169,574 research outputs found
Recent work on French rural history.
The purpose of this review is to take stock as the historiography of rural France pauses for breath following the headlong expansion of the post-Second World War decades.It examines some of the themes that continue to exert an attraction on scholars,and also some of the most recent attempts to challenge and reformulate the research agendas inherited from the Annales historians.The works discussed below raise questions concerning growth and stagnation in the rural economy,the basic characteristics of the rural community,and the role of quantification in rural history
Housing and council tax benefits administration in England: a long-term perspective on the performance of the local government delivery system
This paper evaluates the performance of the Council Tax and Housing Benefits Administration Services delivered by local authorities since the current system for the delivery of these benefits was introduced. During this period the performance of local government has been regulated and influenced by four successive national delivery regimes imposed by central governments namely Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT); Best Value (BV); Comprehensive Performance Assessments (CPA) and Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAA). An earlier paper (XXXX et al. forthcoming) examined the CPA period in detail and found a significant improvement in performance across all types of authorities in all parts of the country during this period. The current paper is intended to complement this earlier analysis and provide a longer term perspective on the performance of the benefits service under successive regimes between 1993 and 2010. The findings show that under CCT the performance of the system was poor, there were wide variations in individual local authority’s performance, with many acknowledged inadequacies in the system and unacceptably high levels of fraud. However in this period and in the subsequent BV period the antecedents of some of the tools and techniques subsequently used to drive improvement in the CPA era were either put in place or were being developed
Comprehensive performance assessment and public services improvement in England? A case study of the benefits administration service in local government
The purpose of this paper is to independently evaluate the impact of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment regime on one particular public service, namely the provision of Council Tax and Housing Benefits distributed by local authorities throughout the course of the regime. This service was assessed in every iteration of the CPA methodologies and it included one of the few key performance indicators (KPIs) where the definition of the performance indicator, the means of collection and the public reporting of its results, remained the same throughout the CPA period between 2002 and 2008
Automatic assembly design project 1968/9 :|breport of economic planning committee
Investigations into automatic assembly systems have
been carried out. The conclusions show the major
features to be considered by a company operating
the machine to assemble the contact block with regard
to machine output and financial aspects.
The machine system has been shown to be economically
viable for use under suitable conditions, but the
contact block is considered to be unsuitable for
automatic assembly.
Data for machine specification, reliability and
maintenance has been provided
Reflectionless measures and the Mattila-Melnikov-Verdera uniform rectifiability theorem
A new proof is given of the Mattila-Melnikov-Verdera theorem on the uniform
rectifiability of an Ahlfors-David regular measure whose associated Cauchy
transform operator is bounded.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure
Not just old and sick - the 'will to health' in later life
The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism in the 1970s was the prelude to a period of greater individualisation within societies and was accompanied by an increase in the importance of consumption as a way of organising social relations. During the same period there was also an expansion in the discourses aimed at enhancing the government of the autonomous self. One such discourse operates around what has been termed the ‘will to health’: it suggests that health has become a required goal for individual behaviour and has become synonymous with health itself. The generational groups whose lifecourses were most exposed to these changes are now approaching later life. We explore the extent to which social transformations related to risk, consumption and individualisation are reflected in the construction of later-life identities around health and ageing. We examine how the growth in health-related ‘technologies of the self’ have fostered a distinction between natural and normal ageing, wherein the former is associated with coming to terms with physical decline and the latter associated with maintaining norms of self-care aimed at delaying such decline. Finally, we consider anti-ageing medicine as a developing arena for the construction of later-life identities and discuss the implications of the social changes for researching later life
The segregation of starless and protostellar clumps in the Hi-GAL l=224deg region
Stars form in dense, dusty structures, which are embedded in larger clumps of
molecular clouds often showing a clear filamentary structure on large scales (>
1pc). One of the best-studied regions in the Hi-GAL survey can be observed
toward the l=224deg field. Here, a filamentary region has been studied and it
has been found that protostellar clumps are mostly located along the main
filament, whereas starless clumps are detected off this filament and are
instead found on secondary, less prominent filaments. We want to investigate
this segregation effect and how it may affect the clumps properties. We mapped
the 12CO(1-0) line and its main three isotopologues toward the two most
prominent filaments observed toward the l=224deg field using the Mopra radio
telescope, in order to set observational constraints on the dynamics of these
structures and the associated starless and protostellar clumps. Compared to the
starless clumps, the protostellar clumps are more luminous, more turbulent and
lie in regions where the filamentary ambient gas shows larger linewidths. We
see evidence of gas flowing along the main filament, but we do not find any
signs of accretion flow from the filament onto the Hi-GAL clumps. We analyze
the radial column density profile of the filaments and their gravitational
stability. The more massive and highly fragmented main filament appears to be
thermally supercritical and gravitationally bound, assuming that all of the
non-thermal motion is contributing thermal-like support, suggesting a later
stage of evolution compared to the secondary filament. The status and
evolutionary phase of the Hi-GAL clumps would then appear to correlate with
that of the host filament.Comment: Accepted for publication on "Astronomy and Astrophysics
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