Local Lessons in Letting Go.

Near twenty years ago, I arrived in Appleton, bright-eyed, to be curator at the Outagamie County Historical Society. Brimming with excitement about my first day at my first real museum job, I stepped into...chaos. The museum had been without a curator for a little while and in the interim, the staff had had an idea that, in retrospect, looks years ahead of its time: make the community the curators! There would be an exhibit about holiday celebrations in the Fox Valley and different ethnic groups would each take charge of showcasing their own traditions

Reflections on the introduction of value added tax in the United Kingdom and goods and services tax in New Zealand

Twenty-two years ago (in 1985) the New Zealand (NZ) Goods and Service Tax (GST) Act was enacted. The Value Added Tax (VAT) in the United Kingdom (UK) has now been operational for over thirty-four years. VAT and GST are now an accepted part of taxation policy. Such controversy as remains is concerned with specific issues rather than the existence of the tax itself. However the specific form the legislation takes in each country differs and the process of introducing the tax can in hindsight be evaluated in order to analyse the rules, methods and techniques that have proved to be most efficient and effective

A Diagnostic System for Remote Real-Time Monitoring of Marine Diesel-Electric Propulsion Systems

An innovative diesel-electric power supply and propulsion system is a highly integrated electric system consisting of power generation, power distribution, and electrical drives. Every component of this system constantly produces operating data, which is read and evaluated by several programmable logic controllers, which in turn produce control signals. This thesis presents a diagnostic system that collects the operating data and control signals from all power supply, propulsion, and control components on board, saves them to a hard drive, and enables an engineer to view the data remotely over the internet, in real-time as well as in retrospect. An industrial computer, certified for on-board use, is embedded into the ship’s control unit, autonomously running the software that retrieves the data via an industrial Ethernet connection and makes it available to a remote user through a web interface or a database connection

The First World Trade Center Project: A Historical Tribute to a Great Mega Project

The tragic collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 could not erase the memory of one of the most successful projects in history. The project set standards of excellence in project management for years to come. Using a retrospective look at the construction management of the WTC during the 1960s and 1970s, we show how the vision of great leadership and a determined organization transformed the economy of one of the most important cities in the world

Activist stabilization policy and inflation : the Taylor rule in the 1970s

A number of recent studies have suggested that activist stabilization policy rules responding to inflation and the output gap can attain simultaneously a low and stable rate of inflation as well as a high degree of economic stability. The foremost example of such a strategy is the policy rule proposed by Taylor (1993). In this paper, I demonstrate that the policy settings that would have been suggested by this rule during the 1970s, based on real-time data published by the U.S. Commerce Department, do not greatly differ from actual policy during this period. To the extent macroeconomic outcomes during this period are considered unfavorable, this raises questions regarding the usefulness of this strategy for monetary policy. To the extent the Taylor rule is believed to provide a reasonable guide to monetary policy, this finding raises questions regarding earlier critiques of monetary policy during the 1970s

The Liberal Playground: Susan Isaacs, Psychoanalysis and Progressive Education in the Interwar Era

The Cambridge Malting House, an experimental school, serves here as a case study for investigating the tensions within 1920s liberal elites between their desire to abandon some Victorian and Edwardian sets of values in favour of more democratic ones, and at the same time their insistence on preserving themselves as an integral part of the English upper class. Susan Isaacs, the manager of the Malting House, provided the parents – some of whom were the most famous scientists and intellectuals of their age – with an opportunity to fulfil their ‘fantasy’ of bringing up children in total freedom. In retrospect, however, she deeply criticized those from their milieu for not fully understanding the real socio-cultural implications of their ideological decision to make independence and freedom the core values in their children’s education. Thus, 1920s progressive education is a paradigmatic case study of the cultural and ideological inner contradictions within liberal thought in the interwar era. The article also shows how psychoanalysis – which attracted many progressive educators – played a crucial role in providing liberals of all sorts with a new language to articulate their political visions, but, at the same time, explored the limits of the liberal discourse as a whole