Returning the Radiant Gaze: Visual art and embodiment in a world of subjects

Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century anti-ocularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other—an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no final conclusions but is rather a process, a journey through the contested territory of the sensual world of art and vision

A new, more efficient waterwheel design for very-low-head hydropower schemes

Very-low-head hydropower constitutes a large untapped renewable energy source, estimated at 1 GW in the UK alone. A new type of low-impact waterwheel has been developed and tested at Abertay University in Scotland to improve the economic viability of such schemes. For example, on a 2·5 m high weir in the UK with 5 m3/s mean flow, one waterwheel could produce an annual investment return of 7·5% for over 100 years. This paper describes the evolution of the design and reports on scale-model tests. These show that the new design harnesses significant potential and kinetic energy to generate power and handles over four times as much water per metre width compared to traditional designs

Ghost writing: the work of Muriel Spark

No abstract available

Introduction: new developments in Robert Burns bibliography

Introduces four talks given at the National Library of Scotland on March 16, 2017, at a workshop on New Developments in Robert Burns Bibliography, jointly convened by Robert Betteridge of the National Library and by Prof. Carruthers, as general editor of the AHRC-funded project Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century, arguing that "every bit as much as literary criticism or textual editing, bibliographical studies need generational renewal.

Beyond the Wall: Typography from the German Democratic Republic

1989: The German Democratic Republic (GDR) still existed and the Berlin Wall was still standing. Communism was alive in Europe. Hard to believe now, yet only fifteen years ago, a reality. By 1990 the GDR was gone, but it lingers on in the memory of many people now as a dull, repressive, unimaginative place full of cheap plastic, grey concrete, goosestepping soldiers, sports stars with mullets, the dreaded Stasi secret police and of course, the Wall. These memories illustrate common Western stereotypes of the GDR. But in the real, existing East Germany, the reaction of designers to the Communist system was not as downbeat or sterile as you might expect. The graphical and typographical culture of the GDR is a fascinating glimpse into how graphics and typography might have developed and functioned in an integrated system not based solely on the economics of supply and demand. The “workers and peasants state” was founded in 1949 on the premise of supporting humanism, anti-fascism, peace and security. East Germany occupied a unique position within Eastern Europe; not only did it define an outer edge of the Soviet bloc, it faced the difficulty of being umbilically connected to ‘the other (Western) Germany’. Questions of identity dogged it to the end, and stereotypical perceptions about Communism and Capitalism heightened the tensions between the split personality of east and west. The history of East German typography is essentially, from a Western perspective, one of those “in spite of” stories. Inevitably constrained by inconsistent political ideologies in the arts, a lack of raw materials and outdated typesetting and printing equipment, GDR graphics and typography eventually flourished in a way which only occurs when designers are forced to come up with solutions in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles. Designers found innovative, critical and individual ways of coping with political and material shortcomings

Written evidence to Justice Committee, Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006, Post-legislative Scrutiny

No abstract available

Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent by Liz Howard

Review of Liz Howard\u27s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

Scaling Laws in Hierarchical Clustering Models with Poisson Superposition

Properties of cumulant- and combinant ratios are studied for multihadron final states composed of Poisson distributed clusters. The application of these quantities to ``detect'' clusters is discussed. For the scaling laws which hold in hierarchical clustering models (void scaling, combinant scaling) a generalization is provided. It is shown that testing hierarchical models is meaningful only for phase-space volumes not larger than the characteristic correlation length introduced by Poisson superposition. Violation of the scaling laws due to QCD effects is predicted.Comment: 14 pages, Plain TeX, no figure

(WP 2010-02) The Demand for Historic Preservation

Historic preservation is commonly used to protect old buildings and neighborhoods from deterioration. In 1981, the City of Milwaukee established a historic preservation commission to develop and maintain a local register of places with historical importance to the area. The commission also reviews all applications for historic status as well as any requests for exterior alterations. As such, there are numerous rules and restrictions that are imposed on property owners once it has been declared a historic site. Thus, while historic designation can serve to internalize the externalities in neighborhoods with historic buildings, it also imposes costs on homeowners who wish to make improvements to their homes. This paper uses a hedonic model to estimate the impact of historic preservation on the sale price of a single family home in the Milwaukee area. Preliminary results show that the impact of historic preservation is positive when it is significant, with the average impact at 26.6%. However, there was significant variation between districts, with the impact significantly positive in 13 of 22 districts used in the sample. Specifically, the positive impact ranged between 11% and 65%, holding other factors constant. None of the 22 districts had a negative and significant impact. An evaluation of spillover effects reveal that just over one third of them displayed positive and significant spillover effects, whereas 21% had negative and significant spillover effects. The remainder were insignificant. An important question is what factors influence this variability in historic preservation effects. The eventual goal of this research is to extend our preliminary analysis to two stages using a recently developed method that employs spatial econometric methods to solve the unique identification problems inherent in hedonic models (Carruthers and Clark, forthcoming in Journal of Regional Science). This will permit us to determine the specific factors that influence these premiums. While the spatial estimates presented in this preliminary work do not permit a two-stage model, we did explore whether implicit prices appear to be correlated with the household income and racial makeup of the neighborhoods in which they are located. The findings show little evidence that the implicit values of historic districts are correlated, but the implicit price associated with historic district spillovers was positively correlated with both neighborhood measures