Lancashire County Council St Michaels and Carnforth Footbridges - United Kingdom

<p>Lancashire County Council (LCC) in UK are a forward thinking and innovative local authority with a significant number of bridges in their asset stock. They commissioned Jacobs to carry out a detailed options study for eight footbridges following concerns that were raised during principal inspections. The options report considered refurbishment and replacement options and the possibility of using new construction materials with the aim of maximizing durability and minimizing maintenance. The recommendations for all footbridges was replace them with Fibre Reinforced Polymer. LCC divided the eight bridges into packages of two according to their budget constraints and issued tender documents to contactors for the first two packages. The first package contractor has successfully delivered two replacement FRP Footbridges of 28m span over railway in Ormskirk. These are the longest simply supported FRP footbridges in the UK. The second tender package to be issued to tender was for St Michaels and Carnforth Footbridges at 37m and 31m spans. The Council wanted FRP Bow String Trusses for these bridges that crossed a River and a Canal respectively. Nothing like this type and scale of footbridges had ever been realized in the UK. This tender was won with an alternative proposal to replace these footbridges with an aluminium solution explaining to the client in doing so the risks and costs involved in designing and fabricating these structures in FRP would be significantly greater. These are the longest aluminum footbridges in the UK of this type.</p>

The open-access telecommunication transmission network in the Canary Islands: an alternative proposal to the current management model?

Purpose This paper aims to study the competition problems and market failures in the Canary Islands and propose an alternative management model for the telecommunication transmission network. This model is based on a wholesale-only open-access transmission network, available to all the retail service providers of this region, and managed by a unique entity subject to regulation with cost-based prices. The proposal hopefully will help to debate about the implementation of certain regulatory models in the network industries, concerning telecommunication submarine cables connecting archipelagos. Design/methodology/approach An empirical approach has been used, based on the observation and analysis of the regulatory policies applied to the wholesale transmission networks in the Canary Islands, Azores and Madeira archipelagos. Findings Results show a persistent margin squeeze situation on the retail broadband market in the Canary Islands, due to the pricing strategy on the Spanish mainland-Canaries wholesale market, which is, in turn, delaying the entry of alternatives and the level of development and efficiency of competition. The risk of duopoly collusion is also present on this wholesale market. Additionally, public aids will be needed to replace the systems connecting with the non-capital islands and to provide redundancy to El Hierro. The alternative proposal might help preventing the above. Eventually, several insights are considered for further investigation. Originality/value Little attention has been paid to this topic in the literature, regarding the analysis of regulatory policies applied over fiber optic submarine cable infrastructures in fragmented territories like archipelagos. Consequently, an empirical analysis has been accomplished to emphasize this research work, based on the regulatory policies adopted.

Testing a new method for scattering in finite volume in the $$\phi ^4$$ theory

We test an alternative proposal by Bruno and Hansen (J High Energy Phys 2021(6), 10.1007/JHEP06(2021)043, 2021) to extract the scattering length from lattice simulations in a finite volume. For this, we use a scalar $$\phi ^4$$ ϕ 4 theory with two mass nondegenerate particles and explore various strategies to implement this new method. We find that the results are comparable to those obtained from the Lüscher method, with somewhat smaller statistical uncertainties at larger volumes.

A Contextualist Account of Moral Responsibility

If the ability analysis of control is correct, it demonstrates that abilities are pivotal to an account of the control required for moral responsibility. But the precise details do not matter for the argument of the last two chapters. All that requires is the much less contentious claim that abilities to do otherwise are part of an analysis of robust control. If this is so, then the issue of the consequences of a contextualist theory of agential modals for a theory of moral responsibility arises. The aim of this chapter is to begin exploring these consequences. The first four sections outline a positive case for the view that our attributions of moral responsibility have different semantic values relative to different contexts of utterance. This argument draws upon the preceding considerations, semantic evidence, the argument from manipulation, and experimental data regarding our folk intuitions. The chapter ends by contrasting the resulting contextualist analysis of moral responsibility with an alternative proposal, offered by Björnsson and Persson.

