Conflict, cooperation and competition: The rise and fall of the Hull whaling trade during the seventeenth century

Ce document examine la montée et le déclin du commerce de pêche à la baleine à Hull au dix-septième siècle. Commençant par les voyages de pêche, y compris à la baleine, du port nordique à la fin du seizième et début du dix-septième siècle, il examine aussi bien la rivalité et la concurrence néfaste entre les aventuriers de Hull et la Compagnie de Moscovie de Londres, que le conflit entre les anglais et les hollandais pour l'accès aux baies du Spitzberg. Après un début prometteur, qui a été soutenu pendant les années 1630, le commerce de la pêche à la baleine de Hull a ensuite rencontré des difficultés. En dépit des efforts de le maintenir au cour des décennies tourmentées 1640 et 1650, ce commerce nouveau et potentiellement lucratif a été effectivement abandonné dès la deuxième moitié du dix-septième siècle

English privateering during the Spanish and French wars, 1625-1630

From 1625 to 1630 England was actively involved in that wider, more general conflict which was sweeping across Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century. The main interest of King Charles lay in his determination to see the Palatinate restored to his brother-in-law. It was for this reason that Charles took up arms against Spain: in 1625 a major naval expedition was sent to the Spanish coast to seize the treasure fleet returning from the New World. The disastrous failure of this expedition, perhaps the "low water mark" of English seamanship, increased the King's determination to repeat the operation in 1626. Success again eluded the English fleet. The expedition of 1626 was the last to be sent against Spain for the rest of the war; during the course of that year England became enmeshed in a web of disputes with France. The result was another major naval expedition to aid the Huguenots in the port of La Rochelle. The expedition was under the supreme command of the King's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. The failure of this expedition goaded Charles into another effort to relieve the Protestant city in 1628. Buckingham was again to take personal charge but following his assassination in August the expedition was eventually led by the Earl of Denbigh. The successive failure of these expeditions to the continent, or of their inability to achieve even a modicum of success, sapped the English military effort and contributed to the alienation of opinion of many at home: Sir Simonds D'Ewes was not alone in lamenting, during 1628, that "the Protestant cause was well near ruined this year by the unfortunate and unseasonable assistance of England". Dogged by serious mismanagement and financial debility, despite prodigious efforts to raise money, the English military machine was structurally incapable of successfully fighting both Spain and France. These disastrous expeditions were accompanied by, and related to, growing parliamentary turbulence which affected both the House of Commons and Lords. Feeding upon the failure of the expedition to Cadiz in 1625, the opposition and indignation felt against Buckingham exploded in 1626 with an attempt to impeach him. In 1628, parliament refused to consider any motion concerning supply until the crown accepted the Petition of Right. Relations between crown and parliament failed to improve, despite the King's acceptance of the Petition and the removal of Buckingham from the political scene. With dissidence seeping out from the confines of Westminster into the mercantile community of London and the county communities, a "decade of tension"3 was brought to an end by the dissolution of parliament, following scenes of gross disorder in the House of Commons.By the latter part of 1628 it was evident that the war effort was being crippled by internal dissension and financial weakness. The futility of continuing the Gars was painfully apparent: early in 1629, therefore, peace was made with France, to be followed in November 1630 by peace with Spain.The large naval expeditions of the 1620s were accompanied by a privateering war, carried on by hundreds of English vessels which put to sea on voyages of reprisal between 1625 and 1630. This was a very different story to the unrelieved misery and failure of the large-scale expeditions. Sailing alone, or sometimes in packs of three or four, English privateers plundered in the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. While the fortunes of the King's fleet, waned those of the privateers waxed, as prize upon prize was seized and returned to England. The success of many privateers recalled the Elizabethan sea war against Spain, which many in the 1620s looked on as a golden age of English maritime plunder and as a model for the warlike efforts of their own generation

On the local dynamics of polynomial difference equations with fading stochastic perturbations

We examine the stability-instability behaviour of a polynomial difference equa- tion with state-independent, asymptotically fading stochastic perturbations. We find that the set of initial values can be partitioned into a stability region, an instability region, and a region of unknown dynamics that is in some sense \small". In the ¯rst two cases, the dynamic holds with probability at least 1 ¡ °, a value corresponding to the statistical notion of a confidence level. Aspects of an equation with state-dependent perturbations are also treated. When the perturbations are Gaussian, the difference equation is the Euler-Maruyama dis- cretisation of an It^o-type stochastic differential equation with solutions displaying global a.s. asymptotic stability. The behaviour of any particular solution of the difference equation can be made consistent with the corresponding solution of the differential equation, with probability 1 ¡ °, by choosing the stepsize parameter sufficiently small. We present examples illustrating the relationship between h, ° and the size of the stability region

