‘For the house her self and one servant’: Family and Household in Late Seventeenth-century London

The 1695 returns for the marriage duty tax provide a unique opportunity to investigate the composition of London’s domestic groups. Traditional schemes for the analysis of the early modern family and household fail to capture the complexities of metropolitan living, and a ‘London-specific’ methodology is outlined for use in the returns’ classification. Application of this scheme to returns from two contrasting areas of London, a cluster of wealthy city-centre parishes and a poorer suburban precinct, reveals a series of structural differences in their families and households that are attributable to the wealth and social status of their respective populations. However, some aspects of the domestic experience within the two areas are more comparable than previous accounts would suggest

Reviews

Martin Oliver (ed.), Innovation in the Evaluation of Learning Technology, London: University of North London, 1998. ISBN: 1–85377–256–9. Softback, 242 pages, £15.00

Assessment of applicability and transferability of evidence-based antenatal interventions to the Australian indigenous setting

There is a need for public health interventions to be based on the best available evidence. Unfortunately, well-conducted studies from settings similar to that in which an intervention is to be implemented are often not available. Therefore, health practitioners are forced to make judgements about proven effective interventions in one setting and their suitability to make a difference in their own setting. The framework of Wang et al. has been proposed to help with this process. This paper provides a case study on the application of the framework to a decision-making process regarding antenatal care in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Queensland. This method involved undertaking a systematic search of the current available evidence, then conducting a second literature search to determine factors that may affect the applicability and transferability of these interventions into these communities. Finally, in consideration of these factors, clinical judgement decisions on the applicability and transferability of these interventions were made. This method identified several interventions or strategies for which there was evidence of improving antenatal care or outcomes. By using the framework, we concluded that several of these effective interventions would be feasible in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities within Queensland

Literature, Logic and Mathematics in the Fourteenth Century

This thesis assesses the extent to which fourteenth-century Middle English poets were interested in, and influenced by, traditions of thinking about logic and mathematics. It attempts to demonstrate the imaginative appeal of the logical problems called sophismata, which postulate absurd situations while making use of a stable but evolving, and distinctly recognisable, pool of examples. Logic and mathematics were linked. The ‘puzzle-based’ approach of late-medieval logic stemmed in part from earlier arithmetical puzzle collections. The fourteenth-century application of the ‘sophismatic’ method to problems concerned with what might now be called ‘Physics’ or ‘Mechanics’ sustained the symbiotic relationship of the two disciplines. An awareness of the importance of this tradition is perhaps indicated by the prominence of logical and mathematical tropes and scenarios in the works of three authors in particular: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and the Gawain-poet. It is argued that, in the poetry of all three, what may loosely be called ‘sophismatic tropes’ are used to present concerns that the poets share with the logical and mathematical thought of their time. Certain themes recur, including the following: problematic promises; problematic reference to non-existent things; problems associated with divisibility, limits and the idea of a continuum; and, most importantly, problems focused on the contingency, or otherwise, of the future. The debate over future contingency was one of the fiercest scholastic controversies of the fourteenth century, with profound implications for both logical and theological thought. It is suggested here that the scholastic debate about future contingency has a visible impact on Chauntecleer’s prophetic dream in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Troilus’s apparent determinism in Troilus and Criseyde, Gower’s presentation of causation in the Confessio Amantis, and the Gawain-poet’s treatment of covenants. The conclusion reached is that fourteenth-century logical and mathematical texts had a significantly wider cultural effect than is generally recognised

Permutable entire functions and multiply connected wandering domains

Let f and g be permutable transcendental entire functions. We use a recent analysis of the dynamical behaviour in multiply connected wandering domains to make progress on the long standing conjecture that the Julia sets of f and g are equal; in particular, we show that J(f)=J(g) provided that neither f nor g has a simply connected wandering domain in the fast escaping set

Refining self-propelled particle models for collective behaviour

Swarming, schooling, flocking and herding are all names given to the wide variety of collective behaviours exhibited by groups of animals, bacteria and even individual cells. More generally, the term swarming describes the behaviour of an aggregate of agents (not necessarily biological) of similar size and shape which exhibit some emergent property such as directed migration or group cohesion. In this paper we review various individual-based models of collective behaviour and discuss their merits and drawbacks. We further analyse some one-dimensional models in the context of locust swarming. In specific models, in both one and two dimensions, we demonstrate how varying the parameters relating to how much attention individuals pay to their neighbours can dramatically change the behaviour of the group. We also introduce leader individuals to these models with the ability to guide the swarm to a greater or lesser degree as we vary the parameters of the model. We consider evolutionary scenarios for models with leaders in which individuals are allowed to evolve the degree of influence neighbouring individuals have on their subsequent motion