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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

University of Huddersfield awarded ?93k award from the EPSRC

University of Huddersfield awarded 93k award from the EPSRC

Public release date: 28-May-2013
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Contact: Megan Beech
m.beech@hud.ac.uk
01-484-473-053
University of Huddersfield

Dr. Feng Gao of the Huddersfield Metrology Centre is awarded a grant to study ultra-precise surfaces

UNIVERSITY of Huddersfield scientist Dr Feng Gao has been awarded 93,668 for a research project to achieve new levels of efficiency and cost-saving for companies making advanced products using ultra-precise surfaces. This research will help to reduce the amount of material that is wasted due to imperfections.

Photovoltaic film which can store solar energy plus hard disks, optics, silicon wafers and a wide range of micro-engineered products will gain from Dr Gao's project, which has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), under its First Grant Scheme, aimed at academics in the early stage of their careers.

Currently, Dr Gao explains, the measurement of nano-scale and ultra-precise surfaces is heavily dependent on the practical experience of process engineers backed up by an expensive trial-and-error approach. As a result, between 50 and 70 per cent of the items manufactured have to be scrapped because of imperfections.

There is a pressing need for an inspection process that can measure such products and correct defects with no interruption to production. Dr Gao's EPSRC-backed project will tackle the problem by investigating a high-speed, on-line surface profile optical measurement technique. It is based on white light spectral interferometry, a non-contact method for measuring surfaces, plus signal processing using a general purpose graphic processing unit.

These techniques can be combined to create a system for the mass production of products that include high-quality, high-efficiency photovoltaic thin film, meaning that solar power can be converted to electricity more effectively and cost-efficiently.

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University of Huddersfield awarded 93k award from the EPSRC

Public release date: 28-May-2013
[ | E-mail |

Share ]

Contact: Megan Beech
m.beech@hud.ac.uk
01-484-473-053
University of Huddersfield

Dr. Feng Gao of the Huddersfield Metrology Centre is awarded a grant to study ultra-precise surfaces

###

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/uoh-uoh052813.php

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Bob Dole: GOP Should Be ?Closed For Repairs?

Posted on May 27th, 2013 in News and Commentary

HUFFINGTON POST: ?Dole, who served in the Senate from 1969 to 1996, wasn?t fully critical of the president, but said part of the problem is that he ?lacks communication with Congress? and should have gotten together with members earlier in his presidency?

Still, he acknowledged it?s not easy to work with the Senate, where he said ?no doubt about it,? cloture is being abused. He didn?t spare the Republican Party his criticism, saying they need to be ?closed for repairs? and come up with more plans and a vision for the future before the end of the year. Wallace asked him whether he?d even fit in with the Republican Party today.

?I doubt it,? Dole replied. ?Reagan wouldn?t have made it, certainly Nixon wouldn?t have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.? ? (more)

Source: http://newslanc.com/2013/05/27/bob-dole-gop-should-be-closed-for-repairs/

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Colombia, FARC rebels reach agreement on agrarian reform

By Jeff Franks

HAVANA (Reuters) - Colombia and the Marxist-led FARC rebels have reached agreement on the critical issue of agrarian reform, the two sides said on Sunday in a major step forward for the peace process aimed at ending their long war.

They said the accord called for the economic and social development of rural areas and providing land to the people living there, which addresses one of the main issues that led the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, to form in 1964 as a communist agrarian reform movement and launch its insurgency.

Lead government negotiator Humberto de la Calle reminded that the agreement would take effect only if an overall peace accord is achieved, which has been the guiding principal of the talks since the beginning.

"Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed," he said.

De la Calle said it would represent "a historic change, a rebirth of the Colombian countryside."

The government promised to build up services and infrastructure in rural areas as it tries to end the country's long history of social and economic inequality.

"What we have agreed to in this accord will be the beginning of radical transformations in the rural and agrarian reality of Colombia, with equity and democracy," said the joint statement, which was read at the end of the ninth round of the talks, which began November 19 in Havana.

The rebels warned that "certain points" in the agrarian reform accord "necessarily will have to be retaken before the completion of the final agreement," but said a path was being opened for "the people to act, to mobilize themselves in defense of their rights."

It was not disclosed how much land would be given out. De la Calle said there would be "an ambitious program of restitution and adjudication of lands" to the rural poor, but that private landowners would not lose their property.

