Report on Urban Settlement Upgrading in Iraq: Kurani Ainkawa, Erbil: Moving Forward, Lessons Learned

In 2009 UN-HABITAT engaged in assisting the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) with the design and implementation of a ‘Improving the Housing Delivery System Project in Erbil’. This initiative built upon Iraq’s National Slum Upgrading Strategy (2005) and upon Phase II of UN-HABITAT’s 'Strengthening the Capacity of the Housing Sector in Iraq' project. Key to its initiative within the KRG has been a pilot project to upgrade an informal settlement in Erbil - Kurani Ainkawa. This report reflects on the pilot project’s achievements and lessons learned from pioneering a decentralized housing strategy.

Planning for Renewable Energy: Lessons from the UK’s Devolved Administrations

The planning system has been put forward as a key element in facilitating the low carbon transition (Bulkeley 2006, While 2008), by reducing carbon footprints through initiatives such as encouraging less-energy intensive development, reducing the need to travel or promoting sustainable forms of transport. It has also played a key role on encouraging a shift to more renewable sources of energy, through establishing the spatial ‘rules’ for its regulation, consenting of specific projects and acting as the key arena for mediating a range of social concerns over the resulting socio-technical shift. Despite having this key facilitative role, planning is also regularly seen as a key impediment to renewables, particularly on-shore wind (Ellis et al 2009). There is however, little known about what makes the ‘best’ approach to planning for renewables and indeed little discussion on how to judge the effectiveness of a planning regime for this issue – is it one that maximises generating capacity, protects or landscapes or biodiversity, or perhaps one that maximises social acceptance of renewable developments?

The UK offers a useful context for exploring these issues, with its four main territories (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) having broadly similar institutional arrangements, but autonomy over spatial planning during the period in which renewables expanded across the landscape. Each of these jurisdictions has sought to use their planning system to encourage renewables with subtlety different discourses, regulations and spatial strategies. Such an ‘experiment’ offers some important insight into what ‘works’.

This paper will draw on a two year study funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (RES-062-23-2526), which has charted the effects of devolved administrations on policy and delivery of renewable energy from 1990 to 2012. Drawing on more than 80 interviews, documentary analysis and secondary data sources it describes the growth of renewable capacity in each jurisdiction, explores the spatial strategies adopted and analyses the way in which the broader institutional frameworks in which planning for renewables has emerged. The paper uses this analysis to consider the lessons that can be drawn from the comparable experience of the devolved administrations in the UK and points to the ways in which we should evaluate the effectiveness of planning regimes for renewable energy.

Energy: lessons from devolution

Geraint Ellis and Richard Cowell explain the findings of the ‘Delivering renewable energy under devolution’ project, including some reasons for Scotland’s lead.

The UK has seen massive increases in renewable energy since 1998, with installed capacity growing from 2,600 MW to 12,300 MW in 2011. This has coincided with devolution and it is within Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales that the greatest increases have been seen.

As devolved administrations now host half of the UK’s renewable energy capacity, their policies are critical to achieving the broader UK targets. This also provides a fascinating insight into what sort of approach works best, and why. This has been the focus of a two-year study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, involving universities from across the UK, which indicates that Scotland is leading the way on renewable energy.

All devolved governments have offered significant support to renewable energy but have different degrees of powers in relation to energy. Scotland’s success seems to be based on the centrality of energy issues to current political aspirations, particularly the SNP, but also has cross-party support. The research suggests that the consensus on the importance of renewable energy amongst élite interests in Scotland helps to explain why Scottish governments have been empowered and enabled to make robust use of the powers available.

As it has achieved successful growth in the sector, this too helps cultivate credibility among key business interests and gives increased leverage to its position in policy discussions with the UK Government. Scotland has been more consistent over time in presenting the expansion of renewable energy as a national economic agenda, rather than just an environmental or rural development agenda. The availability of larger, windy, but relatively less contested sites for onshore wind in Scotland has meant that more projects went through central consenting procedures rather than local planning authorities. Its enhanced support for wave and tidal power technologies is also notable. These political conditions have been harder to find in the rest of the UK, making progress a little more uncertain.

