The accord: an economic and social success story.

From 1983, Australia operated an Incomes Policy - the Accord. Senator Peter Cook, Australian Industrial Relations Minister, gave a Centre for Economic Performance-sponsored public lecture on the Accord in June 1991. In view of the considerable worldwide interest in the Accord, Senator Cook''s lecture is reprinted as a Centre for Economic Performance Occasional Paper to reach a wider audience. Peter Cook looks at the ways in which the Accord process facilitated a major assault on the impediments to economic growth and social equity in Australia in the 1980s, and argues that economic management should be achieved by consensus policies supported by social wage and industrial policy measures rather than economic and social confrontation.

The evolutionary biology of dance without frills

Recently psychologists have taken up the question of whether dance is reliant on unique human adaptations, or whether it is rooted in neural and cognitive mechanisms shared with other species 1, 2. In its full cultural complexity, human dance clearly has no direct analog in animal behavior. Most definitions of dance include the consistent production of movement sequences timed to an external rhythm. While not sufficient for dance, modes of auditory-motor timing, such as synchronization and entrainment, are experimentally tractable constructs that may be analyzed and compared between species. In an effort to assess the evolutionary precursors to entrainment and social features of human dance, Laland and colleagues [2] have suggested that dance may be an incidental byproduct of adaptations supporting vocal or motor imitation — referred to here as the ‘imitation and sequencing’ hypothesis. In support of this hypothesis, Laland and colleagues rely on four convergent lines of evidence drawn from behavioral and neurobiological research on dance behavior in humans and rhythmic behavior in other animals. Here, we propose a less cognitive, more parsimonious account for the evolution of dance. Our ‘timing and interaction’ hypothesis suggests that dance is scaffolded off of broadly conserved timing mechanisms allowing both cooperative and antagonistic social coordination

Feasibility study for locating archaeological village sites by satellite remote sensing techniques

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Gravitational Coset Models

The algebra A(D-3)+++ dimensionally reduces to the E(D-1) symmetry algebra of (12-D)-dimensional supergravity. An infinite set of five-dimensional gravitational objects trivially embedded in D-dimensions is constructed by identifying the null geodesic motion on cosets embedded in the generalised Kac-Moody algebra A(D-3)+++. By analogy with supergravity these are bound states of dual gravitons. The metric interpolates continuously between exotic gravitational solutions generated by the action of the Geroch group but is not a continuously transforming solution of the Einstein-Hilbert action. We investigate mixed-symmetry fields in the brane sigma model, identify actions for the full interpolating bound state and understand the obstruction to the bound state being a solution of the Einstein-Hilbert action.Comment: 46 page

G+++ and Brane Solutions

We demonstrate that the very extended G+++ group element of the form $g_A=\exp(-{\frac{1}{(\beta,\beta)}\ln N}\beta \cdot H)\exp((1-N)E_\beta)$ describes the usual BPS, electric, single brane solutions found in G+++ theories.Comment: One new equation, added references, corrected typos and minor changes, 42 pages, 6 figures, LaTeX2

Should archaeologists care about 14C inter-comparisons? Why? A summary report on SIRI

Radiocarbon (14C) dating is used widely in many projects as a basis for the creation and testing of chronological constructs. 14C measurements are by their nature complex and the degree of sample pretreatment varies considerably depending on the material. Within the United Kingdom and Europe, there are a number of well-established laboratories and increasingly, archaeologists are not just commissioning new dates, but also using statistical modelling of assemblages of dates, perhaps measured in different laboratories, to provide formal date estimates for their sites. The issue of comparability of measurements (and thus bias, accuracy and precision of measurement) from the diverse laboratories is one which has been the focus of some attention both within the 14C community and the wider user communities for some time. As a result of this but also as part of laboratory benchmarking and quality assurance, the 14C community has undertaken a wide-scale, far-reaching, and evolving program of intercomparisons, to the benefit of laboratories and users alike. This paper summarizes the most recent exercise, the Sixth International Radiocarbon Intercomparison (SIRI)

The fifth international radiocarbon intercomparison (VIRI): An assessment of laboratory performance in stage 3

Proficiency testing is a widely used, international procedure common within the analytical chemistry community. A proficiency trial (which VIRI is) often follows a standard protocol, including analysis that is typically based on zscores, with one key quantity, σp. From a laboratory intercomparison (sometimes called a proficiency trial), we hope to gain an assessment of accuracy (in this case, from dendro-dated samples), laboratory precision (from any duplicate samples), and generally, an overall measure of performance, including measurement variability and hence realistic estimates of uncertainty. In addition, given our stated aim of creating an archive of reference materials, we also gain a determination of consensus values for new reference materials. VIRI samples have been chosen to deliver these objectives and the sample ages included in the different stages, by design, spanned modern to background. With regard to pretreatment, some samples required intensive pretreatment (e.g. bone), while others required none (e.g. cellulose and humic acid). Sample size was not optimized, and indeed some samples were provided solely for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurement. In this sense, VIRI presented a more challenging exercise than previous intercomparisons, since by its design in stages, one can explore improvements (or deteriorations) over time in laboratory performance. At each stage, more than 50 laboratories have participated, with an increasing demographic shift towards more AMS and fewer radiometric laboratories

Metric of a tidally distorted, nonrotating black hole

The metric of a tidally distorted, nonrotating black hole is presented in a light-cone coordinate system that penetrates the event horizon and possesses a clear geometrical meaning. The metric is expressed as an expansion in powers of r/R << 1, where r is a measure of distance from the black hole and R is the local radius of curvature of the external spacetime; this is assumed to be much larger than M, the mass of the black hole. The metric is calculated up to a remainder of order (r/R)^4, and it depends on a family of tidal gravitational fields which characterize the hole's local environment. The coordinate system allows an easy identification of the event horizon, and expressions are derived for its surface gravity and the rates at which the tidal interaction transfers mass and angular momentum to the black hole.Comment: 4 pages. Final version, as it will appear in Physical Review Letter

Off-Shell Hodge Dualities in Linearised Gravity and E11

In a spacetime of dimension n, the dual graviton is characterised by a Young diagram with two columns, the first of length n-3 and the second of length one. In this paper we perform the off-shell dualisation relating the dual graviton to the double-dual graviton, displaying the precise off-shell field content and gauge invariances. We then show that one can further perform infinitely many off-shell dualities, reformulating linearised gravity in an infinite number of equivalent actions. The actions require supplementary mixed-symmetry fields which are contained within the generalised Kac-Moody algebra E11 and are associated with null and imaginary roots.Comment: 33 pages, 2 figures, nomenclature changed and comments added to the conclusion