"Legal landowners have nothing to fear," he said.

The agreement drew praise at the United Nations in New York, where a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it "a significant achievement and important step forward."

Ban "wishes both delegations further success in their efforts to reach agreement on the remaining issues and to put an end to Colombia's long conflict," the spokesperson said.

Adam Isacson, senior associate for security policy at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, told Reuters the agrarian reform agreement was a "genuine big deal" for Colombia's peace hopes.

"To have arrived at an agreement on land and rural development with a peasant-based guerrilla group for the first time in nearly 50 years is a step whose importance is hard to overestimate," he said.

"It greatly increases the probability - now to well over 50 percent - that a final accord will be reached as a result of these talks," Isacson said.

Many potential obstacles remain, starting with the next agenda item - the delicate subject of political participation for the FARC.

FACING JUSTICE

More than 100,000 people have died and millions have been displaced in the war that is now Latin America's longest-running insurgency and goes on at a low intensity even as the peace discussions continue.

Many Colombians feel the FARC must face justice for war casualties, the use of kidnappings to extort money and involvement in the illicit drug trade, the latter a charge the group has denied.

But criminal charges and jail time could exclude many FARC leaders from taking part in politics.

The rebels have said they are willing to "review" any "error" committed during the war but have ruled out prosecution by a state they say they legitimately rose up against for persecuting and neglecting its own people.

Other remaining agenda points include the logistics of ending the conflict, the drug trade, compensation for victims and the implementation of the final accord.

President Juan Manuel Santos, who recently hinted that he plans to run for re-election in 2014, has said he wants the talks ended this year.

Santos initiated the peace talks last year on a bet the FARC had been so weakened by the government's 10-year, U.S.-backed offensive against the group that its leaders were ready to negotiate an end to the fighting.

Three previous peace attempts - the last ending in 2002 - had failed.

The rebels have been pushed into remote corners of the country but still are able to attack oil and mining operations that are fueling Colombia's economic growth.

The war has diverted billions of dollars from the economy as industry is unable to function at full capacity and the government is forced to spend heavily on troops and weapons.

Even if peace with the FARC is achieved, the government still must deal with a smaller rebel force, the ELN or National Liberation Army, and criminal gangs running drug-trafficking operations.

The ELN, with an estimated 3,000 fighters, has expressed interest in seeking a peace accord similar to the one being pursued with the FARC, but Santos has said it must first release captives who include a Canadian citizen.

Norway and Cuba are serving as guarantors for the Colombia-FARC talks, with Chile and Venezuela as observers.

The discussions are set to resume in Havana on June 11, a government spokesman said.

(Reporting By Jeff Franks, Nelson Acosta and Rosa Tania Valdes; Editing by Sandra Maler and Bill Trott)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/colombia-farc-rebels-reach-agreement-agrarian-reform-010708366.html

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Sea level rise: Drowning in numbers

Continue reading page |1 |2

We urgently need to know how far and how fast the sea will rise, but the latest attempt to put figures on it is dangerously misleading

IMAGINE your job is to protect London from surging seas. In one way it is easy: unlike most coastal cities, London has a formidable flood defence system in the form of the Thames Barrier, capable of protecting it from all but the highest storm surges.

But as the seas rise, the risk of the barrier being breached will increase steadily. With a 1-metre rise in local sea level, London will get flooded every 10 years. So when do you start building new flood defences, and how high do you make them?

The stakes are enormous. Building new defences will cost tens of billions and involve decades of planning and controversy before construction even begins. Get it wrong, and storm surges could kill thousands and displace millions. So all around the world, planners are clamouring to know how fast the seas will rise as the planet warms.

Until recently, scientists could not give them any reliable numbers. There were no computer models capable of simulating the melting of the world's ice sheets and glaciers.

The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) handled this uncertainty really badly. It acknowledged that we don't know how fast all the ice will melt, but then gave some numbers anyway ? between 18 and 59 centimetres of sea level rise by 2100 ? based on highly dubious assumptions such as glaciers continuing to flow at the same rate and the Antarctic ice sheet growing larger. The numbers also assumed a maximum warming of 5.4 ?C, even though the report's highest projection was 6.4 ?C. Unsurprisingly, many people wrongly took 59 cm of sea level rise to be the worst case.

