Open access monographs: a humanities research perspective

This article discusses the thoughts of a humanities researcher in relation to open access (OA) publishing. Digital media have dramatically improved access to historic texts but library e-books are frustrating due to software and loan arrangements. Authors of illustrated books risk losing control of book design, although new media offer opportunities to improve image quality and access. Alfred Tennyson's career shows that authors have been sensitive about the physical form of their work since the Victorian period and ignoring the material significance of the book could make us overlook the fundamental changes that the e-book represents. Monographs retain value as a way of evaluating substantive research projects and those published through the OA process will have great advantages over the commercial e-book. ‘Green’ OA publishing is impractical for humanities scholars and funded ‘gold’ OA publishing is likely to involve a labour-intensive application process

Policies for mixed communities: faith-based displacement activity?

The belief that it is fairer if communities are ``mixed'' can be traced at least to the late nineteenth century and the founders of the Garden City Movement. The idea is now firmly established in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and national policies. This article reviews the evidence and argues that this is essentially a faith-based policy because there is scant real evidence that making communities more mixed makes the life chances of the poor any better. There is overwhelming evidence that the attributes that make neighborhoods attractive are capitalized into house prices/rents. The result is that poor people cannot afford to buy into nicer neighborhoods, which anyway have amenities of no value to them. Moreover, ``specialized neighborhoods'' are an important element in agglomeration economies and seem to be welfare enhancing. Thus, policies for mixed neighborhoods treat the symptoms rather than the causes of poverty. Efforts to improve social equity would be more effectively directed toward people themselves rather than moving people around to mix neighborhoods

Urban policy - helping people or helping places? New evidence from London on social exclusion and the spatial articulation of the distribution of income

That local job creation within a large urban labour market does not have a significant long term influence on the unemployment rates of local residents has long been documented (for example in Cheshire, 1979; Burridge & Gordon 1981; Gordon & Lamont, 1982). Urban ?regeneration policy? continues, nevertheless, to be targeted at small areas within large cities. This has been a continuing element in British urban policy, for example, since the Innner Urban Areas Act of 1978. An explicit aim of such urban policy has been to ?regenerate local economies and provide jobs for local people?. Increasingly European regional policy has also attempted to intervene on the basis of smaller areas within large urbanised regions. In the literature two mechanisms have been explored to explain the failure of local job creation to influence the unemployment rates of local residents. The operation of housing markets and social housing systems and the way that these generate social segregation means that the source of unemployment differentials across urban areas is primarily that poor neighbourhoods are where those with a higher propensity to be unemployed are concentrated. In addition it has been shown that interaction between local labour markets linked by significant commuting flows means that any differential opportunities that result from local job creation are quickly diffused throughout the set of interacting labour markets. Commuting flows adapt so that characteristic specific unemployment rates tend to equality throughout the urbanised region. This paper examines evidence relating to an additional mechanism: local migration. Data were collected for one area of regeneration in west London - Harlesden. This area was the recipient of a City Challenge grant of ?37.5 million running over 5 years from 1993. It is quite typical of disadvantaged neighbourhoods within large British cities. It grew up on the back of a successful industrial economy which has now been subject to 35 years of decline. It has a large concentration of ethnic minorities and - despite evidence of some success in local job creation - a relatively worsening unemployment rate over the 5 year regeneration period. Data for three samples of people of working age were collected: a sample of those who had lived within the area throughout the period of the regeneration; a sample of ?outmovers?; and a third of ?inmovers?. The samples were large enough for statistical analysis and the differing labour market experience of the samples over the five year period was compared. Differences were very substantial, with the out-movers having far the greatest labour market success. The results reinforce the important role of housing markets in articulating overall social inequality to generate the observed geographical patterns of poverty and social exclusion in urbanised regions. They also reinforce the need to distinguish between the goals of regenerating local economies within cities and that of improving the lives of the most disadvantaged. They also underline the need to think more carefully about what exactly is meant by the aim of providing jobs for local people. These and other implications for policy are explored. Burridge, P. and Gordon, I. (1981) Unemployment in the British Metropolitan Labour areas. Oxford Economic Papers, 33, 274-97. Cheshire, P.C. (1979) Inner areas as spatial labour markets: a critique of the inner area studies. Urban Studies, 16(2), 29-43. Gordon, I. and Lamont, D. (1982) A model of labour-market interdependencies in the London region. Environment and Planning A, 14, 238-64.