The importance of urgency in decision making based on dynamic information

A standard view in the literature is that decisions are the result of a process that accumulates evidence in favor of each alternative until such accumulation reaches a threshold and a decision is made. However, this view has been recently questioned by an alternative proposal that suggests that, instead of accumulated, evidence is combined with an urgency signal. Both theories have been mathematically formalized and supported by a variety of decision-making tasks with constant information. However, recently, tasks with changing information have shown to be more effective to study the dynamics of decision making. Recent research using one of such tasks, the tokens task, has shown that decisions are better described by an urgency mechanism than by an accumulation one. However, the results of that study could depend on a task where all fundamental information was noiseless and always present, favoring a mechanism of non-integration, such as the urgency one. Here, we wanted to address whether the same conclusions were also supported by an experimental paradigm in which sensory evidence was removed shortly after it was provided, making working memory necessary to properly perform the task. Here, we show that, under such condition, participants’ behavior could be explained by an urgency-gating mechanism that low-pass filters the mnemonic information and combines it with an urgency signal that grows with time but not by an accumulation process that integrates the same mnemonic information. Thus, our study supports the idea that, under certain situations with dynamic sensory information, decisions are better explained by an urgency-gating mechanism than by an accumulation one.

La distribución tradicional del agua del río Turia entre las acequias de la Huerta de Valencia: Un sistema de origen bajomedieval

The water of the Turia river has been traditionally distributed in the Huerta of Valencia among eight irrigation canals through a system of 138 filas, a measure of water capacity which nature is not clear. It is also unknown what is the historical origin of this system of water division and this is what we study in this article. Thomas F. Glick defended that it was a system of Andalusi origin, and proposed a reconstruction of the original system based on time shifts, but we try to demonstrate that this proposal cannot be correct, especially because it is based on a wrong interpretation of the nature of the row. Subsequently, we provide an alternative proposal on the origin of the distribution system in 138 filas that is based on the proportionality between the amount of water that each irrigation canal has and the amount of land irrigated by each hydraulic system, concluding that the distribution system of the Huerta de Valencia can only have been established shortly after the Christian conquest of the thirteenth century, when the Huerta was greatly expanded and rebuilt. Finally, we conclude that this is another evidence of the great changes that took place in irrigated cultivation spaces of Andalusi origin after the Christian conquests, contrary to what had been said so far.

Media Arbitration Schemes: Addressing the Backlog of Defamation Cases in Malaysia

The rise in defamation claims in Malaysia has placed an onerous workload on the courts to deal with such matters. Against this backdrop, Hamid Sultan Abu Backer JC (as his Lordship then was) (Hamid Sultan JC) suggested in two separate High Court decisions that to alleviate the courts’ burden, matters pertaining to libel and slander ought to be constrained to the criminal courts through appropriate statutory amendments, including to the Criminal Procedure Code (Malaysia). In this paper, the author cautions against the learned Hamid Sultan JC's recommendations and proffers an alternative proposal in the form of media arbitration schemes to handle the growing influx of defamation claims. In particular, the salient features of the IMPRESS and IPSO Schemes from the United Kingdom are scrutinised in detail and measured in terms of suitability for a potential arbitration scheme in the Malaysian jurisdiction.

Kant and the Possibility of Transcendental Freedom

What does Kant claim to have shown in the Resolution of the Third Antinomy (RTA)? A recent publication by Bernd Ludwig shows the shortcomings of a fairly broad interpretative consensus around the claim that all that is at stake in the RTA is the mode of logical possibility. I argue that there is a lack of clarity as to what logical possibility, and that the real possibility of transcendental freedom (TF) is examined in much of the RTA. Ludwig’s own proposal that Kant shows the real possibility of TF however faces major problems. I formulate an alternative proposal that pays due attention to the claim of the antinomy’s thesis, the evolution of the argument of the RTA, and Kant’s later textual references to it. This also deals with the thorny issue of the relation between practical and TF.