national development squad for the 1988 Commonwealth Games triathlon team, from which I withdrew prematurely with what my coach insisted on calling a ‘spectacularly ill-timed pregnancy’. Perhaps that’s why I ‘backed the bid’ for London 2012 and signed up as a volunteer long before I began to ask critical questions about what the Olympic brand actually means. Even in anOlympic year, almost all s...

This note describes the inside-outside algorithm. The inside-outside algorithm has very important applications to statistical models based on context-free grammars. In particular, it is used in EM estimation of probabilistic context-free grammars, and it is used in estimation of discriminative models for context-free parsing. As we will see, the inside-outside algorithm has many similarities to...

A large amount of the role of the land surveyor, land registries and land information systems is concerned with building and maintaining a land administration infrastructure where one of its primary tasks is to support the operation of an efficient and effective land market. This includes cadastral surveys to identify and subdivide land, land registry systems to support simple land trading (buy...

Museums and galleries in the UK increasingly engage with educational and social concerns; this article refers to research to evaluate two such initiatives. Evaluation of the Museum and Gallery Education Programme Phase 2, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, ends in August 2004. The research partnership to evaluate the ‘En-vision’ pilot action research programme, established by En...

We are told that an object is hidden in one of m(m < ») boxes and we are given prior probabilities p. that the object is In the i box. A search of box i costs c. and finds the object with probability a. if the object is in the box. Also, we suppose that a reward R. is earned if the object Is found in the i box. A strategy is any rule for determining when to search and if so which box. The major...

The molecular ion H3 1 is considered the cornerstone of interstellar chemistry because it initiates the reactions responsible for the production of many larger molecules. Recently discovered in dense molecular clouds, H3 1 has now been observed in the diffuse interstellar medium toward Cygnus OB2 No. 12. Analysis of H3 1 chemistry suggests that the high H3 1 column density (3.8 3 10 per square ...

Daily weight monitoring is integral to the management of heart failure (HF) [1]. Indeed, weight gain is a marker of HF decompensation, and daily weight monitoring has been associated with favorable prognosis [2]. Until now, assessment of weight has required patients to attend an in-person visit, which provides only an infrequent snapshot of their weight. Remote hovering practices have gained co...

We used an established seagrass monitoring programme to examine the short and longer-term impacts of an oil spill event on intertidal seagrass meadows. Results for potentially impacted seagrass areas were compared with existing monitoring data and with control seagrass meadows located outside of the oil spill area. Seagrass meadows were not significantly affected by the oil spill. Declines in s...