Taxes Versus Regulation: The Welfare Impacts of Policies for Containing Sprawl

Our central concern in this paper is to examine some alternative policies for physically containing the growth of urban areas. We undertake a microsimulation to provide a comparison between land use planning policies that enforce an urban growth boundary and policies that limit development at the periphery using taxes. We parameterise our microsimulation using the structure of demand and policy implemented in a rapidly growing city in the south of England. We make no judgment as to the optimality or otherwise of the existing degree of constraint: we take that as datum and analyse only the welfare costs, distributional impacts and effects on urban densities of alternative ways of achieving the currently observed degree of constraint. The methodology we deploy to address these issues could be turned to a wide range of other urban modeling purposes. It has the advantage of being clearly founded in microeconomic theory and applies observed behavioural relationships, estimated from the relevant economic data. We find that the use of a tax on land could produce the same limitation on growth as existing regulatory policies but provide higher equilibrium welfare levels. We find that the use of a tax on transport costs, however, while capable of producing a compact urban form, would not raise welfare when compared with regulatory approaches.Urban Sprawl, Property Tax, Land Use Regulation

Westminster REFRAME workshops for foundation year doctors 2016-2017: Evaluation report

Executive summary Introduction The Foundation Programme is the postgraduate medical training that UK medical graduates undertake after finishing medical school and prior to choosing a speciality training. It marks the move from medical school into employment as a medical professional. Whilst this is often an exciting and rewarding time, it is also a key transitional time which brings with it feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and unpreparedness. This period is reported as the most stressful in a junior doctor’s career. Resilience training has the potential to improve physician wellness by alleviating distress. The Westminster REFRAME workshop is a half day, intensive resilience-training event for Foundation Year 1 (FY1) doctors, which is designed to help them cope better with the personal and professional challenges of this demanding, transitional time. The workshop has been presented to FY1s at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital since 2014, and this evaluation report, using a newly designed evaluation strategy to enhance questionnaire completion rates, presents findings for the 2016/7 cohort of doctors. Methods All FY1 doctors at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital were asked to attend the course, and all attendees were invited to take part in the evaluation. Questionnaires were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from participants at three time points: immediately prior the workshop (baseline), immediately after the workshop (post workshop), and two months after the workshop (follow-up). Outcome measures collected included perceived stress and positive well-being scales. Participants were also asked to rate six statements about the workshop (e.g. ‘the workshop was useful to me’; ‘The ideas and concepts were communicated clearly’). Open-ended questions sought participants’ experiences and perceptions of the workshop and any changes made as a result of attending. Key findings • Of the 52 FY1 doctors attending a Westminster REFRAME resilience workshop 49 completed baseline and post-workshop questionnaires, and 43 completed a follow-up questionnaire. • Participant ratings of different aspects of the workshop overall presented a positive impression of participants’ experiences of the day. Many responses rated various aspects of the workshop with the maximum scores of 4 and 5. • Two-thirds of participants said that the workshop was useful, with 21% unsure how useful the workshop had been and 11% reporting not finding it useful. Eighty-one percent of participants felt that topics covered were useful for their work. Over three-quarters of participants said that they intended to use some of the techniques they had learnt on the workshop. • Participants particularly liked learning tips and practical solutions to reduce stress and improve well-being and resilience; and reported wanting to have even more of this in the workshop. • Participants also valued sharing experiences of work stress with peers, having time to reflect on stress and coping, and learning about stress and resilience. • Eighty-five percent of participants reported that they intended to do at least one thing differently as a result of attending the workshop; 76% of those who completed a follow-up questionnaire had actually done something differently. Changes made included using breathing techniques learnt in the workshop, meditation, taking more breaks/time out, adopting a different mental approach to stress/stressful situations, increased reflection on stressful situations, and accepting help. • Changes resulted in participants reporting that they were managing stress more effectively, had improved focus/concentration, were able to think more clearly under stress, and had an improved work/life balance. • Just over half of participants felt that their patients had benefited from their attending resilience training, because the workshop had enabled them to carry out their jobs more effectively and/or communicate better with patients. • Participants reported high levels of stress at baseline. • Comparisons between baseline and 2 month follow-up questionnaires revealed stress levels and well-being ratings improved, but that this change was not statistically significant. • The Westminster REFRAME website intended to support FY1s to make changes was not used by participants. The main reasons for not doing so included not being aware that it existed, lack of time, and ‘forgot about it’. • The new evaluation strategy (e.g. new evaluation procedures, making participating in the evaluation mandatory, improved questionnaires) improved the questionnaire completion rate and provided more contextual data about how participants were experiencing the workshop. Participant quotes “Encouraged open discussion around issues of resilience. It was also nice to know that other people experience the same levels of stress, find out ways to deal with it.” P11 “Very much enjoyed breathing exercise and practising mindfulness techniques – found it very relaxing.” P20 “Great tips on how to manage the many common challenges of being a Dr in the NHS today.” P15 “The technique of slow breathing has helped me to calm down several times when I was under severe stress.” P32 “Very busy days with more jobs than time - expected to be in attendance on ward a lot, difficult to take time for breaks.” P20 “Introduced some calm into hectic days, clear my mind and focus on most important tasks.” P20 Conclusions The Westminster REFRAME workshop was generally well received by FY1 doctors. The workshop was able to instigate at least some behaviour change amongst a number of participants, who reported managing their well-being and stress differently as a result of attending the course. However, these changes did not translate into statistically significant changes in stress and well-being outcome measures. Additional work to support and encourage behaviour change after the workshop may be useful, particularly additional promotion of the resilience website during and after the workshop. The new evaluation strategy improved the questionnaire completion rate and provided more reliable data on the workshop’s impact. Inclusion of a stress outcome measure was useful, as it identified this group’s high perceived levels of stress. The stronger qualitative element of the evaluation was helpful in providing data on how participants were making use of what they had learnt on the course

