Mindful Stitch: Generating dialogue in and around the threads of wellbeing

This article investigates wellbeing and mindfulness within contemporary art and craft practice, exploring initial introductions by Jon Kabat-Zinn of mindfulness practices into modern westernised medicine as a group or independent outlet. 21st Century sociological observations suggest we are infected by the ‘Hurry Virus’ (Kickbusch, 2012). Studies into mindfulness practices through established services such as the NHS and Arts and Minds show how crafts can be used as a tool for slowing down pace of making/doing, influencing overall wellbeing. Mindful Stitch is a community derived workshop exploring hand embroidery as a mindful practice, using methods of social inclusion and outrospective empathy. Independent mindful craft practitioners, Kathryn Vercillo and Tara Jon Manning, show the benefits of mindfulness knit and crochet practices. Mindful Stitch addresses the gap in the research regarding hand embroidery as a mindful craft practice, catering for a wide audience, additionally welcomed to the 2013 conference The Subversive Stitch: Revisited, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Nelson and Winter Models RevisitedPrototypes for Computer-Based Reconstruction of Schumpeterian Competition

The report deals with the reconstruction and further development of the models of industrial dynamics developed by Nelson and Winter and summarised in their famous 1982-book. The basic idea underlying the Nelson and Winter models is that a verbal account of Schumpeterian competition can naturally be transformed into a description of a computational process in which firms not only make short-term production decisions and investment decisions but also performs a search for new technologies. The latter search is successful in a probabilistic manner, and its successes and failures determine an evolutionary process of the industry. Although the simulation models of Nelson and Winter have played a central role the ‘take-off’ of evolutionary economics, they have never been fully documented and their differences have never been explored. The resulting problems are obvious for students who start from Nelson’s and Winter’s most famous accounts, but even for researchers with a full collection of the underlying research papers, the situation is quite confusing. The report tries to make things easier by presenting overviews of the structure of Nelson and Winter models as well as fully implemented versions of their simulation models – especially NELWIN78 based on ch. 13 of the 1982-book and NELWIN77 based on ch. 12. The report furthermore presents a computer-based environment (implemented in MAPLE V Rev2) for revision of the models and for analysis of the overwhelming number of data resulting from simulation runs.Evolutionary economic modelling, simulation of industrial dynamics, Schumpeterian competit