The Dublin society in eighteenth-century Irish political thought

Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue

Classifying blocks with abelian defect groups of rank 33 for the prime 22

In this paper we classify all blocks with defect group $C_{2^n}\times C_2\times C_2$ up to Morita equivalence. Together with a recent paper of Wu, Zhang and Zhou, this completes the classification of Morita equivalence classes of $2$-blocks with abelian defect groups of rank at most $3$. The classification holds for blocks over a suitable discrete valuation ring as well as for those over an algebraically closed field. The case considered in this paper is significant because it involves comparison of Morita equivalence classes between a group and a normal subgroup of index $2$, so requires novel reduction techniques which we hope will be of wider interest. We note that this also completes the classification of blocks with abelian defect groups of order dividing $16$ up to Morita equivalence. A consequence is that Broue's abelian defect group conjecture holds for all blocks mentioned above

Donovan’s conjecture, blocks with abelian defect groups and discrete valuation rings

We give a reduction to quasisimple groups for Donovan’s conjecture for blocks with abelian defect groups defined with respect to a suitable discrete valuation ring O. Consequences are that Donovan’s conjecture holds for O-blocks with abelian defect groups for the prime two, and that, using recent work of Farrell and Kessar, for arbitrary primes Donovan’s conjecture for O-blocks with abelian defect groups reduces to bounding the Cartan invariants of blocks of quasisimple groups in terms of the defect. A result of independent interest is that in general (i.e. for arbitrary defect groups) Donovan’s conjecture for O-blocks is a consequence of conjectures predicting bounds on the O-Frobenius number and on the Cartan invariants, as was proved by Kessar for blocks defined over an algebraically closed field

Strain-mediated magnetoelectric coupling in magnetostrictive/piezoelectric heterostructures and resulting high frequency effects

Magnetoelectric coupling terms are derived in piezoelectric/magnetostrictive (multiferroic) thin film heterostructures using Landau-Ginzburg free energy expansions in terms of strain and by considering strain boundary conditions between the two materials. Then, a general effective medium method for solving for the complete electromagnetic susceptibility tensor of such heterostructures is used to calculate the ferromagnetic resonance frequency in a BaTiO$_3$/NiFe$_2$O$_4$ superlattice. This method differs from existing methods for treating magnetoelectric heterostructures since the magnetic and electric dipolar fields are not assumed constant but vary from one film to another. The ferromagnetic resonance frequency shift is calculated as a function of applied electric field and is compared to some experimental results.Comment: 4 figure

Some examples of Picard groups of blocks

We calculate examples of Picard groups for 2-blocks with abelian defect groups with respect to a complete discrete valuation ring. These include all blocks with abelian 2-groups of 2-rank at most three with the exception of the principal block of J1. In particular this shows directly that all such Picard groups are finite and Picent, the group of Morita auto-equivalences fixing the centre, is trivial. These are amongst the first calculations of this kind. Further we prove some general results concerning Picard groups of blocks with normal defect groups as well as some other cases.Comment: 21 page

Towards Donovan's conjecture for abelian defect groups

We define a new invariant for a $p$-block, the strong Frobenius number, which we use to address the problem of reducing Donovan's conjecture to normal subgroups of index p. As an application we use the strong Frobenius number to complete the proof of Donovan's conjecture for 2-blocks with abelian defect groups of rank at most 4 and for 2-blocks with abelian defect groups of order at most 64

Insights of project managers into the problems in project management

A Delphi study using project managers who had managed projects in excess of $500 million was used to confirm the significance and frequency of problems resulting from the nature of projects. Using the results obtained from the Delphi study a ranking of the problems experienced in these projects was obtained by calculating a Relative Importance Index. Additionally, the Delphi panel members were asked their views concerning the need for traditional project management skills (hard skills) and team management skills (soft skills) as project size increased from below$50 million to over $500 million. A substantial increase in the need for both skills was indicated with the increase in the need for soft skills being the most significant