Putting fairness first: Grant v Grant and the date at which property is acquired for the purposes of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 1985

What role does property doctrine play in defining the scope of “matrimonial property” for the purposes of financial provision on divorce in Scots law? In Grant v Grant, the Sheriff Appeal Court held that the date at which an asset was acquired can be the date of construction of family house, rather than the date of acquisition of the land on which it stands. Does the statutory context justify departure from the long-established doctrine that the legal status of an accessory follows that of the principal? If the usual rules of property law do not apply, on what basis are decisions about the scope of “matrimonial property” to be made? Is fairness between the parties the only principle that matters

Holding it all together? The management of supply cover in the teaching profession

There have for some years been concerns in Scotland about the availability of supply cover, the quality of supply teachers and the adequacy of support and development provided for them. This is a report of a study which focuses on the management of supply cover in Scotland. It presents an analysis of qualitative and quantitative data collected from education authorities, schools and supply teachers

The management of supply cover in the teaching profession

There have for some years been concerns in Scotland about the availability of supplycover, the quality of supply teachers, and the adequacy of support and developmentprovided for them. This Insighthighlights key findings from a study of the managementof supply cover in Scotland. The research was commissioned by the Scottish ExecutiveEducation Department in October 2002 to inform the development of guidelines

The significance of subsurface chlorophyll, nitrite and ammonium maxima in relation to nitrogen for phytoplankton growth in stratified waters of the Gulf of Maine

Data on the distributions in summer of phytoplankton and inorganic nutrients in the Gulf of Maine and across Georges Bank are presented. The chlorophyll maximum represents a phytoplankton biomass maximum and occurs at a depth where both light and nitrate availability allow net growth of the population. The dominant species were generally flagellates and included the toxic dinoflagellate, Gonyaulax tamarensis var. excavata, at some stations. The ammonium and nitrite profiles suggest that nitrification is occurring at the base of the pycnocline below the chlorophyll maximum, and this may be an important source of nitrate during the summer months. The highest levels of nitrite and ammonium were found over the slopes of Georges Bank

Global capitalism's Trojan Horse: Consumer power and the National Student Survey in England

Neo-liberal capitalism is a representation of values that are detrimental to intellectual inquiry. Market deregulation and consumer choice are relentless in their erosion of academic autonomy and traditions of independent scholarship. Education as a ‘positional good’ may be weakened more in the post-1992 higher education sector, where consumer-oriented quality assurance is used strategically to bolster prestige and so improve relative competitive advantage (for student recruitment and external monies), than in the pre-1992 Russell Group of universities, which privileges academic research and autonomy from regulation. The university as an intellectual public domain is subject to suppression by capitalism’s deployment of a putatively enlightened ‘student voice’. This neo-liberal embrace of ‘student experience’ is evidenced in the privileging of choice and satisfaction anchored in the envisaging of earning power as a basic touchstone of relevance. Globalisation’s Trojan Horse, the authors argue, is embodied in the positivism of the quantitative metrics of the National Student Survey, designed by global giant Ipsos MORI. The argument that a ranking of universities on the results of the National Student Survey demonstrates excellence begs the question of what the university is for

Effect of multipath and antenna diversity in MIMO-OFDM systems with imperfect channel estimation and phase noise compensation

The effect of phase noise in multiple-input–multiple-output systems employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing is analyzed in a realistic scenario where channel estimation is not perfect, and the phase noise effects are only partially compensated. In particular, the degradation in terms of SNR is derived and the effects of the receiver and channel parameters are considered, showing that the penalty is different for different receiver schemes. Moreover it depends on the channel characteristics and on the channel estimation error. An analytical expression is used to evaluate the residual inter-channel interference variance and therefore the degradation. The effects of multipath and antenna diversity are shown to be different for the two types of linear receivers considered, the zero-forcing scheme and the minimum mean squared error receiver.This work has been partly funded by projects “MACAWI” TEC2005-07477-C02-02 and “MULTI-ADAPTIVE” TEC2008-06327-C03-02.Publicad

Glueballs and strings in Sp(2N) Yang-Mills theories

Motivated in part by the pseudo-Nambu Goldstone Boson mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking in Composite Higgs Models, in part by dark matter scenarios with strongly coupled origin, as well as by general theoretical considerations related to the large-N extrapolation, we perform lattice studies of the Yang-Mills theories with Sp(2N) gauge groups. We measure the string tension and the mass spectrum of glueballs, extracted from appropriate 2-point correlation functions of operators organised as irreducible representations of the octahedral symmetry group. We perform the continuum extrapolation and study the magnitude of finite-size effects, showing that they are negligible in our calculation. We present new numerical results for N = 1, 2, 3, 4, combine them with data previously obtained for N = 2, and extrapolate towards N ! 1. We confirm explicitly the expectation that, as already known for N = 1, 2 also for N = 3, 4 a confining potential rising linearly with the distance binds a static quark to its antiquark. We compare our results to the existing literature on other gauge groups, with particular attention devoted to the large-N limit. We find agreement with the known values of the mass of the 0++, 0++⇤ and 2++ glueballs obtained taking the large-N limit in the SU(N) groups. In addition, we determine for the first time the mass of some heavier glueball states at finite N in Sp(2N) and extrapolate the results towards N ! +1 taking the limit in the latter groups. Since the large-N limit of Sp(2N) is the same as in SU(N), our results are relevant also for the study of QCD-like theories

Color dependence of tensor and scalar glueball masses in Yang-Mills theories

We report the masses of the lightest spin-0 and spin-2 glueballs obtained in an extensive lattice study of the continuum and infinite volume limits of Sp(Nc) gauge theories for Nc = 2, 4, 6, 8. We also extrapolate the combined results towards the large-Nc limit. We compute the ratio of scalar and tensor masses, and observe evidence that this ratio is independent of Nc. Other lattice studies of Yang-Mills theories at the same space-time dimension provide a compatible ratio. We further compare these results to various analytical ones and discuss them in view of symmetry-based arguments related to the breaking of scale invariance in the underlying dynamics, showing that a constant ratio might emerge in a scenario in which the 0++ glueball is interpreted as a dilaton state