Is Britain Pulling Apart? Area Disparities in Employment, Education and Crime

This paper explores the changing extent of concentration worklessness and deprivation in Britains communities over the last twenty years and seeks to identify what shapes patterns of relative affluence and deprivation. The paper goes on to explore the evidence that there are lasting consequences from concentrated deprivation for the residents, including children. The paper address issues of employment, educational outcomes and crime victimisation. Looking at the available evidence from the UK and abroad, the evidence suggests that concentrated deprivation has little effect on employment opportunities, (e.g. moving people to more affluent neighbourhoods would make little difference), has modest effects on childrens educational outcomes and propensity to get involved in deviant behaviours but substantial effects on crime victimisation. The paper then concludes on what policy agendas could be developed to address concentrated deprivation and above all its consequences on residents outcomes.neighbourhoods, employment, education, crime

A Holographic Path to the Turbulent Side of Gravity

We study the dynamics of a 2+1 dimensional relativistic viscous conformal fluid in Minkowski spacetime. Such fluid solutions arise as duals, under the "gravity/fluid correspondence", to 3+1 dimensional asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AAdS) black brane solutions to the Einstein equation. We examine stability properties of shear flows, which correspond to hydrodynamic quasinormal modes of the black brane. We find that, for sufficiently high Reynolds number, the solution undergoes an inverse turbulent cascade to long wavelength modes. We then map this fluid solution, via the gravity/fluid duality, into a bulk metric. This suggests a new and interesting feature of the behavior of perturbed AAdS black holes and black branes, which is not readily captured by a standard quasinormal mode analysis. Namely, for sufficiently large perturbed black objects (with long-lived quasinormal modes), nonlinear effects transfer energy from short to long wavelength modes via a turbulent cascade within the metric perturbation. As long wavelength modes have slower decay, this lengthens the overall lifetime of the perturbation. We also discuss various implications of this behavior, including expectations for higher dimensions, and the possibility of predicting turbulence in more general gravitational scenarios.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures; v2: references added, and several minor change

China on the move : travel, exile, and migration in Chinese literature and film of the 20th century

During no previous century in China’s long history has society experienced more profound and far-reaching changes than during that nation’s long twentieth century. The contact with Western modernity and institutional change during the late Qing dynasty, the end of dynastic rule and the birth of the Republic, the Pacific War and the Civil War, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan’s gradual democratization and finally the era of opening and reform in China under Deng Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904−97) and the ensuing economic rise are only some of the key historical events that have profoundly transformed Chinese society and culture. What these events have in common is that they all gave rise to various forms of displacement, both voluntary and involuntary, and both internally within China proper as well as from China to the outside world. This special issue intends to explore the degree to which displacement in the form of travel, migration, and exile has given rise to modern literary and cinematic works and how intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers have responded to the various forms of displacement in their works. The theme of this special issue is deliberately broad in scope. The editors believe that only if studied over the entire span of the twentieth century and in all its various facets can the impact of displacement on the creative imagination of Chinese writers and filmmakers be adequately explored

Trade Unions and Training Practices in British Workplaces

We use establishment-level data from the 1991 Employers Manpower and Skills Practices Survey (EMSPS) and individual-level data from the Autumn 1993 Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) to investigate the links between training provision and workplace unionization. We focus on two training measures, an incidence variable and an intensity variable. Both are strongly positively related to whether unions are recognised in the workplace. Working in a unionized establishment substantially raises the probability of receiving training and the amount of training received by British workers. We view these results as confirming the potentially important role that British unions can play in developing skill formation.

X-ray emission from an FU Ori star in early outburst: HBC 722

Aims: We conducted the first X-ray observations of the newly erupting FU Ori-type outburst in HBC 722 (V2493 Cyg) with the aim to characterize its X-ray behavior and near-stellar environment during early outburst. Methods: We used data from the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray observatories to measure X-ray source temperatures and luminosities as well as the gas column densities along the line of sight toward the source. Results: We report a Chandra X-ray detection of HBC 722 with an X-ray luminosity of LX ~ 4E30 erg s-1. The gas column density exceeds values expected from optical extinction and standard gas-to-dust ratios. We conclude that dust-free gas masses are present around the star, such as strong winds launched from the inner disk, or massive accretion columns. A tentative detection obtained by XMM-Newton two years earlier after an initial optical peak revealed a fainter X-ray source with only weak absorption.Comment: Accepted for Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters on September 17, 201

Small representations, string instantons, and Fourier modes of Eisenstein series (with an appendix by D. Ciubotaru and P. Trapa)

This paper concerns some novel features of maximal parabolic Eisenstein series at certain special values of their analytic parameter s. These series arise as coefficients in the R4 and D4R4 interactions in the low energy expansion of scattering amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric string theory reduced to D=10-d dimensions on a torus T^d, d<8. For each d these amplitudes are automorphic functions on the rank d+1 symmetry group E_d+1. Of particular significance is the orbit content of the Fourier modes of these series when expanded in three different parabolic subgroups, corresponding to certain limits of string theory. This is of interest in the classification of a variety of instantons that correspond to minimal or next-to-minimal BPS orbits. In the limit of decompactification from D to D+1 dimensions many such instantons are related to charged 1/2-BPS or 1/4-BPS black holes with euclidean world-lines wrapped around the large dimension. In a different limit the instantons give nonperturbative corrections to string perturbation theory, while in a third limit they describe nonperturbative contributions in eleven-dimensional supergravity. A proof is given that these three distinct Fourier expansions have certain vanishing coefficients that are expected from string theory. In particular, the Eisenstein series for these special values of s have markedly fewer Fourier coefficients than typical ones. The corresponding mathematics involves showing that the wavefront sets of the Eisenstein series are supported on only certain coadjoint nilpotent orbits - just the minimal and trivial orbits in the 1/2-BPS case, and just the next-to-minimal, minimal and trivial orbits in the 1/4-BPS case. Thus as a byproduct we demonstrate that the next-to-minimal representations occur automorphically for E6, E7, and E8, and hence the first two nontrivial low energy coefficients are exotic theta-functions.Comment: v3: 127 pp. Minor changes. Final version to appear in the Special Issue in honor of Professor Steve Ralli