What is behavioural medicine? Commentary on definition proposed by Dekker, Stauder & Penedo

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

13 Years of Timing of PSR B1259-63

This paper summarizes the results of 13 years of timing observations of a unique binary pulsar, PSR B1259$-$63, which has a massive B2e star companion. The data span encompasses four complete orbits and includes the periastron passages in 1990, 1994, 1997 and 2000. Changes in dispersion measure occurring around the 1994, 1997 and 2000 periastrons are measured and accounted for in the timing analysis. There is good evidence for a small glitch in the pulsar period in 1997 August, not long after the 1997 periastron, and a significant frequency second derivative indicating timing noise. We find that spin-orbit coupling with secular changes in periastron longitude and projected semi-major axis ($x$) cannot account for the observed period variations over the whole data set. While fitting the data fairly well, changes in pulsar period parameters at each periastron seem ruled out both by X-ray observations and by the large apparent changes in pulsar frequency derivative. Essentially all of the systematic period variations are accounted for by a model consisting of the 1997 August glitch and step changes in $x$ at each periastron. These changes must be due to changes in the orbit inclination, but we can find no plausible mechanism to account for them. It is possible that timing noise may mask the actual changes in orbital parameters at each periastron, but the good fit to the data of the $x$ step-change model suggests that short-term timing noise is not significant.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted by MNRA

The 48th Highlanders in Sicily

Account by Lieutenant-Colonel I.S. Johnston, Officer Commanding 48 Highlanders given on 14 August 1943 at the Battalion Rest Area near SCORDIA

The telephone in Scotland

A social history of the use of the telephone in Scotland

Shifting perspectives: holography and the emergence of technical communities

Holography, the technology of three-dimensional imaging, has repeatedly been reconceptualised by new communities. Conceived in 1947 as a means of improving electron microscopy, holography was revitalized in the early 1960s by engineer-scientists at classified laboratories. The invention promoted the transformation of a would-be discipline (optical engineering) and spawned limited artist-scientist collaborations. However, a separate artisanal community promoted a distinct countercultural form of holography via a revolutionary technology: the sandbox optical table. Their tools, sponsorship, products, literature and engagement with wider culture differentiated the communities, which instituted a limited ‘technological trade’. The subject strikingly illustrates the co-evolution of new technology along with highly dissimilar user groups, neither of which fostered the secure establishment of a profession or discipline. The case generalises the concept of 'research-technologists' and 'peripheral science', and extends the ideas of Langdon Winner by demonstrating how the political dimensions of a technology can be important but evanescent in the growth of technical communities

Partners in Austerity: Jamaica, the United States and the International Monetary Fund

This paper looks at Jamaica's ongoing relationship with the International Monetary Fund and multilateral development banks, its recent economic performance and the impact on development of a persistently high debt burden. It finds that after 20 years of negative average annual per capita GDP growth, Jamaica continues to be plagued by high debt and low growth.Now in the third year of an IMF-backed economic program, Jamaica is running the most austere budget in the world, with a primary surplus of 7.5 percent of GDP. After two debt restructurings, both as preconditions to receiving IMF support, Jamaica still has a debt-to-GDP ratio of nearly 140 percent, and net flows from multilateral banks turned negative for two consecutive years. The paper finds that multilateral debt relief may be necessary for Jamaica to escape from its unsustainable debt burden, low-growth trap

The construction of colorimetry by committee

This paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual factors involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, which stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar period. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American and British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, communities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to negotiate a compromise between their desire for a quantitative system of description and the perceived complexity and human-centeredness of color judgement. These debates were played out not in the laboratory but rather in institutionalized encounters on standards committees. Groups such as this constitute a relatively unexplored historiographic and social site of investigation. The heterogeneity of such committees, and their products, highlight the problems of identifying and following such ephemeral historical 'actors'

Conjugacy classes of parabolic subalgebras in complex semi-simple lie algebras

For a complex semi simple Lie algebra g, Richardson's dense orbit theorem gives a map between conjugacy classes of parabolic subalgebras in g and conjugacy classes of nilpotent elements. Unfortunately, this map is not surjective, in general, and hence does not give a direct classification of the nilpotent conjugacy classes in g. Despite this, the theorem is used by Bala and Carter to produce an indirect classification of the nilpotent conjugacy classes in g. The map is not injective, either, and this thesis attempts to discover a necessary and sufficient condition for two parabolic subalgebras to give the same nilpotent conjugacy class under the above map. Springer conjectured that associated parabolics would give the same nilpotent conjugacy class. The problem was also raised in another form by Dixmier in his work concerning the distribution of nilpotent polarisable elements in g. He conjectured a generalisation of Kostant's results on the regular nilpotent elements. We prove both these conjectures correct, the method of proof being inspired by Dixmier's work. Unfortunately, the necessary and sufficient condition is clearly more complicated than this and we give two examples (one trivial, one non-trivial) of non-associated parabolics giving the same nilpotent conjugacy class under Richard son's ma