Now we have some more numbers. A European-funded project called ice2sea has developed computer models of glaciers and ice sheets. Earlier this month it announced that melting ice would contribute between 4 and 37 cm to global sea level by 2100. Adding this to the other causes of sea level rise ? the main one being the expansion of the oceans as they warm ? gives figures of between 16 and 69 cm by 2100.

Some media reports focused on the fact that this is less than some other recent estimates of at least a metre. "Seas will rise no more than 69 centimetres by 2100," proclaimed this magazine.

Others focused on the fact that even this relatively small rise could have devastating consequences. "Floods could overwhelm Thames Barrier by end of century," declared The Guardian in London.

How much trust can we put in these numbers, though? The whole point of the ice2sea programme was to "reduce the uncertainty", but its numbers come with some rather large caveats.

For starters, the modellers didn't have the computing power to look at a range of scenarios for how much carbon dioxide we will pump into the atmosphere. Instead, they looked at just one ? a "mid-range" scenario predicted by the 2007 report to lead to warming of around 3 ?C.

Yet actual emissions today are much closer to the worst-case scenario, which some recent studies predict could lead to warming of 6 ?C or more. And far from falling, annual global emissions are rising ever faster. With hundreds more coal-fired power stations being built and new sources of fossil fuels like tar sands being exploited, there is good reason to think emissions will continue to soar for many decades to come.

What's more, to account for the fact that warming will not be uniform across the globe, the modellers had to produce regional projections of warming, snowfall and so on to feed into the ice models. But regional projections are highly unreliable, with different models often producing wildly varying results. The prime example is the Arctic, where the sea ice is disappearing much faster than anyone expected.

To understand why regional climate predictions are so much less reliable than global ones, think of the heat entering the atmosphere and oceans as water pouring into a bath. Predicting the average level of the bath is much easier that predicting the height of the waves sloshing around.

So the climate information being fed into these latest ice models could be way off the mark.

And even if it isn't, how do we know the models are right? Well, say the researchers, they can reproduce some of the observed responses to the actual 0.5 ?C warming of the past few decades, such as the retreat of glaciers. But that doesn't prove they can predict the response to future warming of 3 or 6 ?C. There are similar issues with global climate models.

This kind of research is vital. But when such a limited study is presented as the "best estimate" available, the danger is that it will be misinterpreted in the same way as the 2007 IPCC report. Its numbers do not encompass the worst-case scenario ? far from it. They don't even represent the most likely scenario. The narrow range implies a degree of certainty that simply doesn't exist. Nobody should be basing life-and-death decisions such as how to protect Londoners on these numbers.

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In China, US official promotes military ties

U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, left, talks with Gen. Fan Changlong, right, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, during their meeting at the Bayi Building, headquarters of Chinese Defense Ministry, in Beijing Tuesday, May 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan, Pool)

U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, center, walks to his seat while Gen. Fan Changlong, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, back right, shakes hands with U.S. Ambassador Gary Lock, during their meeting at the Bayi Building, headquarters of Chinese Defense Ministry, in Beijing Tuesday, May 28, 2013. Gen. Sun Jianguo, right, Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Deputy Chief of General Staff, also waits to shake hands with visiting U.S. officials. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan, Pool)

U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, left, poses with Gen. Fan Changlong, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, during their meeting at the Bayi Building, headquarters of Chinese Defense Ministry, in Beijing Tuesday, May 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan, Pool)

Hostesses stand outside a meeting room while a Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) officer enters the room, before a meeting of U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Gen. Fan Changlong, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, at the Bayi Building, headquarters of Chinese Defense Ministry, in Beijing Tuesday, May 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan, Pool)

BEIJING (AP) ? U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon pushed Tuesday for stronger military relations with China, on the final day of a visit to Beijing to set the stage for a summit next month between President Barack Obama and China's Xi Jinping.

Nontraditional military activities such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and anti-piracy operations offer opportunities to boost cooperation and "contribute to greater mutual confidence and understanding," Donilon told Gen. Fan Changlong, a vice chairman of the commission overseeing China's armed forces.

A "healthy, stable, and reliable military-to-military relationship" is an essential part of overall China-U.S. ties, Donilon said at the start of the meeting at China's hulking Defense Ministry building in central Beijing.