On the Use of Adaptive Meshes to Counter Overshoot in Solutions of Discretised Nonlinear Stochastic Differential Equations

Abstract We consider two classes of nonlinear stochastic differential equation with a.s. positive solutions. In the first case the drift coefficient is strongly zero-reverting, and dominates the diffusion, whereas in the second the diffusion is highly variable and dominates the drift. In each case, the tendency to overshoot zero prevents a uniform Euler discretisation from preserving positivity in solutions. To address this, we construct adaptive meshes allowing the generation of positive trajectories with arbitrarily high probability. For completeness, we generalise the analysis to finite-dimensional systems of stochastic differential equations, investigating the effect of a uniform Euler discretisation on the positivity of systems with coefficients satisfying linear bounds, and introducing an adaptive mesh to counter overshoot when those bounds are violated

Ensuring confidence in radionuclide-based sediment chronologies and bioturbation rates

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 71 (2007): 537-544, doi:10.1016/j.ecss.2006.09.006.Sedimentary records of naturally occurring and fallout-derived radionuclides are widely used as tools for estimating both the ages of recent sediments and rates of sedimentation and bioturbation. Developing these records to the point of data interpretation requires careful sample collection, processing, analysis and data modeling. In this work, we document a number of potential pitfalls that can impact sediment core records and their interpretation. This paper is not intended as an exhaustive treatment of these potential problems. Rather, the emphasis is on potential problems that are not well documented in the literature, as follows: 1) The mere sampling of sediment cores at a resolution that is too coarse can result in an apparent diffusive mixing of the sedimentary record at rates comparable to diffusive bioturbation rates observed in many locations; 2) 210Pb profiles in slowly accumulating sediments can easily be misinterpreted to be driven by sedimentation, when in fact bioturbation is the dominant control. Multiple isotopes of different half lives and/or origin may help to distinguish between these two possible interpretations; 3) Apparent mixing can occur due simply to numerical artifacts inherent in the finite difference approximations of the advection diffusion equation used to model sedimentation and bioturbation. Model users need to be aware of this potential problem. Solutions to each of these potential pitfalls are offered to ensure the best possible sediment age estimates and/or sedimentation and bioturbation rates can be obtained.Thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program, the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, the Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at Columbia University, and the National Science Foundation for funding

Mercury sources to Lake Ozette and Lake Dickey : highly contaminated remote coastal lakes, Washington State, USA

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Water, Air, & Soil Pollution 208 (2009): 275-286, doi:10.1007/s11270-009-0165-y.Mercury concentrations in largemouth bass and mercury accumulation rates in age-dated sediment cores were examined at Lake Ozette and Lake Dickey in Washington State. Goals of the study were to compare concentrations in fish tissues at the two lakes with lakes in a larger statewide dataset and evaluate factors influencing lake loading at Ozette and Dickey, which may include: catchment disturbances, coastal mercury cycling, and the role of trans-Pacific Asian mercury. Mercury fish tissue concentrations at the lakes were among the highest recorded in Washington State. Wet deposition and historical atmospheric monitoring from the area show no indication of enhanced deposition from Asian sources or coastal atmospheric processes. Sediment core records from the lakes displayed rapidly increasing sedimentation rates coinciding with commercial logging. The unusually high mercury flux rates and mercury tissue concentrations recorded at Lake Ozette and Lake Dickey appear to be associated with logging within the catchments

The social value of a QALY : raising the bar or barring the raise?

Background: Since the inception of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England, there have been questions about the empirical basis for the cost-per-QALY threshold used by NICE and whether QALYs gained by different beneficiaries of health care should be weighted equally. The Social Value of a QALY (SVQ) project, reported in this paper, was commissioned to address these two questions. The results of SVQ were released during a time of considerable debate about the NICE threshold, and authors with differing perspectives have drawn on the SVQ results to support their cases. As these discussions continue, and given the selective use of results by those involved, it is important, therefore, not only to present a summary overview of SVQ, but also for those who conducted the research to contribute to the debate as to its implications for NICE. Discussion: The issue of the threshold was addressed in two ways: first, by combining, via a set of models, the current UK Value of a Prevented Fatality (used in transport policy) with data on fatality age, life expectancy and age-related quality of life; and, second, via a survey designed to test the feasibility of combining respondents’ answers to willingness to pay and health state utility questions to arrive at values of a QALY. Modelling resulted in values of £10,000-£70,000 per QALY. Via survey research, most methods of aggregating the data resulted in values of a QALY of £18,000-£40,000, although others resulted in implausibly high values. An additional survey, addressing the issue of weighting QALYs, used two methods, one indicating that QALYs should not be weighted and the other that greater weight could be given to QALYs gained by some groups. Summary: Although we conducted only a feasibility study and a modelling exercise, neither present compelling evidence for moving the NICE threshold up or down. Some preliminary evidence would indicate it could be moved up for some types of QALY and down for others. While many members of the public appear to be open to the possibility of using somewhat different QALY weights for different groups of beneficiaries, we do not yet have any secure evidence base for introducing such a system

