The alternative vote re-visited
Electoral reform re-emerged in the 1980s as a significant issue in British politics. After a long spell in which the established system was very widely accepted, warts and all, political developments in the last ten years have undermined satisfaction with the system. The 1983 and 1987 general elections produced a particularly disproportional relationship between the parties' votes and seats, and thereby highlighted the inherent unfairness of first-past-the-post. The Liberals and Social Democrats presented electoral reform as a central feature of their Alliance programme, and the Nationalists and Greens advocated systems other than first-past-the-post. Since 1987 growing concern over the Conservatives' electoral dominance has prompted renewed interest in electoral pacts between out-of-office parties, and thus in electoral systems which might facilitate such pacts. As well as doubts about the adequacy of the electoral system for the House of Commons, the proposals to create Assemblies for Scotland, Wales and the English regions, and Labour's recent proposals to establish an elected Upper House, involve the question of the electoral system that should be used. The 1990 Labour Conference recommended that the party consider the creation of a Speakers' Conference to examine the whole issue of electoral reform.
Turning Dreams into Reality
Gifted children with a flair for the qualities required by successful technologists could make a significant contribution to the future prosperity of the U.K. The science based project team have developed ways of explaining to young people the concepts on which the subjects are based and the framework surrounding design and technological activity. The team have sought to locate and encourage gifted young technologists by working directly with them in an interactive and challenging environment. The teaching methods which are described in the paper range from half day classroom sessions, weekend courses and one week project based activities.
Research on Control and Planning of Soft-Wing UAV for Haze Removal
The existence of fog and haze has caused great pollution to the environment. The research of removing haze is a hot topic in recent years. In this paper, a special haze removal algorithm based on Soft- Wing UAVis proposed. In this algorithm, two track control strategies are designed based on the Soft-Wing UAV model transfer function. A SIMULINK platform based mathematical model of Soft-Wing UAV is built to testified effectiveness of the two track control strategies. An autonomous ergodic-planning algorithm with greedy strategy and foldback algorithm for Soft-Wing UAV is designed. Within the algorithm, the haze regional has been modelled, the cost matrix is constructed, and the planning and ergodic strategy is proposed. Finally, the experimental results validates the reliability of the algorithm in the application of haze removal with the proposed evaluation Index.