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What's the difference between a peninsula and a kitchen island? A They are similar in that both are units that usually take a central position in the kitchen and feature [...]

In this work, variations in the channel length and gate oxide thickness are studied for the design optimization of 3300 V 4H-SiC based VDMOSFETs. For this, a batch of 3 wafers was processed and tested for key device characteristics. The results indicate shorter channel length of 0.5 μm leads to an increase in the drain leakage current, thus affecting the breakdown voltage as well. The thinner gate oxide at 50 nm demonstrates better control of threshold voltage with no variations in the gate leakage current distribution as compared to 65 nm.

John Allen was one of the leading British geologists of the late twentieth century, who changed his primary research focus in mid career from clastic sedimentology to geoarchaeology. He read for a BSc degree in geology at the University of Sheffield, graduating with first class honours in 1955. He continued at Sheffield as a postgraduate student researching the geology of the Old Red Sandstone of the Clee Hills in Shropshire, but never submitted a PhD thesis. However, in 1958 the University of Reading offered him a research fellowship to investigate the geology of the hydrocarbon-rich River Niger delta region. In 1961 he became a lecturer in geology and a member of the new purpose-built Sedimentology Research Laboratory at Reading. The international renown of the laboratory was largely based on his prodigious sedimentological research output relating to sedimentary structures, river and coastal environments and Devonian continental deposits. He was appointed reader in 1967 and professor in 1972. In 1974 he led the founding of a taught MSc course in ‘Sedimentology and its applications’, which soon became a world leader. In 1988, in the context of the rationalization of university geology departments, Reading's department was selected for closure. However, John Allen's research esteem was such that a special case was made and a postgraduate-only institute specializing in sedimentology was established with him as director. He resigned the directorship after five years in favour of a research professorship. His objectives changed from orthodox old-rock studies to research on recent muddy estuarine sediments. By selecting the estuary of the River Severn as his new field area, he soon realized that this opened up a rich area of collaboration with colleagues in archaeology. His geological skills were subsequently applied to a range of archaeological problems. He became a key contributor to a new MSc degree course in geoarchaeology.

A research on the relationship between spatial clustering and the technological learning of firms is presented. A case study of wine industry of Chile is presented to study the meso-level learning and innovations in the industry.

Imagine a country which more than half the 11 million inhabitants were children. Imagine a country in which half a million had died of Aids and there were a million [...]

There is considerable demand for official statistics on temporary populations to supplement statistics on resident and working populations. Progress has been slow, with temporary population statistics not part of the standard suite of measures produced by national statistical offices. This article adopts the framework for official statistics proposed by Raymer and colleagues as a guide to aspects relating to society, concepts, data, processing, outputs and validation. The article proposes a conceptual framework linking temporary population mobility, defined as a move more than one night in duration that does not entail a change in usual residence, and temporary populations. Using Australia as an example, we discuss various dimensions of temporary mobility that complicate its measurement. We then report the outcomes of a survey of user needs for temporary population statistics along with a desktop review of OECD countries to identify the best formulation of temporary population statistics, and current international practice respectively. The article concludes by proposing two related concepts for temporary populations: population present and person-time, which overcome a number of issues currently impeding progress in this area and discuss their potential implementation.

Byline: Martin Bell There has been a wealth of research on technological learning in firms, industries and clusters in industrialising economies. Most of this has centred on issues about change over time: paths of technical change, trajectories of capability accumulation, and the forces that shape these trends. This paper argues, however, that little of this work has adequately addressed the empirical heart of these dynamic issues: the time-scales involved, their differences and the reasons for these. Consequently, the field of research can offer managers and policymakers very limited understanding about these time-centred issues at the core of decisions about investment in learning. This is primarily a consequence of the way research has been organised and funded, and the paper calls for new approaches to support deliberately designed longitudinal research.

Martin Bell MB BS, DRCOG, DA, MRCGP GP and medical writer, Chelmsford, Essex Chronic renal failure (CRF) is the result of many different diseases that cause irreversible destruction of the [...]

How's this for a familiar scenario? You're entranced by a bounty of gorgeous technology at an electronics superstore, and you tell yourself that next time you're online you'll check out [...]

When asked which party he supported, my father said: 'I am on the side of those who cultivate their gardens' The date of an election is creeping up on us [...]