Northern Ireland has used its powers (which are more extensive than Scotland’s) to facilitate small-scale renewables and bio-fuel processes, with its liberalised planning regime offering an initial boost to expanding capacity.

This has contrasted with the position in Wales, which has least control over energy but the Welsh Government has adopted a more innovative approach to strategic spatial zoning; this appears to have pulled in a larger volume of onshore wind development interest than could be expected in a comparable region of England. A downside of the Welsh approach appears to be the fact that the concentration of these wind projects in these zones has triggered public opposition and political conflict.

It therefore appears that the powers available to the devolved governments do not seem to determine which country has been able to make greatest headway, with broader political commitments being more significant. Despite this, the research does not conclude that the actions and activities undertaken by the devolved governments are necessarily the most important factors in shaping the development of renewable energy in the UK. This is because devolution is still a relatively new dimension of energy governance in the UK and decisions affecting key drivers for renewable energy investment are still made mainly in Westminster, with the Treasury exercising close budgetary control. In all areas of the UK, grid capacity expansion remains slow to achieve. The major growth in offshore wind to date has been driven mainly by Westminster and cross-UK bodies with the most significant capacity growth being in English territorial waters.

Analysis of Dependence Tracking Algorithms for Task Dataflow Execution

Processor architectures has taken a turn towards many-core processors, which integrate multiple processing cores on a single chip to increase overall performance, and there are no signs that this trend will stop in the near future. Many-core processors are harder to program than multi-core and single-core processors due to the need of writing parallel or concurrent programs with high degrees of parallelism. Moreover, many-cores have to operate in a mode of strong scaling because of memory bandwidth constraints. In strong scaling increasingly finer-grain parallelism must be extracted in order to keep all processing cores busy.

Task dataflow programming models have a high potential to simplify parallel program- ming because they alleviate the programmer from identifying precisely all inter-task de- pendences when writing programs. Instead, the task dataflow runtime system detects and enforces inter-task dependences during execution based on the description of memory each task accesses. The runtime constructs a task dataflow graph that captures all tasks and their dependences. Tasks are scheduled to execute in parallel taking into account dependences specified in the task graph.

Several papers report important overheads for task dataflow systems, which severely limits the scalability and usability of such systems. In this paper we study efficient schemes to manage task graphs and analyze their scalability. We assume a programming model that supports input, output and in/out annotations on task arguments, as well as commutative in/out and reductions. We analyze the structure of task graphs and identify versions and generations as key concepts for efficient management of task graphs. Then, we present three schemes to manage task graphs building on graph representations, hypergraphs and lists. We also consider a fourth edge-less scheme that synchronizes tasks using integers. Analysis using micro-benchmarks shows that the graph representation is not always scalable and that the edge-less scheme introduces least overhead in nearly all situations.

Risk assessment of neonatal excipient exposure:Lessons from food safety and other areas

Newborn babies can require significant amounts of medication containing excipients intended to improve the drug formulation. Most medicines given to neonates have been developed for adults or older children and contain excipients thought to be safe in these age groups. Many excipients have been used widely in neonates without obvious adverse effects. Some excipients may be toxic in high amounts in which case they need careful risk assessment. Alternatively, it is conceivable that ill-founded fears about excipients mean that potentially useful medicines are not made available to newborn babies. Choices about excipient exposure can occur at several stages throughout the lifecycle of a medicine, from product development through to clinical use. Making these choices requires a scalable approach to analysing the overall risk. In this contribution we examine these issues.

Mature students – participation in maths support and progression

Maths support at the Learning Development Service takes the form of drop-in contact, one-to-one appointments and workshops. Analysis over three years from 2010/11 to 2012/13 shows that 45% of one-to-one appointments involved a mature student, defined at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) as one who has had a break in full-time study (normally a minimum of two years). This is a very high proportion given that 4% of students at QUB are mature. Considering engineering undergraduates only, the fraction of one-to-one appointments involving mature students was also 45%. This study can report a wide variation in terms of progression of mature students in engineering and aims to consider how more traditional undergraduate learners could be persuaded to adopt the attitudes of mature students in partaking of maths support.

