The Crafts Study Centre

The Crafts Study Centre is a specialist university museum open free to the public as well as a research centre of the University for the Creative Arts. The Centre's acclaimed collections include modern and contemporary calligraphy, ceramics, textiles, furniture and wood as well as makers' diaries, working notes and photographs dating from the 1920s. Inspiring exhibitions and gallery talks by leading artist-makers are held year round in our two galleries. We foster scholarship and writing about modern and contemporary craft through this website and publishing new books and monographs. We also host one academic symposium a year. The Centre's research library is available by appointment for those interested in learning more about our collections

From the “broadband ditch” to the release of the 2010 US national broadband plan. A short history of the broadband penetration debate in the US

The paper provides an historical account of the policy debate that took place in the United States after the 2007 release of the OECD's broadband statistics. It explains why and in what context such a debate occurred (lack of relevant statistics from the FCC, dissatisfaction of some stakeholders with the deregulation of broadband, role of new players). The paper reviews the policy options proposed by the main players to foster the deployment of broadband, among others the potential inclusion of broadband in the scope of the US universal service, the need for a national policy, and implementation/funding issues. It puts into perspective the national broadband plan proposed by the FCC in March 2010.broadband, competition, industrial policies, government intervention, universal service, open internet, deregulation, rankings/ benchmarking countries.

Endogeneity and Instrumental Variables in Dynamic Models

The objective of the paper is to draw the theory of endogeneity in dynamic models in discrete and continuous time, in particular for diffusions and counting processes. We first provide an extension of the separable set-up to a separable dynamic framework given in term of semi-martingale decomposition. Then we define our function of interest as a stopping time for an additional noise process, whose role is played by a Brownian motion for diffusions, and a Poisson process for counting processes.

Enhanced LFR-toolbox for MATLAB and LFT-based gain scheduling

We describe recent developments and enhancements of the LFR-Toolbox for MATLAB for building LFT-based uncertainty models and for LFT-based gain scheduling. A major development is the new LFT-object definition supporting a large class of uncertainty descriptions: continuous- and discrete-time uncertain models, regular and singular parametric expressions, more general uncertainty blocks (nonlinear, time-varying, etc.). By associating names to uncertainty blocks the reusability of generated LFT-models and the user friendliness of manipulation of LFR-descriptions have been highly increased. Significant enhancements of the computational efficiency and of numerical accuracy have been achieved by employing efficient and numerically robust Fortran implementations of order reduction tools via mex-function interfaces. The new enhancements in conjunction with improved symbolical preprocessing lead generally to a faster generation of LFT-models with significantly lower orders. Scheduled gains can be viewed as LFT-objects. Two techniques for designing such gains are presented. Analysis tools are also considered