Crime and the economy of makeshifts: Kent and Oxfordshire 1830-1885

This thesis examines the link between legislative reforms, crime and the makeshift strategies that the poor used to support their households in the Medway basin and rural districts in north Oxfordshire between 1830 and 1885. In short, this thesis considers whether the poor relied on different criminal strategies to maintain their makeshift households in both rural and urban environments. To this end, it examines how the labouring population in the two regions coped with a raft of legislative reforms and the sort of socio-economic changes that occurred over the longer term. This thesis also demonstrates how the technique of Record Linkage can help eliminate some of the problems that arise when data-sets are incomplete or when source documents are missing. To fulfill these objectives, this thesis is divided into eight chapters. The first of these outlines the research questions and definitions that are used throughout this survey. Chapter two engages with the current historiography that relates to the study of crime and poverty in Kent and Oxfordshire in the nineteenth century. It establishes how this thesis improves our understanding of the way that legislative reforms and socio-economic change helped to shape the criminal strategies that the labouring poor utilised in the two regions, between 1830 and 1885. Chapter three identifies the socio-economic emergence of the Medway basin as an industrial centre and explains why similar changes did not occur in Oxfordshire. The chapters which follow detail how population growth and industrial development affected labour markets and the distribution of welfare in the two regions. In doing so. they establish whether the poor in the two regions were reliant on the proceeds of crime to support their makeshift households. or whether they simply exploited weaknesses in the administration of local government institutions. so that they might improve the state of their household economies. When considered together, this thesis establishes that crime was one of the components that the labouring poor in Kent and Oxfordshire used to support their makeshift economies, when legislative reforms and socio-economic change threatened to undermine the solvency of their households

Modeling-based determination of physiological parameters of systemic VOCs by breath gas analysis, part 2

In a recent paper we presented a simple two compartment model which describes the influence of inhaled concentrations on exhaled breath concentrations for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) with small Henry constants. In this paper we extend this investigation concerning the influence of inhaled concentrations on exhaled breath concentrations for VOCs with higher Henry constants. To this end we extend our model with an additional compartment which takes into account the influence of the upper airways on exhaled breath VOC concentrations

Coherence of Spin Qubits in Silicon

Given the effectiveness of semiconductor devices for classical computation one is naturally led to consider semiconductor systems for solid state quantum information processing. Semiconductors are particularly suitable where local control of electric fields and charge transport are required. Conventional semiconductor electronics is built upon these capabilities and has demonstrated scaling to large complicated arrays of interconnected devices. However, the requirements for a quantum computer are very different from those for classical computation, and it is not immediately obvious how best to build one in a semiconductor. One possible approach is to use spins as qubits: of nuclei, of electrons, or both in combination. Long qubit coherence times are a prerequisite for quantum computing, and in this paper we will discuss measurements of spin coherence in silicon. The results are encouraging - both electrons bound to donors and the donor nuclei exhibit low decoherence under the right circumstances. Doped silicon thus appears to pass the first test on the road to a quantum computer.Comment: Submitted to J Cond Matter on Nov 15th, 200

Coupling the Biophysical and Social Dimensions of Wildfire Risk to Improve Wildfire Mitigation Planning

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113114/1/risa12373.pd