Social, Economic and Geographical Differences in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Homes: The Evidence from Inventories

This article was first published in Regional Furniture (2013)

Risk media and the end of anonymity

Whereas threats from twentieth century 'broadcast era' media were characterised in terms of ideology and ‘effects', today the greatest risks posed by media are informational. This paper argues that digital participation as the condition for the maintenance of today's self identity and basic sociality has shaped a new principal media risk of the loss of anonymity. I identify three interrelated key features of this new risk. Firstly, basic communicational acts are archival. Secondly, there is a diminishment of the predictable 'decay time' of media. And, thirdly, both of these shape a new individual and organizational vulnerability of 'emergence' – the haunting by our digital trails. This article places these media risks in the context of the shifting nature and function of memory and the potential uses and abuses of digital pasts

Memory ecologies

The individual and collective and also cultural domains have long constituted challenging boundaries for the study of memory. These are often clearly demarcated between approaches drawn from the human and the social sciences and also humanities, respectively. But recent work turns the enduring imagination – the world view – of these domains on its head by treating memory as serving a link between both the individual and collective past and future. Here, I employ some of the contributions from Schacter and Welker’s Special Issue of Memory Studies on ‘Memory and Connection’ to offer an ‘expanded view’ of memory that sees remembering and forgetting as the outcome of interactional trajectories of experience, both emergent and predisposed

Development of convection along the SPCZ within a Madden-Julian oscillation

A subtropical Rossby wave propagation mechanism is proposed to account for the poleward and eastward progression of intraseasonal convective anomalies along the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) that is observed in a significant proportion of Madden-Julian Oscillations (MJOs). Large scale convection, associated with an MJO, is assumed to be already established over the Indonesian region. The latent heating associated with this convection forces an equatorial Rossby wave response with an upper tropospheric anticyclone, centred over or slightly to the west of the convection. Large potential vorticity (PV) gradients, associated with the subtropical jet and the tropopause, lie just poleward of the anticyclone and large magnitude PV air is advected equatorwards on the eastern side of the anticyclone. This ``high'' PV air, or upper tropospheric trough, is far enough off the equator that it has associated strong horizontal temperature gradients, and it induces deep ascent on its eastern side, at a latitude of about 15-30\degr. If this deep ascent is over a region susceptible to deep convection, such as the SPCZ region, then convection may be forced or triggered. Hence convection develops along the SPCZ as a forced response to convection over Indonesia. The response mechanism is essentially one of subtropical Rossby wave propagation. This hypothesis is based on a case study of a particularly strong MJO in early 1988, and is tested by idealised modelling studies. The mechanism may also be relevant to the existence of the mean SPCZ, as a forced response to mean Indonesian convection

The Technological Bias Against Production Workers in United States Manufacturing 1949 – 1996

This paper presents quantitative estimates of the effects of technological change on the composition of production and non-production workers in manufacturing in the United States for the period 1950 – 1995. The paper separates the effects of relative wage change, biased technological change and changes in sectoral composition and estimates the effect of upward pressure on relative pay exerted by biased technological change.Skill change; United Kingdom; technological change; sectoral composition

The Long Run Bias Against Manual Workers in British Manufacturing 1920 – 1995

This paper presents quantitative estimates of the effects of technological change on the composition of manual and non-manual employment in manufacturing in the United Kingdom for the period 1921 – 1995. The paper separates the effects of relative wage change, biased technological change and changes in sectoral composition and calculates the upward pressure on relative pay exerted by biased technological change.Skill change; United Kingdom; technological change; sectoral composition

Quotients of unstable subvarieties and moduli spaces of sheaves of fixed Harder-Narasimhan type

When a reductive group $G$ acts linearly on a complex projective scheme $X$ there is a stratification of $X$ into $G$-invariant locally closed subschemes, with an open stratum $X^{ss}$ formed by the semistable points in the sense of Mumford's geometric invariant theory which has a categorical quotient $X^{ss} \to X//G$. In this article we describe a method for constructing quotients of the unstable strata. As an application, we construct moduli spaces of sheaves of fixed Harder-Narasimhan type with some extra data (an '$n$-rigidification') on a projective base.Comment: 33 pages, minor revision. To appear in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Societ

The linear dependence relations and truncation errors for interpolating even order splines

Linear dependence relations are derived for even order polynomial splines defined over the points midway between a uniformly spaced set of knots. The leading term of the truncation error is determined and is illustrated by an example