Edinburgh Napier University

About: Edinburgh Napier University is a education organization based out in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2665 authors who have published 6859 publications receiving 175272 citations.

Eutrophication and some European waters of restricted exchange

Abstract: Regions of Restricted Exchange (RREs) are an important feature of the European coastline. They are historically preferred sites for human settlement and aquaculture and their ecosystems, and consequent human use, may be at risk from eutrophication. The OAERRE project (EVK3-CT1999-0002) concerns ‘Oceanographic Applications to Eutrophication in Regions of Restricted Exchange’. It began in July 2000, and studies six sites. Four of these sites are fjords: Kongsfjorden (west coast of Spitzbergen); Gullmaren (Skagerrak coast of Sweden); Himmerfj. arden (Baltic coast of Sweden); and the Firth of Clyde (west coast of Scotland). Two are bays sheltered by sand bars: Golfe de Fos (French Mediterranean); and Ria Formosa (Portuguese Algarve). Together they exemplify a range of hydrographic and enrichment conditions. The project aims to understand the physical, biogeochemical and biological processes, and their interactions, that determine the trophic status of these coastal marine RRE through the development of simple screening models to define, predict and assess eutrophication. This paper introduces the sites and describes the component parts of a basic screening model and its application to each site using historical data. The model forms the starting point for the OAERRE project and views an RRE as a well-mixed box, exchanging with the sea at a daily rate E determined by physical processes, and converting nutrient to phytoplankton chlorophyll at a fixed yield q: It thus uses nutrient levels to estimate maximum biomass; these preliminary results are discussed in relation to objective criteria used to assess trophic status. The influence of factors such as grazing and vertical mixing on key parameters in the screening model are further studied using simulations of a complex‘research’ model for the Firth of Clyde. The future

What is `Alternative' Journalism?

Abstract: The recent flurry of research into alternative media (most significant being the book-length studies by Atton, 2002, Downing, 2001, Rodriguez, 2001, and Part 3 of Couldry, 2000) has illuminated contemporary practices within alternative media that present ways of reporting radically different from those of the mainstream. Rodriguez (2001) has conceptualized such media as ‘citizens’ media’. By this she means a philosophy of journalism and a set of practices that are embedded within the everyday lives of citizens, and media content that is both driven and produced by those people. Approached in this way alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of ‘objectivity’ with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a ‘radical popular’ style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization – and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. Whilst recent scholarship has provided us with richly theorized empirical accounts of alternative media praxis (and, in particular, the use of such media by new social movement actors), it has had little to say about the historical conditions under which these media enact their journalism; it offers little understanding about the role and status of these alternative journalists; much less does it present what such journalism actually looks like. The aim of this issue of Journalism is to address these absences. Alert to the journal’s subtitle, we hope to present contributions that critically assess the nature of alternative journalism and propose theoretical bases from which to explore both historical and current practices. By way of laying some groundwork for what follows, let us begin with those dimensions of alternative media practice that have to do with economics Journalism

Expert elicitation on ultrafine particles: likelihood of health effects and causal pathways

Abstract: Background Exposure to fine ambient particulate matter (PM) has consistently been associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The relationship between exposure to ultrafine particles (UFP) and health effects is less firmly established. If UFP cause health effects independently from coarser fractions, this could affect health impact assessment of air pollution, which would possibly lead to alternative policy options to be considered to reduce the disease burden of PM. Therefore, we organized an expert elicitation workshop to assess the evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to UFP and health endpoints.

A speculative approach to spatial-temporal efficiency with multi-objective optimization in a heterogeneous cloud environment

Abstract: A heterogeneous cloud system, for example, a Hadoop 2.6.0 platform, provides distributed but cohesive services with rich features on large-scale management, reliability, and error tolerance. As big data processing is concerned, newly built cloud clusters meet the challenges of performance optimization focusing on faster task execution and more efficient usage of computing resources. Presently proposed approaches concentrate on temporal improvement, that is, shortening MapReduce time, but seldom focus on storage occupation; however, unbalanced cloud storage strategies could exhaust those nodes with heavy MapReduce cycles and further challenge the security and stability of the entire cluster. In this paper, an adaptive method is presented aiming at spatial-temporal efficiency in a heterogeneous cloud environment. A prediction model based on an optimized Kernel-based Extreme Learning Machine algorithm is proposed for faster forecast of job execution duration and space occupation, which consequently facilitates the process of task scheduling through a multi-objective algorithm called time and space optimized NSGA-II TS-NSGA-II. Experiment results have shown that compared with the original load-balancing scheme, our approach can save approximate 47-55i¾źs averagely on each task execution. Simultaneously, 1.254i¾ź of differences on hard disk occupation were made among all scheduled reducers, which achieves 26.6% improvement over the original scheme. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.