Precision luminosity measurements at LHCb

Measuring cross-sections at the LHC requires the luminosity to be determined accurately at each centre-of-mass energy √s. In this paper results are reported from the luminosity calibrations carried out at the LHC interaction point 8 with the LHCb detector for √s = 2.76, 7 and 8 TeV (proton-proton collisions) and for √sNN = 5 TeV (proton-lead collisions). Both the "van der Meer scan" and "beam-gas imaging" luminosity calibration methods were employed. It is observed that the beam density profile cannot always be described by a function that is factorizable in the two transverse coordinates. The introduction of a two-dimensional description of the beams improves significantly the consistency of the results. For proton-proton interactions at √s = 8 TeV a relative precision of the luminosity calibration of 1.47% is obtained using van der Meer scans and 1.43% using beam-gas imaging, resulting in a combined precision of 1.12%. Applying the calibration to the full data set determines the luminosity with a precision of 1.16%. This represents the most precise luminosity measurement achieved so far at a bunched-beam hadron collider

Performance of the LHCb vertex locator

The Vertex Locator (VELO) is a silicon microstrip detector that surrounds the proton-proton interaction region in the LHCb experiment. The performance of the detector during the first years of its physics operation is reviewed. The system is operated in vacuum, uses a bi-phase CO2 cooling system, and the sensors are moved to 7 mm from the LHC beam for physics data taking. The performance and stability of these characteristic features of the detector are described, and details of the material budget are given. The calibration of the timing and the data processing algorithms that are implemented in FPGAs are described. The system performance is fully characterised. The sensors have a signal to noise ratio of approximately 20 and a best hit resolution of 4 μm is achieved at the optimal track angle. The typical detector occupancy for minimum bias events in standard operating conditions in 2011 is around 0.5%, and the detector has less than 1% of faulty strips. The proximity of the detector to the beam means that the inner regions of the n+-on-n sensors have undergone space-charge sign inversion due to radiation damage. The VELO performance parameters that drive the experiment's physics sensitivity are also given. The track finding efficiency of the VELO is typically above 98% and the modules have been aligned to a precision of 1 μm for translations in the plane transverse to the beam. A primary vertex resolution of 13 μm in the transverse plane and 71 μm along the beam axis is achieved for vertices with 25 tracks. An impact parameter resolution of less than 35 μm is achieved for particles with transverse momentum greater than 1 GeV/c

Pollen, biomarker and stable isotope evidence of late Quaternary environmental change at Lake McKenzie, southeast Queensland

Unravelling links between climate change and vegetation response during the Quaternary is important if the climate–environment interactions of modern systems are to be fully understood. Using a sediment core from Lake McKenzie, Fraser Island, we reconstruct changes in the lake ecosystem and surrounding vegetation over the last ca. 36.9 cal kyr. Evidence is drawn from multiple sources, including pollen, micro-charcoal, biomarker and stable isotope (C and N) analyses, and is used to gain a better understanding of the nature and timing of past ecological changes that have occurred at the site. The glacial period of the record, from ca. 36.9 to 18.3 cal kyr BP, is characterised by an increased abundance of plants of the aquatic and littoral zone, indicating lower lake water levels. High abundance of biomarkers and microfossils of the colonial green alga Botryococcus occurred at this time and included large variation in individual botryococcene d13C values. A slowing or ceasing of sediment accumulation occurred during the time period from ca. 18.3 to 14.0 cal kyr BP. By around 14.0 cal kyr BP fire activity in the area was reduced, as was abundance of littoral plants and terrestrial herbs, suggesting wetter conditions from that time. The Lake McKenzie pollen record conforms to existing records from Fraser Island by containing evidence of a period of reduced effective precipitation that commenced in the mid-Holocene