City and Countryside Revisited. Comparative rent movements in London and the South-East, 1580-1914

Economic historians have traditionally argued that urban growth in England was driven primarily by prior improvements in agricultural supply in the two centuries before the industrial revolution. Recent revisionist scholarship by writers such as Jan Luiten van Zanden and Robert Allen has suggested that 'the city drove the countryside, not the reverse'. This paper assembles new serial data on urban and agricultural rent movements in Kent, Essex and London, from 1580-1914, which enables us to provide a tentative estimate of the strength of the urban variable and the productivity of land across the rural-urban continuum. Our initial findings support the revisionist view, and throw new light on London's position within the wider metropolitan region. Comparative rent movements suggests a greater continuity between town and countryside than has often been assumed, with sharp increases in rental values occurring on the rural-urban fringes of London and the lower Medway valley

Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory for the Stopping Power of an Interacting Electron Gas for Slow Ions

Based on the time-dependent density-functional theory, we have derived a rigorous formula for the stopping power of an {\it interacting} electron gas for ions in the limit of low projectile velocities. If dynamical correlation between electrons is not taken into account, this formula recovers the corresponding stopping power of {\it noninteracting} electrons in an effective Kohn-Sham potential. The correlation effect, specifically the excitonic one in electron-hole pair excitations, however, is found to considerably enhance the stopping power for intermediately charged ions, bringing our theory into good agreement with experiment.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, Accepted to Phys. Rev. B (Rapid Communication

Superheroes and Identities

This collection analyses stories from popular comics franchises such as Batman, Captain America, Ms Marvel and X-Men, alongside less well known comics such as Kabuki and Flex Mentallo

Caring for the patient, caring for the record: an ethnographic study of 'back office' work in upholding quality of care in general practice

© 2015 Swinglehurst and Greenhalgh; licensee BioMed Central. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Additional file 1: Box 1. Field notes on summarising (Clover Surgery). Box 2. Extract of document prepared for GPs by summarisers at Clover Surgery. Box 3. Fieldnotes on coding incoming post, Clover (original notes edited for brevity).This work was funded by a research grant from the UK Medical Research Council (Healthcare Electronic Records in Organisations 07/133) and a National Institute of Health Research doctoral fellowship award for DS (RDA/03/07/076). The funders were not involved in the selection or analysis of data nor did they make any contribution to the content of the final manuscript

Tawney and the third way

From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capitalism was combined with a concern for detailed institutional reform, challenging simple dichotomies between public and private ownership. He began a debate about democratizing the enterprise and corporate governance though his efforts fell on stony ground. Conversely, Tawney's moralism informed a whole-hearted condemnation of market forces in tension with both his concern with institutional reform and modern third way thought. Unfortunately, he refused to engage seriously with emergent welfare economics which for many social democrats promised a more nuanced understanding of the limits of market forces. Tawney's legacy is a complex one, whose various elements form a vital part of the intellectual background to current third way thinking