The composition of famuli labour on English demesnes, c.1300

This article explores the nature of agricultural labour in England c.1300. Using a national sample of over 400 manorial accounts containing detailed data for over 4000 individuals, the piece looks closely at famuli labour, the nucleus of the workforce on seigneurial demesnes (the farms directly cultivated by manorial lords as opposed to the land of their tenants) at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a period considered to be the pinnacle of medieval population and intensive land exploitation. By examining the rates of remuneration as well as the availability of work for the range of famuli labourers, we argue that famuli labour was divided into a bipartite system of first- and second-tier workers where core, or first-tier (and mostly male), labourers such as ploughmen, carters, and shepherds were paid higher wages and presented with more opportunities to work as compared to a group of more subsidiary 'second-tier' labourers largely comprised of women, the young and the elderly

Interview with Yolande Bavan Member of Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan Vocalist, The Real Ambassadors, 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival Date of Interview: September 23, 2012

Dave and Iola Brubeck created The Real Ambassadors in the late 1950s. The jazz musical pointed out the absurdity of segregation and makes the case that artists such as Louis Armstrong are the best and real ambassadors to demonstrate a nation\u27s ideals. It was recorded in 1961 and performed live only once. Despite their efforts, the play never made it to stage. Here is a collection of letters, photographs, scripts, and audio that document the creation of The Real Ambassadors.https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/trai/1000/thumbnail.jp

An inclusive design perspective on automotive HMI trends

This paper looks at recent trends in automotive human machine interfaces, with a lens of evaluation from an inclusive design perspective. The goal of Inclusive Design is to ensure that the population of potential users for a product or service is maximised. Until relatively recently, automotive human machine interfaces (HMI’s) have excluded and caused difficulties for users due to visibility, reach and force required to operate controls. Over the last 15 or so years however, there has been a significant increase in control and display location, interface types and integration of functions, as well as dramatically increased potential functionality due to in-vehicle emergent technologies. It is suggested that this increase in interface unfamiliarity for a driver will cause significant difficulty and potential exclusion, due to the demands of learning and conflicts in expectation. The effects on this trend in the context of an ageing population and automated driving technologies are discussed.This work was carried out at the University of Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, within the Inclusive Design Group. Sponsor: Jaguar Land Rover.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40238-3_5

Horses, oxen and technological innovation : the use of draught animals in English farming from 1066 to 1500

This study is primarily intended as a contribution to the subject of medieval technology. In it the introduction of the work-horse to English farming as a replacement for oxen has been traced through nearly 450 years to see how medieval English society reacted to and upon this particular technical innovation. It has been found that in the adoption of the horse and in the use of draught animals generally there was a sharp differentiation between the experience of the demesne and that of the peasantry. Horses were adopted slowly on demesnes, such that by the end of the fourteenth century oxen still dominated as draught animals here by a ratio of two to one over horses. On the peasant side the adoption of horses for work was much quicker. Nearly half of the peasantry’s draught animals were horses by the end of the thirteenth century, and this proportion continued to increase, especially during the fifteenth century and afterwards. Smallholders in particular were in the vanguard in using horses, because they found the beasts so much more versatile than oxen. The use of draught animals overall seems to have been linked most intimately to the activities of the market. Thus when the economy began to expand in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so did the employment of horses, especially in their capacity as hauling animals. Similarly, when market relationships became more complex at the end of the medieval period, there was a marked specialisation in the use of draught animals, as some areas began to employ horses exclusively and others reverted to the more intensive use of oxen. On the other hand, such changes had little effect on agricultural production, since any cost savings resulting from improvements in traction tended to be spent on increased consumption or other non-agricultural purposes. This seems to have been particularly true of lords and other demesne holders, and it is clear from this study that, in the matter of traction at least, they took a firm second place to the peasantry in the adoption of new techniques

Visualising the number of people who cannot perform tasks related to product interactions

Understanding the number of people who cannot perform particular tasks helps to inform design decisions for mainstream products, such as the appropriate size and contrast of visual features. Making such informed decisions requires a dataset that is representative at the level of a national population, with sufficient scope and granularity to cover the types of actions associated with product use. Furthermore, visualisations are needed to bring the dataset to life, in order to better support comparing the number of people who cannot perform different tasks. The 1996/97 Disability Follow-up Survey remains the most recent Great British dataset to cover all types of ability losses that may be relevant to using everyday products. This paper presents new visualisations derived from this dataset, which are related to vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, dexterity and reach. Compared to previous publications on this dataset, the new visualisations contain task descriptions that have been simplified, described pictorially and separated out into different categories. Furthermore, two-dimensional visualisations are used to present exclusion results for products that require vision and/or hearing and for tasks that require each hand to do different things. In order to produce these new visualisations, the publicly available version of this dataset had to be reanalysed and recoded, which is described here-in detail.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10209-013-0297-

How could everyone have been so wrong? Forecasting the Great Depression with the railroads

Contemporary observers viewed the recession that began in the summer of 1929 as nothing extraordinary. Recent analyses have shown that the subsequent large deflation was econometrically forecastable, implying that a driving force in the depression was the high expected real interest rates faced by business. Using a neglected data set of forecasts by railroad shippers, we find that business was surprised by the magnitude of the great depression. We show that an ARIMA or Holt- Winters model of railroad shipments would have produced much smaller forecast errors than those indicated by the surveys. The depth and duration of the depression was beyond the experience of business, which appears to have believed that recovery would happen quickly as in previous recessions. This failure to anticipate the collapse of the economy suggests roles for both high real rates of interest and a debt deflation in the propagation of the depression

Pocket editions of the new Jerusalem : Owenite communitarianism in Britain 1825-1855.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN035069 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

A GIS/GPS Approach For The Abondoned Mine Inventory Of The Monongahela National Forest Using Space Borne And Aerial Images For Basemap Selection

The Monongahela National Forest spans 10 counties in eastern central West Virginia. It has been an area of high mining and timbering activities throughout much of the early to mid twentieth century. As a result, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has focused reclamation and remediation efforts on the abandoned mine land areas. Much of the area has been subjected to mining after effects such as acid mine drainage, structural remains, gob/spoil piles, garbage piles, mine portals, and highwalls. In 1998 the USFS contracted with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to provide a detailed georeferenced inventory with a Global Positioning System (GPS) for the mining remains previously mentioned. In addition, the inventory included quantitative descriptions and water quality data. A geobiophysical model containing the abandoned mine land features will provide the information necessary for appropriate steps toward reclamation of the area. The primary objective of this research creates a GIS database infrastructure for the Monongahela National Forest inventory integrating Landsat 7 +ETM 30 m and 15 m imagery, and USGS Digital Orthophoto Quarter Quadrangles (DOQQ\u27s), as a more modern image base map. This data base can then be used to simulate the resolution and visual effects that can be seen through high resolution space borne imagery such as IKONOS (Space Imaging, 2002) and Quickbird (Digital Globe, 2002). This, in comparison to the USGS Digital Raster Graphics (DRG) topographic maps, allows for more current geobiophysical modeling in a remote sensing system and provides an easily updated data management tool