When users are searching for information, they quickly read documents to assess their usefulness. This brief action / termed document triage / will often be undertaken many times in the pursuit of finding enough information to satisfy one particular need. The user may attempt different searches through a system such as Google, or browse a catalogue of documents, but in either case, they will regularly need to open a digital document such as a web page or electronic book (PDF) to evaluate its real relevance. Experimental evidence demonstrates that the judgements made in these short reviews of documents play a significant role in the overall success of a user's information seeking. There are frequent errors made in rejecting relevant material, and selecting irrelevant material for further reading. Only substantial further effort by the user, in wasted close reading of unhelpful material and repeated attempts to locate relevant information will finally achieve a sufficiently successful outcome for most searches. This is clearly inefficient. This project will scrutinise the impact that the interaction between the user and the document display software has on the user's decision making during this process. Driven by the goal to optimise the outcome of human effort, it will examine the positive and negative factors that affect the quality of relevance decisions during the initial reading of a document.While users are reading a document primarily to assess its relevance, there are many other events that can be triggered at the same time. New information needs can be identified, answers to another question can be unexpectedly found, and alternative terminology for a new search discovered. These secondary activities can have dramatic impacts on the user's search plans, but there is limited understanding of the related needs of users. In physical environments, these goals are usually tracked using notebooks, scraps of paper and human memory. Digital information-seeking tools provide no replacement for these tools, and thus existing practice is usually continued alongside electronic searching.Motivated by this gap, this research will refine our understanding of goal-tracking during information seeking. This improved knowledge will be used to design provide useful digital tools to support this work that integrate with existing information seeking facilities such as search engines and document organisation software.There are a number of challenges to address in achieving these objectives. Relevant data, from which good models of human behaviour can be built, is in short supply. Though related areas, such as the detailed reading of longer texts, have been studied, these findings, and the data that underpins them, cannot be applied directly. User observations of human searchers in physical environments provide insights that may prove false when using computer software. The users of paper-based books are themselves limited by the properties of the books they use. New methods may be available digitally that paper cannot supply, and digital reproductions of paper-based behaviour may prove ineffective due to differences between the two mediums.At present, software designers can only intuit the best interactions for the document reader applications to use. These software tools were often originally designed to support the download and printing of documents, and already include features that support the systematic reading of longer documents. Scientists currently lack the theoretical insights to recommend effective solutions for supporting the triage reading of documents.Document triage plays a central role in the decision-making processes that drive information seeking. A deeper understanding of document triage will make a significant contribution to the ongoing development of scientific understanding of the information seeking process as a whole

Past climate change provides a critical baseline against which to compare present and future warming. Unfortunately, however, although numerous reconstructions spanning the last ice age have been made, most of the records cannot be precisely correlated to one another. The main problem is the vast majority of records have been radiocarbon dated for which no internationally-accepted calibration curve exists, precluding the placement of reconstructions on a calendar timescale and preventing robust comparisons with high-resolution and absolutely dated sequences (such as ice cores). This is a significant problem for the scientific community. 'Calibration' of radiocarbon-dated records can result in the conclusion that climate change led, lagged or was synchronous around the world depending on which conversion is used, preventing the scientific community from gaining a detailed understanding of mechanisms of change in the Earth system. An accurate and precise radiocarbon calibration curve should be based on an absolutely dated record that has carbon incorporated directly from the atmosphere at the time of formation. Tree rings have proven to be an excellent resource for this purpose. At the moment, the internationally-accepted absolutely-dated calibration curve based on North American and European tree-ring dated material only extends back to 12,410 years; the prospect of significantly extending the records in the northern hemisphere is not high due to destruction of material by past ice sheets. Buried in peat bogs across northern New Zealand are ancient conifer trees called kauri. We know of nowhere else in the world with such a rich resource of subfossil wood that is capable of capturing the complete range of radiocarbon. The time span preserved within these bogs is truly enormous; spanning more than 130,000 years. These trees are of vast proportions and almost perfectly preserved; individual trees can measure up to 4 metres across and live for up to 2000 years. Within this precious archive is an annual record of changing atmospheric radiocarbon levels and past climate. This is a unique resource. Unfortunately, however, the timber is also highly-prized for household furniture, arts and crafts. The result is the buried wood is being mined at an alarming rate and will be exhausted within ten years. In this project, we will collect and analyze the kauri before it is lost forever. We will focus on undertaking comprehensive dating of the tree rings to determine changing levels of radiocarbon in the atmosphere using ancient logs that have been collected within the period spanning 30,000 to 11,700 years ago. The results from this study will help to precisely calibrate radiocarbon-dated sequences of past climate, environmental and archaeological change, thereby helping us to improve our understanding the Earth system.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