Disability benefit growth and disability reform in the US: lessons from other OECD nations

Unsustainable growth in program costs and beneficiaries, together with a growing recognition that even people with severe impairments can work, led to fundamental disability policy reforms in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. In Australia, rapid growth in disability recipiency led to more modest reforms. Here we describe the factors driving unsustainable DI program growth in the U.S., show their similarity to the factors that led to unsustainable growth in these other four OECD countries, and discuss the reforms each country implemented to regain control over their cash transfer disability program. Although each country took a unique path to making and implementing fundamental reforms, shared lessons emerge from their experiences.

On the potential of significance-driven execution for energy-aware HPC

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) exhibits fundamental limitations as a method to reduce energy consumption in computing systems. In the HPC domain, where performance is of highest priority and codes are heavily optimized to minimize idle time, DVFS has limited opportunity to achieve substantial energy savings. This paper explores if operating processors Near the transistor Threshold Volt- age (NTV) is a better alternative to DVFS for break- ing the power wall in HPC. NTV presents challenges, since it compromises both performance and reliability to reduce power consumption. We present a first of its kind study of a significance-driven execution paradigm that selectively uses NTV and algorithmic error tolerance to reduce energy consumption in performance- constrained HPC environments. Using an iterative algorithm as a use case, we present an adaptive execution scheme that switches between near-threshold execution on many cores and above-threshold execution on one core, as the computational significance of iterations in the algorithm evolves over time. Using this scheme on state-of-the-art hardware, we demonstrate energy savings ranging between 35% to 67%, while compromising neither correctness nor performance.

Lessons from 'The Wire': Epistemological Reflections on the Practice of Sociological Research

Recent debates and controversies have highlighted several issues surrounding sociological research, which relate to the general conditions under which it is undertaken and how this is changing. There is a pressing need to respond to these issues as a whole, in particular by examining what they tell us about research practices. This article argues that a consideration of themes raised by the American television drama The Wire is useful for facilitating such a response, since it may be read as a discussion of working conditions within neoliberal societies. The following themes are pertinent here: the need to reflect upon the terms by which research is framed by funders, to take adequate time to conduct and complete research, and to encourage critical debate within research. Whilst these relate to influential epistemological discussions by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Burawoy, this reading of The Wire is particularly helpful for highlighting the practical and inter-relational situations in which sociological research is carried out but which tend not to receive the systematic attention they deserve.

Optimization by quantum annealing: Lessons from simple cases

We investigate the basic behavior and performance of simulated quantum annealing (QA) in comparison with classical annealing (CA). Three simple one-dimensional case study systems are considered: namely, a parabolic well, a double well, and a curved washboard. The time-dependent Schrodinger evolution in either real or imaginary time describing QA is contrasted with the Fokker-Planck evolution of CA. The asymptotic decrease of excess energy with annealing time is studied in each case, and the reasons for differences are examined and discussed. The Huse-Fisher classical power law of double-well CA is replaced with a different power law in QA. The multiwell washboard problem studied in CA by Shinomoto and Kabashima and leading classically to a logarithmic annealing even in the absence of disorder turns to a power-law behavior when annealed with QA. The crucial role of disorder and localization is briefly discussed.

Dyslexia in higher education: Implications for maths anxiety, statistics anxiety and psychological well-being

This study examined levels of mathematics and statistics anxiety, as well as general mental health amongst undergraduate students with dyslexia (n = 28) and those without dyslexia (n = 71). Students with dyslexia had higher levels of mathematics anxiety relative to those without dyslexia, while statistics anxiety and general mental health were comparable for both reading ability groups. In terms of coping strategies, undergraduates with dyslexia tended to use planning-based strategies and seek instrumental support more frequently than those without dyslexia. Higher mathematics anxiety was associated with having a dyslexia diagnosis, as well as greater levels of worrying, denial, seeking instrumental support and less use of the positive reinterpretation coping strategy. By contrast, statistics anxiety was not predicted by dyslexia diagnosis, but was instead predicted by overall worrying and the use of denial and emotion focused coping strategies. The results suggest that disability practitioners should be aware that university students with dyslexia are at risk of high mathematics anxiety. Additionally, effective anxiety reduction strategies such as positive reframing and thought challenging would form a useful addition to the support package delivered to many students with dyslexia.