When some granular material contained into a silo is pushed upwards with a piston, an irregular stick-slip motion of the system of grains is observed. We show how one can adapt the 'Scalar Arching Model' (sam) – proposed as a model for giant stress fluctuations in silos – in order to describe this stick-slip phenomenon. As a function of the sensitivity of the system to mechanical noise, the sys...

The lack of a reliable and secure repository for raw data is a major problem facing science. While there are various repositories for ‘processed’ information these have substantial limitations and thus only serve a portion of the need (and the community), and importantly cannot store ‘raw’ data. Therefore there is an essential need for such an entity. This can be accomplished by providing long ...

Games have been used as a tool to introduce older people to digital technology. Here we are developing a gameful system to facilitate the social interactions between older people and young adults in a community run club. We discuss opportunities for gamification as it relates to our current study using a local running group as platform for supporting older people in gaining confidence in integr...

The representation of abstractions through models is an over-arching theme in system development methodologies. In order to express all the subtleties of complex systems, methodologies suggest the use of several models, with each representing some aspects of the universe of discourse. Unfortunately, there is no universal agreement about which aspects of the existing and/or the new information s...

In the historical context of plant systematics over the last 50 years, systematics is examined in terms of where it is now, where it is headed, where it should be, and how it should get there. Issues and concerns of the past decades are still with us today. Molecular systematics has become the over-arching field in systematics, but each of eight other areas (genome, chromosomes, morphology and ...

This paper describes a novel application of semantic web technologies to support undergraduate students’ learning in Plant Sciences. The pedagogical context focuses upon a field trip, seeking to enhance students’ familiarity with plant species they will encounter in the field and making links to over-arching concepts in the wider taught course. Semantic web technologies were selected as a poten...

Canonical subjects of eventive predicates are agentive and animate—so goes one of the over-arching, and idealized, generalizations of argument realization1. As robust as this generalization is, caveats are always made (e.g. Comrie 1989:107,128), in part due to a set of recalcitrant counter-examples, known as “instrumental subjects”, which violate this generalization on both counts. A paradigm c...