Clive Bates of the anti-smoker group Action on Smoking & Health claims "no one is proposing a total ban" (LW, 24 August), but our expose of the anti-smoker industry's long-term […]

WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL (1821-1907) was of all war reporters probably the one most admired by those who came after him. We envy his access and his courage--not only the courage […]

The article discusses that henges in the villages of Marden and Wisford in England have never been given enough importance owing to the presence of neolithic and prehistoric works in Avebury and Stonehenge in England and efforts of archaeologists to establish the significance of Marden in Wiltshire

The operation's winning minds and hearts, Or so we're told, until the shooting starts; And then the hovering Apaches smother The Taliban (or not) with cannon fire And bombs and [...]

Rather late in my career I have become a paid employee of the United Nations. Unicef commissioned me to travel to Afghanistan and write what it calls a Child Alert--a [...]

Nguyen Vu Binh is a former journalist, an advocate of reform and an independent voice in politics. I fall into the same three categories myself. The difference is that I [...]

Current and future astronomical survey facilities provide a remarkably rich opportunity for transient astronomy, combining unprecedented fields of view with high sensitivity and the ability to access previously unexplored wavelength regimes. This is particularly true of LOFAR, a recently-commissioned, low-frequency radio interferometer, based in the Netherlands and with stations across Europe. The identification of and response to transients is one of LOFAR’s key science goals. However, the large data volumes which LOFAR produces, combined with the scientific requirement for rapid response, make automation essential. To support this, we have developed the LOFAR Transients Pipeline, or TraP. The TraP ingests multi-frequency image data from LOFAR or other instruments and searches it for transients and variables, providing automatic alerts of significant detections and populating a lightcurve database for further analysis by astronomers. Here, we discuss the scientific goals of the TraP and how it has been designed to meet them. We describe its implementation, including both the algorithms adopted to maximize performance as well as the development methodology used to ensure it is robust and reliable, particularly in the presence of artefacts typical of radio astronomy imaging. Finally, we report on a series of tests of the pipeline carried out using simulated LOFAR observations with a known population of transients.

Ionization of the Earth's atmosphere by sunlight forms a complex, multilayered plasma environment within the Earth's magnetosphere, the innermost layers being the ionosphere and plasmasphere. The plasmasphere is believed to be embedded with cylindrical density structures (ducts) aligned along the Earth's magnetic field, but direct evidence for these remains scarce. Here we report the first direct wide‐angle observation of an extensive array of field‐aligned ducts bridging the upper ionosphere and inner plasmasphere, using a novel ground‐based imaging technique. We establish their heights and motions by feature tracking and parallax analysis. The structures are strikingly organized, appearing as regularly spaced, alternating tubes of overdensities and underdensities strongly aligned with the Earth's magnetic field. These findings represent the first direct visual evidence for the existence of such structures. Vast arrays of regularly spaced, field‐aligned ducts are common at midlatitudesWidefield, low‐frequency radio telescopes are powerful probes of the ionosphereNew imaging technique allows regional‐scale monitoring of plasma dynamics in 3‐D

Experimental buildings at Butser Ancient Farm and St. Fagans (UK) and Lejre (Denmark) were sampled to investigate micromorphology of known activity areas, to contribute to our understanding of the internal use of space in excavated buildings and formation processes of house floor deposits. The experimental buildings provided important information relating to activity residues and sediments over the 16 years that the buildings were in use. Specifically, these results contribute to our understanding of the routes and cycles for transportation of materials in occupation contexts, which can be used to inform archaeological studies. It has been possible to identify internal ‘hot spots’ within the buildings for the deposition of activity residues and for the formation of specific deposit types. Analysis also highlighted post-depositional alterations occurring in internal occupation deposits, which has provided a means of identifying roofed and unroofed spaces in the archaeological record.

An overview is presented on the Children Helping Children campaign, in which United Kingdom children raise money to help their counterparts in Afghanistan. The author supports the expansion of the campaign to other countries who may not be experiencing the effects of war but are nonetheless facing humanitarian emergencies.

Between the 1940s and 1960s, studies of aircraft and ship production during World War II (WWII) gave rise to the concept of 'learning-by-doing'. This proved to be an influential and long lived idea. It has been embedded in micro-level analyses concerned with firm level management and in macro analyses underpinning numerous fields of policy – ranging trade and industry policy in developing countries to policy options for addressing global climate change. While its empirical basis has been questioned, the basic features of the idea continue to be widely used, and the claimed validity continues to be sustained by reference to the WWII studies. This paper reviews those studies. It demonstrates that they provide little empirical support for these policy applications. A long overdue effort should be made to develop a much more empirically grounded understanding of the various innovation and technical change processes that have been obscurely bundled together in the learning-by-doing idea.