nodes and improves the QoS. Despite th presence of multiple shortest paths in a system, we show that these paths cannot be exploited by spreading the messages over the paths in a simple round-robin manner; nodes along one of these paths will always handle more messages than the nodes along the other paths. We characterize the set of shortest paths between a pair of nodes in regular mesh topologies and derive rules, using this characterization, to effectively spread the messages over all the available paths. These rules ensure that all the nodes that are at the same distance from the source handle roughly the same number of messages. By modeling the multihop propagation in the mesh topology as a multistage queuing network, we present simulation results from a variety of scenarios that include link failures and propagation irregularities to reflect real-world characteristics. Our method achieves improved QoS in all these scenarios.

Resonances, scattering theory, and rigged Hilbert spaces

The problem of decaying states and resonances is examined within the framework of scattering theory in a rigged Hilbert space formalism. The stationary free,''in,'' and ''out'' eigenvectors of formal scattering theory, which have a rigorous setting in rigged Hilbert space, are considered to be analytic functions of the energy eigenvalue. The value of these analytic functions at any point of regularity, real or complex, is an eigenvector with eigenvalue equal to the position of the point. The poles of the eigenvector families give origin to other eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian: the singularities of the ''out'' eigenvector family are the same as those of the continued S matrix, so that resonances are seen as eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian with eigenvalue equal to their location in the complex energy plane. Cauchy theorem then provides for expansions in terms of ''complete'' sets of eigenvectors with complex eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian. Applying such expansions to the survival amplitude of a decaying state, one finds that resonances give discrete contributions with purely exponential time behavior; the background is of course present, but explicitly separated. The resolvent of the Hamiltonian, restricted to the nuclear space appearing in the rigged Hilbert space, can be continued across the absolutely continuous spectrum; the singularities of the continuation are the same as those of the ''out'' eigenvectors. The free, ''in'' and ''out'' eigenvectors with complex eigenvalues and those corresponding to resonances can be approximated by physical vectors in the Hilbert space, as plane waves can. The need for having some further physical information in addition to the specification of the total Hamiltonian is apparent in the proposed framework. The formalism is applied to the Lee–Friedrichs model and to the scattering of a spinless particle by a local central potential. Journal of Mathematical Physics is copyrighted by The American Institute of Physics.

Multipliers of Sobolev spaces

Let Wm,p denote the Sobolev space of functions on Image n whose distributional derivatives of order up to m lie in Lp(Image n) for 1 less-than-or-equals, slant p less-than-or-equals, slant ∞. When 1 < p < ∞, it is known that the multipliers on Wm,p are the same as those on Lp. This result is true for p = 1 only if n = 1. For, we prove that the integrable distributions of order less-than-or-equals, slant1 whose first order derivatives are also integrable of order less-than-or-equals, slant1, belong to the class of multipliers on Wm,1 and there are such distributions which are not bounded measures. These distributions are also multipliers on Lp, for 1 < p < ∞. Moreover, they form exactly the multiplier space of a certain Segal algebra. We have also proved that the multipliers on Wm,l are necessarily integrable distributions of order less-than-or-equals, slant1 or less-than-or-equals, slant2 accordingly as m is odd or even. We have obtained the multipliers from L1(Image n) into Wm,p, 1 less-than-or-equals, slant p less-than-or-equals, slant ∞, and the multiplier space of Wm,1 is realised as a dual space of certain continuous functions on Image n which vanish at infinity.

Composition operators on vector-valued BMOA and related function spaces

A composition operator is a linear operator between spaces of analytic or harmonic functions on the unit disk, which precomposes a function with a fixed self-map of the disk. A fundamental problem is to relate properties of a composition operator to the function-theoretic properties of the self-map. During the recent decades these operators have been very actively studied in connection with various function spaces. The study of composition operators lies in the intersection of two central fields of mathematical analysis; function theory and operator theory. This thesis consists of four research articles and an overview. In the first three articles the weak compactness of composition operators is studied on certain vector-valued function spaces. A vector-valued function takes its values in some complex Banach space. In the first and third article sufficient conditions are given for a composition operator to be weakly compact on different versions of vector-valued BMOA spaces. In the second article characterizations are given for the weak compactness of a composition operator on harmonic Hardy spaces and spaces of Cauchy transforms, provided the functions take values in a reflexive Banach space. Composition operators are also considered on certain weak versions of the above function spaces. In addition, the relationship of different vector-valued function spaces is analyzed. In the fourth article weighted composition operators are studied on the scalar-valued BMOA space and its subspace VMOA. A weighted composition operator is obtained by first applying a composition operator and then a pointwise multiplier. A complete characterization is given for the boundedness and compactness of a weighted composition operator on BMOA and VMOA. Moreover, the essential norm of a weighted composition operator on VMOA is estimated. These results generalize many previously known results about composition operators and pointwise multipliers on these spaces.