Donilon met with a range of Chinese officials over two days to hammer out plans for the June 7-8 summit, the first face-to-face meeting between the presidents since Obama's re-election and Xi's promotion to Communist Party chief last November.

Their informal summit at the private Sunnylands estate of the late publishing tycoon Walter Annenberg in southern California will come months before the two leaders had been originally scheduled to meet, underscoring concerns that the U.S-China relationship was drifting.

Xi told Donilon on Monday that relations were at a critical juncture, and that the sides must now "build on past successes and open up new dimensions for the future."

Building trust between their militaries is one of the main challenges the sides face in seeking to stop a drift in relations, troubled by issues from trade disputes to allegations of Chinese cyberspying.

Although Washington and Beijing have talked about boosting military cooperation for more than a decade, distrust runs high and disagreements over Taiwan, North Korea and China's assertive claims to disputed territories in the East and South China seas remain potential flashpoints.

The U.S. has repeatedly questioned the purpose of China's heavy military buildup over the past two decades, while Beijing is deeply suspicious of Washington's new focus on military alliances in Asia and plans to redeploy more weaponry and troops to the Asia-Pacific region.

Steps to increase benign interactions between their militaries have been modest so far, including joint anti-piracy drills in the Gulf of Aden and a classroom natural disaster response simulation. The U.S. has also invited China to take part in large U.S.-led multinational naval exercises, though China has not said if it would participate.

Apart from purely military issues, distrust has deepened as the U.S. feels its world leadership challenged and China, its power growing, demands greater deference to its interests and a larger say over global rule-setting. Chinese officials and state media regularly say Washington is thwarting China's rise by hemming Beijing in through its Asian alliances and discouraging Chinese investment in the U.S. on grounds of national security.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-05-28-China-US/id-420715a4d2d246c681f1dda8ec518300

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Monday, May 27, 2013

Senate immigration reform bill lacks enough votes to pass, senator says (cbsnews)

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E-commerce Web Design | Webdreams Blog

E-commerce is by and large believed to be the trade feature of e-business where buying and selling of services or products are carried through internet and other computer networks. It is a valuable and well organized way of informing within an association and also one of successful way of accomplishing business, it also comprises of data transferring to assist the payment and funding characteristic of business dealings. A specialized e-commerce web design is one of the most vital components for successful online business; an impressive site will always get customers visiting the site for improving sales factor. E-commerce is sometimes called virtual mall reaching prospective buyers.

ecommerce web design

In today?s fast moving world online presence is very essential, allowing the visitors to navigate easily and it is possible through a well organized site with impressive design. E-commerce is represented on technologies like mobile business, internet marketing, and electronic fund transfer, involving latest technologies such as telephone, social media, e-mail and mobile devices. A website should have a good design and color based on the industry focused on to receive profits, the site should contain the exact products matching the design ex- Women clothing store should have vibrant color, specific design, material and patterns to make the customers buy the products and it should have a clear purpose meaning it should sell. The traffic can be attracted through decent designs for creating online growth for sales and services.

?There are some rules to be followed during E- commerce site designing phase such as:

? Design should have matching products ? Different technical approach is needed while designing websites for customers to continue business for ex a shopping site should comprise of products urging visitors to buy with attractive color scheme, uncomplicated menus, modern products, and easy buying options.

? Design should highlight the products ? The key purpose of e-commerce websites is that, the design should emphasize the products using exact images and script, making it easy for visitors to navigate, using relevant and quality images.

? Using Quality images ? Customers get attracted to quality and realistic images that will certainly make them buy the products, neglecting the usage of such techniques will crash the business and profits. Customers believe what they see so it becomes important to highlight specific images with right color, layout that should not crowd many products making it difficult for buyers to choose the right one.

? Easy access and usage is Imperative ? E-commerce website requires a design that helps customers in stages of buying, from being attracted by other competitors. Availability of shopping cart, payment information and shipping details has to be accessed and in usable condition to continue shopping, other features can be less attended but not these categories, they hold importance in sales growth.

Keeping the website simple and easy is the thumb rule in e-commerce website designing process, avoiding clutter on the homepage is safe, shabby animation should be avoided as users might find it

Source: http://webdreams.in/blog/e-commerce-web-design

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