EU – CIEMBLY addresses the need for the introduction of new forms of citizens’ participation and deliberation in EU political life and, particularly, an EU Citizens’ Assembly whose design and implementation fully addresses issues of intersectionality, inclusiveness, and equality. While there has been an admirable appetite to improve the landscape of participatory and deliberative democratic mechanisms at the EU level, this has not always been accompanied by adequate considerations of how to build these mechanisms to ensure avoidance of intersectional discrimination and the exclusion of vulnerable groups of citizens. In fact, the concept of ‘intersectionality’ within EU law has presented difficulties even without bringing into the picture the context of citizens’ democratic participation. The time is ripe to create a new participatory tool with intersectionality at the forefront. This project will provide the analytical framework and the prototype through which such a tool can be created in the form of a Citizens’ Assembly that can be established at the EU level and with features allowing for the transfer of a (modified) prototype to the national and local levels of EU Member States. To do this, the project moves from theorising to evaluating and finally piloting such a tool and concludes with recommendations. In this way, EU-CIEMBLY seeks to be the first project that uses an academic and theoretical understanding of issues of intersectionality, equality, and power relations in the design of an innovative and inclusive EU Citizens’ Assembly.

Although life successfully moderates surface conditions on Earth, some events in Earth History have threatened the viability of most life forms. Arguably the most profound and long-lasting challenge in the last 2 billion years was glaciation on a near-global scale (pan-glaciation), with the best documented event being around 650 to 630 million years ago ('Marinoan' glaciation). One overaching model (Snowball Earth hypothesis) proposes that snow and ice was so widespread that the Earth become much more reflective of solar radiation and cooled to a mean temperature of around -50 degrees Celsius. Glaciation was eventually terminated by the build-up of carbon dioxide emitted from volcanoes, that was not used up by the weathering of rocks, since rocks were buried beneath the extensive snow and ice cover. Although the extremity of the cold and the way in which glaciation terminated have been challenged, there is widespread agreement that glaciation reached tropical latitudes at sea level. New data will significantly constrain future modelling efforts. We have recently made a breakthrough in generating a new suite of chemical data on exceptionally well-preserved carbonate precipitates in saline glacial lakes in the Wilsonbreen Formation rocks of Svalbard, thought to be the same age as glacial deposits found on all the continents and referred to as 'Marinoan'. Firstly we find that in terms of oxygen isotopes, these carbonates are the most evaporative yet discovered and so must have formed in a hyperarid environment. Secondly we use new discoveries about the meaning of the abundances of the isotope 17-O in relation to our measurements of sulphur isotope ratios in order to show that the atmosphere was profoundly different from that which existed during younger glaciations: the simplest explanation for it is that the atmosphere was very high in carbon dioxide. This implies that weathering was indeed inhibited by an extensive ice cover. This study and various previous studies have demonstrated the outstanding importance of the rock exposures in these remote locations to understanding this extraordinary event in Earth history - indeed they are the only place where we can find a chemical sedimentary record that allows us to understand conditions on the Earth surface and in the atmosphere. We propose to make new studies over two summer seasons in this remote field area to enable us to fully describe and archive the field relationships and collect suites of samples that will enable us to understand more clearly the preserved evidence. We will use magnetic properties to reconstruct the palaeolatitude of the glacial deposits and will try to determine the age directly by radiometric methods to see if it is consistent with the 'Marinoan'. Our favoured modern analogue for the Wilsonbreen formation saline glacial lakes are found in the intensely cold McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica. We will test this idea using physical properties of the sediment whilst the chemical properties will be used to constrain how much water is cycled through the atmosphere, how oxidizing the atmosphere was and whether carbon dioxide had already built up in the atmosphere by the time the first glacial lakes formed. Our work will also extend to the apparently warm- and cold-climate marine deposits that are found above and below two glacial units in the Svalbard in order to understand the broader context. Our work includes a number of new approaches as well as applying tried-and-tested modern methods of dating and magnetic analysis in a new area. We expect to emerge with a clear and vivid picture of the nature of the land surface during one of the most extreme cold events in the history of the planet. We will also find out whether this location could be the best place in the world to formally place a 'golden spike' at the base of the Cryogenian geological period. The information will be disseminated and archived in novel ways.