Exploring the links between employment clusters and economic diversity in the British urban system

A growing body of literature, built up over the years, has explored the cluster concept. In parallel, another body of literature has accumulated regarding the diversity and specialisation of cities. There has been little explicit linkage between these two bodies of literature. This study sets out to explore the potential link between these two representations of spatial patterns so that a better understanding of the relationship between the two might be established. The UK Annual Business Inquiry 2007 provides the employment data drawn from various aggregated levels of the SIC 2003 for 70 TTWAs that represent the British Urban System. The paper investigates the extent of spatial concentration of individual sectors, and provides an example of how clusters might be identified spatially. Further analysis, using data drawn from the SIC 1, 2 and 3 digit levels indicates the relationship levels diversity/specialisation have with the clustering of activities, particularly when various sub-sectors are examined. Specific locations, or groups of cities are identified, which reinforce previous understandings of some of the key concepts. The results indicate further analysis of the role of localisation and urbanisation economies and their relationship with diversity/specialisation is required with an added emphasis on occupational, rather than just industrial diversity

Cathedrals in the digital age: a case study of Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury

The main aim of this paper is to understand, in the age of ‘Smart Cities’ (Caragliu et al 2011), how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are used to manage and promote the cathedrals of Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury as key elements in their strategies to attract visitors and tourists to both places. We have analysed online visits, ICT service provision and the numbers of tourists at both venues since 2010, with the goal of exploring how technology is modifying the information available to tourists and management alike. The research is inspired by the words of an English pilgrim, cited above, who was travelling along the way to Santiago de Compostela some five hundred years ago. It was a time when communication was limited, travel by land and/or sea was the only form of communication between territories, and the only available method to establish economic and commercial relationships required cultural exchange and human mobility. In the early 21st century, one can fly from Santiago de Compostela (Spain) to London and then from London to Canterbury (UK) via high-speed train. Today, we speak of timetables, online bookings, emails, websites, smartphones and credit cards. This is the language of modern travel and acts as an example of our ICT requirements for such a journey. A visit to either city today highlights how the places and travellers have changed from the days of Boorde’s pilgrimage. Just as important perhaps, despite such huge change, is that these two cities remain the destinations for vast numbers of pilgrims. Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury have several commonalities. Both located in western Europe, both historic cities are recognised as world heritage sites by UNESCO, both cities have magnificent Cathedrals that dominate the cityscape crisscrossed by pedestrian streets in their old town centres, both cities are the historical seats of the Church in their respective country, both cities act as cultural and religious destinations for pilgrims, and both cities have university campuses close to the city. Given the obvious similarities, it is seems a very attractive proposition to compare both places in terms of tourism today. The research focuses on the two ancient Cathedrals. With centuries of tradition behind them, both ‘attractions’ have adapted management policies in keeping with the times. The digital age is here and a new era of ‘smart cities’ has arrived. A new episode in the history of Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury has emerged and needs further research. Keywords: Santiago, Canterbury, cathedral, digital, tourism

The Future of Particle Physics

After a very brief review of twentieth century elementary particle physics, prospects for the next century are discussed. First and most important are technological limits of opportunities; next, the future experimental program, and finally the status of the theory, in particular its limitations as well as its opportunities.Comment: Invited talk given at the International Conference on Fundamental Sciences: Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Singapore, 13-17 March 200

Quantum power correction to the Newton law

We have found the graviton contribution to the one-loop quantum correction to the Newton law. This correction results in interaction decreasing with distance as 1/r^3 and is dominated numerically by the graviton contribution. The previous calculations of this contribution to the discussed effect are demonstrated to be incorrect.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures; numerical error corrected, few references adde

Fermion masses in noncommutative geometry

Recent indications of neutrino oscillations raise the question of the possibility of incorporating massive neutrinos in the formulation of the Standard Model (SM) within noncommutative geometry (NCG). We find that the NCG requirement of Poincare duality constrains the numbers of massless quarks and neutrinos to be unequal unless new fermions are introduced. Possible scenarios in which this constraint is satisfied are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX; typos are corrected in (19), "Possible Solutions" and "Conclusion" are modified; additional calculational details are included; references are update

The elusive quest for balanced regional growth from Barlow to Brexit: lessons from partitioning regional employment growth in Great Britain

The British Government’s economic strategy for post-Brexit Britain of achieving balanced regional growth by “driving growth across the whole country” echoes the objectives set by the Barlow Report of 1940. The regional policies that followed the Barlow Report were heavily influenced by papers written for the Commission by G D A (later Sir Donald) MacDougall. The first of these papers was included as an appendix to the report itself and introduced the shift-share methodology to the analysis of regional employment growth, and subsequently shown to be flawed. The second paper considered the urban hierarchy and growth but was never fully developed. Consequently post-war regional policy focussed on the contribution of industrial structure to employment growth without fully taking into account the urban hierarchy or regional locations of that employment. This article replaces the flawed shift-share methodology with multifactor partitioning (MFP) and applies it to regional employment growth for the period 1971-2012, a span of special interest because it largely coincides with British membership of the European Union (EU). The deficiencies in the second paper are addressed by introducing allometry to measure the employment growth of each region relative to that of Great Britain and then regression analysis to relate the allometries to distance from London. The results of the two sets of analyses highlight the need for a multiple-factor, comprehensive, and integrated approach to regional policy and provide a benchmark against which to gauge the success of Britain's post-Brexit policy of driving future growth across the whole country

The anthropic principle and the mass scale of the Standard Model

In theories in which different regions of the universe can have different values of the the physical parameters, we would naturally find ourselves in a region which has parameters favorable for life. We explore the range of anthropically allowed values of the mass parameter in the Higgs potential, $\mu^2$. For $\mu^2<0$, the requirement that complex elements be formed suggests that the Higgs vacuum expectation value $v$ must have a magnitude less than 5 times its observed value. For $\mu^2>0$, baryon stability requires that $|\mu|<<M_P$, the Planck Mass. Smaller values of $|\mu^2|$ may or may not be allowed depending on issues of element synthesis and stellar evolution. We conclude that the observed value of $\mu^2$ is reasonably typical of the anthropically allowed range, and that anthropic arguments provide a plausible explanation for the closeness of the QCD scale and the weak scale.Comment: 28 pages, LaTeX. No changes from version originally submitted to archive, except that problem with figure file has been correcte