The benefits of parenting: Government financial support for families with children since 1975

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children

Ageing with a captive society in London: Audrey, Ron and Smokey at the Zoo

This paper considers the spatio-temporal capacity of a set of relationships as they are identified by a group of older people who are regular visitors to London Zoo. It explores the intersections between the time of retirement and the scales and directionality of time commonly invoked by zoological forms of knowledge about species and biodiversity. This includes a look at how both positive and negative theories of futures, including the future of the zoo itself, become a prism through which individuals examine their relationships to time towards the end of life. In addition, the paper focuses on those visitors who seek, in a hopeful manner, to reorient themselves in the city through engagements with individual captive animals.PostprintPeer reviewe

Snared : ethics and nature in animal protection

This paper will examine how animal protection investigators, lobbyists and campaigners in Scotland consider the relationship between nature and ethics. Specifically, it will look at the complex ways in which activists deploy the categories ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in order to interpret realms of animal suffering and judge the actions of human and non-human agents in those fields. The paper is also concerned to chart the ways in which animal protection activists develop strategies for persuading various audiences of the rightness of their position; these include charity supporters and prospective donors, but also politicians and civil servants involved in the legislative process in the Scottish Parliament. More broadly, the paper engages with debates in the emergent fields of the anthropology of ethics and human-animal relations. It is interested in the relationship between ethics and appearance and in the distribution of agency in claims or judgments of ethical or unethical behaviour.PostprintPeer reviewe

Evaluating the Thermoresponsive Properties of Hydroxypropyl Cellulose Solutions for Smart Window Applications

With HVAC and building energy usage expected to increase, there is a strong need for autonomous thermal management solutions. In particular, there has been a growing interest in thermoresponsive (TR) smart windows that are activated by ambient temperature changes. Most TR smart windows contain a liquid solution between two panes. The goal of this research project was to develop a self-supporting smart window by forming a gel that maintained its TR properties. A gel is less prone to spilling in the case of window breakage. It was also desired to tune the phase transition to occur at environmentally relevant conditions for a building. Solutions were prepared with varying concentrations of glycerol, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), and hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) – and analyzed using UV-vis spectroscopy and cloud point measurements. A highly viscous gel was formed when 15 wt% HPC and 1 wt% SDS were added to a solution containing 50 wt% glycerol and water. This gel had a phase transition at 28°C. This sample’s heat-shielding performance was then tested under the heat of an incandescent light bulb, resulting in a heat-shielding of 56% compared to a 9% heat shielding when only glass slides were used

Games of Collaboration: An Ethnographic Examination of Experts Acting Seriously

This paper looks at the theme of collaboration through the prism of game design, and especially the example of serious games. At its heart, this is a consideration  of two collaborative projects between experts. The first is a current collaboration between computer scientists, game designers, and a theatre company in Scotland, in which the author is also a collaborator and the project’s ethnographer. The second is perhaps the largest and most high-profile collaborative project recently led and documented by anthropologists, Meridian 180, which aims to experiment with the norms of collaboration itself, and which has already been theorised and extensively reflected upon by one of its founders, Annelise Riles. The paper aims to put these two collaborations into some kind of conversation in order to throw each into productive relief and to ask some new questions about how we think about both the exercise of collaboration and the deliberate subversion of its norms. Keywords: collaboration, serious games, co-operation, experts, rules, friendshi

Negative Scarcity And The Praxeology Of Open Source Software

Economics, which in its 20th-century sense deals only with optimizing the exchange of values, may be generalized to praxeology (von Mises 1949,) a comprehensive science of human action. Under a generalized praxeological definition of scarcity there are contexts in which the scarcity of software becomes negative, so that a rational maximization of return on investment in developing such software occurs when the software is opened to free distribution under a GPL-equivalent license

Dialectical Learning In Information Systems

The classical dialectical (study partner) learning method of Greek and Hellenistic antiquity remains the traditional learning method of Jewish religious and cultural studies, and enjoys widespread informal use by students in some American universities.  The cognitive advantages of dialectical study have led to its adoption as a powerful, general cognitive methodology, for example in Extreme Programming (Beck 1999.)  This article describes the author’s experience with formally assigned dialectical study in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in Information Systems at California State University, Los Angeles

An examination of state regulations of hydraulic fracturing

textAs hydraulic fracturing gains popularity in the energy industry, the state of Texas finds itself in a very advantageous position. With multiple regions which could have great potential for oil and natural gas extractable via the production technique, Texas has assumed a new importance for the energy industry. However, in order to fully utilize its advantages, the state of Texas should revise its oil and gas regulations, particularly with regard to groundwater use and contamination, air emissions, and discretion for municipal regulation of oil and gas operations, insofar as they may apply to hydraulic fracturing. This course of action only will this allow the state to efficiently utilize the production method while better balancing against the technique's risks.LawPublic Affair