As autumn gets well underway and a noticeable chill appears in the air, the natural inclination is to shift to heartier meals to sustain you. Luckily, there are plenty of satisfying seasonal ingredients available that will taste their best at this time of year. Even better, choosing food that is in season allows you to be more environmentally aware.

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Game season

Various types of game are in season in October and these can form the base of many tasty meals. Pheasant can be roasted and accompanied by a range of root vegetables, or turned into a terrine. Grouse and partridge may also be at their best at this time of year.

Vegetables

With Halloween fast approaching, there is no doubt pumpkins are one vegetable that experiences a surge in popularity at this time of year. Pumpkin can be used in sweet or savoury dishes, from a soup starter to the American favourite of pumpkin pie. Its cousin, butternut squash, is also in season and can make a tasty accompaniment to a variety of dishes when roasted.

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Celeriac might not look like it, but it is closely related to celery and has a similar taste. Try roasting or mashing it. Other vegetables in season at this time of year include radicchio and its cousin chicory, beetroot, Swiss chard, cabbage, kale, swede, turnip and a wide range of different wild mushrooms.

Fruit

If you want something to accompany the seasonal meals you provide in your restuarant or bar, post mix suppliers such as https://empireuk.com/ can supply a range of draught soft drinks. You may also want to try fruit juices based on those fruits that are in season.

Summer berries may have faded, but others fruits are just coming into their prime. Apples can be eaten fresh from the tree, used as an accompaniment to pork or added to a fruit crumble. Quince also flourishes from October to December, and plums are another versatile fruit that can be used in anything from a jam to a dessert.

Elderberries are not a good fruit to eat undercooked, let alone raw, but they can be added to muffins and puddings. This kind of cooking can reduce their flavour, but their colour can add a bright spot to pickles and chutneys. Other berries that are available at this time of year include blackberries and cranberries.

One of the most important aspects of any clinical trial is ensuring the safety of participants. This means there must be clear channels of communication between clinicians and patients. A new mobile technology aims to assist in this process and more generally improve the speed and efficiency of clinical research.

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New Technology

Parexel International Corporation is a biopharmaceutical firm based in Boston. It is currently looking to develop mobile and wearable technology to assist with clinical research and drug development. Recently, it announced a range of new products as part of this endeavour, all based around the Perceptive Cloud platform.

One notable new product utilises Microsoft’s Azure App Services. It will allow clinicians and healthcare teams to receive data from patients in a quicker and more efficient manner. This in turn should alert them to any immediate threat to the patient’s safety, and therefore reduce the possibility of serious injury or death to patients. As there are strict rules around the conducting of clinical trials in the United Kingdom to ensure patient safety, this is an important step.

Other technological improvements include an expansion of Parexel’s available platforms. Both Clinphone and DataLabs (an electronic technology for data capture) will be able to connect with Parexel’s patient sensor. Artificial intelligence may also be able to help the sensor transfer data and predict patient adherence during trials. Any technology that can assist in adaptive phase 1 clinical studies, such as those carried out by https://www.richmondpharmacology.com/specialist-services/adaptive-phase-i-studies, will be a welcome way to improve research quality.

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Other Research

Another way in which Parexel has researched the potential of wearables in clinical trials is in collaboration with the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi. They aimed to combine their expertise, whether clinical, logistical, regulatory or technical, to study how wearables could speed up the drug development process.

Digital technology is becoming an important focus in life science research. Parexel is not the only company to experiment with mobile and wearable devices or artificial intelligence. One start-up at UC Berkley recently announced a collaboration with Sanofi to use artificial intelligence to search through studies and find those that are most relevant to pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders.

At the Bio2018 Conference, many experts expressed the hope that collaborations between life science companies and digital companies could lead to further improvements in data collection and study efficiency.

When there’s a need for an adhesive that will give a very strong, permanent bond, most people reach for the structural adhesives. These are usually made from thermosetting resins, but the resins require either a hardener (curing agent), a catalyst or the application of heat.

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Polyurethanes are mega-strength thermosetting elastomers, and they are also counted as structural adhesives. Let’s look at the six main types of structural adhesives, so that you can choose the best one for the job.

1. Epoxies

Epoxies are highly versatile and provide strong bonding with plastics, glass and metals. They’re the most widely used structural adhesive https://www.adhesives.org/adhesives-sealants/adhesives-sealants-overview/adhesive-technologies/chemically-curing/two-component-(2-c)/epoxy-adhesives). When they have cured, they’ll resist chemicals and temperature extremes, with high cohesion and very low shrinkage. Widely used in industrial applications.

2. Acrylics

Acrylic adhesives are often called reactive acrylics, to distinguish them from other acrylic resins used when pressure is a key factor. Starting as thin liquids, they can form very strong bonds through the polymerisation process. Acrylics are designed to cure, even in room temperature air, in a matter of minutes or hours. You’ll recognise an acrylic adhesive through its pungent odour – some love it, some can’t abide it.

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3. Anaerobic acrylics

These only cure when there’s no air in or around the resin. They mainly consist of (meth)acrylic monomers and are widely used where there’s a requirement for a metal bonding adhesive (www.ct1ltd.com/product-applications/metal-to-metal-adhesive), particularly between tightly fitting metal joints. They can augment the seals on joints or threads, or provide a hold when assemblies are being mechanically joined.

