Performing public credit at the eighteenth-century Bank of England

Much is known about the negotiation of personal credit relationships during the eighteenth century. It has been noted how direct contact and observation allowed individuals to assess the creditworthiness of those with whom they had financial connections and to whom they might lend money. Much less is known about one of the most important credit relationships of the long eighteenth century: that between the state and its creditors. This article shows that investors could experience the performance of public credit at the Bank of England. By 1760 the Bank was the manager of nearly three-quarters of the state's debt and housed the main secondary market in that debt. Thus, it provided a place for public creditors, both current and potential, to attend and scrutinize the performance of the state's promises. The article demonstrates how the Bank acted to embody public credit through its architecture, internal structures, and imagery and through the very visible actions of its clerks and the technologies that they used to record ownership and transfer of the national debt. The Bank of England, by those means, allowed creditors to interrogate the financial stability and reputation of the state in the same ways that they could interrogate the integrity of a private debtor.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

New records of Tephritidae (Diptera) from Great Smoky Mountains National Park - 2

Thirty additional species of tephritid flies (Diptera: Tephritidae) from Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), including historical records, are presented together with information on host(s), if known, distributions, and life histories. This brings the total number of tephritid flies recorded from GSMNP to 46

Evaluation of loudness calculation techniques with applications for product evaluation

Methods of calculating steady loudness were examined. Loudness has been characterised as a psychoacoustic metric that closely matches the perception of sound intensity. Seven loudness model and four types of frequency filtering were considered, via the loudness levels of 80 dB tones over a range of frequencies. The loudness levels obtained from all combinations of the loudness models and filtering techniques were compared with the values from ISO 226-2003, an equal-loudness level standard. Glasberg and Moore\u27s 2006 loudness model using FFT-based third-octave band filtering was determined to be the most suitable combination for general use. The criticality of setting full-scale sound pressure levels as close to the measured levels as possible was demonstrated. Jury tests were performed for product sounds, in which both loudness and overall acceptability were evaluated. It was found that calculated and subjective loudness agreed well but that loudness was not the dominant sensation in acceptability determination

Flyer by Night: A Cautionary Review

Review of Bio-rhythms, Biological Clocks and Periodicity: Index of New Information with Authors & Subjects by Preston G. Parke. ABBE Publishers Association of Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. 1996. $49.50. The flyer piqued our interest: a hot topic that students were trying to find pre-packaged for their reports and essays. One hundred and sixty pages full of the most recent articles on bio-rhythms -- with index. A reasonable price, for this day, was demanded. The book was ordered, cataloged, prepped and placed on the new books for reference truck. Twenty minutes later, the book had been withdrawn and a note made in the accession records to never purchase from the publisher again. We had been burned by a vanity press

Storage Coalescing

Typically, when a program executes, it creates objects dynamically and requests storage for its objects from the underlying storage allocator. The patterns of such requests can potentially lead to internal fragmentation as well as external fragmentation. Internal fragmentation occurs when the storage allocator allocates a contiguous block of storage to a program, but the program uses only a fraction of that block to satisfy a request. The unused portion of that block is wasted since the allocator cannot use it to satisfy a subsequent allocation request. External fragmentation, on the other hand, concerns chunks of memory that reside between allocated blocks. External fragmentation becomes problematic when these chunks are not large enough to satisfy an allocation request individually. Consequently, these chunks exist as useless holes in the memory system. In this thesis, we present necessary and sufficient storage conditions for satisfying allocation and deallocation sequences for programs that run on systems that use a binary-buddy allocator. We show that these sequences can be serviced without the need for defragmentation. We also explore the effects of buddy-coalescing on defragmentation and on overall program performance when using a defragmentation algorithm that implements buddy system policies. Our approach involves experimenting with Sun’s Java Virtual Machine and a buddy system simulator that embodies our defragmentation algorithm. We examine our algorithm in the presence of two approximate collection strategies, namely Reference Counting and Contaminated Garbage Collection, and one complete collection strategy - Mark and Sweep Garbage Collection. We analyze the effectiveness of these approaches with regards to how well they manage storage when we alter the coalescing strategy of our simulator. Our analysis indicates that prompt coalescing minimizes defragmentation and delayed coalescing minimizes number of coalescing in the three collection approaches

Parental Education Choice: Some African American Dilemmas

The research literature on families and educational achievement as it addresses African American populations is uniquely characterized by attention to educational failure rather than educational success (Slaughter, Nakagawa, et al., 1990). This orientation originated over 40 years ago with the culture-as-social-class conceptual model, which attempts to explain the behavior of lower income African American children and families in encounters with traditional schools (e.g., Davis, 1948). Even the most progressive of contemporary models addressing families and schooling in relation to this population such as those of Ogbu (1974, 1988), Brice-Heath (1988), and Clark (1983) have been compelled to account for the educational failures of urban African American children

Exploration of Dynamic Memory

Since the advent of the Java programming language and the development of real-time garbage collection, Java has become an option for implementing real-time applications. The memory management choices provided by real-time garbage collection allow for real-time eJava developers to spend more of their time implementing real-time solutions. Unfortunately, the real-time community is not convinced that real-time garbage collection works in managing memory for Java applications deployed in a real-time context. Consequently, the Real-Time for Java Expert Group formulated the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) standards to make Java a real-time programming language. In lieu of garbage collection, the RTSJ proposed a new memory model called scopes, and a new type of thread called NoHeapRealTimeThread (NHRT), which takes advantage of scopes. While scopes and NHRTs promise predictable allocation and deallocation behaviors, no asymptotic studies have been conducted to investigate the costs associated with these technologies. To understand the costs associated with using these technologies to manage memory, computations and analyses of time and space overheads associated with scopes and NHRTs are presented. These results provide a framework for comparing the RTSJ’s memory management model with real-time garbage collection. Another facet of this research concerns the optimization of novel approaches to garbage collection on multiprocessor systems. Such approaches yield features that are suitable for real-time systems. Although multiprocessor, concurrent garbage collection is not the same as real-time garbage collection, advancements in multiprocessor concurrent garbage collection have demonstrated the feasibility of building low latency multiprocessor real-time garbage collectors. In the nineteen-sixties, only three garbage collection schemes were available, namely reference counting garbage collection, mark-sweep garbage collection, and copying garbage collection. These classical approaches gave new insight into the discipline of memory management and inspired researchers to develop new, more elaborate memory-management techniques. Those insights resulted in a plethora of automatic memory management algorithms and techniques, and a lack of uniformity in the language used to reason about garbage collection. To bring a sense of uniformity to the language used to reason about garbage collection technologies, a taxonomy for comparing garbage collection technologies is presented

A comparison of the aerodynamic characteristics of the normal and three reflexed airfoils in the variable density wind tunnel

An investigation was made of the aerodynamic effects of reflexing the trailing edge of three commonly used airfoils. Six airfoils were used in the investigation: three having the normal profiles of the Navy 60, the Boeing 106, and the Gottingen 398, and three having these profiles modified to obtain a reflexed trailing edge with the mean camber line changed to give Cmc/4=0. The tests were conducted at a value of the Reynolds Number of approximately 3,100,000 in the variable density wind tunnel of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Measurements of lift, drag, and pitching moment were made on each of the six airfoils. The expected reduction of the center of pressure travel was obtained. The maximum lift was reduced approximately 12 per cent and the minimum profile drag approximately 4 per cent