The provincial social survey in Edwardian Britain

This article examines three social surveys carried out in English provincial towns after Seebohm Rowntree's study of York and before A. L. Bowley's sample surveys of five towns. The authors emphasized specific local circumstances and suggested local voluntary and municipal remedies for the social problems they described. Their focus was on the community, and although informed by the discourses of 'national efficiency' that also lay behind Rowntree's researches, the solutions to the problems of juvenile life and casual labour that compromised national efficiency were to be found in local endeavour. Poverty was viewed in the context of its impact on the community rather than on the individual

'Splendid display; pompous spectacle': historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain

This article examines the organisation, nature and content of historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four pageants at St Albans, Hertfordshire – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – it considers the selection of historical episodes that were depicted, the role that pageants played in the life of the community, and the ways in which the relationship between past and present was presented. Pageants functioned as both education and entertainment, and were significant events in the creation of the public image of the city, although they could also provoke local controversy and dissent. They promoted a strongly local sense of identity, and civic pride was perhaps even more important to the post-war pageants than to those staged in the Edwardian period, as communities such as St Albans negotiated a period of rapid development and change in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the large-scale civic pageant that characterised the first half of the twentieth century rapidly declined in the late 1950s and early 1960s, proving less adaptable in the context of the cultural upheavals of the period. Subsequent pageants were on a much smaller scale than those that were staged before the mid-1950s, and adopted a different attitude to the national and local past

The Segregated Lambda-coalescent

We construct an extension of the Lambda-coalescent to a spatial continuum and analyse its behaviour. Like the Lambda-coalescent, the individuals in our model can be separated into (i) a dust component and (ii) large blocks of coalesced individuals. We identify a five phase system, where our phases are defined according to changes in the qualitative behaviour of the dust and large blocks. We completely classify the phase behaviour, including necessary and sufficient conditions for the model to come down from infinity. We believe that two of our phases are new to Lambda-coalescent theory and directly reflect the incorporation of space into our model. Firstly, our semicritical phase sees a null but non-empty set of dust. In this phase the dust becomes a random fractal, of a type which is closely related to iterated function systems. Secondly, our model has a critical phase in which the coalescent comes down from infinity gradually during a bounded, deterministic time interval.Comment: Updated to accepted article - to appear in the Annals of Probability. 36 pages, 2 figure

Pairing-based identification schemes

We propose four different identification schemes that make use of bilinear pairings, and prove their security under certain computational assumptions. Each of the schemes is more efficient and/or more secure than any known pairing-based identification scheme

Promoting Inclusion Oral Health:Social Interventions to Reduce Oral Health Inequities

The aim of this collection of papers is to provide the reader with a cogent understanding of the role of evidence in the development of social or community-based interventions to promote inclusion oral-health and reduce oral health, health, and psychosocial inequities. In addition, this material will include various methods used for their implementation and evaluation. At the outset, the reader will be offered a working definition of inclusion oral-health, which will be modelled on the work of Luchenski et al. [1]. The interventions described are theoretically underpinned by a pluralistic definition of evidence-based practice [2] and the radical discourse of health promotion as postulated by Laverack and Labonte [3] and others [4,5]. This Special Issue will consist of eight papers, including an introduction. The first three papers will examine the various sources of evidence used to transform top-down into bottom-up community-based interventions for people experiencing homelessness; people in custody and for families residing in areas of high social deprivation. The final four papers will report on the implementation and evaluation of social or community-based interventions. This collection of research papers will highlight the importance of focusing on prevention and the adoption of a common risk factor agenda to tackle oral health, health and psychosocial inequities felt by those most excluded in our societies

Knowledge, education and social differentiation amongst the Betsileo of Fisakana, highland Madagascar

This thesis is an ethnographic study of a village in Fisakana, an area of highland Madagascar where the institution of formal education has had great social, economic and cultural influence. Although the principal means of subsistence in Fisakana is wet rice cultivation, a severe shortage of good land has led to large-scale emigration. Schooling has provided opportunities for social and spatial mobility that have shaped the character of the region. Migration and movement are dominant themes in the ethnography of Madagascar. The thesis examines three different types of migration in Fisakana. Each entails a different type of relationship between the migrants and their ancestral land. These are discussed in the context of other literature dealing with this topic in the anthropology of Madagascar. The region is characterised by inequalities of wealth. People working in the profession sector have prospered economically in comparison to those dependent on agriculture. This thesis makes an original contribution to the literature on social and economic differentiation in the highlands by treating the subject from an ethnographic perspective. The role of formal education in widening socio-economic differentiation is explored in detail. Then the thesis studies how this differentiation is elaborated symbolically through the building of houses and tombs. it also points out the ambiguous nature of tomb ceremonies: whilst ostensibly symbolising social unity and cohesion, they also imply fissure and exclusion. The thesis then examine the Betsileo social construction of knowledge. Through an exploration of what is learned inside and outside the classroom the thesis shows how local notions of traditional and foreign knowledge articulate with missionary, colonial and post-colonial ideologies of schooling, and with the social and spatial differentiation and displacement produced by formal education

Rider Haggard and rural England: methods of social enquiry in the English countryside

No abstract available