The mathematical research of William Parry FRS

In this article we survey the mathematical research of the late William (Bill) Parry, FRS

War and Moral Consistency

Provides an opinionated overview of some recent debates within the ethics of war

The idea of the record

This paper examines the idea of the sports record and its relation to our ideas of excellence, achievement and progress. It begins by recovering and reviewing the work of Richard Mandell, whose definition of the record emphasizes three central ideas: statistic, athletic and recognition. It then considers the work of Henning Eichberg, Allen Guttmann and Mandell, from the 1970s onwards, on the genesis of the modern sports record, explaining and developing their ideas via a distinction between descriptive and emulative records, and between different kinds of emulative records. This then permits an analysis of contemporary athletic and sports records. The idea of the significant record will also be advanced, offering the four-minute mile as an example, in an attempt to explicate our continuing fascination with such exceptional achievements. It then considers the contribution of recent discussions of sport technologies and the logic of quantifiable progress, and tries to put our obsession with records in perspective as but one way in which we respond to and evaluate sporting performance

An examination of e-HRM as a means to increase the value of the HR function

This article examines the potential use of e-human resource management (e-HRM) as ameans to increase the value of the human resources (HR) function, within theframework of the resource-based view. Past research has suggested that e-HRM maysupport the HR function in becoming more efficient, improving service delivery andadopting a greater role in delivering the firm's business strategy. The results from alarge-scale survey across 12 countries showed that e-HRM may help HR to increase itsvalue by becoming more strategic, but found no evidence of cost savings due toreductions in HR headcount. This suggests that organisations are using e-HRM in orderto redeploy HR practitioners from transactional work to more strategic and value-addedactivities

Circe and the Poets: Theocritus IX. 35-36

published or submitted for publicatio

Reid on knowledge and justification in Physical Education

[FIRST PARAGRAPHS] To my knowledge, very little has been written on the educational justification of PE activities for the last decade. Since PE now does have a place on the National Curriculum, albeit arguably a minor one, the justification issue does seem to have been put on the back burner by the profession. In a recent and welcome addition to the literature, Reid revisits the debate, outlining two ‘conventional assumptions’ made by what he calls the ‘new orthodoxy’ in PE: 1. The ‘early Hirstian’ account3, which sees knowledge as propositional, and education as academic. When applied to PE, this suggests: 2. The distinction between practical performance and the ‘theory’ related to it - i.e. the propositional knowledge of Human Movement Science (HMS). The paper is a critique of these two assumptions, and a defence of the claim that PE ‘can indeed satisfy the knowledge requirements of education; but ... without making claims to academic significance’ (p95)

Two Parameters for Three Dimensional Wetting Transitions

Critical effects at complete and critical wetting in three dimensions are studied using a coupled effective Hamiltonian H[s(y),\ell]. The model is constructed via a novel variational principle which ensures that the choice of collective coordinate s(y) near the wall is optimal. We highlight the importance of a new wetting parameter \Omega(T) which has a strong influence on critical properties and allows the status of long-standing Monte-Carlo simulation controversies to be re-examined.Comment: 4 pages RevTex, 2 encapsulated postscript figures, to appear in Europhys. Let

A Survey of Spherically Symmetric Spacetimes

We survey many of the important properties of spherically symmetric spacetimes as follows. We present several different ways of describing a spherically symmetric spacetime and the resulting metrics. We then focus our discussion on an especially useful form of the metric of a spherically symmetric spacetime in polar-areal coordinates and its properties. In particular, we show how the metric component functions chosen are extremely compatible with notions in Newtonian mechanics. We also show the monotonicity of the Hawking mass in these coordinates. As an example, we discuss how these coordinates and the metric can be used to solve the spherically symmetric Einstein-Klein-Gordon equations. We conclude with a brief mention of some applications of these properties.Comment: 27 pages, 1 figure, Analysis and Mathematical Physics, 201