Adult education between the wars - the curious case of the Selborne Lecture Bureau

‘Independent’ lecture agencies are an important but neglected element in the history of education. Between 1918 and 1939, the Selborne Lecture Bureau was a significant national provider of adult education in Britain, both in its own right and as a supplier of lecture(r)s to Women’s Institutes and other bodies, and it pioneered the use of films in schools. For a brief period, it was an ‘educational’ vehicle for the Empire Marketing Board with a programme of over 2,400 lectures in 1929. The Bureau originated in the early 20th century split between the conservative (and male) traditions of natural history and the radical (and female) campaigning (anti) plumage movement that produced the RSPB. The inter-War history of the Selborne Lecture Bureau provides a counterpoint to conventional accounts of adult education between the two World Wars, representing an influential ‘third stream’ alongside the ‘liberal tradition’ and growing state and local authority provision

Ambiguity reduction by objective model selection, with an application to the costs of the EU 2030 climate targets

I estimate the cost of meeting the EU 2030 targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction, using statistical emulators of ten alternative models. Assuming a first-best policy implementation, I find that total and marginal costs are modest. The statistical emulators allow me to compute the risk premiums, which are small, because the EU is rich and the policy impact is small. The ensemble of ten models allows me to compute the ambiguity premium, which is small for the same reason. I construct a counterfactual estimate of recent emissions without the climate policy and use that to test the predictive skill of the ten models. The models that show the lowest cost of emission reduction also have the lowest skill for Europe in recent times

Hierarchies, scale and privilege in the reproduction of national belonging

It is increasingly recognised both that belonging divides hierarchically and that people have different capacities to be seen as belonging. However, while the existence of hierarchies of belonging is well‐documented from the perspective of ethnically minoritised and migrant groups, what characterises, produces and underpins these hierarchies is largely unaddressed, as is a geographically‐informed analysis of their reproduction. This paper, based on interviews with white British people in the suburbs of London, takes a novel approach, examining the reproduction of national belonging among people for whom such belonging is relatively privileged. The paper identifies three constructions of national belonging within white British narratives – “belonging in Britain”, “belonging to Britain” and “being of Britain” – and argues that, although not always recognised as such, the three constructions are hierarchical in their differing temporalities and connections to whiteness. The elucidation of these different belongings and, crucially, the recognition of their hierarchisation and scalar‐reproduction, represent major contributions to research on belonging, and also help to explain the exclusion from a full sense of national belonging articulated by British people of colour

Effects in polarimetry of interference within wave plates

Multiple-beam interference within wave plates is investigated in terms of the detrimental effects it produces in the data of stellar spectropolarimetry. It is noted that spectral fringe structures occur in the phase delay, the polarizance and, for Pancharatnam designs, the reference axis of the wave plate. The natures of the problems are exposed by considering typical wave plates and experimental procedures used in linear and circular spectropolarimetry. It is demonstrated that the chief bane of accurate measurements is the presence of polarizance fringes, but which can be alleviated by the choice of experimental procedure. For spectral circular polarization studies, problems of cross-talk from any linear polarization present in the source are especially severe. In principle the effects of fringing can be removed in data reductions by calibration measurements of a set of linear polarization standard stars displaying different vibration azimuths and, for circular polarization measurements, knowledge of the linear polarization characteristics of the investigated star must also be known

“He was my best subaltern#8221;: The Life and Death of Lieutenant Herrick S. Duggan, 70th Field Company, Royal Engineers

At 0400 hours on 21 October 1915, 24 year–old First Lieutenant Herrick “Heck” Stevenson Duggan died of wounds in Béthune, France. One of the 61,000 casualties suffered by the British Army during its failed Loos offensive (25 September to 19 October 1915), Herrick differed from the vast majority of the dead and wounded because he was Canadian, not British. Based primarily on correspondence between Herrick Duggan and his family during the years 1913–15, this article explores Duggan’s life and experiences leading up to, and during, the Great War. In doing so it examines how the “war to end all wars” impacted one Canadian and his family, as well as exploring the nature of British society during the early years of the war. Indeed, Duggan’s letters are a valuable source for understanding the social and military aspects of the Great War. Duggan was a candid and observant writer who held little back. He was not afraid to tender criticism and concern about the Allied war effort and objectives—not to mention government figures—when he felt it was necessary to do so. Furthermore, he was often quite open with his own feelings and emotions with regard to the position in which he found himself

The Riemannian L^2 topology on the manifold of Riemannian metrics

We study the manifold of all Riemannian metrics over a closed, finite-dimensional manifold. In particular, we investigate the topology on the manifold of metrics induced by the distance function of the L^2 Riemannian metric - so called because it induces an L^2 topology on each tangent space. It turns out that this topology on the tangent spaces gives rise to an L^1-type topology on the manifold of metrics itself. We study this new topology and its completion, which agrees homeomorphically with the completion of the L^2 metric. We also give a user-friendly criterion for convergence (with respect to the L^2 metric) in the manifold of metrics.Comment: 31 pages; v2: minor corrections, published versio