ADN: An Information-Centric Networking Architecture for the Internet of Things

Forwarding data by name has been assumed to be a necessary aspect of an information-centric redesign of the current Internet architecture that makes content access, dissemination, and storage more efficient. The Named Data Networking (NDN) and Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) architectures are the leading examples of such an approach. However, forwarding data by name incurs storage and communication complexities that are orders of magnitude larger than solutions based on forwarding data using addresses. Furthermore, the specific algorithms used in NDN and CCNx have been shown to have a number of limitations. The Addressable Data Networking (ADN) architecture is introduced as an alternative to NDN and CCNx. ADN is particularly attractive for large-scale deployments of the Internet of Things (IoT), because it requires far less storage and processing in relaying nodes than NDN. ADN allows things and data to be denoted by names, just like NDN and CCNx do. However, instead of replacing the waist of the Internet with named-data forwarding, ADN uses an address-based forwarding plane and introduces an information plane that seamlessly maps names to addresses without the involvement of end-user applications. Simulation results illustrate the order of magnitude savings in complexity that can be attained with ADN compared to NDN.Comment: 10 page

Capitalising the Value of Free Schools: The Impact of Supply Constraints and Uncertainty

There has been a growing literature in both the US (for example Haurin and Brasington 1996, and Black 1999) and the UK (for example Gibbons & Machin, 2001) that estimates the way in which school quality is capitalised into house prices. Cheshire and Sheppard 1995 and 1999 have estimated hedonic models in which the quality of the secondary school to which a household was assigned was a significant variable. This provided evidence that the value of secondary school quality was being capitalised into the price of houses. In contrast Gibbons and Machin concluded that primary schools had an identifiable and significant price associated with their quality but that secondary schools did not. Their study did not have data for individual houses but used post-code sector data and then various techniques to standardised for all but one variable: either the notional primary school catchment area or the notional secondary school catchment area. Each of these analyses is predicated on the assumption that the value of local schools should be reflected in the value of houses. We expect variation in the capitalised price of a given school quality at either primary or secondary level according to the elasticity of supply of ‘school quality’ in the local market. This will vary systematically between and perhaps within cities and this paper explores the sources and the impact of such variations as well as the impact of model specification. Using an hedonic model and data from 1999-2000, we estimate values attached to both secondary school and primary school quality. The results support the conclusion that both secondary and primary school quality is capitalised into the market price of houses and that the capitalisation of school quality is discounted within the context of an urban area that is tightly constrained by land use planning in areas where new construction is concentrated. We also find evidence that appropriate model specification is imperative since bias is evident both when key neighbourhood characteristics are omitted and if the actual allocation of addresses to schools is not included. JEL: D12; H4; I2; R5