"The GRA is a good start, but there’s much more to be done”: legal change, gender diversity and recognition

Representing the civil recognition of gender transition, the Gender Recognition Act (2004) marks an important change in attitudes towards trans people; enabling the change of birth certificates and granting trans people the right to marry in their acquired gender. Arguably, these developments reflect broader social changes around the conceptualization and the practices of identity, and illustrate how questions of gendered, sexual, intimate and embodied identity and citizenship are being debated, contested and reconfigured. First we will explore understandings of ‘sex’, gender and sexuality, and the relationship between these, within the GRA. A key question for consideration is the extent to which the GRA recognises ‘gender’ as distinct from ‘sex’. The paper will move on to draw on initial research findings from an on-going ESRC funded project. The project seeks to explore the meanings and significance of the Gender Recognition Act for people who seek gender recognition and for those who choose not to, and to consider the impact of the GRA on individual and collective identity practices

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

Many capital good firms deliver products that are not strictly one-off, but instead share a certain degree of similarity with other deliveries. In the delivery of the product, they aim to balance stability and variety in their product design and processes. The issue of engineering change plays an important in how they manage to do so. Our aim is to gain more understanding into how capital good firms manage engineering change, design variety and process variety, and into the role of the product delivery strategies they thereby use. Product delivery strategies are defined as the type of engineering work that is done independent of an order and the specification freedom the customer has in the remaining part of the design. Based on the within-case and cross-case analysis of two capital good firms several mechanisms for managing engineering change, design variety and process variety are distilled. It was found that there exist different ways of (1) managing generic design information, (2) isolating large engineering changes, (3) managing process variety, (4) designing and executing engineering change processes. Together with different product delivery strategies these mechanisms can be placed within an archetypes framework of engineering change management. On one side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to open product delivery strategies, have some practices in place to investigate design reuse potential, isolate discontinuous engineering changes into the first deliveries of the product, employ ‘probe and learn’ process management principles in order to allow evolving insights to be accurately executed and have informal engineering change processes. On the other side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to a closed product delivery strategy, focus on prevention of engineering changes based on design standards, need no isolation mechanisms for discontinuous engineering changes, have formal process management practices in place and make use of closed and formal engineering change procedures. The framework should help managers to (1) analyze existing configurations of product delivery strategies, product and process designs and engineering change management and (2) reconfigure any of these elements according to a ‘misfit’ derived from the framework. Since this is one of the few in-depth empirical studies into engineering change management in the capital good sector, our work adds to the understanding on the various ways in which engineering change can be dealt with

Modelling change in individual characteristics: an axiomatic framework

Economic models describe individuals in terms of underlying characteristics, such as taste for some good, sympathy level for another player, time discount rate, risk attitude, and so on. In real life, such characteristics change through experiences: taste for Mozart changes through listening to it, sympathy for another player through observing his moves, and so on. Models typically ignore change, not just for simplicity but also because it is unclear how to incorporate change. I introduce a general axiomatic framework for defining, analysing and comparing rival models of change. I show that seemingly basic postulates on modelling change together have strong implications, like irrelevance of the order in which someone has his experiences and ‘linearity’ of change. This is a step towards placing the modelling of change on solid axiomatic grounds and enabling non-arbitrary incorporation of change into economic models

Master-equation approach to the study of phase-change processes in data storage media

We study the dynamics of crystallization in phase-change materials using a master-equation approach in which the state of the crystallizing material is described by a cluster size distribution function. A model is developed using the thermodynamics of the processes involved and representing the clusters of size two and greater as a continuum but clusters of size one (monomers) as a separate equation. We present some partial analytical results for the isothermal case and for large cluster sizes, but principally we use numerical simulations to investigate the model. We obtain results that are in good agreement with experimental data and the model appears to be useful for the fast simulation of reading and writing processes in phase-change optical and electrical memories

Green is Good, but Why? A Content Analysis of Climate Change in Children's Literature

This study is a content analysis of climate change in children’s books. Prior research has found that certain depictions may make the issue feel far away from children’s daily lives. Others have been criticized for assigning the weight of responsibility of the problem to children. This study elaborated by analyzing how climate communication via children’s books compares to scientific knowledge, ecocritical frameworks, and research on effective communication with children. Using a rubric based on these standards, 20 children’s books from recommended reading lists were assessed. Overall, common themes showed a lack of comprehensive explanations of the causes, mechanisms, and solutions and underrepresentation for the most impacted groups. Publishers, authors, librarians, and teachers can address these issues through selecting and advocating for high quality books on climate science and by designing programming to fill the gaps until there is more impactful, informative, and inclusive climate literature.Master of Science in Library Scienc

Can official advice improve mortgage-holders’ perceptions of switching? An experimental investigation. ESRI WP612, February 2019

Encouraging consumers to seek out and switch to lower-rate mortgages is important both for the individual consumer’s finances and for functioning competitive markets, but switching rates are low. We conducted an experiment with mortgage-holders to test whether official advice on how to select good mortgage products and how to navigate the switching process alters perceptions of switching. The experiment shows that the advice made consumers more sensitive to interest rate decreases and more favourable towards switching at longer terms. It also increased consumers’ confidence in their ability to select good offers. The findings imply that advice from policymakers can change perceptions and increase switching rates

Modelling change in individual characteristics: an axiomatic framework

Economic models describe individuals in terms of underlying characteristics, such as taste for some good, sympathy level for another player, time discount rate, risk attitude, and so on. In real life, such characteristics change through experiences: taste for Mozart changes through listening to it, sympathy for another player through observing his moves, and so on. Models typically ignore change, not just for simplicity but also because it is unclear how to incorporate change. I introduce a general axiomatic framework for defining, analysing and comparing rival models of change. I show that seemingly basic postulates on modelling change together have strong implications, like irrelevance of the order in which someone has his experiences and `linearity'' of change. This is a step towards placing the modelling of change on solid axiomatic grounds and enabling non-arbitrary incorporation of change into economic models.mathematical economics;

Optimal pre-scheduling of problem remappings

A large class of scientific computational problems can be characterized as a sequence of steps where a significant amount of computation occurs each step, but the work performed at each step is not necessarily identical. Two good examples of this type of computation are: (1) regridding methods which change the problem discretization during the course of the computation, and (2) methods for solving sparse triangular systems of linear equations. Recent work has investigated a means of mapping such computations onto parallel processors; the method defines a family of static mappings with differing degrees of importance placed on the conflicting goals of good load balance and low communication/synchronization overhead. The performance tradeoffs are controllable by adjusting the parameters of the mapping method. To achieve good performance it may be necessary to dynamically change these parameters at run-time, but such changes can impose additional costs. If the computation's behavior can be determined prior to its execution, it can be possible to construct an optimal parameter schedule using a low-order-polynomial-time dynamic programming algorithm. Since the latter can be expensive, the performance is studied of the effect of a linear-time scheduling heuristic on one of the model problems, and it is shown to be effective and nearly optimal