It's OK to be angry about capitalism

At a time when most politicians are wary of the phrase "working class", Bernie Sanders has no such qualms. It recurs countless times in this book, most of which is devoted to detailing the current plight of the American working class, its causes and the remedies needed. Sanders does not mince his words: the American working class lives a precarious, underpaid existence and suffers abysmal health care and poor education. Attempts at unionisation are aggressively put down. The force oppressing the working class, the Sanders narrative continues, is a handful of billionaires, who make massive donations to America's two major political parties (sometimes to both at once), by which means they are able to block policy changes threatening their own financial interests. He expresses, at length, a quite personal loathing for these people and their values. Sanders informs us that the Democrats have more billionaire donors than the Republicans but he is justly proud that he did not solicit or receive any funding from them for his own campaign for nomination as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2020 (and when they read his book they won't be giving him a cent in the future)

Jorge Tamames (2020) For the People: Left Populism in Spain and the US

There are three sections to this book, each of which contains three chapters, each of which begins with three quotations. This is a systematic author. The clear structure makes the text easy to navigate and a useful index makes it easier still. The third section fulfils the promise of the title, with analyses of the rise and considerable fall of the Podemos movement in Spain and Bernie Sanders’ promising but ultimately unsuccessful 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in America. The second section lays the ground for these two analyses, with accounts of the political economies of Spain and America, respectively, over the 35 years or so up to the recent financial crash; a major part of the argument of the book is that the current 'populist moment' can only be properly understood by locating it in its historical context, which dates back to the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s

The attack on The Spirit Level

The attack on The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket

The Spirit Level

Book reviewThe Spirit Level:  Why more equal societies almost always do better.  Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.  Allen lane, London, 200

Review: Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What can be done?

This book tells the narrative of the fall in social inequality after the second world war and its subsequent and continuing rise. It then proposes a set of policies to reverse the current trend, which could be implemented in the UK without undermining its capitalist economy. They include a more progressive income tax, with a top rate of 65%, a capital endowment paid to all citizens on their reaching adulthood and guaranteed public employment for job-seekers at the level of the living wage

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century

Capital in the Twenty First Centur

Review Essay: What Are We Struggling For?

review ofThe crucible of resistance:  Greece, the Eurozone & the world economic crisis.  Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos.  London:  Pluto Press.  2013. After neoliberalism?  The Kilburn manifesto.  Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin (eds.).  London:  Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.  2015

Rural versus urban accent as an influence on the rate of speech

Speakers of rural accents have been said to speak more slowly than speakers of urban accents. However, there would appear to have been no previous empirical investigation of such a claim. In the study reported here, recordings were made of 12 Orkney English speakers and 12 Edinburgh English speakers, during a reading task and in conversation with the experimenter. Measurements, in syllables per second, were made of both the Speaking Rate and the Articulation Rate (i.e. the rate calculated after excision of pauses) of each speaker in reading mode and in conversation mode. Comparison of the results for the two groups revealed no tendency for the urban (Edinburgh) speakers to speak faster than the rural (Orkney) speakers. The claim that rural speakers speak more slowly than urban speakers therefore still awaits empirical support. Some discussion is offered concerning the possible relationships among speech tempo, lifestyle and accent.casl28pub2564pub01-Fe

Lingual Coarticulation in Preadolescents and Adults: An Ultrasound Study. ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-22-4075

SwindonWhen people combine sounds to make words, there is overlap in the tongue movements involved in articulating individual sounds, referred to as lingual coarticulation. For example, in adult speech, tongue positions at mid-consonant, in the words she- and shah-, differ because of the influence of the following vowel. The research team's earlier work showed that young children differed from adults in the extent of vowel-on-consonant coarticulation. In this project, for the first time, a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of tongue movements was performed. The project used high-speed ultrasound to measure lingual coarticulation in the syllables she-, shah-, sea- and 'Sah', comparing preadolescent children and adults, fifteen speakers in each age group. In both age groups and both consonants, the tongue position at mid-consonant was affected by the identity of the following vowel. There was no significant effect of age on the size of the vowel-related difference in tongue posture, nor on within-speaker variability in tongue placement. Age-related differences were observed in the onset of coarticulation. While in the adults, the vowel effect was present throughout the consonant for both consonants, in preadolescents the effect was apparent later into the first half of the consonant. The results of the study suggest a near-adult-like achievement in the development of lingual control by preadolescents, with respect to the coarticulation of fricative-vowel sequences. However age-related differences in timing may indicate that preadolescents have still to gain the extent of forward planning in speech production which is possible for a typical adult.caslpub3341pu

Children's perception of direct and indirect reported speech

This study investigated the abilities of adults and children to distinguish direct reported speech from indirect reported speech in sentences read aloud by a native English speaker. The adults were highly successful, the older children less so and the younger children were relatively unsuccessful. Indirect reported speech appeared to be the default category for the children. Potential prosodic cues were identified and measured from waveforms and pitch contours of the stimulus sentences. Statistical analysis was applied with a view to ascertaining which (combination of) cues best predicted the listener responses. The results suggest that pitch movement and duration both provided important cues to distinguishing the sentence types. The analysis also revealed a learning effect by all groups.caslpub2247pu