4. Cyanoacrylates

These are the famous “super glues”, beloved of practical jokers everywhere, because they bond and cure in seconds. However, they need moisture to start the polymerisation process and aren’t brilliant at resisting moisture or heat.

5. Urethanes

Polyurethanes give a tough bond and because they are flexible, they are widely used to bond materials such as foils, films and elastomers. They have good adhesion to sheet moulding materials and perform well at low temperatures. However, you need to apply a primer to get them to bond effectively to metals.

6. Silicones

These adhesives have outstanding heat resistance and are able to bond to polyethylene and fluorocarbons. They are used either as pressure sensitive formulations, or as solvent solutions.

Whatever your business, people who visit your company need to be treated well. If they are, they’re more likely to visit you again or purchase your products. They might write an online review – one which can influence a much wider audience – or recommend you to friends, family or colleagues. What, though, makes a great visitor experience? And how do you make sure your visitors have just that?

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First Impressions

The first thing you need to think about when it comes to creating a great visitor experience is what you want it to look like. Create a visitor experience strategy and implement it across your organisation. What do you want a visitor to think and feel when they walk through the door? Will they think it’s easy to find where they are going? Will they feel like they are being made to feel welcome? First impressions are ones which help form lasting impressions for visitors, so you need to get this right.

A Warm Welcome

Your staff are key to providing a great visitor experience. They should be warm, friendly and helpful, answering any questions your visitors might have and making them feel welcome. Think about this when you recruit any customer-facing staff and when you’re looking at training for them.

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Making Things Easy

Once a visitor arrives, they shouldn’t need to jump through hoops to get to meet who they want to meet or see what they want to see. Streamline any sign-in processes you have, using technology if you can to make things easy for visitors. The visitor management system UK based https://www.ofec.co.uk/web-and-software-development-services/digital-visitors-and-staff-signing-in-book.aspx offers might be the ideal solution here.

Gather Feedback

No matter how good a visitor experience you’ve created, you can always get better. Ask people who’ve visited you what went well and what you could’ve done better. This doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Many shops and museums now have a simple button people can press to say how they felt, for example, but it can help you understand how you are doing and how to improve things.

And, finally, remember to say thank you for visiting. Your visitors will appreciate it. They are more likely to return and more likely to recommend you to others. As a result, your business is more likely to succeed.

The future of telecommunications is upon us and it has come in the shape of the VoIP phone. Once upon a time your use of telecommunications was a pretty simple choice. You bought a phone from British Telecom and then just waited weeks for it to be installed into your home by an engineer. There was little choice and as it rang on an analogue system you were reliant on wires transmitting the signal underground or through telegraph poles. This was an easy system to interrupt and it wasn’t that far removed from the one laid down by Alexander Graham Bell.

Once that technology was in place it was just a simple matter of laying miles and miles of cable across the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. As with any analogue or non-digital system there were lots of situations that could break up that signal. The poles could fall over, although they were cemented in, a gale force wind could send them toppling, severing the line. Alternatively some other kind of accident like a tree being felled across the line or the possibility of lightning strikes meant that the public or businesses would be faced with weeks of inconvenience as the aforementioned British telecom engineer had to get out in his van and find the fault and fix it. This took a lot of time.

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The other factor was a box with a bedazzling conundrum of wires that only a select few engineers could fathom with the help of a very big guide. One wrong wire in the wrong hole and that was you cut off. That meant another contact to the British Telecom engineer to send them back out to the exchange. The other thing that the old analogue system could not deal with was atmospherics, heatwaves etc and also the quality of the copper that was used to keep the line in check. If that corroded, then the signal became week and you could barely hear the other person.

Originally this was run as an extension of the post office and they would employ armies of women to connect people via the exchange system. Again, if the lady plugged the wrong connector in the wrong hole you ended up talking to someone completely different to the person you wanted to. Exactly how these women kept track of what was where is a mystery. They were highly prized for their speed and deftness of touch plus their precision. It was a role that was for once done exclusively by women and brought about the realisation of the importance of the skills women brought to the workplace and how these differed to those skills that men possessed.

As the years moved on the technology for the phone began to improve dramatically as new ways of working also took a hold. Personal phones in the home began to become cheaper and business also learned the advantage of reaching a whole new market. This was especially lucrative as the only people to own phones were the upper classes and they had plenty of money to spend!

This brand of telephone marketing would grow as the phone became more affordable, so it was not only the social benefits of keeping in touch with friends and family on long distances there was also the chance to buy and sell goods and services that previously were not available. This also saw the rise of the phone directory basically a massive book full of everyone’s address and phone number, hard to believe now and the famous Yellow pages the internet of contractors, businesses and public offices in paper form. No wonder there were world records based on ripping them apart.

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There was still the problem of the poor reception as the signal was based on the old analogue system. One of the most amusing and potential difficult errors that the system brought up was the crossed line where someone else conversation suddenly butted into yours. Rather than use the direct landline system radio waves were also used but again these were easily disturbed by atmospheric conditions so that at times the system was unusable. We had to wait a good few years for the onset of digital to make life a bit easier.

The best new feature of the digital age is the use of the VoIP phone. All that analogue waves and copper wiring are redundant as you can use this voice over the internet protocol system to communicate without the worry of all the things we’ve mentioned above. You will need to find a VoIP provider that is given the technology by an International voip wholesale provider like https://www.idtexpress.com/ but once you do all you then have to have is an internet connection. No is no more need for British telecom engineers fiddling about with wires. A truly modern improvement.